Stephen Meyer: Darwin: A Myth for the Post-Christian Mind

well I'm awfully glad to be here I'm actually a local so I didn't have to get on an airplane to do this talk which was pretty exciting that was a terrific setup from dr. L molar I was kind of wondering exactly how I'd introduce this talk and he made it so easy I'm wondering if this session was intelligently designed he asked this question what is the the why is there something rather than nothing and the the author James Dyer who's written a number of great books about worldview calls that question the prime reality question and I like to reframe that question just slightly and put it this way what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes and in our elite culture our elite knowledge culture as dr. Mohler referred to it the answer to that question has been given over the last 150 years or so in strictly materialistic terms the thing or the entity from which everything else comes is matter and energy and purely materialistic processes such as natural selection acting on random genetic mutations and so there has been not only the idea of materialism but the idea that science properly understood supports this materialistic worldview in particular the science of Darwinian evolution because Darwinian evolution gives an account of the most difficult thing to account to to explain the origin of and the most difficult thing to explain is the origin of life life is the most complex an exquisitely beautiful thing on earth and Darwinian evolution has provided an answer or alleges to provide an answer for the origin of the very first of every new form of life from simpler pre-existing forms of life and there's an auxilary theory that complements it called chemical evolution that attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler pre-existing chemicals so the evolutionary theory has provided an indispensible plank in support of this materialistic worldview about which dr. Mohler was speaking now I'm going to talk today about whether or not the evidence supports this materialistic worldview and I'm going to do that by way of examining the evidence for this proposition of Darwinian evolution now my book begins with a story and the story is the story of Darwin's own doubt about his theory I begin the book with a line when Darwin finished his great masterpiece the Origin of Species he thought he had explained every clue but one and the clue that he knew he hadn't explained was an event in the history of life known as the Cambrian explosion now the Cambrian explosion is the geologically sudden appearance of most of the major groups of animals that have ever existed on earth at least at a certain level of biological classification known as the Philo this is these the phyla represent the largest divisions of animals in the animal kingdom and each phylum represents a unique body plan and the mysterious thing about the Cambrian explosion from a Darwinian point of view is precisely that these forms of life emerge so suddenly geologically speaking when they come into the fossil record they do so without any apparent connection to any discernible ancestral forms in the lower Precambrian strata if you remember your basic geology the oldest stuff is on the bottom all other things being equal and them and the the newer things are on the top things pile up over time so the older things are on the bottom as you look at the sedimentary record you see all these different forms of life emerging very suddenly or abruptly I have on the slide behind me nice graphic that one of our graphic artists helped us produce you see the sedimentary column on the right you're right you see the different some of the representatives of the the new animal forms that come into the fossil record and you see the geological time scale rendered in millions of years as geologists do on the other column and you see that there's a very discrete pulse of what's called morphological innovation innovation in biological form new forms of life and there and you see beneath that the absence of the ancestral forms that would be expected based on Darwin's theory in the standard geological way of dating the Cambrian period is the first period of the Paleozoic era and it it started about five hundred and forty three million years ago and the explosion occurs about five hundred and thirty million years and the most explosive pulse of that explosion occurs within about a five million year window or 1/10 of 1% of the Earth's history which deal geologically speaking is a blink of the eye now I know there are many different views even within the Christian world about the age of the earth and I want to ask you whatever your view is on that to set that aside because it really doesn't matter what your view is on that notice the pattern here the pattern is what's important you have a very discrete pulse of innovation very sudden geologically speaking and from the biological point of view as well even 5 million or 10 million years as the explosion is often dated is not only a geological blink of the eye it's a biological blink of the eye because biologists have a in fact evolutionary biologists have a sub-discipline of their field called population genetics that allows evolutionary theorists to calculate how much evolutionary time or how much evolutionary change could take place in the given period of time if they know certain factors the mutation rate the time from one generation to the next the size of a population and so forth and as scientists have begun to calculate how much change couldn't take place in a given period of time when they need for example even just two or more coordinated genetic mutations what are called waiting times