Stephen Meyer: Return of the GOD Hypothesis!

oh no here we go again brian keating an allegedly serious scientist is having on another person to talk about god god save us oh we're not gonna say that but uh it is true i am having on dr steven c meyer author of darwin's doubt the signature in the cell and other uh expositions of so-called intelligent design and of course intelligent design tends to get conflated with creationism and young earth creationism but actually nothing could really be farther from the truth stephen is a very highly scientifically literate i challenge you if you think that his bonafides are not up to snuff he has actually debated the most imminent atheist scientist in the world including lawrence krauss and others and i think you'll find him incredibly introspective thoughtful person with a very very good arguments on his side for the case that he makes in his new book return of the god hypothesis which is about fine-tuning about entropy in the early universe about uh alexei valenkin about lawrence krauss about richard dawkins about issues raised in his previous books uh regarding the nature of information and the claim is simply defended here not a personal god not jesus not moses god of moses and or abraham but instead the necessity in his claim for a mind to create information and i push back in many cases as you'll see maybe you think i succeeded in defending your viewpoint whether that be pro or against so-called intelligent design i hope you'll give it a chance if you want to unsubscribe i will refund your money which is zero but i hope you don't i'm going to have on many many of the world's most eminent scientists coming up including those that use god just as much as steven does namely michio kaku i also have on david spurgle one of the most eminent scientists in the world and oh a guy by the name of john mather is coming up very soon he of course won the 2006 nobel prize in physics for his cosmological discoveries so i urge you to treat this with an open mind if you're not interested i hope you won't unsubscribe but i'll understand if you do but nevertheless you have to at least give steven credit and i hope i get a little credit too for pushing the boundaries of what we know about the origin of information itself and stay tuned there'll be many many more lectures including caleb scharf who is a professor at columbia to my knowledge secular and he's going to talk about the rise of information on his new book coming out in may we have many other guests coming up so unsubscribe at your own loss at your own peril i hope you won't because i had a phenomenal time talking with dr steven meyer and i hope you will enjoy this episode any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic [Music] welcome everybody to this episode of the into the impossible podcast and today i am joined by a very interesting individual someone i have spoken about before uh on the podcast and in my day job as a practicing cosmologist and and that is uh dr steven meyer who is joining us he is at the discovery institute and i will give a proper introduction to him uh as we go on but the occasion of today's podcast interview which is years in the making because i've known of his work for many many years i've followed him and admired what he does and the role that he plays in the philosophy of science and even in as you'll find out intelligent design what is this keating a respected cosmologist is now getting into intelligent design well you'll find out and uh as i said in the in comia that i gave to this new book by our wonderful guest today called the return of the god hypothesis stephen c meyer he's the author of the breakaway bestselling book darwin's doubt the signature in the cell many other books and works of a really outreach and scientific communication and it's such a treat to to be with you today stephen and i'm so i'm so enamored of uh your prodigious workload how do you do it how do you possibly do this tremendous output that you do and uh and still have some semblance of sanity left over well i could ask you the same thing actually with your uh practicing day job at the forefront of cosmology and also work putting out uh very very fine books yourself so uh it's it's once i got liberated from full-time teaching i was able to write quite a bit more so that's been the secret i think i was a professor for 12 years and then came to discovery and been more focused on the research right so i want to just read your quick bio that i received and um this should be familiar to many of my listeners because they may have encountered you already in your debates with none other than upcoming guest uh dr lawrence krauss of the origins project in the origins podcast hopefully lawrence is coming on not too long from now lawrence plays a not insignificant role in the god hypothesis i wonder did you send him an advanced uh copy of this book i will send it out okay good yeah we'll get him a sign i think he and i have dueling essays in a journal inference uh coming up soon oh wow okay so i received the copy we're the intellectual interlocutor for sure yes that's right and uh and the the odd couple if ever there were one so i received this book in the mail at ucsd and and i and i opened it up and i said oh steven's got a new book i didn't know that back in it was december 7th i know uh because it's a day that will live in infamy for many reasons and i got this book and said stephen meyer received his phd from cambridge university in the philosophy of science a former geophysicist and college professor he directs the center for science and culture at the discovery institute in seattle he authored the new york times best-selling darwin state signature in the cell sup which was selected as near as a london times literary supplement book of the year it's been featured on pbs ben shapiro et cetera center and it said professor keating you know uh we we um we're so pleased to present to you this galley copy so this is not the original copy and it said um uh we'd be so pleased if you'd get us some comment on the book uh by december 15th and you know stephen doesn't write books by the pound but but if he did he'd be even more uh replete and munificently remunerated than he is this book is like 600 pages long so i can't do that i you got to give me at least eight days nine days stephen come on uh but uh but actually i tore through it of course i looked up my name in it um and uh see made sure that i was featured prominently as a couple of chapters befitting my my own personal resplendence but this book is so thoroughly researched it really is kind of like a mini phd in the philosophy of science it is dense i took billions of notes on the hard copy the i'm going to get the audiobook version but i want to first start off with the question that my audience is going to ask why are you on this show why are you an intelligent design advocate on a show with a practicing cosmologist who professes that he is a devout practicing agnostic on not an infrequent basis so what makes you and some of the work that you do uh what brings attention maybe even controversy to the work that you do well one of the things that that you have said that i like is that you're an agnostic who wrestles with god you're interested in the big questions and i am too and i think that's a common uh interest that we have what does science have to say about uh these larger metaphysical or worldview issues if anything i think it actually has quite a lot to say and uh i think there are design implications in cosmology and physics every bit as much as in in biology i think we do live in a universe that has evidence of of design and purpose and i think that that means that science may have some clues as to some of those uh the answers to some of those big questions so i hope that that makes some sense to your audience but certainly i think in our conversations has been one of the things that has drawn us together absolutely yeah we've had really um deep conversations and as you know i'm practicing jew i'm not orthodox devout uh orthodox but i do adhere to the uh some of the tenants most of the tenants in my faith you know it's been a long time i i haven't you know uh slept with my uh with my with my grandmother's uh you know ex-husband or so you know they're all these mitts vote in the torah and people say i can't keep it i can't keep all those commandments and i say you know did you sleep with your with your stepmother's wife or whatever and it's it's actually not that hard to uh to adhere to some of these things you know you don't you don't have to do that much you know find a red heifer and kill it that's not something we have to do on a daily basis but uh but the conversation that we had i'll just start off by saying the thing that worried me about um about this book and even you know conversing with folks like you or william is it william lane craig or william craig lane i always forget william lane you always get the sort of sense as a as a scientist jewish or not you know that there will be the following progression uh it'll start off with the column cosmological argument that you know anything that has a beginner uh must have or anything that began must have had a beginning and must perhaps have a beginner so cosmology the big bang the universe had a beginning therefore there must have been a banger as one of my rabbis says uh the big banger is is the uh is the force the motive force to put the bang in the big bang and then it will be well because uh god wouldn't create the universe without some sense of purpose and design therein it is in effect a personal god okay so that might follow logically from a supposition that column is right or that this argument is sound um and then it will always be and therefore jesus and it's very difficult as a you know practicing jew not to deny the historicity um the magnificent teachings of jesus the authenticity of jesus's life and his teachings we as you know as jews document exquisitely the teachings of all of our rabbis going back thousands of years and and jesus was of course one of the most preeminent uh exemplars of that tradition um so i always find it interesting and and a little bit perilous to engage with christian uh people that are scientifically inclined to want to support the hypothesis that jesus more than the god hypothesis the jesus hypothesis so can you say something about that can you believe can you read this book which is as i said thoroughly documented details the biological