Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design and The Return of the God Hypothesis

ever since the enlightenment god and science have been kept in separate compartments and a lot of scientists will tell you that god doesn't even exist let alone matter which is of course the way it should be or is it today on uncommon knowledge dr stephen meyer on his new book the return of the god hypothesis [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson a graduate of whitworth college the author stephen meyer holds a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science from cambridge in 2009 dr meyer published signature in the cell dna and the evidence for intelligent design of signature in the cell the philosopher thomas nagle of nyu wrote that quote anyone who believes god never intervenes in the natural world will be instructed by mayor's careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem close quote in 2013 dr maya published darwin's doubt the explosive origin of animal life in the case for intelligent design of darwin's doubt david gallartner of yale one of the founders of the discipline of computer science wrote quote stephen myers thoughtful and meticulous book convinced me that darwin has failed close quote dr meyer now directs the center for science and culture at the discovery institute in seattle his newest book the return of the god hypothesis three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe stephen meyer thank you for joining us thank you for having me peter um steve a couple of preliminary questions what is the god hypothesis well the god hypothesis is the idea that the postulation of the existence of god provides explanatory power with respect to observations we can make about the natural world and in the book i argue that it that the god hypothesis provides superior explanatory power over and against other competing metaphysical hypotheses or worldviews whether they be d whether it be deism or materialism or pantheism or some other things that i consider in the book as well another preliminary sort of question here is biologist richard dawkins quote 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 close quote mistaken but you can sort of see his point or demonstrably mistaken well mistaken but beautifully for framed this is in a sense the the the money quotation that i use in the book to frame the argument because what's implicit in darwin in dawkins's quotation is that a metaphysical hypothesis what he means by blind pitiless and differences after all the philosophy of scientific materialism that metaphysical hypotheses are every bit as testable in their own way as scientific ones we can judge the merits of a metaphysical hypothesis of a worldview by looking at the world around us to see if it matches the expectations what we think should follow if that hypothesis were true dawkins says that the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if scientific materialism is true scientific materialism being that world view that affirms that matter and energy are the thing from which everything else comes and that matter and energy are eternal and self-existent and required no prior creator or creation and in the book i appreciate dawkins for framing the argument that way but then take him head on and ask the question is that true or not and argue that that in fact the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is if there was intelligent design built into the universe an indeed intelligent design that has a theistic source so the subtitle is three discoveries three scientific discoveries that effectively have changed everything but before we get to those three discoveries you spend a portion of your time at the beginning of the book elucidating the old or the original relationship between science and theology theology here in the judeo-christian view of theology and i'd like to take a moment or two to go through these points because frankly because i found them so striking this is not what one hears in the usual debates you quote the historian of science ian barber quote science in any modern form arose in western civilization alone well that's politically incorrect that's a dangerous assertion right there science in its modern form arose in western civilization alone among all the cultures of the world because only the christian west possess the necessary intellectual presuppositions close quote so let's take the first and outrageous suggestion that science arose in the west what about the advanced aspects of chinese civilization mathematics architecture and so forth they had those for at least a few millennia depending on how you count before the west did or the islamic civilization which reached a high point in into reading and interpreting classical texts working out mathematics algebra all of that while we were in while the west was in its dark ages what about all that well this is uh maybe a controversial point in the current climate but almost all historians of science have uh observed the same thing that that modern science in a sense of a systematic method for interrogating and investigating nature arose uniquely in a judeo-christian milieu in western europe roughly between 1300 and 1750 with a particular focus on the period of time from 1 500 to 1750 often called the scientific revolution it is absolutely true that there have been many advanced civilizations the chinese invented gunpowder they had advanced forms of military weaponry they had organized cities and city-states the the the romans built roads and aqueducts and and so forth uh and but this actually highlights what was unique in the west the material conditions of doing science were present in many cultures but somehow this systematic way of investigating nature involving the isolation of variables various scientific methods and and then the mathematization of the descriptions of nature uh this didn't happen everywhere it only happened in the in the judeo-christian west and it only happened during a particular period of time and so it's raised this question that historian in the way historians of science opposed it is why there why then what was the difference what was the variable what was the difference that made the difference and they have found that difference in the realm of ideas so let's go back to barbara's phrase intellectual presuppositions presupposition one the contingency of nature from your book the return of the god hypothesis in 1277 this says something about the sweep of your book right there in 1277 18 the bishop of paris writing with the support of pope john xx condemned necessary in theology and 219 separate theses influenced by greek philosophy about what god could or couldn't do close quote now that's a mouthful and it seems just unbelievably abstrused what on earth has that got to do with the scientific method let's let's unpack that because it's actually fairly clear the greeks always are the great histories of the western intellectual tradition