go right out the roof they rise exponentially and once you get beyond two coordinated mutations the expected waiting time based on these equations of population genetics the mathematical expression of modern Darwinian theory suggests that we would have to wait much longer than then the age or the period of time that life has been on earth several beyond several hundred millions of years so a five to ten million year window in Darwinian time is a blink of the eye it's not nearly enough time for the mutation natural selection mechanism to get the job done so whatever your view of the org or the age of the earth is you have to realize that from a Darwinian point of view this sudden appearance of all this new form and structure is very unexpected it defies the explanatory power of the Darwinian mechanism it defies the creative power of that mechanism and so you have kind of a puzzle and Darwin was aware of it in in an incipient form in the 19th century here's what he would expect to see in the fossil record based on his theory he remembered depicted you'll remember he depicted the history of life is a great branching tree where the branches at the top of the tree represent all the forms of life that exists today and the trunk or the root of the tree represents that first primordial form of life probably a simple one-celled organism and although all the connecting branches represent those forms of life that have gradually evolved and changed and morph from that simple one-celled organism to produce all the forms of life we see today but instead of seeing in the fossil record a picture of gradual and continuous change the great tree of life instead what we see in the history of animal life is something like this something more like a lawn instead of a tree so there's this tension between the the theory on the one hand and what the fossil evidence actually shows on the other now Darwin didn't doubt that his theory was true he was convinced he had advocated for it very forcefully in the Origin of Species but he did doubt that his theory was able to explain all the relevant evidence and the the fossil evidence in particular tripped him up he was concerned about it and this is what he said right in the Origin of Species itself he says to the question as to why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the cambrian system I can give no satisfactory answer and this I call Darwin's doubt now I like to contrast Darwin's rhetorical modesty his willingness to acknowledge problems with his theory or weaknesses in his argument with the tendency of modern defenders of Darwinian theory what's called modern neo-darwinism I had the opportunity a couple years ago to testify before the Texas State Board of Education at the time the board was considering a rather innocuous seeming state science standard - that was to encourage teachers to present to students the strengths and weaknesses of competing scientific ideas and theories the Darwin only Science Lobby turned out in force and they were opposing this idea because in the words of Eugenie Scott the president of the National Center for Science education there are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution now I found this to be rather actually shocking statement because I was there at this hearing to present into evidence a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles that were raising problems with contemporary Darwinian theory these were articles from mainstream biology journals many even written by evolutionary biologists and evolutionary theorists so I knew full well there were plenty of weaknesses with contemporary evolutionary theory but one of the themes of my book the new book Darwin's doubt is that there is a huge display dirty' between the public presentation of the status of Darwinian theory in textbooks by statement by public spokesman for Darwinian theory such as Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins and others on the one hand and the actual status of the theory as you find it in the peer-reviewed scientific literature in biology and even in evolutionary biology and evolutionary theory the public hasn't gotten the word yet but even many leading evolutionary biologists now are calling for a new theory of evolution precisely because they recognize that the central mechanism of modern Darwinian Theory the mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic variations lacks the creative power required to explain events like the Cambrian explosion it does a great job of explaining minor variations Galapagos finches and their beaks getting a little longer or a little shorter in response to varying weather patterns or the Peppard famed peppered moths in England that got darker and lighter and darker again in the population in response to the varying levels of pollution but these are cyclical variations within an established limit they do not explain where we get moths or birds or indeed animals in the first place and many leading evolutionary biologists today are saying things like neo-darwinism explains the survival but not the arrival of the fittest it explains small-scale variation but it does not explain what is called morphological innovation innovation in form and structure and so despite these kinds of very candid admissions about the limitations and weaknesses in the contemporary version of Darwin's theory we still have people like Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins saying things like as Dawkins said in this in an interview of the New York Times it's absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is either ignorant stupid or insane and then he said by way of concession or wicked but I'd prefer not to consider