cosmological and physical implications of the evidence for design can you accept the contents of this book written by a christian a devout christian um if you're not christian and and perhaps have no no you know position on the act on the legitimacy of christ as messiah well yeah i mean you and i have something else in common which is that um you're kind of a christian friendly jewish person and i'm a jewish friendly christian person and i have a lot of a lot of uh close colleagues in our work of discovery who are are jewish and um i don't think you can settle questions um uh specific religious questions within especially within the context of theism through appeals to nature um i think the the theologians make a distinction between general and special revelation and the the uh the kind of arguments that i'm making are based on the general revelation of nature and i don't think they they they settle um those differences between jews and christians or non-religious theists and uh muslims or yeah uh those those other sorts of considerations would have to come into play and those conversations would have to occur separately so this is a book simply about well simply it's a big topic of first the evidence of design uh but then it also addresses uh a second order not addressed before which is uh what what what can science tell us about the possible identity of the designing intelligence responsible for life for example so that's that that that might get you to theism i argue that it does but uh it doesn't get you further than that within the framework of theism um uh or some sort of transcendent intelligence uh then there's there's other sorts of questions that would require further deliberation that can't be i think uh settled by by appeals to nature and of course you know this is not a new topic people have been kind of looking at the confrontation is is religion engaged in a perpetual battle against science and and some of those uh come down to what uh the late great stephen j gould called noma non-overlapping magisterial um support and i actually um i've never been a huge fan of that i always kind of find that rather bland and that's not to say i haven't used that argument myself i frequently have said you know if you pick up a book and it says you know great the stars of the nba and and you look through it and it's 999 pages of the you know seven jews who have ever made it to the nba and there's one page about everybody else then you would say well this is not really an accurate title for the book and and yet that same ratio takes place in the bible in the old testament at least the the testament i'm most familiar with in that there's about 35 verses that plausibly have to do with evolution or the big bang or creation of the universe out of 35 000 verses so there's that same ratio of one to a thousand um and yet people want to kind of pigeonhole it as saying a couple of scientific things here a couple of you know a couple of uh of biological claims here over there and i really feel like that's the most that's the that's the deepest clue that they're it's not just that they're not overlapping it's that they're totally irrelevant it's like picking up a book on quantum field theory and expecting to find a way to raise your kids so what is it about noma is it just because of steven j gould's you know amazing personality and communication of science is there something actually there that is more than you know than just kind of feel good you do what you want to do i'll do what i want to do because i always say if god exists you're going to act very differently than if god doesn't exist if you know god doesn't exist so just tolerating it you know giving it lip service as noma appeals to at least in my understanding of it um i don't find it very satisfying is it is it legitimate in some sense it well there's i think there's legitimacy you know there's an old uh saw from galileo you know the bible tells us how to go to heaven not how the heavens go and that is to say much of what we call the natural sciences concerns questions that are religiously neutral you know what what's the formula for assault what's the the uh um so given reaction sequence or uh the specific form of the law of gravity or whatever but there are uh there are questions that science raises that do have larger philosophical worldview religious implications uh what is a law of nature uh from when from whence did the universe come uh what caused the universe to come into existence um and so there i i don't adhere to know my but i agree that there's some truth to it there are vast realms of science that are religiously neutral but there are also questions that arise in science that are that have philosophical worldview or religious implications and it's at that intersection that i think that are some of the most interesting questions the kind that you address on your podcast for example and that's what this book is about what what do what can science tell us about those big questions one things i appreciate about some of the interlocutors opposite me um and that would be the the uh very overt new atheist is that they do a great job of framing some of those big questions so for example richard dawkins says the universe he asserts that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there was no purpose no design nothing but blind pitiless indifference a blind pitylist and difference just a metaphorical way of describing what scholars call scientific materialism the worldview of scientific materialism that says that there is at bottom nothing but matter and energy the matter and energy are the things from which everything else comes and the material the physical universe has been eternal is eternal and self-existent it doesn't require an external cause to account for its origin or existence now that's a very provocative claim and a very interesting one because what dawkins is essentially saying is that is that metaphysical hypotheses every bit as much as scientific ones might be testable by reference to observations that we can make about the world around us and he asserts in fact that the metaphysical hypothesis of scientific materialism is testable that it comports beautifully with what we would expect to see if that hypothesis were true when we go out and look at the natural world and that's actually an excellent i use that quote as a framing device in the book because i want to argue just the opposite that there are at least three big discoveries that we've made about biological and cosmological origins that are not what you'd expect if a materialistic world view were true but rather comport more nicely with the expectations of theism and those three discoveries in the book are that the universe likely had a beginning that it's been fine-tuned from the beginning and subsequently and subsequent to that for life and that there have been large bursts of digital information into our biosphere that made new new forms of life possible and i i look at those three big discoveries and suggest that they comport more nicely with theism and therefore provide what philosophers call epistemic support not proof but uh evidential or epistemic support for a theistic worldview what level of epistemic support is is it you know possible to say you've achieved a status tantamount to you know evidentiary support uh in that you know they say people say oh that's just circumstantial evidence but you know as i understand in the american you know juror system there's a certain amount of of circumstantial evidence that upon a certain amount of it uh will constitute enough to at least could be dispositive in certain legal circumstances so at what level would there you know rise to be the level of evidentiary support coming from epistemological support and maybe just define you know both both of those uh yeah that's that's an excellent question especially coming from a cosmologist i mean you know that in your field you're reconstructing often events that took place billions of years ago and you you don't have the the luxury of being able to do a controlled experiment or an experiment or control laboratory conditions you have to go back you you reconstruct the past based on the clues that are left behind whether it's the cosmic background radiation or other things and i actually did my phd thesis on origin of life biology and the historical method of scientific investigation that's used in fields like origin of life research or evolutionary biology or archaeology or forensics or cosmology there's a whole class of disciplines that depend upon uh long after the fact circumstantial evidence in order to reconstruct processes and events that took place a long time ago stephen j gould said that speaking of evolutionary biology said the historical sciences reconstruct the facts based on the clues that are left behind so um so people think well that makes it a lesser type of science well maybe but oftentimes circumstantial evidence can be very compelling and it is it is in this in the followings uh under the following conditions epistemologically um often the problem with reasoning from effects back to causes is that there may be more than one cause that can explain the same effect the type of inference you use when you reason retrodictably from effect back to causes is known as in logic an abductive inference now abductive inferences can be uh grossly underdetermined there can be many more causes that might explain the same effect uh and in that case you're stuck then circumstantial evidence isn't very compelling but the the historical geologists and evolutionary biologists in the 19th century uh refined that method and they did so by showing that if you compared competing hypotheses against often a wider ensemble of evidence you could narrow down the candidate explanations and in a in the best of cases you could infer to a best explanation this method known as the method of multiple competing hypotheses is used instinctively by people in for example cosmology or evolutionary biology and it does allow us uh in in some cases to make very definitive inferences about the causal uh uh events in the past that explain the the the the ensemble of clues and evidences that we have in the present so circumstantial evidence can be very powerful and it can be dispositive if you're in a position to make an inference to the best explanation where you have after an an examination of an ensemble of clues only one plausible uh explanation for the evidence at hand right