and so they should be they gave us philosophy plato and aristotle but greek science was impeded by assumptions that the greeks made about the nature of nature they assumed that built into nature was a kind of intrinsic logic that they characterized as the logos and so they also assumed that the order that they in nature was governed by this logic so that whatever seemed most logical to us was also what was built into nature was was logic it was the logical form of the order in nature so what's the most logical and perfect form of of motion it's a circle so how do the planets go what what are planetary orbits what kind of shape do they have it must be circular and there were numerous uh logically deduced uh conclusions about nature that were not empirically grounded what the greeks worked things out in theory and assumed that they worked that way in practice exactly exactly so they did a lot of armchair philosophizing about nature it wasn't that they weren't interested in nature or they didn't assume that there was an order there but they assumed it was an order that had to be a certain way the way that appeared most logical to them okay and now again from the return of the god hypothesis because god himself because god himself present possesses a certain free will a certain freedom quote quoting you the order in nature could have been otherwise the job of the natural philosopher the old term for scientists the job of the natural philosopher was not to ask what god must have done but what god actually did close quote and that's and that intellectual presupposition is unique to the west yes beca and the idea is that yes there's an order in nature but it's an order that's impressed upon nature or engraved upon nature from the outside because because there was a creator who who chose the form of order that would be manifest in creation we have to go and look and see which form it is when i was teaching i used to use the example of paint brushes with my students show them all the different kinds of paint brushes that a painter could use all of them manifest a form function relationship a kind of order orderliness but the painter could choose which one he or she wants to use for the particular application in mind in the same way god in in providing for example the law of gravity could have chosen to had gravitational attraction much much stronger weaker it has an inverse square law in newton's formulation but it might have been an inverse cubed law might not have had an exponent in the in the denominator at all it could have been entirely different there's an order but which order is up for us to go into to discover and that quote that you just attributed to me is almost a direct paraphrase of robert boyle who said that the job of the natural campus not to look at what god must have done not to not to decide what god must have done but to go and look and to see what he actually did do so that was the shift yeah the following question would only occur in the west and that question is hmm this is interesting let's see what the big guy actually did here this gives rise to the western emphasis on actual observation go look go look and see go look and see it becomes an empirical science rather than a deductive or philosophical approach to to studying nature presupposition to the intelligibility of nature again i'm quoting from the return of the god hypothesis modern science was inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind who designed it to be understood and who designed the human mind to understand it you go on to quote the 17th century astronomer johannes kepler quote god created us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts close quote now that seems to me almost emerge to be stepping a step or two in the direction of a kind of feel-good 21st century psychobabble view of western theology but but but it's not and yet and yet it was a crucial idea because it's actually very hard to discover the order of nature it's not an easy thing to conduct experiments you there has to be an instinctive confidence that there is a secret there in nature to be revealed to motivate people to do the hard work of investigating or interrogating nature and this this conviction that nature had an intelligible order that was the product of the rational mind of the creator the same creator who made our minds and had endowed our minds with a rationality that enabled us to understand the rationality and the design and the order built into nature so that's what gave us confidence or that's what the theology that the theology that human beings are distinctive that we alone this notion about being made in god's image in one way or another not dogs or cats or fish or any but human beings can understand congrat that's vital here we've been made this yeah it was the judeo-christian idea that we've been made to stewards this is also politically incorrect of course yeah right one long continuum from from single from amoeba to human beings human beings are different well i i thank you for pointing that out yeah yeah exactly no it's absolutely human exceptionalism if you if you will that there's something unique about the the intellectual and cognitive capabilities of human beings that allow them uniquely to understand the design and the order and the rationality built into the natural world okay so intellectual presupposition number three and this is three of three so it's the last one human fallibility on the one hand human beings are created in the image of god so they can understand on the other hand to quote you you know the christian doctrine of original sin humans are vulnerable to self-deception flights of fancy and jumping to conclusions scientists must therefore employ systematic experimental methods close quote explain that uh this is an idea that's been emphasized by the historian and philosopher science steve fuller uh in britain and peter harrison in uh in australia that the doctrine of original sin which was recovered in the same period when uh in late medieval catholic theology and during the protestant reformation the doctrine of creation was being re-emphasized with that came also the doctrine of the fall of human beings and therefore the idea that we were that fall affected our cognitive capabilities we were capable of understanding the rationality and design of nature but we were also capable of flights of fancy of deceiving ourselves of self-deception and therefore it was necessary to test our theories against nature and this again gave an impetus to observation we could think of all kinds of different ways that nature might be it was important to find out what nature actually was like in its in its reality and to do that methods of testing were developed and so when we think of testability as a crucial aspect of scientific investigation this is part of where it came from all right so so we've got this notion that there that nature is contingent it could have been different and the only way to figure out