that that was sporting of him I thought by contrast Darwin was very candid and in his great work the Origin of Species he said the case referring to the Cambrian explosion at present must remain inexplicable and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the view here entertained now I call in in writing about the Cambrian explosion I have focused on two separate but related mysteries and the first mystery I call the mystery of the missing fossils and what I do in the book is I tell the story of Darwin's doubt his doubt about the ability of his theory to explain the Cambrian explosion and I trace what has become of that doubt I tell the story of what's become of that doubt because 'men tend that that doubt has grown up to become a major problem illustrative it has become a lustrated of a major problem in all of evolutionary theory for Darwin it was that one troubling anomaly that one small thing that he thought his theory couldn't explain but that small thing has grown up to become a much bigger and more fundamental problem and I'd like to explain that in a little more detail as I said there were two aspects to the mystery of the Cambrian explosion and the first is the MIT what I call the mystery of the missing fossils those missing ancestral fossils in the lower Precambrian strata now Darwin was a great scientist so though he acknowledged the problem he was already thinking about how he might or how someone might be able to eventually explain it and he had a charming metaphor which he used to get across his idea about what might eventually resolve the mystery he said I look at the natural geological record as the history of the world imperfectly kept in on this view the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished his idea was that the fossil record was incomplete and if we looked a whole lot more and a whole lot harder and over a and concertedly over a number of decades we would surely find those missing ancestral fossils in Darwin's time he knew about the Cambrian event primarily because of a few basic forms of animal life that had been well preserved and and extensively documented in the 19th century one of those forms of life was is the iconic trilobite you've probably seen them is a little kid I was fascinated with not only dinosaurs but also trilobite s-- and trilobites have the distinct three distinctive lobes they have compound eyes that can actually be the the cone like structure of the compound eye is actually visible in many trilobite fossils so you have this extraordinary complexity and a sophisticated visual organ present in animal form from the very dawn of animal life it's very extraordinary and Darwin was aware of trilobite he also knew about another form of life a common animal form called brachiopod it add a shell of two unequal parts in a feeding organ an organ called a loaf of four now Darwin hoped that subsequent fossil finds would would fill in the gaps would establish that there had been gradually a gradual transformation from simple to complex in the lower Precambrian strata unfortunately for proponents of Darwinian theory that's not what the great fossil finds of the 20th century have documented instead they've actually made the Cambrian explosion more they've made the mystery of the Cambrian explosion more acute the first great fossil find of Cambrian era fossils occurred in Canada in 1909 at a place in Canada just across the the border from Alberta in in British Columbia this is the famed Burgess Shale find near field British Columbia these fossils were discovered in 1909 by the Smithsonian scientists Charles Wolcott he was prospecting in the high Canadian Rockies and as the story goes his mule slipped into a talus slope of loose pieces of shale right near the end of the prospecting season and he turned over some of the pieces of rock to get his horse out or his mule out and he discovered exquisite forms of marine life preserved high in the Canadian Rockies this is a picture of one of the the fossils that that he found it is a delicate lace crab unknown in our time extinct today but an extraordinary creature with and you can see how beautifully resolved how beautifully preserved this creature is in this in this dark shale rock and there were many such exquisite creatures found of which scientists had previously no knowledge and so rather than a few basic forms of life missing ancestral forms now as a result of the Burgess find there were many forms exotic forms of animal life that had been unknown before each of which was also missing ancestral forms so the explosion became from our point of view more explosive or we learned that it had been more explosive more forms of life and even more gaps to be filled in here's another iconic form from the from the The Canadian Rockies this is a creature called a whop dia it's a it's a crustacean and you can see that the the segmentation in the tail beautifully preserved here looks a little like a shrimp and so the the Burgess documented that the explosion had been much more explosive than what had been previously known then in 1984 there was another just absolutely extraordinary fossil find this in southern China near the town of Chang Jiang in in the great country of China and here the the the again the fossil finds accentuated the problem the Cambrian explosion in part because the scientists were able to pin down the dating of this with the radiometric methods and they found that the the period of time of the explosion had been even much shorter than had been previously believed it had meant it was cut in half by about it was about 25% of the time that had previously thought I and and again the explosion documented many new forms of life that had been