Stephen Meyer: The Return of the God Hypothesis

[Music] well first of all let me say what I've never said in this sanctuary before welcome to Socrates in the city you can applaud now that's traditionally traditionally that's when people applaud I am so thrilled to be here Dallas is one of my absolute favorite places in the world that people want to know where I am when I'm not home probably it's Dallas I get here a fair amount I've already recognized a bunch of you from other events it is a joy to be here and it's a joy to do Socrates in the city in Dallas I think it's important for us to talk about what we call life God and other small topics in a fun way I've always said and I even said earlier at a dinner we had that if you know that you know there is a God and that he's a God that is for us and not against us and that he is the author of reality and all that kind of stuff you really aren't afraid of anything you're not afraid of exploring the truth you're not afraid of where the facts might take you you're not afraid of where the evidence might take you which is why it's my thesis that science and real faith are friends not enemies they ought to be so I love to talk to scientists I have interviewed now Stephen Meyer with whom I'll be speaking in a minute I've interviewed him a number of times before at Socrates and city events and every single time we've done it I say never again and then something happens I forget what happened and then somehow we end up doing it again every single time I say I'm not gonna do it again and here we are so we're gonna get through this together I don't want to be here any more than you do trust me okay we're gonna we're just gonna do our best to get through this Steven Mayer has a few credentials I'd like to share with you he has a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge who doesn't he as you heard he's the director of the Centre for science and culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle that's that's actually slightly rarer there are very few people who are other directors of the Center for science and culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle that's a smaller group of us isn't it he now this is a kind of a big one he is one of the pioneers in articulating the theory of intelligent design in science if that doesn't impress you you're clearly not listening or you don't speak English that is a big deal I hate to embarrass people when they're in the room actually that's not true I love to embarrass people when they're in the room but that's a very big deal I am thrilled to think that tonight I get to speak to my friend Steven Mayer if in fact he's still my friend I'm not gonna look him in the eye he has written many books all of which I really must recommend a signature in the cell DNA and the evidence for intelligent design Darwin's doubt the explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design what is very rare about Steven Mayer is that he is a real scientist who's operating at the top scientific level who's also able to communicate those ideas to those of us who are not operating at the top scientific level which is a lot of us in the room yeah I think it's really important that we have public conversations on the issues of science and faith and all those big things it's why I've been doing Socrates and city all these years and I have to say I really never have more fun than when I get to talk to a brilliant scientist like Steven Mayer except when I'm actually talking to Steven Mayer who's here tonight Steven Mayer welcome to Socrates in the city come on up [Applause] after this no this is it this is the last one um the problem I have of these events is that I so enjoy your humorous introductions I forget I have to come up and say something yeah no you didn't have to I could just go on and on and on but I think some of these people would leave quickly ah you um I I've talked to you before but a lot of the folks here and who are watching this on youtube or on their phones or wherever they are on the subway because we're videotaping this they don't know your story so I want to talk about your new book which excites me like crazy I have to say I didn't think you could write another book that I would be really really excited about it but you've done it and the title of that book now you have a title for the new book yes okay what is the title for the new book the return of the god hypothesis the return of the god hypothesis so my first question not yet but when we get to that book will be what do you mean the return of the gods but I want to talk to you about your career a little bit and how you got to be who you are I said you're a scientist you're also philosopher right okay so how did you get to be who you are today what was the path when you were where did you grow up I grew up in the Northwest Seattle area I went to university in Washington State Whitworth college now University I majored in physics and geology and I took a lot of philosophy classes along the way and I came to Dallas after I graduated now you say again you majored in physics physics yeah and you took a lot of philosophy classes along the way now is that just to make other people feel stupid what did you like you like what is the reason for that is there an actual reason or you just wanna make us feel bad what is the I was always interested in in the you know the question my mom age 12 told me on the way home from church one day you're gonna be a philosopher she said then some of the questions that I was asking but I was always interested in the questions that were at the intersection between science and philosophy you know so I'm taking physics classes I know there's annoying students that kept asking the professor but but why but why that but why that and for example I was talking to kids today at the Covenant School here in Dallas and we started we had a little conversation about Newton and his theory of universal gravity something we all learned about in physics class you drop a ball that falls why does it fall it falls because of gravity then you ask the question what is gravity gravity turns out to be nothing more than the tendency for unsupported bodies to fall it's all kind of circular and there's something really mysterious about something that we scientists think is sort of ordinary we have equations we have laws but you think about the moon up there in the sky it's influencing it's causing tidal action on the earth you know a long way away but there's no no touching no touch no touch you know pushing and pulling Newton was mystified by this himself he called it action at a distance how does the moon separated by empty space cause action on the earth you're asking me well it's a question it's question I would say gravity I think it's just a thing that mass has it's a property it's a property yeah that's as far as I'm willing to take it yeah it's the thing they were trying to get away from in the early part of the Scientific Revolution what the medievals used to do is they would name and they would give to an effect a name which was just renaming right affect its own cause it was like chronic fatigue syndrome yeah right right right fatigue all the time I would say chronically yeah it sounds like exactly exactly you say what is it and they say it's chronic fatigue syndrome yeah or opium puts you to sleep because it has a dormant to virtue yeah so then the problem was Newton comes along he writes this beautiful mathematical equation describing method and describing the movement of the planets yeah and the the force of gravity but what gravity is was actually causing it he's in the Latin he says hypothesis none finger which means I don't feign to know the cause non finger on Fingal he doesn't know and so so you there's stuff in science that scientists get really used to manipulating and describing but there's deep mysteries underlying it that we hardly ever think about but Newton did and that's what fascinated me and grow well that's cool I think that's one of the reasons I love talking to you because there are a lot of really brainy scientists but they might not be thinking about why right to think about why to ask those questions I think those of us who are not scientists have those why questions and we always want to ask a scientist and sometimes asking a scientist is like asking you know a bad priest who says shut up we don't ask questions here you know because