what it is is to observe it that humans being human they can actually get someplace they can't understand but humans being human they'd better double check those observations that's why we have peer-reviewed journals that's right speaking yes exactly systems of accountability that are built in to check our own uh capacity for either self-deception or or simply missing things okay so what i find so striking here is i mean i'm used to the idea i'm used to books and arguments where science has its realm religion has its realm but you make a much stronger argument that science as we understand it arose from a distinctively judeo-christian worldview and that well so the next question is what happened we've already quoted kepler god created us after his own image newton is explicitly and unashamedly in fact unself-consciously a believer he writes effectively how did god do this what was going on here how do we test this but it's he assumes some we could argue about exactly what what the what the characteristics of his god are but there is an omniscient uh that he assumes i'm just she makes all those same presuppositions that we just discussed but then he also sees in the scientific realm that he's investigating in the realm of nature that he's investigating evidence for design so in the general scolium to the principia the theological epilogue that he writes to his great master piece on gravitation he makes a design argument about the initial condition fine-tuning the setup job that was required to create stable planetary orbits and at the in this memorable passage he says this most beautiful system of sun planets and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being now this is written in one of the greatest works of physics ever written and yet there is a a theological deep theological reflection a design argument in this which is a form of natural theology but he also brings to bear a theology of nature that is to say he's bringing theological presuppositions to bear in the whole framing of the inquiry all right and then it all falls apart the return of the god hypothesis the success of new scientific theories in the 18th century you begin there about astronomical geological and biological origins contributed to the rejection of theism as an explanatory framework explain that they feel they no longer need a god to explain phenomena that they observe in nature no longer useful or they must reject god explain well it becomes a little of both and the shift starts with enlightenment philosophy in the 18th century and then the many of the theories especially theories about origins scientific theories in the 19th century i tell the story of pierre laplace in the book who is summoned to receive commendation before the french emperor napoleon for his great work the celestial mechanics he attempts to do precisely what newton said could not be done newton thought that the laws of nature were a mode of divine action but he also thought the laws given that they produced very predictable regularities could not explain the origin of the very precise and specified initial conditions that made the solar system stable in the first place and that required an initial act of design or creation that could not be explained as the result of a regularity or a law laplace came along and attempted to explain the origin of the solar system without such initial acts of design and then there were other kind there were other theories in geology and of course in biology with the origin of species and charles darwin and the way his ideas were extended to explain both the origin of human beings and his book descent of man and to explain even the first life by other early evolutionary biologists in the late 19th century so that by the end of the 19th century you had this kind of seamless materialistic narrative about how where everything had come from from the origin the solar system to the great geological features on earth to the origin of the first life and subsequent forms of life without any reference to a designing intelligence or creator of any kind and that combination of of theories gave rise to a larger kind of world view known as to scholars as scientific materialism and there were other other thinkers in that era freud marx huxley who contributed to this grand materialistic synthesis by the end of the 19th century you write darwin marks freud huxley quote science seemed to answer many of the deepest worldview questions that heretofore judeo-christian religion had answered science no longer needed to invoke a pre-existent mind to explain the evidence of nature close quote okay so this is i just want to say for our viewers there's a lot in your book it's over 400 pages of close argument and we're just getting started we can't i can't begin to do justice to the book in a in video just can't do it so one of the many pleasures of this book is this historical tour de force um before you get to the three scientific discoveries which we will get to in just a moment you you give us about five centuries of history of science all right which brings us to the present we've already quoted richard dawkins biologist here's david barash if i'm pronouncing his name correctly at the university of washington he wrote a piece in the new york times about the talk he gives to his students each year quote as evolutionary science has progressed the available space for religious belief has narrowed close quote now that's a little bit different from saying science no longer needed to resort to an omni present omni all-knowing first mover now it's saying that as science progresses it squeezes out any legitimate possibility of religious belief correct that's not only the opinion of barash and many of the so-called new atheist writers but public opinion polling uh data show that it's increasingly the opinion of many young people we have this phenomenon that the pollsters are picking up they call it the rise of the nuns the religiously unaffiliated agnostic and atheists atheistic young people between 18 and 33 in that kind of age cohort and when you probe deeply with that group of young people you find that science has played an outsized role in cementing that disaffection with religion and with belief in god in fact two-thirds of the young atheists surveyed in one poll said quote affirm the following statement uh the discoveries of science make belief in god less probable and so that's so this is the kind of direction that we've been going into popular culture and the argument of the book is that this this move towards agnosticism and atheism is unnecessary especially if it claims to be grounded in science because the scientific evidence is actually pointing in the opposite direction okay which brings us to the first of these three great scientific discoveries the origin of the universe the big bang i quote you advances in astronomy and cosmology have established that the material universe had a definite beginning in time and space suggesting a cause