and i see this a lot in a kind of fallacy of of insufficient evidence uh playing out but more on a practical level in other words you might find a lot of scientists as union you know mentioned in the book and some of the most preeminent scientists are are mentioned in this book are are some of them are friends of mine uh you know despite the the the folks that i associate with my off time and uh and and yet they'll say things like you know i mean just i'll bring up sir roger penrose he hasn't commented specifically on this book but uh to me but he was you know one of the first if not the best to really popularize this idea of the exquisite fine tuning or low entropy state of the early universe that seems in great conflict with the uh with the theory you know of of inflation which seems to suggest that you know this the entropy created during this early evolutionary you know process in the universe of its expansion by you know 35 orders of magnitude and in a microscopic fraction of a second uh that that's almost you know a death blow to that theory um and and you do mention those uh those concerns in the book as as you know kind of um reasons to doubt the kind of universe from nothing which we'll get into in just a bit however um you know what you don't talk so much about is that sir roger came up with a alternative cosmology which does away with the evidence uh or does away with this disposes of the entropy challenge to the inflationary cosmology and it actually involves a universe with no beginning a multiverse in time which he calls a cyclic universe which he calls conformal cyclic cosmology featuring an innumerable number of uh of of aeons eons as we would say in the states and uh but but i don't see much made of that in fact i see you know predominantly the evidence that you put forth in the book for a singular origin of the universe which you know at first blush might be considered uh you know kind of consistent if not proved or you know posited by the by the bible specifically the old testament so uh what do you make of the fact that you know what one cosmologist can do another can undo in other words we used to think the universe was infinite it was static unchanging uh hubble the standard lore comes along shows even einstein was wrong um so any any point and and now and then later on uh folks like uh beta and gamma came up with with the theory of the evolution of the very earliest synthesis of elements then we had hoyle who's in the book and and burbidge my late great colleague here at ucsd coming up with uh quasi steady state universe and we see this going on and on and then we had inflation now we have cyclic cosmology or the bouncing cosmology of paul steinart also in the book uh so tell me what you know why should we trust this science this argument that you're making right now when history shows time and time again as mark twain said their cosmology at least is rhyming that you know you it's dangerous to say there was a single beginning despite all the proofs in there there's counter proofs from everybody else so why should we trust the cosmology which you thoroughly explore and explain in this book it's really a magnificent treatment of our current understanding but again steven it's our current understanding and what one cosmologist can do you know in the past another can do better now that's a great question um uh uh first i i do address the the cyclic cosmology of uh penrose first in a long foot no and then i have extended research notes that go with the book they're going to be posted online and so it's uh obviously very important to keep current with the most current things um and i can come back i can come back to that in a bit but the the the big picture broad stroke uh answer to your question is that what i've done is i've made an argument for the theistic implications of modern cosmology that does not depend upon a specific conclusion about there being a beginning or not what i have constructed is what philosophers uh sometimes call a robust argument meaning that multiple multiple predicates lead to the same conclusion and and so i show that as best i make the argument from a preponderance of evidence both from observational cosmology and from theoretical physics uh drawing on the singularity theorems of the 1960s and 70s which are conditional and they're conditioned upon general relativity and their reasons that we uh might not extrapolate all the way back to the beginning if we accept that there could be a quantum theory of gravity in the early you know pre-plank time part of the universe but i also also make the argument that that the back extrapolation that is being made in observational uh cosmology that gets us to a big bang and the um the the movement towards an infinite curvature which is the implication of the singularity theorems are indicators of a beginning and then then there's also a third line of argument which is the board guthful lincoln theorem that doesn't depend upon the kind of energy conditions that are necessary to make the singularity theorems work it depends only on special relativity and basic geometric considerations that also implies that there was a beginning so we have multiple lines of evidence pointing to a beginning but then i say but if you don't accept that there was a beginning or if you accept that there might not have been a beginning then and that in this era of quantum gravity um we should be exploring sort of uh quantum accounts of the origin of the universe then i show that those accounts of the universe though they've been uh promulgated by uh sort of overt scientific materialists they actually have latent theistic implications certainly idealist implications if you want to say that the universe has come out of a universal wave function and then um then you have to ask well what is the universal wave function if you say the laws of nature or laws of physics explain why there is a universe rather than nothing uh well what are the laws of nature what what what kind of form can they have before there is an actual physical universe and this is a question that was raised by alexander valencia himself one of the proponents of quantum cosmology in fact i've got i've got the quote here it's really provocative in the absence of space time and energy what tablets could these laws of nature be written upon the laws are expressed in the form of a of mathematical equations if the medium of mathematics is the mind does this mean that mind should predate the universe but in that account the universe comes out of a mathematical abstraction or a universal wave function which is the solution to a prior mathematical equation that wheeler dewitt equation which is an analog to the schrodinger equation in ordinary quantum physics the lint can make this provocative observation however if we're saying that matter space time and energy come out of essentially mathematics and mathematics is the realm exis is conceptual and exists in the realm of the mind is our new account of the origin of the universe actually presupposing the existence of a prior intelligence or a mind he doesn't answer that rhetorical question but interestingly hawking who is also a proponent of quantum cosmology was sensitive to the same concern when he said what puts fire in the equations that gives them a universe to describe in our experience math by itself has no causal powers it's causally inert so deposit math is to posit something that in our experience only exists in a mind and minds of the things that do have causal powers so have we by circumventing one sort of cosmological account that leads to a theistic conclusion on one basis namely that there was a definite beginning or singularity before which there was not matter space time or energy to explain the origin of the universe now we have a different cosmological account but it for different reasons implies the prior existence of mind and as i show in the book even there's even some deeper logic to that in that to get a universal wave function you have to solve the wheeler dewitt equation but the wheeler-to-wood equation is a functional uh differential equation that has an infinite number of solutions and can only be solved if there are boundary constraints placed on that equation and the boundary constraints are chosen selectively by the quantum cosmological modelers to give a universal wave function that includes a universe like ours which is their condition of saying that we've we've explained the universe so that input of information by the modelers i think is actually quite significant because it suggests that to to get a universe like ours out the other end you've got to put information in and the information is coming in the modeling from the mind of of of the theoretical physicists so yeah what what i've shown is that in a sense yeah many roads to rome you've got you've got different cosmological models but they all have if you if you probe them deeply enough they they have implications that are not strictly materialistic and point in the direction of mind so yeah wait let's go deeper in that um i just want to remind everybody i'm talking with dr steven meyer the discovery institute and author of darwin's doubt signature in the cell as well as the upcoming book or now today's released just released fresh off the presses as they say return of the god hypothesis we're going to talk about that word return in a moment and because i think it's provocative i want to ask you to uh to visit stephen on the web on twitter we'll have his links on the youtube version otherwise uh please do subscribe to this podcast wherever you're getting it and leave a review that's what helps us get great guests like dr stephen meyer and others like lawrence krauss who i presume will come on and present a form of rebuttal he plays not an insignificant role in this book and he's a controversial character a self-declared militant atheist and one of the ones who i think um although i agree with your most recent you know uh mentioning of the wheeler dewitt equation which is something you know that's not super well known to most certainly most practicing experimental cosmologists and yet as an example of something which i've encountered quite frequently where there is sort of a teleological imposition that's placed that you once you have an idea uh for example the hawking hardell no boundary proposal which features prominently in this book or in uh you know the ever ready in many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which