questions are challenging as you said so all right I had a terrific physics professor in college he finally caught on to what was bugging me and he'd say okay listen you when when you ask why and then I give you an answer and then you ask why again and I give you an answer and when I give you the answer it's just the phenomenon it's what nature does we know not why then it's okay and you can stop asking questions and that's when I finally realized oh I do understand physics I understand it in the same way that everyone else understands that we really don't know I don't understand it yeah and even the great Isaac Newton had to you know put some English on the ball by using Latin term non fing go no right cuss sounds you know very erudite it means I don't know well his his ultimate answer to that question interestingly since we're talking about science and faith was what had to do with would the way God orders the the universe he wrote a letter to a bishop named Bishop Bentley he was being pressed by other scientists who realized that his equations didn't answer the cause question what causes gravity he says I don't know they says well they said well then you were not really being the proper what scientists in those days they called the mechanical philosophers right but he admitted privately to a bishop that he believed that the real cause of gravity was constant spirit action it was God's Way of ordering the universe and he quoted a paraphrased a passage of the Bible that talked about in Christ all things are held together the Colossians passage so he was deeply religious guy who realized that some of these deep mysteries were not answered by materialistic cause-and-effect that there must be something that was beyond that in fact spiritual yeah that sounds like a theological way of saying I don't know yeah right Wow now anyway that's the sort of stuff that interested me for a sec I was gonna say I don't want to get stuck on this but I have to ask you yeah Newton lived you know 300 plus years ago in the 300 years since Newton have we figured out what gravity is one of my grad school supervisors and Cambridge made this point to me said in 300 years we've still really don't know why we have new theories Einstein said that gravity was caused by massive bodies curving space and then that affected the trajectory of other bodies passing through that curved space the curved space is still like well it's not a thing doing any pushing and pulling it's kind of hard to understand and then people have come up with the idea of gravitons but those are massless particles causing gravity so of course they are you know it it doesn't get any better let's just say that yeah let's move on yeah I I'm trying to understand what you're saying because I'm gonna give a talk here tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. I want to repeat a lot of this stuff you um okay so you had an affinity to ask the big questions he obviously had an affinity for science as an undergraduate what did you think you wanted to do and at what point did you decide to go in the direction that you've gone in well I caft er I graduated I came to Dallas I got a job in the 80s when the oil market was up and I worked for as a geophysicist for a atlantic richfield company a big major oil company back in the 80s and then in the mid 80s oil market was down I had applied for a rotary scholarship and I didn't get it the first time but I got the second time and was able to go to Britain and what was the big event that occurred for me here was an extraordinary conference maybe somewhat like this one but it was about the issue of how science and faith go together and the conference was at the Dallas Hilton and there were there were there were representatives of what was called scientific materialism or some we'd called it you know like the new atheist of scientific atheists and scientists were theists and they were discussing the big questions the origin of the universe the origin of life and the origin and nature of human consciousness and I heard about it the night before and attended just as a walk up and I was just blown away by what I heard in this very first session one of the most famous astrophysicists in the history of of astronomy astrophysics was the heiress named as Allen sand it was their own Sandage Sandage was an agnostic Jew well known for that point of view for most of his career even worked with Edwin Hubble the great astronomer who had verified that the universe was expanding and had which was crucial to establishing that the universe had a beginning and Santa shocked everybody by sitting with the other theists though he was thought to be one of the materialists and in his talk explained how the evidence for both the beginning of the universe and its exquisite fine-tuning had convinced him that there must be something more than a strictly materialistic account of the universe and then he proceeded to reveal how he realized that the evidence was pointing in a frankly theistic direction and he didn't like it and he was trying to suppress it and finally he confronted himself and said wait a minute I've prided myself my whole life on my scientific objectivity now the evidence is pointing me towards the god hypothesis what is it in me that doesn't want that to be true and I was incredibly taking I was going to say that is one honest man and that's rare right because we always I think the question we don't want to ask ourselves is why am i biased because we just don't want to think that we are biased so that's a that's an extraordinary thing so you were quite a young man at 26 walked in off the street to hear this and early in my career as a scientist here working in Easter walking off the street yeah they line up when you're sober I just want to make sure I was a little delirious leaving because in addition to Sandage at this amazing session on the origin of life and the you know my book about the signature in the cell was really a combination of what I first learned that in that so this was a life changing it was absolutely it was you know I'm going this direction and I meet all these interesting guys and scientists and I begin to think about these big questions in a new way the session on the origin of life will have Jim tour here tomorrow is sitting the front row phenomenal scientist from Rice talking about it the origin of life disciplined by the middle of the 80's had reached an impasse it's gotten it's made no progress since the big problem is trying to get no hang on when you say the origin of life you're talking about the primordial soon exactly I want to I want to translate for those of us who are not at the top scientific level there's a lot of us here right okay so you're saying that in the mid 80s there was how do we put this they got to the point where people were scientists were understanding that even though they had been saying since the Miller experiment Cades earlier they've been saying that there was this primordial soup and lightning struck and the next thing you know chemicals arrange themselves so whatever way you're saying that in in the mid 80s suddenly they had gotten to the point of wondering why they didn't have evidence for this hypothesis yeah like an Apollo 11 Houston we have a problem and the problem was many problems but the most fundamental problem was the discovery of the information bearing properties of DNA and the other large what are called bio macromolecules in the cell Watson and Crick 1953 they elucidate the structure of DNA 1957 Crick realizes that the chemical subunits along the interior that double helix are functioning just like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters like the zeros and ones in a machine code and that they are directing the construction of the proteins and protein machines that all cells need to stay alive so you've got digital information directing the construction of the crucial components of living cells and people begin to this gets all elucidated in the in the 60s and the people begin to reflect on this and the origin of life guys say well to explain the origin of life that no means we have to explain this complicated information processing system and that's where I got really sticky and because nobody nobody wants to work that hard no no I mean how do you get chemistry to produce code it turned out to be a really difficult problem and I was I first learned about this at this same