previously unknown and they were beautifully preserved in fact there was a time covers a time magazine cover story about this find in 1995 and the period of time of the Cambrian had shrunk so much that one paleontologist said what I like to ask my evolutionary biology colleagues is this how much faster does this have to happen before we stop calling it evolution now in the year 2000 we at Discovery Institute had were right here locally in Seattle we had the chance to sponsor a lecture at the University of Washington from one of the leading Chinese paleontologists one of the paleontologists who had been right at the forefront of making these extraordinary discoveries in southern China and his name is jy Chen and Chen came to the University of Washington bearing gifts he had fossil samples galore and as a result of that many of the professors from the University of Washington in the geology department the paleontologists and the evolutionary biologists in particular turned out in force and Chen gave a just an absolutely spellbinding lecture on the many different forms that had been established forms of animal life that had been established in this Chinese Cambrian layer one of which was a creature called an animal a carrot which was the the the predator of the Cambrian seize the top of the food chain about a meter long with these giant appendages in a round mouth and all these different very exquisite anatomical features preserved brilliantly in this honey colored Shale in southern China there were high lifts conical shaped animals that lived in a shell with an attached lid there were four a night it's a filter feeding organism with basically a worm in a tube there were other forms of worms with little segmented bristles lateral bristles for locomotion and and on and on it went there was even an animal form that looked like a plant called a Dynamis 'kiss this was so unusual in its structure that the the paleontologists didn't know quite how to classify it so they just called it a problem Attica you're starting to see how scientific terminology works yeah and one of my favorites was a beautifully preserved comb jelly now this is 530 million years ago and I have on the screen a picture of a modern comb jelly as we might find one out in Puget Sound and you can see that the structure of these two organisms is almost identical that in paleontology they call this stasis lack of directional morphological change in other words no evolutionary change in over half a billion years absolutely extraordinary and on and on professor Chen went near the end of his lecture he held up his hand and used it as a visual aid to make a very compelling point he said these new animal finds in the Maui Shan Shale in southern China have turned Darwin's Tree of Life upside down in the Darwin the Darwinian metaphor of the tree implies that the change moves gradually from simple to complex but instead what the fossil record shows is the very first forms of animal life come into the fossil record fully formed with an extraordinary integrated complexity in each case exemplifying a unique body plan so there's no gradually changing things connecting the different forms of life they simply appear fully formed now this is really puzzling from a Darwinian point of view when Chen's lecture expressed some considerable skepticism about the adequacy of Darwinian theory at the end of the lecture there was time for Q&A and one of the professors from the University of Washington our great local research university by the way is one of the leading research universities in the world one of our professors raised his hand and said professor Chen was fascinating lecture but aren't you a little nervous about expressing skepticism about Darwinian evolution coming as you do from a communist country suddenly there was a kind of awkward silence in the room but professor Chen no nobody's fool got a wry little smile on his face and he said well in our country we can question Darwin just not the government in America you can question the government but you can't question Darwinism it was his way of saying whose country is more free really he'd heard about political correctness in the American universities in any case he made a fascinating presentation of just how explosive we now know the Cambrian explosion to have been in 2009 there was an even additional piece of evidence added to that as scientists discovered that it in the Precambrian the Cambrian layer there were even fish fossils were now known that fishes which were previously known to a river isn't much later were first also present in the Cambrian so this is an extraordinarily explosive event from a geological point of view it's typically dated using the radiometric methods at about 10 million years the most explosive pulse of that morphological innovation has been dated to be about five to six million years in which time between 13 and 16 distinct animal body plans first arise in the Cambrian period even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged it's as though they the animal phyla were just planted there without any evolutionary history everything with Dawkins is as if okay life looks as if his first line of The Blind watchmaker life biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose the appearance but not the reality of course now that's the first mystery and in the book Darwin's doubt I not only explain how the mystery has become has been made more acute but I also look at the various progressive attempts that have been made to solve the mystery of the missing fossils and show why one by one they have failed but I want to get on today to the more fundamental mystery and this gets to some of the points that dr. Mohler