is another kind of quantum mechanical um and you know a set of equations or framework perhaps is the best way to describe it that could potentially according to some explain the features of the universe we do observe so when we when we look at it but the the challenge that i have for you is that again you know there's nothing that says wheeler dewitt is is the ultimate expression any more than there was anybody who who said that oh hawking hartl um uh made this made this beautiful no boundary proposal what need then for a creator as you as you mentioned in the book many times and i have tremendous challenges to hawking but i'm afraid that you know you're you will leave yourself exposed to you know people who are not as as friendly as i am and they'll say things like well no one tells you that wheeler dewitt is correct in other words there might not be a universal wave function first of all um you know how could you interact with it how could you parameterize it in what type of a hilbert space does it exist while i agree with you that the challenge to krauss and and all um you know who popularized lincoln's idea he wasn't the originator of those ideas the universe from nothing was that it presupposed the existence of a hilbert space of a mathematical entity of the laws of nature and i find it very weak t as you brits or you're american but you spend enough time in england to be an honorary brit um and as they say so it's weak to say well okay so now here's this one it feels like a critic will say you're cherry picking you're saying oh because the wheeler dewitt equation describes the properties which a universe must have and all quantum mechanical systems are undeniably subject to initial value conditions and boundary conditions um and uh that that they'll say well okay so what so wheeler do it or wrong just the same way that hawking and hartle are wrong so why are you cherry picking which physicist you choose to get your evidence for the uh the mind behind the universe if again if it's eternal just like no the stupid question that people who created god well god doesn't need a creator right so you wouldn't stipulate that there has to be a mind that creates the mind that created the matter uh so anyway how do you overcome that objection that there's no saying that we now it could be epistemologically sufficient or could be uh parsimonious to believe that but there's no evidence for it we have no no treatment no no ability to to ascertain whether or not the wheeler dewitt equation is as fundamental as the schrodinger equation in that it has predictive power in the domain which attempts to be magisterial over which right well again what i'm attempting to do is not to say that wheeler dewitt is necessarily right in fact in near the end of my treatment with this i raised some questions about whether this application of quantum the analogy that's drawn between ordinary quantum mechanics and the origin of the universe is is apt at all um because there are some dis analogies and in an ordinary quantum mechanical system you have you have a detector you have something emitting uh you know electrons or photons you've got you have an experimental apparatus you've got double slits in the quantum cosmological case you have nothing at all you have just the mathematics of of uh quantum quantum physics that you apply to try to explain the origin of the system rather than describing a system that already exists but the point that i make is that if you take this as an as an alternative to the body of evidence that we have pointing to a beginning uh and say well there's a different way of giving a cosmological account then oddly that that account also leads to a theistic implication um so um the the and then in a sense what i presented in the book is what i i've called elsewhere a cosmological trilemma uh the preponderance of evidence that we have from observational astronomy and from developments in theoretical physics and both special based on both special general relativity does point to a beginning it's and it suggests uh that is the most likely conclusion and i i think there is a good argument for theism based on the origin of the physical universe at a finite time in the past um but if you don't like that conclusion if you opt for a different account and the the main account that's been given as an alternative to the beginning is one that tries to circumvent the beginning with with a a a a quantum physical account of the origin of the universe that then also has an uh a theistic implication now a third approach to that is to say well as you mentioned uh maybe all the possibilities that are described by the universal wave function exist in some possible world the many worlds interpretation and in a separate chapter i show that if you go many worlds you end up essentially with absurdities like boltzmann brains and an inability to make any predictions or explanations of a phenomena in our event or in our in our universe you end up having absurd science destroying consequences so you can't absolutely prove the existence of god but the consequences of denying the existence of god as a theoretical postulate at least is um is a system of physics which ends up eating its own which ends up uh destroying for epistemological reasons our ability to rely on our own reasoning capabilities about the world around us so at the end the choices between god and science or no god and no science so um that's that's the sort of argument that i construct in the book now there are obviously the other thing that i i'm critical of in the book is the the tendency among some theoretical physicists to create kind of mathematical castles in the air based on zero evidence and then say well because i can create these mentions that that provides a better account of things than say what we are getting from your field observational cosmology which are these strong indicators of the beginning well maybe so but at some point you have to weigh the epistemological weight of the speculative mathematics against the evidential arguments that are evidential uh just uh considerations that we have coming out of observational astronomy so i'm not and and this is where i think it's very important to point out that if if if the standard here is absolute apodectic proof of the kind you get reasoning deductively from mathematical axioms you don't get that you don't get that in science you don't get that it for a science-based argument for the existence of god but what i'm arguing from is the preponderance of evidence and showing that the if the best indications we have are of the beginning and if the the main alternative conclusions that we have or the main alternative uh models that have been proposed as to explain away the beginning both have theistic implications then we have a strong argument we have good evidence for a theistic conclusion even if we don't reach the standard of proof which is again unattainable both in science and in science and in what you might call natural theology science-based arguments for god's existence when i think about the you know kind of approach that atheist scientists self-declared militant or otherwise uh take stephen hawking and speaking of edifices in the sky i mean no one was better at kind of uh slipping a slider by an unsuspecting lay audience than stephen because he was so charismatic he was uh so brilliant uh and he was so accomplished and such a brilliant writer i only recently fit i started reading a brief history of time in 1988 uh when i was a teenager you know and and i stopped reading it in 1988 and then i picked it up again in 2020 and uh and and i started reading and i finished it and found it you know oh these objections are trivial so i was like congratulating my you know all it took is becoming you know a full professor of physics that but he's actually a wonderful writer and but the sophistication needed to understand uh it's far beyond the fact that he would say things that such as any equation in your book cuts the readership by half but any mention of god doubles the amount of readers for the book uh and of course i i only later came to the conclusion of what he was doing uh was really a slant of hand and it was um i believe somewhat dis dishonest perhaps intellectually to do what he did and i can say this because i wouldn't i wouldn't expect that you would say it although you hint strongly at it but you're too much of a gentleman to mention it and speak ill of the dead i love stephen i am having on the first author of a critical biography of him called hawking hawking sort of about the business of stephen hawking which i call hawking incorporated he calls hawking hawkings charles scythe at new york university anyway he'll be on soon i think he his book comes out a week or so after yours but the the problem i have with him is that he would use in a brief history of time this hawking heartless cosmology as a way to obviate the need for a creator as he said if god has two roles according to stephen hawking who was not a great theologian although i'd point out that he thought so much about god that he actually was an israelite because the word israel and hebrew means wrestles or struggles with god and nobody struggled more with god than stephen hawking and in fact the last word words of his book that famous book probably one of the most popular science books in history sold three times more copies as you point out than richard dawkins blind watchmaker or the god delusion uh it sold over 10 maybe 12 million copies to date now uh the lobster best sellers yeah yeah it was and it made a whole publishing company and a whole industry of popular science writing which i benefit to this day so at the risk of you know uh of killing the the golden goose i i would say you know he in that book the final three words are mind of god in other words if this is proven to be true uh that uh in back in 1988 he believed that the hawking heart of cosmology would obviate the need for god because god had two purposes one was to instantiate the universe and the other was to instantiate the laws of physics the latter he disposed of according to him in the grand design another book with very strong theistic overtones and atheistic overtones but speaking of of a brief history of time in that book he goes through what i only later really recognizes you know after going to graduate school basically as he was doing this mathematical trick of transforming time in a calculational sense from proper time from physical time