conference there was a leading origin of life researcher named Dean Kenyon Stanford PhD professor out in California worked at NASA he had a best-selling graduate level book on this called biochemical predestination and at this conference he disclaims his own book and explains that he has now become persuaded that there must be some kind of guiding intelligence responsible for the origin of life he called it an intelligent cause and there were three other professors on this panel who had just written a book called the mystery of life's origin who were arguing the same thing and I was working in industry in geophysics doing a digital signal processing which was an early form of information technology and I got absolutely fascinated with the idea that the the the key to the mystery of the origin of life was actually information it was code and then obviously that that follows you through through your career and we'll talk about that a little bit but I so listen to go back so so everything changes for you so what what do you do at this point you decide I want to get a PhD in what well I was thinking of something at the intersection of science and philosophy there's a field called the philosophy of science Oxford and Cambridge have great programs in that area I applied for a rotary scholarship here in Dallas and I was a runner up the first year and actually to a great candidate who was also a former Miss Texas and when I was feeling kind of down in the dumps about it one of the rotary adjudicators said well don't feel too bad she was a great candidate academically but she had some attributes that you did not have my yet other than strictly academic he said yeah yeah yeah so he was referring to the baton it's extraordinary because I know you're not good at that yes okay so thank you I got the scholarship you go to Cambridge and and what are you thinking I mean you're getting a PhD but where do you what do you want to do with that well I had been one of the guys that was at this conference was Charles Saxton and he was working at a small think-tank here in Dallas which is was directed by John Buell who was here in the audience tonight who in some ways was you know ground zero for this whole concept of intelligent design Charles was the lead author on this book the mystery of life's origin and I was introduced to him in the aftermath of the conference started meeting him in his office and talking about these issues so by the time I got actually got to England I knew what I wanted to work on I wanted to work on this origin of life question Saxton had the idea that that it might be possible to make a scientific argument or a scientific case for the theory of intelligent design and I got think I wondered was that possible and to answer that question I really needed to study the scientific methods that people like Darwin used to Rican strucked events in the distant past cuz this isn't the same kind of science it's not like going into the laboratory and and getting something to replicate itself under controlled conditions you had to reconstruct what might have happened and so I began to study Darwin's method of scientific reasoning and became convinced that that could be applied to the origin of life problem in a way that would would support a design hypothesis and at what point did you think I've got something here well I'm the first couple years after grad school III was convinced that there was a method by which you could make this case but there were a lot of other questions that had to be answered for example what do we mean by information it has multiple definitions and there's a mathematical definition that just mean is a measure of the improbability of a sequence of symbols but that mathematical definition called Shannon information name for a pioneering scientist named Claude Shannon who developed information theory as a subject didn't capture the notion of meaning or function and so we were groping for is so just an improbable sequence might be the result of random processes and so it might in random processes might produce Shannon information but DNA had more it has something beyond just an improbable array it was it had specificity of arrangement in order to produce a function like the kind of information we use in computer code or the kind of information that you know we in a Booker and so it wasn't meeting another younger guy at the time Bill demske William demske and we began to talk about the these issues of what what type of information what's the analytical tool we can develop to capture the thing that indicates intelligent design what what what is it that intelligent agents produce that undirected natural processes don't produce okay it wasn't Shannon information it was functional information or specified information I want to just because you've said that now I want to go broad for a second and and talk about the concept of intelligent design for those who really aren't familiar with it I guess that when you talk about material the materialist pothe assists that there is nothing in the universe except material right and and people say unless you can touch it or smell it or whatever in other ISM unless science can put in a test tube and it doesn't exist right right and it's always struck me that most people don't operate with that hypothesis most people know there's something else even if you don't know what that something else is right even just the mystery of gravity would lead you to think as it did Newton there's something else something we haven't discovered yet but then the big question is is there something else beyond the known universe and we don't just mean at the end of the universe is there something beyond it but is there something beyond the material well before we even get to that big question of beyond the universe I think it's it's perfectly appropriate to think of what what there is beyond just the matter and energy around us and there's another there's another fundamental entity that we're all aware of and that's mind because we have them we are self consciously aware so Steven Mayer it's what now when you say we all have Minds right we know that a materialist would say none and then we have brains and a brain is like a computer you're talking about some spiritual thing called mind I don't believe in that and I believe you're confusing mind with brain and you're somehow spiritualizing it so isn't it true that a materialist a scientistic thinker I don't mean scientific but scientistic somebody who says there's nothing outside the realm of science that's it would argue there is no mind even though most people kind of feel that there is you have a lovely vividly blue tie on right now and I have a I'm complimenting your tie but I'm also perceiving it right yeah so I have I have a self conscious awareness of that bright blue color and there's nothing that corresponds to the electrochemistry in my brain electrochemistry in my brain we think helps generate that image but I have a say first person self-conscious awareness of that blue that is that is separate from what my brain cells are doing and most of us have an awareness of our of our own consciousness and our own our own rational abilities as conscious Minds so we have a first-person direct introspective awareness of the reality of a mind and and so let's say the same thing in English I just mean no I know you just said most of these people know what you just said but just to be clear because this is such an important point and I want to kind of pivot on this point what you're saying is that a computer or a brain by itself is not trenches consciousness your ability to perceive yourself and to perceive up at people whatever that mystery is think deliberate - hope - fear - all those things yes cannot be accounted for through circuits or just the brain or whatever you're saying there's this other thing and I think most people would agree with you that there's this thing whether it's consciousness or mind there's something beyond just some pink tissue in our skulls and so then my question is why do people in in the scientific world today have this hard line others why do they get upset at the implication that there's something beyond what science can tell us why is there this even the idea that there's some kind of a problem between faith and science where do we where do we think that came from because that's that's the question that we're really talking yeah there's