raised and this is in a sense a much deeper question than just gaps in the fossil record this is the question of causation what caused those animals to arise or we could think of this as an engineering problem how do you build an animal how would the evolutionary process have produced these complex forms of life given that it requires a great deal of time to work and given that it relies we now know an unguided undirected copying errors in genetic information that's the idea of mutation the modern mechanism of evolution is said to be natural selection acting on random genetic mutations and mutations are essentially copying errors in genetic material in genes now this mystery has presented itself to us with particular difficulty because of the discoveries of the second half of the 20th century in the field of modern molecular biology it started in 1950s with the fame duo Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 they elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule a molecule that had been over the last decade increasingly suspected to be the source of hereditary information in 1957 Francis Crick went further Crick did not at the time of his discovery with Watson even have a PhD he wasn't a biologist he was working on a PhD in physics he had however fittingly been a cryptographer in world war ii a code breaker and fittingly he ended up helping to break the ultimate code the code of life in 1957 he put forward a famed hypothesis known as the sequence hypothesis in which he proposed that the four chemicals that you see running along the interior of the DNA molecule and I have the the image of the DNA molecule on the screen behind me you recognize it's it's familiar helical shape with the fork the four chemicals on the inside which are called nucleotide bases Crick proposed that these bases are functioning in DNA like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters the zeros and ones in a section of software that is to say it's not the shape of these molecules that matters or their chemical properties what matters to their function is the arrangement of these characters in a code in accord with a code with a symbol convention that is to say that they are literally carrying instructions for building the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive an absolutely extraordinary hypothesis it took about six years for this hypothesis to be confirmed by a whole series of experiments that were being Teta being performed on both sides of the atlantic ocean but confirmed it was and our current understanding of life is very much dependent on what Crick realized that inside the DNA molecule we literally have information and information of a kind which is familiar to us in two respects the information in DNA is highly complex that means it's not just a repetitive pattern it's not a mantra it's not um it's not the same letters repeating over and over 80 80 80 80 instead it's complex and unpredictable in a periodic but it's also specified that is the arrangements of the characters in the DNA molecule are specific in order to perform a communication function in particular the function of conveying information to the cell's manufacturing system about how to build the proteins that the cell needs to stay alive so if we think of two different kinds of information information which is complex but not specified which has no meaning and engineers actually have a theory for describing this type of information and measuring it that's not what we're talking about in biology it's not a string of characters like the one on the top of my slide behind me it's a string of characters much more like the one on the bottom which are complex meaning they're not repeating over and over again but they are specifically arranged to perform a function that's what we have in DNA we have information that is functional now what's this got to do with the cambrian mystery and the Cambrian explosion well quite simply this if you want to build an animal you need a lot of new information in fact I used to ask my students a question to get this idea across if you want to give your computer a new function what do you have to give it I would say since you're not students I will leave that rhetorical question hanging but you can imagine the answers code information software instructions all of those are correct answers and it turns out the same thing is true in life if you want to build a new Cambrian animal we now know that you need a whole bunch of new types of cells not just new cells but different types of cells in the Precambrian there were simple creatures called sponges but these Cambrian fishes I showed you a minute ago we required 60 or more cell types whereas the sponge is 6 to 10 so there's a big jump in complexity as measured by the types of cells required but for each new type of cell you need new proteins new dedicated proteins worms which arose in the Cambrian have a gut guts require digestive enzymes enzymes are types of proteins requiring code to build them genetic information stored in DNA so to build each new form of animal life with all these new cell types you need all kinds of new proteins and each new kind of protein requires more genetic information now that's where things start to get sticky from a neo a modern or neo-darwinian point of view because we know something about systems of code or informational text if the systems are functional random changes are not friendly to maintaining function random changes tend to degrade function rather than to enhance function I was standing on the soccer sideline one day with my daughter when she was watching my daughter play when she was 12 years old her soccer coach who is a software