which we enjoy and right now and we can do experiments on and we can observe things like time dilation and other relativistic effects and he converted it to this imaginary space which is purely used for mathematical purposes to solve equations which otherwise cannot be solved without these techniques known officially as wick rotations to the experts playing at home and then he said well it's just a mathematical trick and then literally stephen a page later it's and now we see that there's no boundary to time and therefore there was no need for a creator um speaking harshly and as i assume you know will find out when i read the rest of hawking hawking which talks about him as a commercial entity uh and uh but he was not immune to using god as leverage to infl to increase the uh influence of his books and his thoughts in that book that that that argument is really falling on deaf ear deaf ears and worse than that stephen maybe you would comment on this is that in the uh revised updated edition 2016 he not only says that uh the more you know there's more evidence than ever for the no no boundary theorem uh but there's also evidence more evidence for m theory and inflation and i point out this is two years after the bicep two affair that i play a big role in so you do indeed yeah what about what about this need to to have vindication to have proof etc why do why do you know sort of these uh the headlines you know appear on page one god is dead there's no god hawking says and then the response to the community falls on deaf ears if at all on page b17 of the of the saturday edition that was one of the things that you mentioned lawrence uh claros a minute ago and i'm indebted to him for uh getting me into this uh whole subject of quantum cosmology i've been i've been studying it a bit but in prepping for a debate i read his popular book and then that took me to valencia and then that got me not only i i was fortunate enough to attend the lecture series that hawking did in preparation of the release of a brief history of time when i was a grad student in cambridge i've been aware of this for years but um in prepping for a debate with krauss i ended up getting into the technical papers on quantum cosmology and that's reflected in in the last three chapters of this book and one of the things that i was shocked to find was that this idea of the idea that the wic rotation that eliminates in a in an intermediate step in a longer calculation the implication of uh a singularity but only in the domain of imaginary time or in the complex domain of imaginary numbers um that that implication that he drew from that in the brief history of time played absolutely no role in his technical work with hartle and that was something that was purely offered for public consumption and yet he as he pointed out in the book itself uh the idea of imaginary time and the the uh the depiction of the space-time geometry that is possible during that intermediate step in the complex domain has no physical meaning and yet from that hawking drew a metaphysical implication namely that there was not a beginning to the universe and therefore there was no creator uh but then he acknowledges that when you complete the mathematical manipulation when things are converted back into the real time in which we live the singularity reemerges and this is one of the things that was actually also very interesting is that the singularity is presupposed in all of the quantum cosmological modeling they don't eliminate it it's only in this popular popular work and if if i could just cycle circle back to the your previous very astute question about well you know there's always a new cosmo cosmology how can you draw any significant conclusion from the whole you know body of work in cosmology when things are constantly changing one of the things that's that's not changing it's a constant is the need to account for the specificity of our universe as we find it and specificity in mathematical terms is in a sense um it's a rarity of condition among a vast ensemble of possibilities and no matter which cosmology is invoked there is a need to there's a what's called the cosmic winnowing problem how do you winnow among all those possible ensembles of conditions and and and possible states of affairs how do you account for our universe emerging out of all those mathematical possibilities and that problem is is ubiquitous it cuts across the grain of different cosmological models you find it in multiverse cosmologies where the multiverse is is is invoked whether it's based on inflationary cosmology or string theory or the combination of the two so you cr you construct a multiverse uh uh cosmology to explain the fine-tuning but then it turns out that you need a universe generating mechanism to generate the new universes in the multiverse and those generating mechanisms themselves require prior fine-tuning so you have the the need for specificity of condition and it's left unexplained and the same thing occurred and this is what fascinated me in the in the cosmological case you can you can circumvent the beginning problem but only at the case of a deeper information problem you have to you have to account for the origin of the specificity that is included in in in the case of quantum cosmological models the universal wave function so um so some of these problems that are necessary to account for the origin of the universe at all why we have something rather than nothing and why we have a specified something rather than all the other things that could be are not eliminated by any cosmological theory and and instead continue to beg the same types of questions questions about the origin of specificity of information where in our experience we know of only one cause for the origin of information for the origin of specificity in that sense or the origin of fine-tuning and that that that causes a mind so there's a kind of incorrigibility of the same type of problems in all the cosmological models and that's that's that's what i meant earlier when i was referring to a kind of the what i done in the book was construct a robust argument one that was not dependent on one model versus another but rather upon the need to solve certain basic classes of problems that are only solved in our experience by the by the postulation of of mind or intelligence i'm talking with dr stephen meyer the discovery institute author of darwin's doubt signature in the cell and the latest book return of the god hypothesis let's get to that title word return because you know for many of us we never started off with a god hypothesis and it's often made a great deal of and you talk about this in the book the god of the gaps and how even the great isaac newton who you know folks like krauss disparage you know as a as a wanton torturer of counterfeiters and even i've been known to poke fun at his alchemic alchemical explorations as well of course he was a you know phenomenal scientist but you know it's often been said that he was able to patch certain holes in the theory of universal gravitation by only invoking uh theories of of god's intervention or angels supporting matter distribution now i heard that in the context of the static universe the apparent static universe i hadn't actually until you brought to my attention this kind of offhand comments by neil degrasse tyson and others of you know this this failure and that you know that of how newton stymied scientific progress because of this can you say something about the invalidity of that actually the the lack of scientific uh curiosity or or good scientific practice and just accepting these folklore table tales about isaac newton and his supposed appeals to the god of the gaps it's amazing brian i've heard this this story about newton invoking either the action of angels or the direct action of the deity to remedy an insufficiency in his laws of gravitation because as he examined the solar system he saw that there were certain points when you'd get the outer planets in conjunction that would make the whole thing stable and at that point he would he would uh postulate the direct uh and specific idiosyncratic action of god to to stabilize things and then the solar system could continue to work according to the laws that he had otherwise discovered um i wouldn't i've been suspicious of this for a long time because uh when i was in grad school my uh one of my phd examiners in a tutorial said if you miss newton's theism you've missed everything he was he was devoutly religious but he was also what the whole point of the principia was that he was he was arguing that the mathematical harmony of the universe the mathematical principles that were evident in the universe displayed the handiwork of god so to say that the mathemati the the mathematical laws were insufficient and that they required episodic interventions and interposing of divine will to remedy uh uh instabilities in the system was contrary to his whole program of research so i was always suspicious of this story and so i decided to look into it myself i got into the principia and lo and behold he actually argues that the planetary system he he he does point out that there are these perturbations that that arise from time to time as the planets the outer planets get into uh certain alignments but he says doesn't matter the the system as a whole is is stable on the order of millions of years uh for you know he says for vast eons of time and he never posits a an episodic intervention of the deity to to remedy the irregularities irregularity in the in the planetary system that a real an irregularity that would not be captured by his his law of gravity so it's just a myth um but to your earlier question about the word return the book the title of the book invites um interest in a story and the story is that quite contrary to the depiction of the relationship between science and religion that's offered by for example contemporary new atheists or by late 19th century historians um historians of science now recognize that uh theistic concepts specifically judeo-christian concepts that were part of the milieu of western europe from roughly 1300 to 1700 1750 were crucial to the rise of modern science in particular the concept of lawful order the idea that there are three metaphors that are commonly used and you find them in the writings of kepler and galileo and boyle and newton metaphors like the laws of nature or nature perceived as a clock or a great mechanism or the book of nature all of