a couple ways to answer that one is historically to look back in the late 19th century there's a whole series of theories about origins that suggests that undirected natural processes couldn't count for anything including for example the origin of life and the origin of new forms of life okay so the first issue here is Darwin you get a scientific materialists synthesis at the end of the 19th century and then they codify the idea that if you're going to be a scientist you must explain things in terms of undirected material processes that's one way of answering your question it's just sort of I mean what you're saying is it just sort of happened well there's an historical shift in thinking and the period of of Newton and Kepler and Boyle right they were all they may design arguments in their scientific work this was already something obviously were devout Christians they were but they also thought they were seeing evidence of design in their scientific studies so they so so historically there was not a problem or a perceived problem between so-called faith or Christian faith and so-called science but something one supported the other and there was a kind of close connection between the two well on the contrary they supported each so this was a shift in the late 19th century a canon of method was established or promulgated by you know Darwin and others and said if you're gonna be a scientist you must limit yourself to explain things by reference to material processes only but there are so many things that we just look around us do we think of the information on a road sign or the computer code or many many things around as we know are the product of intelligence of mine and this is the other way of answering your question what happened why do people object many scientists working at the bench become they forget about the role their own mind is playing in the experiments that they're that they're executing yeah so professor tor for example as as shown that many of these guys are doing these what are called prebiotic simulation experiments are actively involved in choosing purified chemicals they have a chemical recipe that you use to get the molecules to to combine and recombine in different ways so that the molecules are more life relevant but at every step of the way this process is guided by their own scientific intelligence and they just kind of forget that the mind is playing a crucial role in other words they're cheating well it is a cheat if you want to turn around it I mean if that's of course what it is now James tour is right here is he misrepresenting you or are we okay he's okay all right he's much better on this and you'll hear Amara yeah all right is Marshall McLuhan in the audience I guess everybody who cares about life the meaning of life we think about these things and think about how do we know what we know and so on and so forth so what you've just said you know most of us here grew up in a world where the Miller experiment that said that life was created out of the primordial soup with no touch from God or anything like that we all were taught this in schools and it was accepted and when in the 1980s there were questions about this nobody contacted us by mail or phone and said by the way you know that thing that was on the test we no longer really know if that's true we just want you to be clear on that it's like a like product you know a recall on a car they would have to legally contact you and say by the way you know we told he was the greatest girl but he could kill you so that never happened and that to me is interesting because that's how as a culture we processed right like stuff gets out there I was always taught that Darwin you know Darwin was right and the idea of natural selection and we did this is how it all happened no one ever contacted me to say by the way there are a lot of big questions that have come up and even evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard is asking questions but that information never gets out there's been no recall in those bad textbooks that's absolutely true so nobody in or in origin of life research today thinks that the miller-urey experiment solves the problem at best it would give you amino acids which are a building block for proteins but to get a actual protein that folds up and does an actual job you've got a sequence those amino acids properly that requires a big information input and that's the unanswered question where does that information right and and and they don't know and I remember reading an article in The Atlantic Monthly in the 80s on this question of the origin of life and I don't know but I remember reading it and it was a long article but what it said at the end effectively was we thought we knew how life evolved but the more we know the more we discover that in fact we have no idea right and it feels like that's what you're talking about with the return of the god hypothesis in other words that the more we know scientifically the more we realize that the concept of a creator of a mind it's it's more and more plausible the more science progresses right which is the opposite of the thesis that the more we know in science the less there's a need for God yeah this is the opposite of a God of the gaps argument right in the case I made for intelligent design just in biology I actually self-consciously applied the method of reasoning that I learned from Darwin and he had this rule of reasoning which was if you want to explain an event in the remote past you should look around and observe cause and effect processes and invoke Avera causa a true cause a cause which is known to produce the effect in question and I got to thinking what is the effect what is the cause that we know that produces digital information and we know of only one it's in mind it's a programmer Bill Gates our local hero and in Seattle says DNA is like like DNA is like a computer program only much more advanced than any we've ever devised and and in fact we know from our experience our uniform and repeated experience that whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source whether it's in a hieroglyphic inscription a paragraph in a book right information embedded in a radio signal or the the information that's generated in a prebiotic simulation experiment or a computer program that's supposedly simulating evolution there's always an intelligent input that accounts for that information so I said maybe we should learn something from nature and apply that to the problem of the origin of information which is at the foundation of life and infer that there was a designing intelligence behind that information - okay but the the person disagreeing with you would say given infinite time anything can happen in other words if I flip a coin and it lands on its side people go ooh but they know it could happen sometimes it'll happen if I flip a coin 10,000 times once or twice or whatever that it'll happen but if I flip it again and it lands on its side a second time you'd be a little weirded out what's the trick if I did it a third time and I sat here for 20 minutes and every time I flipped a dime it landed on its side everyone would say something's going on this doesn't make sense but somebody might say look mathematically given an infinite number of time it is possible that that would happen in infinity so what really changed all of this it seems to me is the Big Bang Theory that said we no longer have infinite time we only have whatever it is 12 or 15 billion years so at what point did the Big Bang Theory grab a hold generally speaking and began to freak out the scientists who pinned everything on infinite time that's a great question quick little sidelight is that you know that's absolutely right you know you there that established what is called a limit on the probabilistic resources the number of tries you would have to win the win the biological cosmic lottery if you will there's another another aspect of that and dr. Turner will probably talk about this tomorrow in his talk and that is that chemically speaking time is actually not your friend that when if you're lucky enough to get some molecules to arrange themselves into something that's moving in the right direction of life all the other processes at work are gonna swamp that and unwind that before you get any further and he'll explain more about how the chemistry of that works but but the chance based argument is is