beyond the physical or material universe now it's possible to stop right there and just spend an afternoon thinking about that but the universe began this is of course what it calls to mind from the theological point of view is genesis but it had a specific beginning all right i think i understand that you may have a sentence or two on that's a mid 20th century early to mid 20th century development scientists it's now pretty solidly widely accepted i think correct from your correct although there are attempts to circumvent the conclusion and one of the things i do in the book is to show that even those attempts within theoretical physics to circumvent the beginning themselves end up having uh implicit uh theological or have have theological implications so the universe began right just a thought that's hard to get one's mind around in the first place my little mind anyway why does that suggest a cause beyond the physical or material universe i mean steve things just happen sometimes well one of the basic principles of rationality is the principle of causality that all uh everything that begins to exist must have a cause this is presupposed in every attempt we make to make sense of the world scientifically or otherwise and the big discovery of both observational astronomy and astrophysics on the one hand and theoretical physics on the other is that the universe is expanding outward in a roughly spherically symmetric way in the forward direction of time we first got an inkling of this from the light that was coming from distant galaxies learning that it was stretched out and looked redder than it should otherwise look where the redder light indicates longer wavelengths as if the objects in the night sky from which the light is issuing are receding so if the universe is expanding outward in the forward direction of time then as we back that time scale up in our mind's eye if we back extrapolate then the matter would be getting closer and closer together the space would be getting more and more tightly curved because this is the contribution from theoretical physics einstein's theory of general relativity published in 1915 um asserted that gravitational force is a consequence of massive bodies curving space around the the mass of those massive bodies so as the theoretical physicists reflected on this in particular stephen hawking in the 1960s you realize that as you back that time sequence up the matter in the energy is getting more and more densely concentrated causing space to be more and more tightly curved until at some point in the finite past and this was called a singularity theorem there is a point where you reach a limiting case where the matter becomes so densely compacted that the space becomes infinitely curved and at that point all physical reasoning becomes impossible the physicist paul davey said beyond that point you reach an extremity where it's impossible to do any physical reasoning at all and before which there would be neither matter nor space nor time nor energy they come into existence at that point so you can't explain the origin of the universe as the result of a material cause because it's matter and energy themselves that come into existence at that point before which there was no matter to do the causing so this suggests an event that took place that began to exist therefore it must have a cause and yet the cause cannot be material it must transcend the domains of matter space time and energy all right i say all right as though i followed absolutely every word oh that yes of course in investigating the big bang scientists have made a corollary finding you've alluded to it several times already but i'm going to quote the book the return of the god hypothesis we apparently live in a kind of goldilocks universe where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right strengths the contingent properties of the universe have just the right characteristics and the initial distribution of matter and energy at the beginning exhibited just the right configuration to make life possible these facts are so puzzling that physicists have given them a name the fine tuning problem explain explain that well uh perhaps a helpful illustration of that is well let's talk about that expansion of the universe yes the expansion is driven by uh a number of factors one of which is uh the outward anti-gravity pushing force that einstein called the cosmological constant if gravity is pulling everything in then there must be something that has pushed everything out because we don't live in a world where all the matter has collapsed into one place and einstein called that the cosmological constant that cause that's just one of many uh finely tuned parameters it turns out that that for the cosmological constant for the universe to expand in a way that will be life conducive cosmological constant has to be finely tuned to one part in 10 to the 90th power is is an accepted um degree of fine-tuning accepted by many physicists they're varying estimates but to put that number in in context and you that would be like to to to get that degree of fine-tuning by chance would be like looking for one elementary particle blindfolded not just in our universe but in 10 billion universes our size it's an exquisite degree of fine tuning meaning that things have to be just right within very fine tolerances or limits to get a universe that's going to come out right but there are dozens if that is that constant if that constant is too small the universe collapses it collapses back on itself you get that crunch if it's a little bit too big what happens we get a heat death of the universe where everything dissipates and we don't get stable galaxies or even basic chemistry in fact so and there are dozens of such there are dozens of such of such parameters some initial the initial conditions of matter and energy have to be finely tuned that's an even more exquisitely finely tuned parameter uh but then the fundamental forces of physics uh gravitation electromagnet magnetism the strong and weak nuclear forces the masses of the elementary particles have to exist within very particular values not too heavy not too light so this is where the goldilocks concept comes from each of these things collectively are within very specific tolerances to allow for the life-conducive universe now there's an obvious objection i say it's obvious because you say in your book that it's obvious i'm not coming up with independent objections here and to quote the physicist brandon carter quote what we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers close quote if you're a fish in the ocean you might be startled to learn that four-fifths of the planet is covered with water that the water has just the right salinity and so forth because you're a fish and because we're humans we look at all this and say wow isn't that remarkable to which the answer is what well it is of course we live in a universe that has conditions which are consistent with our