these are metaphors of theological origins there's a there are laws of nature because there's a law giver there's a sustaining uh the the the deity is understood to be sustaining the regularities that we see he's not an explanation for irregularity but a deeper explanation for why nature is uniform in the way that makes science possible another key concept that came out of this period of the scientific revolution was a concept of intelligibility that uh the early natural philosophers mechanical philosophers people would say would call scientists believe they could study nature and and that nature would have would reveal its secrets because there was a built in rationality or design in nature that was the product of the divine mind the same mind that had endowed in us rationality so there was a principle of correspondence there was rationality built into the universe and we being rational creators made in the image of the rational creator who had made the universe that way could understand the order and design that he'd put into it and thus kepler spoke about the high calling of the scientists was to think god's thoughts after him so these theological concepts and are were crucial to the the rise of modern science the development of systematic methods for studying nature and that perspective uh i think was largely lost in the late 19th century early 20th century the story of the book is the story of discoveries that i think should and are beginning to rightfully bring that perspective back so there's a kind of art to the story that theistic ideas helped inspire science a lot of that theistic perspective was lost in the late 19th century with with figures like huxley and darwin and in other fields marx and freud but much of that is now beginning to come back as scientists i think are again opening their minds to the idea that there could be purpose and design in the universe after all is it a valid argument to say that uh an absence of understanding of how a deity could instantiate these processes is a strike against the god hypothesis in the following sense so uh let's stipulate that the universe began either you know in a finely you know tuned initial condition in the inflationary cosmology or in the cyclical episodic cosmologies of of of penrose of steinhardt of turok and many others uh let's just stipulate the the universe emerges and that with the proper characteristics and then uh the universe is kind of a boring place uh for hundreds of thousands of years uh and even at that time when my bread and butter my bread was buttered uh so to speak when the cosmic microwave background is produced the formation of of hydrogen still not much happens uh for another 400 million years when galaxies begin to form and then and then you know there is a surface of galaxies in the observable universe we have no evidence for life or anything and any other planet in our solar system uh even let alone in other solar systems in our galaxy let alone in other galaxies in the current time in our present universe let alone in the past or the future of our current observable universe but let's just say the universe is pretty boring uh and then if you're just kind of as i like to do let's talk about me uh just focus on the earth nothing much happens the earth you know coalesces out of a protoplanetary disk a bunch of dust comes together billions of years go by um yeah and then uh all of a sudden you know some molecules come out of the primordial soup uh perhaps uh you know with information i'll even stipulate there's information there uh that was cell cellular digital information in the form of the genetic code um all this playing out by the laws of physics which you argue are very finely tuned i should point out there's a colleague my good colleague fred adams at the university of michigan who claims that the actual the evidence for fine tuning in cosmology is not quite as as stringent as as made out and we'll talk about that some other time because i think it's a detailed especially as it pertains to this rambling question i'm asking so the universe is pretty darn boring for you know for about nine billion years until the earth forms then the earth forms and again if we're the pinnacle of creation if we are the you know the planet which as you believe will host the messiah i believe the messiah you know will you believe he'll come back i believe uh he's yet to come but those are the last time yeah yeah exactly you know we could ask him when he comes as avi loeb my friend uh quoting uh ellie wiesel has said um you know when he comes we'll ask him is this your second time or your first and then we'll finally know uh sort it out yeah yeah so so this is the pinnacle of creativity but how does god interact in your view as a as a philosopher etc very very by the way to the audience out there i might be rambling but the book is not uh the book is as deep in cosmology i mean we're talking about wick rotations complex planes couchy integrals and then is equally kind of fluid and maybe even more so conversant with the biological implications because that was your really your domain expertise in graduate school but anyway god is kind of patient right uh and he's waiting and then uh and then all of a sudden the code becomes active and then we've only had civilization for the past few hundred thousand years i don't think you deny evolution obviously but you believe it's directed by by a mind uh and and even the laws of physics are tuned and that requires a mind to tune but i want to ask you how does the deity interact in other words he was fine-tuning 14 billion years ago nearly and then but the pinnacle of what he's waiting for comes about in the last hundred thousand years so let's round up these are big numbers it's basically the entirety of the universe for the laws to actually matter uh in other words you know forget about dinosaurs we i don't really care about that if we are the pinnacle we're the only entity with mind that is conscious that is conscious as homo sapiens means we are conscious of our existence and that we are existing therefore we know we're going to die now we're the only animals we're the only creatures that can do that so with a pinnacle why would god do it in this way um you know why why how would he do it because i think it's fair to ask how you know is he in a laboratory is he is he experimenting if so you know how does it get instantiated the mind is it just like this roll the dice it came up so finely tuned because he's omniscient omnipotent and everything else that he knew eventually there'd be a you and me in the zoom call that we could chat on in other words how is the mind able to account for water yeah for the teleological purpose that we should exist let me speak first about the time question because i have i have uh you know friends to my uh friends to my right if you will who are uh uh old to a young earth creationist view and they're often troubled by the great amounts of time that have elapsed from the beginning of the universe to the first appearance of life on earth and i think you could ask that question coming from the opposite perspective but to me i think the the great expanse of space the great expanse of time that that you know we have lots lots of galaxies that don't seem to give any evidence of life lots of planets that uh uh don't seem to have the right conditions uh our planet does seem to be very privileged as one of my uh my colleagues put it in the book privileged planet uh but to me it speaks of a kind of divine extravagance that the whole great big universe with 13.8 billion years of time that preceded us was leading up to a teleological endpoint so i don't find that the the amount of time that's transpired from the beginning until the appearance of life on earth troubling uh but there's a uh there were concepts theological concepts that existed prior to any of this discussion that i think were helpful and they were part of the scientific revolution that i did that um there were two powers of god that were relevant to understanding nature one was called the potency ordinata the ordinary power of god which was posited as the explanation for the regularities that we see in nature that god's hand was was for the most part hidden in that but yet god was behind the the regularities what we call the law the laws of nature are a mode of divine action and then theologians also spoke of something they called the potentia uh uh absolutely or the fiat power of god where god was capable on occasion of acting as an agent within the orderly concourse of nature that he otherwise sustained and upheld and so uh i think we have evidence of both powers of god in our physical cosmos and certainly the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe and and there i i also i know about fred adams and i also know um if you've looked at the book fortunate universe by um luke barnes and uh his uh cambridge grads supervisor whose name is slipping my mind the gerund lewis yeah they were guests yeah lewis yeah yeah yeah yeah they've you know the terrific pairing there with a theist and a materialist discussing the fine-tuning but they they they argue that adam's position is really an outlier at the end of the book say whether you're a materialist or a theist here's a great list of fantastic physicists who all see the fine-tuning was a real thing and it has to be explained one way or another whether by a multiverse or by theistic design whether by many universes or one god um but in any case the point is i think in the fine-tuning and i and for me in the origin of life and the origin of the digital code i think we see evidence of discrete intelligent action everything we know from experience shows that information especially in a digital or alphabetic form and that's what we find at the foundation of life in dna and rna i mean this should this is a stop press moment in the history of biology that when we discover that you know the secret to heredity the secret to how proteins are built is actually a complex information storage transmission and processing system that's run by literally digital code that is being expressed in accord with an independent symbol convention that we now call the genetic code this is an extraordinary discovery and yet every day men and women get together and do it for free yeah yeah yeah well exactly exactly so uh you know where did the information come from that problem has stymied origin of life research this is what i did my phd on it's what the book signature