suspect for two reason one time isn't your friend it works against the chemical synthesis of life but also there's a limit to the amount of time and that's absolutely right in both of my books I look I look carefully at the at the mathematics of this and I have a little illustration I like to use of a bike lock you've got a four dial lock and you and I asked often asked the audience well you know if you're if you have a thief is it more likely that he'll crack the code or not and they'll say oh well for dialogue it's more it's unlikely well unless the thief has enough time to sample more than half of nations so you always have to assess how many if you're assessing the plausibility of a random search for an informational sequence you have to know how many opportunities you have versus the complexity of the sequence it turns out when you do the math both in the prebiotic case and in the biological case that is even assuming you've got life to start with and now the Darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection takes over in both cases you don't have the probabilistic resources necessary to build even standard-length functional proteins that there's so many possible combinations that have to be searched that there's not enough time in a rent okay a random search to succeed so the larger idea and I know some folks are tracking and maybe some aren't but the idea is that many of us have heard this idea I don't know who said it but somebody once said that you know if you have you you probably know it more exactly than I do but you know monkeys typing on typewriters right randomly hitting random stuff eventually given enough time randomly they would produce the works of William Shakespeare because if it just has to happen randomly right you know that if a monkey just goes like this at some point maybe it takes years but words will randomly come together so what we're really dealing with here is the idea that you're saying I make want to make sure that I'm clear on this that you're saying that what is in DNA is so complex it's like a library of books so it's not like a monkey that would just you know random random random and it's like all we did type the words uh oh he just typed the word cat we're talking about 50 novels by Dickens and Tolstoy we're talking about something so complex that you're saying that science now knows that there could never have been enough time it's the calculations that I show show that it's more likely that a random search for a new gene sequence capable of building a new functional protein will it's overwhelmingly more likely that such as would fail then it would that it would succeed given all the possible opportunities there are for such a search to occur since the first life tell now so it's still you know remember Jim Carrey in that film you know he asks the girl to go out and he says she says he says what are the chances that a girl like me and a guy like you who could get together and this is his pickup line and and she says not good and he says what do you mean you know like 1 in 100 and she says no one in a million buddy and then he starts jumping up and down so oh so there's a chance there's a chance ok there's always a chance but the question is it more likely that a random search would succeed or fail and we can show conclusively that it's more likely that will fail and therefore the idea that natural selection plus random mutation is the means by which new information was generated is also more likely to be false than true and in science we prefer not to have more likely to be false right hypotheses and we prefer more likely to be true hypotheses the most fascinating part of what you just said to me is if somebody could be as smart as you and still watch Jim Carrey movies isn't it isn't that the big takeaway that's the surprise it's incredible ok so I have a question your book is called the return of the dot Isis okay so to frame this you have been one of the creators and proponents of this thing called intelligent design which says the universe looks designed science tells us that it looks designed from the more we know the more it doesn't look like it just evolved randomly right but intelligent design never posits who the designer might be and that's why you have felt comfortable in others be he and M schema saying that it's science we're just telling you what science tells us and science tells us it looks design we're not telling you who did the designing that's not our business we're scientists is that reasonably accurate roughly roughly the case the theory of intelligent design brief brief definition is the idea that there are certain features of living systems in the universe that are best explained by a designing intelligence as opposed to a purely under acted material process okay now in my writing about the design that we see in life I have to this point not tried to make a case for the identity of the designer because it is a there are two possibilities if you're just talking about biology life arises well after time equals zero after the beginning of the universe so it's at least logically possible that there could be some imminent form of intelligence and intelligence in the universe that might be responsible for the evidence of design that we see in cells and and animals and so forth and now I've never heard that hypothesis I'm not kidding well you know who's actually proposed it is Richard Dawkins as mentioned this and so his so did once did Francis Crick Dawkins did it maybe in an unguarded moment when he was being interviewed by Ben Stein in the film expelled right and he suggested maybe it was a space alien or some some agent within the cosmos seeded life to Planet Earth right Crick actually wrote this up as a semi serious proposal in a book in 1980 he got so much pushback he said I'm never gonna talk about the origin of life again it's just too hard a problem but it's I've never been persuaded by that idea because even if you positive prior intelligence and the cosmos then you still have the information problem all over again where'd you get the information to build that who made me alien who made the ailing light but it's it's out there I've always I've always said that the theory of intelligent design is based on scientific evidence but it has theistic implications it seems it fits better in a theistic worldview but I've also long since that conference in 1985 been interested in the cosmology in the physics and I've done a deep dive on the biology for the last you know 10 or 15 years and I wanted to get back to this you know that initial presentation I heard from Allan Sandage and some of those scientists and explore what the physics and the cosmology can tell us about the identity of the designer because if you just think about another evidence of design and you've written about this yet have you had that wonderful piece in The Wall Street Journal around Christmastime in 2014 about all the fine tuning of the universe the laws and of physics are finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life the initial conditions of the universe are finely tuned the expansion rate of the universe we have this kind of Goldilocks universe where everything is just right to allow for the possibility of life but that's built into the cosmos from the very beginning it's built into the fabric of the laws of nature no alien being or no imminent being within the cosmos can be responsible for the laws of physics that make its very existence possible in which preceded its origin back to the back to the very Big Bang okay so again just so we're tracking you were first when we're talking about the origin of life theoretically we're talking about something that happened less than four billion years ago because that's our our sense unless we're we're young earth creationists our sense would be that either way long after the beginning of the universe okay right but right but so now what you're talking about when you say cosmology you're talking about that moment many many more billions of years before whatever what what's the guessed these days 13.8 billion I knew that and so you're saying that in that moment okay this is many many billions of years before the earth existed in any form when the universe expanded out of nothing which is what scientists say in that moment it appears to have been pre-designed it was a setup job to do to become what it is well so this is this is part