own existence but that is not an explanation for how the conditions were set or why the conditions are so exquisitely improbable overwhelmingly improbable so the the this is called the weak anthropic principle that says essentially we don't need to explain the fine-tuning because of course we live in a universe that produces that is consistent with our existence but um it is that is of course uh uh obvious that that would be the case it's it's required it's necessary but it's not necessary that those conditions would have been so overwhelmingly improbable and therefore it doesn't actually provide an explanation for what needs to be explained which is the the exquisite fine-tuning of the fine-tuning why why are the fine-tuning parameters so improbable there's a great philosopher of physics named john leslie who's come up with an illustration to illustrate the fallacy here he says imagine that you are part of the resistance you've been captured by the nazis you've imprisoned camp they put you up against the firing against the wall you're now facing a firing squad of hundred nazi marksmen and the command is given ready aim fire there's a hail of bullets and you look down there's a perfectly inscribed pattern of bullets around your your your your body but none of them have hit you what do you conclude he says well you don't say well of course i live in a universe which is consistent with my own existence you say gee there must have been something going on here that the marksman so perfectly missed me given a choice between design and well it it had to be this way when things when when the conditions are so improbable the design hypothesis is the better explanation all right we go from inconceivably vast to unimaginably small the dna enigma in 1953 watson and crick discover the basic structure of the dna molecule the return of the god hypothesis quote do in large measure to the discovery of the information bearing properties of dna information bearing fascinating to me i think of it as little twisted molecules or and all right we'll come to this in a moment given the discovery of the information-bearing properties of dna the materialist understanding of life has begun to unravel scientists have become increasingly aware that there is at least one appearance of design and biology that has not been explained by natural selection the information present in even the simplest living cells close quote so why is that such a problem for the materialist view well a little bit more on the discovery and then i'll explain the problem watson and crick elucidate the structure of the dna molecule in 1953. in 1957 1958 crick on his own puts forward something called the sequence hypothesis in which he proposes that the chemical subunits called bases or nucleotide bases that run along the interior of the twisting helix are four different amino amino proteins right amino acids are in the proteins the nucleotide bases are the constituent parts of the dna and these these nucleotide bases are functioning like alphabetic characters they are literally providing instructions for arranging the amino acids that build the proteins so what they end up discovering and crick's uh hypothesis is confusing code it's code what we have now is it's not that the nucleotide base their function is not determined by their physical properties their shapes their masses it's determined by their arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention later discovered and now known as the genetic code and so what we have is a sophisticated information storage transmission and processing system at the heart of every single cell and bill gates our local hero here in redmond has said that the dn uh uh that dna is like a software program but much more complex than any we've ever devised richard dawkins himself has acknowledged that the dna contains machine code leroy hood the biotech pioneer simply calls dna chock full of digital code we have an information an information bearing molecule what we know from our uniform and repeated experience the basis of all uh scientific reasoning is that whenever we find information whether it's in a section of software or a paragraph in a book or a hieroglyphic inscription or even information embedded in a radio signal in and we trace that information back to its ultimate source we always come to a mind not a material process the pro the software program requires a programmer the information and dna i argue requires a master programmer now to justify that conclusion i i have to examine the various materialistic attempts that have been made to explain the origin of information i do that i did that first in the book signature in the cell but i reprise some of those problems with materialistic attempts to explain the origin of information whether they're based on chance or principles of law or necessity or some combination of the two but it is universally recognized within original life research that the information problem has not been solved even as prominent a an advocate of scientific atheism and neo-darwinism as richard dawkins has acknowledged that no one knows how life arose from a strictly materialistic chemical evolutionary process okay we begin vast we go very small and now we go very very old the cambrian cambrian or cambrian the cambrian explosion either way it's potato but listen i'm going to take it the way you pronounce it i always say cambrian but done done we're done the return of the god hypothesis quote darwin presented the history of life as gradually unfolding in this view novel animal and plant species arose from a series of simpler precursors and intermediate forms over vast stretches of geologic time but during the cambrian explosion beginning about 530 million years ago most major animals first appear in the fossil record in a geologically abrupt fashion although the cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking it is far from the only explosion of new living forms the first winged insects birds flowering plants mammals and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record close quote so explain that well in in my previous book darwin's doubt i addressed this question in a full book length treatment but i addressed two separate mysteries that arise from this one is the obvious one of the missing ancestral precursors in the fossil record that should be there but aren't there uh should be there if there was a gradual unfolding of life in a in the manner of a darwinian tree but the deeper mystery that i make much more of is the mystery of it's essentially it's an engineering problem how would the evolutionary process build these new and distinct animal forms given what we now know about the primacy of information in living systems if you want to give your computer a new function we know that you have to provide new code same thing turns out to be true now in the biological realm if you want to build a new form of life from a pre-existing form or if you want to build the first