engineer from Microsoft one of their elite architect level programmers walked over to me I didn't know he had any idea what I did for a living he leaned over like this and he said so what did these Darwinists think the code just wrote itself and then he said not at Microsoft doesn't work that way now this is a big problem and intuitively there's a reason that random changes tend to degrade information before you ever get to any new operating system or program in software or any new sentence or or instruction manual in English and that is there are many more ways of arranging characters in all linguistic systems that are going to go wrong than there are ways of arranging things that will go right okay so you could think of this as like a big number of possible ways of arranging English letters or zeros and ones and software that's represented by the big circle and the one the ones that are functional was represented by the little dot a tiny needle in a big haystack now in 1967 the there was a group of MIT scientists who were having a picnic and it included some of the distinguished professors of physics and engineering and computer science at MIT who are having conversations with their biology colleagues and they said look if you guys are right that DNA is functioning like a code if it's a typographic system in which there are characters that are conveying information then we don't get how random mutations is ever going to Genda mutations are ever going to generate the new information you would need to build any new proteins let alone whole forms of life that seems to us to be in crud overwhelmingly improbable that that would ever occur precisely because there's so many more ways to go wrong than there are ways to go right now I've got a way of illustrating this that gets at what was bothering these MIT math guys and it's a bike lock and we're all familiar with bike locks four digits ten dials on each that means there's ten times ten times ten or ten thousand different ways of arranging the digits on the bike lock but only one will open the bike lock right now you can't imagine situations in which you could open the bike lock by chance but that would require a lot of time and so there's a kind of calculus you have to go through to decide whether a random search for a functional sequence of text or any functional information is likely to be is is going to be plausible whether it will likely to succeed or not you need to know how much time you have in relation to this number of things that have to be searched if the number of things that have if the thing you're looking for is going to be is extremely rare and you have only limited time to look it's going to be much more likely that you'll fail then you than it is that you'll succeed so if we got a guy out here wanting to steal a bike and encounters this 10 dial lock I've made a little calculation if he can do one thing per two seconds one new combination per two seconds and he's really persistent in in over three in just about three hours he could get through half the combinations in which case it would be more likely than not that he could open the lock by chance but what if he counted encountered a lock like this in this case he's got to be really persistent in fact his life span is not going to be sufficient to sample more than half of this law so the big question is when we're looking at coming up with a new gene which is a big section of information in DNA enough to build a protein is it more like the first situation where there might be enough time to for a random search to succeed or is it more like the second situation in which there's not new nearly enough time well I go into all the details of this in the book but there's a scientist who's investigated this very carefully his name is Doug axe he worked on some experiments to settle this question at the University of Cambridge he was at it for 14 years and he determined that the by clock in question is not one with ten dials it's one with 77 dials that's how hard it is that's that's how much gibberish there is there's 10 to the 77 possible ways of arranging all the characters in the genetic code a section of genetic text for every functional protein the text codes for in in which case even 10 to the 40th organisms which is the number we've had in the history of life on earth is not enough to search that space and have give you any reasonable probability of generating even one new gene or protein in the known history of life on Earth so we're much more in the ten dial lock situation is the bottom line and the real bottom line is that the mutation selection mechanism is not a sufficient means for generating new genetic information it's much more likely to fail than to succeed even on the scale of the whole history of life on Earth which means the hypothesis that it did succeed is much more likely to be false than true and that's a problem for the neo-darwinian mechanism now there are some other difficulties and I go into them in the book this is just one of five key problems with the neo-darwinian mechanism it can't generate the new genetic information that's necessary but there are other complementary and even deeper problems I'm going to skip over those in the interest of time and explain why on the other hand I think there is positive evidence for intelligent design I was first introduced to the idea of intelligent design in the mid-1980s I was a young scientist working as a geophysicist for an oil company a conference came to our city at the time in which I first encountered an author named Charles Paxton who had written a book about the origin of the very first life and he at the time suggested that the information bearing properties