of why you're you're saying that he'd become even if you look at that it becomes more or I should say when you look at that in addition to the difficulty of the origin of life being explained the difficulty of everything existing right being explained so one of our other colleagues will be speaking tomorrow's Jay Richards and he's written a lot on the fine-tuning there's one particular clip of his in a in a in a science documentary where he explains this beautifully you have there's what there are two types of fine-tuning one has to do with the strength of the physical laws and these numbers that physicists represent they're called the universal constant so if gravity were a little stronger a little weaker if electromagnetism a little stronger a little weaker if the ratio between these forces will off likely be impossible and they're exquisitely finely tuned you know one in 10 to the 40th power or more you know with these so it's actually Looney is Looney crazy Looney engineers here would be familiar with the concept of tolerances these are incredibly tiny tolerances but then there's another type of fine-tuning which has to do with the the arrangement of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe and to get these stable orderly things we call galaxies that can host planetary systems the Oxford physicist sorry has Fred Roger Roger Penrose has calculated that the fine-tuning of the root of the original configuration of matter would have had to be exquisitely finely tuned the number he came up with in his calculations was one in one part to the 10 to the 10 to the 123 you can fill a universe with the zeros after that number what it's what they call a hyper exponential fine-tuning so okay and that and that's that's that's like getting all the matter and energy in just the right place so it will unfold to make stable galaxies so this is completely separate from the four constants right that's a different issue but those are also fine-tuned right I'll say the so so so the question becomes Stephen what does the scientific establishment do in other words I made the case and then I'll talk about it tomorrow morning that the more science knows the more painful it is to put forward the hypothesis that it just happened randomly in other words it becomes less and less and less and less and less and less possible to believe that it happened randomly now that's the science so why doesn't the scientific establishment own up to that or what do they do with that and it was what you're saying that they wouldn't necessarily argue with it it's the conclusion that they like some of the physicists have definitely seen the design implications right from the beginning one of the first physicists to discover a crucial fine-tuning parameter was Fred Hoyle the famous astrophysicist who was himself at the time of really really committed atheist and he discovered that all the fine tuning parameters that were necessary to make it possible to build carbon in the universe which turns out to be necessary to make make long-chain like molecules which are necessary to make life and he was so blown away with the the precision of these fine tuning parameters that he said a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect as monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology to make life possible in many others this is the atheist admitted this right and he in near the end of his career he's very much I met him when I was in grad school and he was actually very very sympathetic to the intelligent design idea in biology by that time as well now he's by the way the man who gave us the term the Big Bang well as it was as a pejorative term he was trying to ridicule it because he didn't want the Big Bang to be true because as you said it implied that there was a beginning to the universe in the creation event so he was really all in the tank for scientific materialism right but the fine-tuning evidence just completely turned him around there and there are other many other great physicists who have seen that the fine-tuning evidence the most common sensical way to interpret it the most natural way to interpret it is that fine-tuning requires a fine tuner right but others saw other physicists really dedicated to this scientific materialist worldview have posited alternative explanations the most popular of which today is that the idea that there's a billion other universes out there sometimes called the multiverse so many in fact that it was would be necessary at some point for some universe to get exactly the right combination of factors to make life possible it's winning the cosmic lottery idea and even I know that that's incredibly dumb that that is well it's funny because sometimes you know angry atheist whatever I've used this term the Flying Spaghetti Monster to talk about God and stuff and I thought to myself to believe that there is an infinite number of universes or words some outrageous number of universes in order to explain why this one just happened to be perfect right it's kind of like saying like if I have a lock with with for what do you call it on them you know for clicks yeah where clicks or whatever it is I've got I've got a lock like that and somebody just walks into room and just gets it just like that and you say well there were 10,000 of those locks and they were all random and one of them just you know it just so happens that it happened to be the right one I used to do this as a gag in my in my classes I'd pass around a lock to illustrate why does fine tuning trigger the design inference and I pass a lock around to the students and and tell them that what I was trying to demonstrate was that chant and the chance would be an implausible way of explaining the fine-tuning because one way to represent the fine-tuning is with a set a series of dials that are all set just right right so I passed the lock around a student 1 2 3 4 or 5 I get to students 6 or 7 and the student would pop the lock open and then and then students would then start with cat calls and sort of hooting like how he showed you a prophecy see chance can do it but then invariably someone in the class would say wait a minute was he for real was that a plant was that a set up job and then and then they'd start to accuse me and then I Wow why would I do something like that and then who moi yeah yeah but they knew I had a reputation for gags in class and and pretty and they would make a design inference because they realized right that not only was the event improbable but it was functionally specified to do something well you know also the idea that we have an innate sense when something doesn't make sense right and and what we're talking about now a lock with with with four of these dials the universe it's like a lock with big exponential with billions of dollars billions and billions and billions of dials right so you're telling us that the most plausible combat the most plausible explanation that scientists are making is that oh yeah there are an infinite number of universes the reason I find that hilarious is that there is literally no evidence for that there can't be their love their universes beyond our own and yet scientists who believe it must be evidence that leads us to our conclusions only evidence are nonetheless positing this because they're they're so uncomfortable with the concept of a designer right there's a wonderful physicist in Cambridge named John Polkinghorne who was one of the pioneers in advancing this fine-tuning design argument and in his wonderful British understated way I got to interview him one time as you're doing with me I wasn't nearly as funny but he said he said well I I don't say that the atheists are stupid I just say that theism provides a more satisfying explanation and and there's a there's another reason for that and that's that I explore in my book and in some details I take this multiverse hypothesis I take it very seriously take it on as an alternative explanation but it turns out that in order for you to have a plausible multiverse hypothesis you have to have some mechanism for generating all the other universes if these other universes were just out there and they had no connection to us at all then they wouldn't affect the probabilities in our universe in order to portray them as the outcome of a giant lottery there must be some kind of common cause some universe generating mechanism that's responsible for all the