in the cell was all about uh even uh uh new atheists as prominent as richard dawkins have acknowledged that we have no idea from an evolutionary point of view how life first originated from simple uh non-living chemicals although as darwin himself pointed out you know this better than anybody but he said it's no objection to speak of the origin of life as not being understood within the theory of evolution one might as well criticize the origin of matter and you know i'd like to point out we understand the origin of matter now but but is that a god of the yeah is that a god of the gaps argument type of argument i think on darwin's part it's more materialism of the gaps we don't understand the origin of matter so why should we have to come up with an explanation for the origin of life uh in in fact we don't understand the origin we still don't understand the origin of either from a materialistic point of view but as for the origin of information we have a wealth of experience as to what causes information to arise the great information theorist henry quassler who was one of the first information theorists to apply that the information sciences to an analysis of molecular biology says that in our experience he says information habitually rises from conscious activity and we know this from and this is part of what we know and should be helping to inform us as we think about the origin of information in a biological context whenever we see information whether it's in computer code or in a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information that's embedded in a radio signal and we trace it back to its source we always come to a mind not a material process so when the discovery of information the foundation of life in every living cell including the very simple simplest ones uh i think is is evidence of of the activity of a mind of intelligence and uh in fact it's this this connection between information and intelligence is presupposed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence they're looking for information embedded in radio signals and if they find it they're gonna they're gonna conclude that that it has an intelligent source from another another galaxy or planet or something so um i i think to get back to the broader question you asked i think we have evidence of of um a discrete divine action at the beginning of the universe and very possibly after that especially with the the or the the origin of the information necessary to get life going in the first place yeah and you see this also i won't belabor the point but the simulation hypothesis is also a presupposition which i think ultimately you know it's a it's a it's a design theory it's a design theory design yeah and it brings up all sorts of interesting you know theological questions of theodicy of the simulators you know would they create evil but but again you know i've had this argument from the left uh i say with sean carroll you know who said that you know god is not a good theory he so i've asked him point blank you know what are the odds of the multiverse is a true explanation for the origin of the laws of nature in our physical universe and he says 50 50. and i said what are the odds of god's existence and he says less than one percent so he won't rule it out obviously but he'll say things like well um can you envision a simpler universe can you envision a simpler universe that could exist be via occam's razor if you like which which i often point out you know uh is more like a hatchet than a razor is employed by most people but nevertheless having uh you know a simpler universe he would posit you know an empty hilbert space to which i'll say well who creates the hilbert space and you know and he really doesn't have a good example he'll say things oh come on you know where does that come but it is true they're they're you know i i think the and he's he's i would say he he i would say is not you know as a pacifist atheist and that he's he's not interested in converting people uh to to atheism as as dawkins or or kraus might openly suggest they are and yet he'll say things like well what is the purpose of the hubble deep field galaxy you know 65 252 over there on the left uh you know the cosmic wallpaper as we call it what's the purpose of that galaxy what's the purpose of uh of you know the 40th excited state of xenon uh what is the purpose of cp violation in cobalt 60 you know why are these things exist um is it you know god's just having fun i mean extravagance is one thing but you know as we know there's no information without energy there's no creation of of order you know without destruction reduction of entropy and that requires energy so you know is it just the prophecy is it god's showing off you mentioned before it's sort of like almost like a flourish uh the magnificence of it all but it would seem very profligate and so what what is it or i think you might answer but i should let you answer but uh but we don't know in other words we can't know why god would do it but what would be the purpose of wasting i mean it's like lawns in the western hemisphere were created you know by as a byproduct of royalty demonstrating that they didn't need to use their their their their agricultural resources to grow food it was meant to show resplendent abundance in their creation so what is the purpose of cobalt 60's parity violation what is the purpose of xenon's 40th resonance what is the purpose of that galaxy over there in a universe with a mind it would seem quite wasteful well our approach is not to try to assign a purpose to everything that we see in the nature in nature but rather to detect action of intelligence where the evidence the distinctive hallmarks of intelligence are present um as to the rest maybe it is cosmic wallpaper but the hubble deep field's an awfully beautiful piece of wallpaper i mean it's really you know so yeah i i pointed out that sean you know i have a colleague who studies that galaxy okay i love i have i have a powerpoint i do on on your field on cosmology i have a beautiful picture of the hubble deep field i think it's gorgeous you know um there is extravagant beauty in in in the universe and but our my work the work of other people who work on intelligent design is not trying to assign a purpose to every last piece of the universe but rather to detect activity of intelligence where it is to be found and i think it is certainly found in the origin of life it's certainly found in the fine-tuning it's certainly found i think at the beginning of the universe so um so rather than uh say how did god do it in that sense we're trying to detect that there was a mind behind it and then in this book what i do is is ask the question well what is the most likely identity of a dis of the designing mind that is revealed by these these features of the universe that display distinctive hallmarks of mind and that's where i say i i don't think it's a space alien i don't think it's even just a deistic creator when you look at the you know dawkins actually in a film uh several years ago was interviewed by ben stein and he he said ben stein asked him about the problem of the origin of the first life and dawkins acknowledged that there isn't an adequate materialistic evolutionary explanation for for same and he said you know it might be that there's a signature but this is dawkins speaking there might be that there's a signature of intelligence in the cell in in which case it would have had to have come from another uh an alien intelligence that itself was evolved by undirected natural pan yeah that's that's unsatisfying in this in in in two respects uh and i argue against this in the book is it it was taking it let's take it seriously as a metaphysical hypothe hypothesis first it pushes the question of the ultimate origin back one generation out into space without answering it um and it leaves it unanswered whereas the theory of intelligent design the only cause does generate information and that is mind but secondly any intelligence within the cosmos cannot account for the evidence of design that precedes it in the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe that that evidence of design points in a transcendent direction something beyond the universe or to a transcendent multiverse but i have uh uh reasons that i lay out in the book for preferring a theistic design hypothesis is an explanation for the fine-tuning over and against the multiverse in particular that the multiverse requires universe generating mechanisms which themselves require prior unexplained fine-tuning so the fine-tuning never gets ultimately explained by the multiverse hypothesis and yet there is one type of explanation that accounts for finely tuned systems in our experience whether they're french recipes or exquisitely crafted pieces of machinery or digital code uh and that is again what we mean by fine-tuning is a small probability system uh that achieves an overall function a discernible function and when those two things are conjoined we we talked about that as fine-tuning and we also know in experience that that those types of systems arise from mind so i think although i think i think there are reasons to prefer theistic design over the multiverse i don't think it's 50 50 for one and zero for the other i think there's reasons to prefer one well to be fair to sean he said one percent or less so he didn't quite say zero he's too smart to say zero right to be fair to sean carroll for another reason i i very much appreciate his work because unlike some of the really ardent defenders of of scientific materialism who take it as axiomatic and take anyone who disagrees is as ignoble and ill-informed uh carol is very clear that scientific naturalism or materialism is itself a metaphysical hypothesis it's a world view that needs to be defended and i i appreciate him for that reason because he puts it on the table and says all right let's look at it what's the evidence for and against he makes a case and with such a person you can have a really a very constructive conversation yeah he's a genuine uh intellectual and somebody that i have great respect for he's also a phenomenal scientist and a yes mentor and uh and he endorsed my book so i can't say anything so you have you can only say good things and you you you gave me a nice endorsement so yeah although with endorsements you know endorsements are kind of funny because you know because of the zero-sum nature of reading books yeah i can't read your book and