of the a intuitively suggested the activity of what he called an intelligent cause he said that intuitively information is a kind of mind product it's the it's something that comes out of minds not material processes and I began to wonder as after I got to know dr. Thaxton he was something of a mentor to me in the year before I went to do my graduate work and as I set off to Cambridge in 1986 I began to wonder if it was possible to formulate this intuition that information points to intelligence as a rigorous scientific argument could the design hypothesis as it was known historically be reformulated as a rigorous scientific argument ironically in order to invest this investigate this question I became very interested in Darwin's method of scientific reasoning because Darwin knew that he would that to investigate events in the remote past required a different kind of scientific reasoning he couldn't repeat the origin of trilobite s-- under controlled laboratory conditions that wasn't going to happen so he had to use a method of of scientific reasoning that was much more like forensic science where you infer the cause of events in the remote past from the clues that are left behind and this method is called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inference to the best explanation but that raised a really crucial question what does it mean in an historical or forensic science to be the best explanation and it the the the scientist of the 19th century worked this out in very practical terms one of Darwin's mentors in fact the famed geologist Charles Lyell laid out a very clear and common-sense criterion to decide what was a what made an explanation for any given event in the past best one day I was reading the front piece the title page of this of his book on geology and had a long Victorian subtitle and just at that moment before I was to fall asleep in boredom this phrase hit me being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation the best explanation said yl is a cause now in operation a cause known from our present experience to have the power or capacity to produce the effect in question illustration if you go to Eastern Washington today where I used to teach out in the Palouse country you will still find little patches of white volcanic ash Oh white ash if you're a historical scientist and you did not get to see what happened on May 18 1980 you would have to use Darwin's historical scientific method you'd have to infer what the cause from the effect les left behind but which cause well then you'd have to propose different hypotheses maybe it was a flood maybe it was an earthquake maybe it was a volcanic eruption according to Lyles criterion which one is best obviously any one the volcano why because it's a cause now in operation it's a cause which is known from our present experience to have the power to produce the effect in question what's this got to do with the Cambrian explosion the origin of the information necessary to produce the Cambrian animals that was my question but it suddenly hit me as I because there's a question I wanted to ask what is the cause now in operation for the production of digital code what do we know from our uniform and repeated experience about what it takes to generate information in an alphabetic typographic or digital form it's a mind right it's an intelligence that's what we know from experience in fact very soon after this I came across a passage in an early work on information science as it was being applied to molecular biology and the thought the the information theorist Henry Cuellar said this the creation of new formation is habitually associated with conscious activity it's a it's a presently acting cause and is that true well let's think about our experience you know the computer code all the computer program always comes from a programmer now but we Bill Gates's said in fact that DNA is like a software program only much more complex than any we've ever devised we know that computer code programs come from programmers we know that hieroglyphic inscriptions come from scribes we know that text in a book comes from a writer in fact whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source we always come to a mind not a material process so the discovery that information runs the show in biology and that there have been huge infusions of new information in the history of life suggests that a designing intelligence played a role in the history of life it provides an inference at the basis of for an inference to intelligent design and notice something else about that inference this is not an unscientific inference the inference the the argument that I made for intelligent design is made using the same method of reasoning that Darwin himself made in other words this is a perfectly scientific approach to the question so um I leave you with this sketch of Darwin's doubt and what's become of it the big question is the question of the origin of information because to explain those Cambrian animals you need new information and what we know from experience is that information always comes from an intelligence and for that reason I think there's a very strong scientific basis for the theory of intelligent design thank you very much

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Keywords: ligonier, ligonier ministries, ligonier conference, stephen meyer, evolution, christian evolution, darwin, charles darwin, darwinism, macro evolution, microevolution, intelligent design, science, faith, creation, creationism, discovery institute, atheism, atheist, christianity, bible, God

Id: PbcY9iya40o

Length: 47min 17sec (2837 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2016