different universes all the proliferation now you're hurting my head so you get a stop okay I might say almost gonna pay off all right okay and everyone will get this okay turns out that the met the universe generating mechanisms yeah themselves have to be finely tuned to produce new universes so in order to explain the fine-tuning you have to invoke a mechanism that requires still prior fine-tuning that that is hilarious and that's why it is a not really great that is but I just find it funny because it gets to the bigger question right we live in a world where it is assumed that there's a problem between faith and science right and there are many people who believe that the problem with faith is that science disproves it or something I mean people believe that in the 18th century when they knew like nothing no it's it's now the opposite it's it's the committed scientific materialists are scientific atheists that are twisting themselves into pretzels right to formulate these speculative cosmological theories to get around things like the fine-tuning or the evidence for a beginning that we've had since the 1920s and with a big bang theory well again this is what I just find so funny because you know even I can see that it only becomes more difficult like something has happened and who knew that this would happen that science would inevitably point us more and more and more and more and more to the god hypothesis you don't have to like it you don't have to accept it but you have to deal with it and that's basically what you're dealing with in this in the new book right and it also is in that book that what we're not talking well the the two books I've done to this point er about the evidence for design at two key points in the history of life the origin of the first life and then the origin animal life but in the Cambrian explosion explosion very good only about 550 yeah million years when I when I was on a talk show with one of your colleagues Dennis Miller he says so Stevie tell me about this Caribbean explosion thing he says that's right no that's a drink yeah but anyway what I'm doing in in in this book I I reprised those biological design arguments but then I say but let's look what do we what else do we know that might help us identify the designer to paint a profile of the kind of intelligence that would be necessary to account for not just the evidence of design and biology but the whole ensemble of evidence that we have about biological and cosmological origins what could explain that fine-tuning if the multiverse just leads to a begging of the question and saying well you know pushing the question you know the origin of that fine-tuning back one when a degree of separation without answering it what do we knew what kind then intelligent design really does look to be a better explanation but now that intelligent design must have been present from the very beginning of the universe it must have been capable of building that into the beginning of the universe and that starts to look like an intelligence which transcends the universe itself okay that's the key right right say not just at the beginning of the universe but clearly at some point before the beginning of the universe exactly and if you're talking about something before the beginning of the universe you're talking about something before time well and and the developments in cosmology proper have reinforced that in a really powerful way I'll tell the story tomorrow in my talk in the morning about the discovery of the expanding universe and the and the the going in the other direction the discovery that the universe had a beginning now called the Big Bang Theory and it's an exciting story and lots of interesting twists and turns in it but in 1968 after most of the observational evidence was now pointing to a beginning of the universe Stephen Hawking working with the oxford physicists Roger Penrose proved something called the singularity theorem we go back we're talking about gravity a little bit ago the new Einstein Ian view of gravity is that you have a massive body it's curving the space around it and Hawking was studying as a PhD student black holes which are places where there's so much mass concentrated that it curved space so tightly that not even light can get out and as he was working on on that he got to thinking about well what would happen how does this apply to the whole cosmos because if the universe is expanding in the forward direction of time and matter is getting more and more dissipated dispersed in the reverse direction of time as you back extrapolate you get to the point where matter would be getting more and more densely compacted space would be getting more and more tightly curved matter would be getting more and more densely compacted and the math showed that at some point in the in the finite past there would be a point where the curvature of space would go to an infinite course bonding to zero spatial volume and what I used to ask like to ask my students is this how much stuff can you put in no space and common sense is no things go in no space and see the new cosmology is moving in a decidedly anti-materialistic direction because if you want explain the origin of the universe as a singularity in matter space time and energy you need a different kind of cause outside of matter space time and energy and you know many cosmologists and astronomers Sandage being one recognized that that had frankly theistic implications that look that we were now painting a profile of the cause that really only God in the way that Jews and Christians have portrayed him meets the has the qualifications and and why do you say that no there's what if somebody says there is some intelligence but not a personal intelligence is that possible and it was when you talk about where the scientific evidence is leading number one it leads us to the idea that there's a designer but when you talk about the character of that designer or the the identity of that designer what is it exactly that's pointing to that designer being the god of the Jewish and Christian well by that but by that I mean a theistic Creator who is transcendent and intelligent and active in the creation at zoos not well not Zeus not a space alien not a d-stick creator deism wouldn't explain the by lot evidence of biological design because it deals to create are only acts at the beginning a theistic creator of the kind that is depicted in the judeo-christian scriptures acts at the beginning but then is active in the creation after time equals zero as well so what I do in the book is I look at the ensemble of evidence from the Big Bang you get transcendence and you find this even in the materialistic theories that they attempt to formulate some sort of other universes to account for what's going on in this one that's a form of transcendence problem is they end up begging the question as to things like fine-tuning right so but from the fine-tuning you the the most natural thing to infer from that is designing intelligence but that designing intelligence must be operating from the beginning and so when you can join the evidence from cosmology concerning the beginning of the universe with the evidence from physics concerning the fine-tuning of the universe you get a transcendent intelligence as as the the the best explanation that what would be necessary to explain the effect and then when you add the biological evidence downstream that yeah the biological episode so what you said is that unless if we're not talking about intelligent design before we get to this concept of intelligent design we can talk about hmm a God who is outside of time and space who created the universe well then you know and we add intelligent design you your biology then you can see that that wouldn't be a deistic creator because then okay but a lot of people including myself are always unclear on deistic theistic so what you mean is that initially there's a god outside of time and space who creates the universe but intelligent design says that science says that god is active after the creation of the university that's the evidence we have that's evident these infusions of information that are necessary to build new forms of life come well after the beginning and so deism holds that God there's a God God created the universe in the beginning but then has had a hands-off policy on a clock okay and so what I do in the book is I examine all these