living cell from non-living chemicals in both cases there needs to be an infusion of information where does that information come from that question has not been answered adequately by either chemical evolutionary theories about the origin of life or biological evolutionary theories about the origin of subsequent forms of life and major innovations in the history of life such as these these new animal forms that arise in the cambrian and as i mentioned in the book in other other places up and down the rock column as well all right this brings us again this is something you've already touched on a couple of in a couple of places but let's let's be explicit about it the question of design itself you discuss of the work of the mathematician and philosopher william dempsky to quote you according to demski extremely improbable events feature one that also exhibit an independently recognizable pattern feature two invariably result from intelligent causes not chance close quote right so what's happened in the last uh 20 years or so is that there has been a development within demski has been at the forefront of this but others as well developments in methods of design detection and we all make design inferences all the time it's very common if you look at the faces on mount rushmore or uh observe a stop sign or we we recognize intelligent causes in the echo of the effects they leave behind and what demski began to think about very deeply was well what are the features of all such objects that are obviously designed and the answer to that that had long been given is well they're very improbable but he showed that there are many improbable things that happen all the time that aren't designed you can flip a series of coins or you can flip a coin a hundred times you're going to get an improbable outcome but if you get a you flip a coin 100 times and it comes up seven every time uh you might infer that the dice were loaded and so it's it's the it's the combination of an improbable event with a pattern that we recognize or with a set of uh discernible functional requirements that trigger this awareness of design and so i give a number of examples in the book that mount rushmore is a great one because you've got the improbable shapes but that's not alone what triggers the design awareness it's that there's a pattern that we recognize that matches something we know from independent experience namely the shape of the human face indeed the shapes of the specific faces of the presidents okay so to paraphrase that great cosmologist bill clinton if you see a turtle on a fence post you know it didn't get there by itself roughly all right the universe had a beginning and was finely tuned to to permit the emergence in a way that permitted the emergence of life one two dna demonstrates that even the tiniest most rudimentary structures possess astounding complexity three the cambrian explosion shows that at intervals new forms of life simply burst into existence and this suggests or requires you you adjust this some kind of what are we i'm trying to avoid using the word god but we this suggests certain properties omniscience omnipotence what what how do you interact with god yeah let's start with designing intelligence because i the first two books i wrote were making an argument for intelligent design without attempting to identify the nature of the designer we know from our uniform and repeated experience that it requires that mind is the only known cause of the generation of large amounts of specified information especially when we find it in a digital or alphabetic form as we do in live in in the molecules that make life possible so from the discovery of the the the functional digital information in living systems i inferred that a designing intelligence must have played a role in the origin and subsequent uh development of life but i didn't attempt to identify the designing an agent involved many of my readers wanted to know well who do you think the designing intelligence is and what can science tell us about that question and so to address that question i broadened the range of phenomena under consideration instead of looking just at the evidence of design in biology i also looked at developments in physics and cosmology about the origin and fine-tuning of the universe and because one of the one of the proposed uh identities of the designing intelligence responsible for life is that it was an imminent intelligence within the cosmos uh even francis crick and uh and richard dawkins have floated that idea that maybe life was seated here on earth because it was so difficult to get life going here maybe it was it started someplace else and that life form evolved and eventually became very intelligent and and seeded some simple cells on planet earth um i argue in the new book that that's an unsatisfactory explanation for a number of reasons but one reason that one thing that that hypothesis clearly can't explain is the origin of the fine-tuning of the laws and concepts of physics and the initial conditions of the universe that precede the origin of any possible imminent intelligence within the cosmos dawkins when dawkins proposed this he he suggested that it that such a being would have evolved by purely natural processes but no being within the cosmos can be responsible for the fine-tuning of the laws and concepts of physics upon which its very origin and evolution depend and so the fine-tuning points not to an imminent intelligence but requires instead as a condition of its explanation both an intelligent cause but one which also lies beyond the boundaries of matter space and matter space time and energy one which is transcendent and so when you bring in the evidence for the beginning of the universe and for the fine-tuning of the universe from the beginning i think this precludes the idea of an imminent intelligence within the cosmos and points rather to a designing agent which transcends the universe but then because of the biological evidence is also active in the creation so we have not a deistic creator not a space alien but rather a a theistic designer that has the attributes that jews and christians have always described to god all right the biologist richard dawkins the quotation with which we began quote the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at no at bottom no design close quote steve meyer if a purposive intelligence had acted periodically during the history of life on earth we might well expect to find evidence of episodic bursts of new information in the biosphere close quote how how strong is your argument steve do you just want to say look let's face it fellas the big bang the 20th century has brought major basic radical discoveries that are consonant with the judeo-christian understanding of god which is a in in in this day and age that would be a very arresting claim by itself or do you want to say these these discoveries require a mind and i'm sorry dr dawkins but you just haven't been paying