read my book or a customer can you know so it's kind of dangerous right you don't want to be too glowing in the praise of another's work now your book is really phenomenal as i say you may not agree with everything but you'll have your work cut out for you and uh and for me you come away sharpened uh for for the better from this debate i want to push back a little bit on the mind and the code anyone who's ever been to the dmv and picked up a license plate you know i take a license plate the other day uh for uh for my wife's car getting renewals 6zq you know txy4 wow that's really improbable i mean to find that i was you know that license plate is extremely improbable you know one in a billion chance uh of trillions of chances actually with all the letter combinations it could be uh and yeah i got that very one and obviously there's no mind you know behind that it might have been a random number generator and of course random processes can be created randomly truly by the radioactive decay which doesn't require a mind unless you want to go to really prima facie causes uh but let's just restrict it to naturalistic explanation and yet there's no real design yes maybe it was didn't have a thousand letter sequence but but it wasn't and and but it wasn't really wasteful it wasn't using you know uh hieroglyphics it wasn't you know just demonstrating the the power of the mind so i want to ask you you know at some level do you think it's possible to derive uh not just a non-deistic god but a personal judeo-christian god from these arguments that you make in this book or from intelligent design generally speaking that advocate for a single god as atheists will say is in the cute kind of uh you know uh tried and true way they'll say i'm i'm i'm not only a monotheist i actually believe in even fewer gods than you stephen i believe in no gods uh so in the sense can you can can intelligent design uh follow down a path that will lead to a personal god in the sense of god who cares about the of perhaps interacting with the laws of nature maybe not for brian keating but for jesus christ in your opinion uh you know and so forth a god who intervenes personally to achieve a a set of of goals or commandments uh as in the ten commandments that we adhere to um can you get from id to you know a.d uh in that in a direct path or is it as difficult as proving god's existence to be real um well there's actually two questions in your in your questions let me take the first one about the detection of design the detection of false positives with design yeah a design inference um the work that my colleague william dempsky has done in his book the design inference shows that yeah it's absolutely possible uh to get a few you know a few letters or a few things to arise that look as though they're designed and the question is do you have the probabilistic resources to explain such things by chance and often you do but there also becomes points where there's you're beyond the reach of chance and this has been widely recognized by origin of life researchers themselves there's a great quote from the scottish biochemist karen smith where he says you know a few uh you can easily by chance generate a few short words cat ran uh you know i used to do this with my students reaching the scrabble bag and pick out pick out letters and occasionally they would you know in in a demonstration in class they'd get the word cat or ran or something like that but i was attempting to show that chance is not an adequate explanation for the origin of the amount of information you would need to build one protein let alone a full living cell and so i would always win the demonstration when the argument in the demonstration by continuing to allow them to pull letters out because as karen smith pointed out if you need a vast amount of information as the amount of organization or information required increases chance becomes increasingly implausible and demski has shown that there's an absolute cut off where you exceed what he calls the probabilistic resources of the universe and so in my in both signature in the cell and i reprise this argument a bit in return of the god hypothesis i show that there's actually some sophisticated second order probabilistic reasoning that allows you to eliminate the chance hypothesis if you have a a a very highly specified thing that you're seeking through a random search and you're only able to sample a small uh miniscule proportion of the total in this case sequences that are relevant um in the time available since the beginning of the universe till now counting every interaction of elementary particles as as an event you can show that there aren't enough events since the beginning of the universe to sample more than in calculation i made more than 10 10 trillion trillionth of the total relevant sequences in searching for one modest protein in that case you can eliminate the chance hypothesis it's more likely than not the chance will be false it's overwhelmingly more likely than not that a random search will fail in which case it's overwhelmingly more likely that the chance hypothesis is false and true so there are there there are ways of guarding against the kind of false positive inferences to design that you were just describing with the license plate illustration um as to the second question of how you get from an inference to um design simplicitor or to a generic intelligence which is as far as i take the argument in my first two books in darwin's doubt and signature in the cell how you get from a generic designer to a designer that has the attributes of a god that would be recognizable to theists well that that is the argument of the new book and what i do there is broaden the the using the method of inference to the best explanation or multiple competing hypotheses that i described earlier in in our discussion i broadened the ensemble of relevant evidence from just the biological evidence the evidence of design we have long after the beginning of the universe to look at the evidence that we have either from the beginning of the universe or soon after the laws of physical chemistry are taking shape and showing that that that you have evidence of design prior to the origin of any possible imminent intelligence no space alien could be responsible for the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe of the laws and concepts of physics upon which its very existence depends and so that candidate designer isn't very good in which case you're looking at something that is is pointing beyond the universe uh and and then i think you start to to look at evidence for transcendent intelligence but also we have evidence of design long after the beginning so you i think when you take the ensemble of evidences jointly you have evidence for both an active intelligence but one which is transcendent and those two two uh uh attributes jointly i think uh give you attributes that we uniquely associate with with the deity oh that's fascinating stephen you know i love talking to you i could talk to you all day i would be upgraded and possibly uh physically abused by uh many people more intelligent than me aka my wife if i don't go and pick up one of my children i gotta pick up some kids yeah that's right uh but i do wanna put a pin in some of these conversations because i i do think it would be great to have more debates and discussions with you about um about these ultimate issues in in life and existence i think there's so much fun i think when you take out the hostility of the militant atheist and and you do so with uh with with love and with true interest in understanding the other's point of view i find your work fascinating again as i said in my in my blurb you might not agree with everything but the but the point being this is these are the the issues that make life worth thinking about and living and understanding because not just in the pascal's wager sense of things i think that if you don't examine these things uh it's sort of you're you're you're not making use of the full computational power it's like buying an iphone and oh it has a camera i don't need that uh oh it can browse the internet i'm just having it you know i just have it for uh for the notes app uh but but stephen i i love talking with you i love meeting you in person uh about three weeks ago uh but now i want to ask you if you are willing to go into the impossible and answer the final three questions that i ask all my treasured guests who come on the into the impossible podcast and to hear steven's answer i learned this trick from our mutual friend ben shapiro to hear steven's answer you're gonna need to subscribe uh to my mailing list which you get at brianketing.com steven is a subscriber as are many of my guests so by the way if you want to be in great company with the wonderful brilliant nine nobel prize winners who have been on the show uh billionaires brainiacs ordinary people like you and me uh please uh subscribe briankeating.com and you'll get a link to the answers that stephen will provide to the thrilling three so if you're not gonna listen to that or subscribe signing off enjoy the rest of the universe but for now those subscribers now stay tuned for stephen's answers to the thrilling three you can get a link to it down here or to my mailing list uh right there uh stephen i want to thank you so much for going into the impossible i wish you wish you the success and blessing and happiness that you are so richly deserving them and i hope we'll meet again for more of these stimulating stimulating impossible conversations and i hope it won't take 14 billion years of evolution and design for us to come together again fantastic these conversations are often impossible because of that underlying hostility that we talked about between different groups but i think uh we've made it possible this morning thanks to a great question so thanks for having me on any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic [Music] you

Channel: Dr Brian Keating

Views: 44,983

Keywords: Dr Brian Keating, brian keating eric weinstein, brian keating ben shapiro, brian keating into the impossible, into the impossible, brian keating michael saylor, lex fridman, sabine hossenfelder, joe rogan eric weinstein, eric weinstein, stephen meyer, intelligent design, theism, cosmology, big bang, Wheeler–DeWitt equation, quantum cosmology, Steve Meyer, Discovery institute

Id: 1ZvrwDtg7rQ

Length: 87min 6sec (5226 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021