the scientific case for the beginning the scientific case for the fine-tuning and then the scientific case for the evidence of design and biology with the the these big infusions of information and II and then and then then I step back and I say all right now we can have a we have a scientific hypothesis the universe had a beginning we have a scientific hypothesis or a philosophical hypothesis that there was design at the beginning we compare that to the multiverse and we argue their reasons to prefer a theistic design hypothesis over the multiverse but then I step back and I look at what if we took the big world view systems of thought theism deism pantheism the Eastern philosophical system and and and in materialism and look at which and treat them as hypotheses call it a metaphysical hypothesis the worldview hypothesis scientific hypothesis I don't care we we just want to know which one best explains this ensemble of evidence we have about biological and cosmological origins which one explains it best well deism could explain the fine-tuning and the origin of the universe the cosmology piece but it doesn't do a good job of explaining the biology evidence the space alien hypothesis might I'm really dubious on this but might explain the biological design evidence but it can't explain the cosmology to the physics even an alien can't create the Big Bang can't because he operates it exists within the universes that expanding from that point forward and then if we look at pantheism which is which makes God it makes God and mater coextensive it's the same thing so it has the same problem materialism it does it has no transcendent entity to refer to no nothing beyond God is inside time and space and the universe had a time and space in universe well created well yeah materialism can't explain any of these things because materialism there's nothing beyond matter space time and energy to do the causing if you will when you're talking about the origin of the universe of the origin of the fine-tuning and then when you get to the biological design case that's a big argument I've made in the books that we lack a materialistic explanation of information okay well so I guess I have to as you say all this you know you're saying that now you have put this together in such a way that if we had to guess based on the evidence based on the scientific evidence whether there's a God and whether that God is like the God of the Bible we would at this point because of the evidence have to say yes I would say we can infer a God with those attributes transcendence intelligence great power and God who is active in the creation on the basis of the evidence that we have in the natural world we can move from that ever to that hypothesis as a best explanation for the evidence itself we don't remember we don't get proofs in science of the deductive form that you get in mathematics right or of the ability in the case of any historical science we can't observationally verify that because all these things happened a long time ago but Darwin couldn't either right there's a different type of scientific reasoning we're using and it's sometimes called the method the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inferring to the best explanation it's the method that Darwin used and it's the method that we use first to make the case for intelligent design and that and and the method that I use to argue that the best candidate for that designing intelligence is actually a God who has the attributes that Jews and Christians have long affirmed I mean but even taking another realm of science it's the method all of us use if you know ordinary life if we're thinking logically about this this this or this an murder mystery this is what you're doing this is what our brains do and so really ultimately Steven what you're saying therefore strikes me as historic and extremely exciting do you have a sense of what you have I'm tremendously excited about it in part it's so fun to do this interview here because the idea of this germinated for me on February 10th 1985 listening to these amazing scientists and I realized I want to be part of this and I took because of my relationship with Charles Saxton whom entered me I took a deep dive on this origin of life question and it took me until 2009 to get that book out and I had a lot of people asking are you ever gonna write that book and but I now had the opportunity to come back to this and pull all these threads together and it's a little sense just it personally in my life a sense that my colleague Paul Nelson says nothing goes to waste and there's a sense that yeah all these side Eddie's these great conversations I've had some of the tremendous the scientists I've met the philosophers the the debates I've had with people the other side of the question I know how they're thinking and I know what their objections are and so in the book I make the positive case and then I won't respond one by one to these these objections and I am excited I do feel like that we've landed the argument in the right place we're not I definitely don't to overstate this this isn't a proof I do want to oversteer but but I do think if you stand back and look at this the universe had a beginning the universe has been finely tuned since the beginning for life and there have been big infusions of information into the cosmos into the universe at periodic episodes after the beginning when you add all that up that looks like theism to me not like materialism not like pantheism not like deism and certainly not like space alien ism and when I add up what you just said it sounds like the return of the god hypothesis is gonna be a huge bestseller that's my hypothesis my final question is Steven Mayer where can we get this lovely product well right now it's available for pre-order on Amazon and them or the other you know online booksellers I wanted to end up the tackiest possible question where can we get this fantastic product it is available for pre-order now yeah right okay and and I know this since I'm an author sometimes when you pre-order they give you the best price between the day you order and the day it comes out so if it like and usually they drop the price whatever I didn't mean for this to be commercial but just so people understand you'd like they give you the best price for pre-ordering Steven I am just like flipped out excited that I was already excited but to hear you go through this well I just feel like we're living in a really exciting it's really exciting there's an historian of science Frederick Burnham who says that the god hypothesis is a more respectable hypothesis now than at any time in the last 100 years and I'd go further than that and say that actually the god hypothesis provides the best explanation of this ensemble of evidence but contrast that with the public perception of what science has to say about the credibility of belief in God that from so many popular authors whether we're talking about Richard Dawkins or Bill Nye the Science Guy or Neil deGrasse Tyson or any of the popular new atheist authors we have exactly the opposite message being promulgated all throughout the culture but they're talking about the science of the late 19th century there and we've had a dramatic shift that they haven't kept up with well that's right well unfortunately we're out of time but I guess in closing I want to say all those folks that you just mentioned boy they're in big trouble your book is going to really ruffle some feathers and I just I just can't believe that we've come to a point now where we had this kind of evidence and then we have you who it's my hypothesis you were created by God and that God created you to be able to put this stuff together so that the rest of us could understand that not only is there no problem between faith and science but that science points to faith that's crazy stuff I'm very grateful for you and we're grateful to all of you for coming Stephen thank you so much Eric [Music] you

Channel: socratesinthecity

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Keywords: EricMetaxasSocrates, Eric Metaxas, Stephen C. Meyer, Stephen Meyer, Metaxas, Socrates in the City, Evolution, Physics, Cosmology, Biology, Socrates, EricMetaxas

Id: 8FKmIDApbe0

Length: 71min 55sec (4315 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2019

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[u/jrbelgerjr]

I like eric metaxes