attention you haven't been keeping up with the developments in the 20th century the great physicist arno penzias who won a nobel prize for discovering the cosmic background radiation in 1965 which was one of the key pieces of evidence that really provided great support for the big bang model and and uh sounded the death knell to this the competing steady state model said this he said that the evidence that we have and he was speaking of the cosmological evidence in this case are precisely what i would have predicted had i nothing to go on but the five books of moses the psalms and the bible as a whole now contrast that statement with dawkins statement now i'm not arguing necessarily for a specifically biblical uh god but i am arguing for uh for what you might call basic or classical theism which would be consistent with the biblical understanding of god the but when so i'm i'm not merely saying that the evidence is consonant with theism i'm saying that nor am i saying that theism is proven by the evidence in a mathematical sense where you would derive certainty but instead i'm arguing that that theism provides a better explanation for these three great pieces of evidence that we have about biology biological physical and cosmological origins and it happens that this type this standard of evidential support is precisely what can be provided by scientific theories and scientists are very if they're astute philosophically and most of them are they know that scientific work does not prove conclusions with absolute certainty we get we we provide evidence or reasons for believing conclusions but we don't provide absolute proof because we always have to be open to new evidence coming down the pike so we've had this kind of false dichotomy in the discussion of the relationship between science and faith since the middle ages in the middle ages there were a lot of people trying to prove god's existence with deductive certainty when the enlightenment philosophers came along and poked holes in those proofs and said no they don't really work then people went shifted to the other end of the the extreme and embrace something called fidaism faith and faith alone arguing that there there's no evidence for faith or no reasons for faith we just make uh blind leaps and what i'm arguing is that there's something in the middle that's still very strong and that is we may have good reasons to believe in god without being able to achieve that unattainable standard of absolute certain proof and the the and part of this method of reasoning i use is to show that is to evaluate competing hypotheses by reference to their explanatory power and when we look at these three great discoveries the universe had a beginning it's been finely tuned from the beginning and there have been bursts of information into the biosphere since the beginning theism provides a better explanation of that ensemble of key facts about our biological and cosmological origins than do the other main competing world views or systems of thought whether that be deism or pantheism or materialism or even this more fanciful pan panspermia idea the space alien designer concept so i examine theism and its explanatory power and compare it to that of competing systems and argue that it provides the best explanation not proof but the best explanation the same kind of standard of evidence that we would want to attain for a very good scientific theory i've been quoting dawkins i've been i've been this through this whole discussion i've been treading water because i'm in the deep end here but now let me swim over to the shallow end and stand on my own two feet and just tell you a story i'm an english major but i'm a product of the american educational system public schools in upstate new york and here's the story i can tell you it starts with some sort of primordial chemical soup how it got there we don't know but it's there and this comes into being in one corner of some vast universe again how it got there we don't know but we don't care and then there's some sort of natural event i seem to recall being told that it was a lightning strike the miller yuri experiment yeah then and for some reason there's a lot there's a lot of ammonia in the atmosphere but there's the lightning strike and in this primordial chemical soup a life gets started and it takes the form of a very simple life form i seem to remember one teacher saying just picture a blob of jello and that's all you need because the blob of jello subdivides now you've got two blobs of jello and there are random mutations and natural selection acts on those random mutations and billions of years later here we are now you may believe in god if you want to but he just doesn't come into the story is that i have the feeling that that's the story i have in the back of my mind that a lot of people must have roughly that story in the backs of their minds what's wrong with that professor philip johnson from across the bay at berkeley the law professor who wrote the very influential book darwin on trial in the 1990s used to tell that story by uh mode of almost a paraphrase from the from the the biblical text only was inverted instead of in the beginning was the word it was from eternity past were the particles and the energy and the particles arrange themselves into more complex chemicals and the chemicals arrange themselves into the first cell and the first cell evolved by darwinian processes to produce more and more complex forms of life and then one of those forms of life namely human beings conceived of the idea of god and so in this materialistic narrative you do have god but god only has a concept in the mind of man remember you're freud god didn't create man man created the idea of god so you have this direct inversion of the theistic worldview the theistic worldview holds that that mind was primary that god is a conscious agent who brought the universe into existence and shaped it and designed everything that we see and materialism has the the opposite sort of uh narrative the question is which of the two narratives better comports with the scientific evidence that we have and that's why i appreciate the the the framing that dawkins brings to the issue the new atheists are brilliant at framing the key issues but i think if you look at these three big discoveries um they they definitely support theism and underscore that let me tell you just a quick story i did a debate with one of my friendly debating partners on the opposite side of this issue i tell his name in the in the book but i won't i want to say it here it's not really important we did our debate we went we went he put me through my paces i put him through his we were in a in a in a car riding back to the airport st st louis and this particular debating partner always starts by telling his deconversion experience how he was he was raised in a in a religious home how he rejected his his belief in god as a result of science and in the car i asked him well what was it specifically about science that caused you to reject your belief in god and he said well you know it's just the general success of science its ability to you know to unpack the dna molecule and discover the big bang and i said well wait a minute friend uh in our debate you acknowledged to me that you didn't actually have an explanation for the origin of the information and dna we theists love the discovery of dna too but you haven't explained the crucial thing about it the origin of the information he says well yeah that's right but and and what about the fine-tuning i said and he said well you know there's the multiverse and i said but do you really believe in all those multiple universes out there that can't be detected and he said nah and i said well what about the problem of consciousness and then he says okay okay okay stop piling on you know so there are these big questions that scientific materialism doesn't answer the origin and fine-tuning of the universe the origin of life the origin and nature of consciousness and i would add things like in philosophy the reliability of the mind or the origin of objective morality why is it that all of us act as though there is an objective standard of morality even if we deny that there could be any a standard that would render such a such a belief plausible or meaningful so there are a lot of fundamental questions the materialistic world view has really failed to answer albeit notwithstanding the great success of science but science does not actually support materialism and that's the argument the book steve you quote the astrophysicist robert jastrow quote science has had extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason the story ends like a bad dream he has scaled the mountains of ignorance he is about to conquer the highest peak as he pulls himself over the final rock he's greeted by a band of theologians who've been sitting there for centuries close quote but what strikes me in that very witty sums up a great deal but he says it ends like a bad dream why why if it offers a better explanation should theism strike scientists as a bad dream or let me put it another way why does steve myer who has written now three carefully reasoned thoroughly footnoted works of scholarship why does steve meyer get dismissed as some kind of snake handling yokel and why there's something going on here that isn't just searching in an honest good faith manner for the best arguments isn't there this is the shift that we were describing in the beginning of the interview that this wouldn't have seen see been seen as a bad dream to newton kepler and boyle that science was revealing the reality of god or was confirming an expectation of a theistic worldview which is i think the graviment of the jastro quote but somewhere in the late 19th century the idea of science reason and non-belief were all equated such that it was assumed that if you were going to make progress in science it would be outside of or independent of any kind of theological framework and that we could explain everything by reference to purely materialistic causes and when we're talking about the origin of matter itself clearly materialism breaks down at that point as an explanation so i think reason has been equated with a materialistic way of thinking and that's when materialism gets challenged then for scientists who think of the two things as co-extensive or equivalent there is a sense of cognitive dissonance that that emerges and i i i think it's it's what i've essentially what i'm arguing in the book is that it's perfectly legitimate to reframe our understanding of reason and science within a theistic framework because it was very fruitful in the beginning and it can be fruitful again not only in our personal lives and thinking about ultimate meaning and purpose but fruitful for science itself it was after the belief in god was not a science stopper for sir isaac newton it was the science starter last question steve genesis 1 1 in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth close quote if you had to reduce to one sentence all that we know would that sentence prove scientifically adequate it's strikingly convergent with what we've discovered from astrophysics and cosmology the first three words of the bible are after all in the beginning and i've even had physicists tell me that you know the idea that there was light first and matter second which is affirmed implicitly in that passage is what we understand from our standard models of particle physics and uh our our most cutting edge uh thinking about the early evolution of the of the universe from the beginning forward so um it's it's uh okay by me you know okay by a lot of scientists yeah yeah i mean there's and this this was this was the the point of the of the statement by arno penzias that uh the discovery of a beginning was what you would expect on that theistic view that has god creating the universe in the beginning steve meyer author most recently of the return of the god hypothesis thank you thank you for having me on peter and for the terrific discussion for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 368,579

Rating: 4.7321014 out of 5

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Stephen Meyer, God Hypothesis, Intelligent Design, Science

Id: z_8PPO-cAlA

Length: 60min 13sec (3613 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ThisBWhoIsMe]

Lot of good points. I really hate to say this, but I must.

It’s not a “hypothesis” or “postulate” that God exist, it’s a “scientific fact” based on observation. Another thing that came out of the “Scientific Revolution” is the realization that you can’t derive State of Existence from the Laws of Physics. They are deterministic, each state is predetermined by the previous state.

Is anybody home in there? If you actually exist, you are observable, testable, proof that God exist.

Atheist, eventually evolutionist, have been trying to get around this simple fact for over 200 years. One of the chief architects was Hume. Basically, you have to attack perception of existence and cause and effect. So we have mountains of philosophical books attacking those two points. Hume had a mental breakdown questioning state of existence which is a mental disorder, depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDR).

You have to attack cause and effect because if you can think, make a decision, and cause something to happen, then you are the cause of a change in the deterministic state. You’ve broken the Laws of Physics.

[u/RobertByers1]

Another fine video and I have enjoyed this guys stuff for a lon time.

Its not Judeo christian but really protestant christianity that raised the intellectual common mean of Europe. It was not other ideas about God. Just plain doing a sharper job to this day. Yet nobody would say our modern world is adfected by ideas of Gods laws. just laws.

However other great ideas here showing God is the foundation of "science" and figuring out the universe.