Stephen Meyer: Untold Stories from His Life, Experience, and Faith

all right friends you are in for a treat we are here with dr stephen meyer who is clearly one of the leading christian thinkers today in philosophy and science he's a new york times bestselling author of multiple books but today we're going to do something a little bit different we're going to look at the people the experiences the events that shaped his personal life and at the end of the last maybe 12 15 minutes we're going to take questions from you that you've always wanted to ask dr meyer and we actually have a free copy of evidence that demands a verdict signed by my father and i for the best question that dr maura thinks was asked of him so thanks for calling out the time and joining me today absolutely thanks for uh having me on although i'm a little nervous about the pressure of choosing the best question you know these will be softballs and easy compared to what you normally get that's for sure now i i love all your books i've read all of them multiple times recommended them we've had you on the show to talk about your more recent book return of the god hypothesis and the reason i invite you back on is in the last chapter of the book it really jumped out to me that you started sharing some of your personal journey and story related to faith issues and i thought we've got to explore this a little bit more now before we jump in one of the things i've really respected about intelligent design is you and others have been careful to say the science alone doesn't get us to the christian god and i think there's some real integrity in that but nonetheless you're christian so we're going to explore some of those issues but here's what you wrote in the book you said at you started to have at 14 years old recurring and unwelcome questions and you thought your life was over will you tell us about that a little bit because most kids at 14 are worried about basketball and you know the sports team but you're asking these deep questions well i was worried about basketball too and i wasn't getting any playing time so that might have been the source of my existential angst and uh and anyway yeah i i in the spring of my 14th year uh just about the time of my birthday i went on a skiing trip with my dad and i broke my leg and it was a pretty bad break i woke up in the hospital after an operation with a full leg cast a couple nights before i went on the trip i started having these weird questions that were just popping in my mind like what's it going to matter in a hundred years and i i i was kind of troubled by them but uh the distraction of the ski trip was such that you know i it went away for a bit in the hospital then um i was confined for several days when i got out i wasn't able to get around move much and my active 14 year old brain was just just i don't know on overdrive and it was and i had the first sense was you know there was this kind of routine of life you get up you go to school come back on the bus you do your homework you do it all over again you make the bed in the morning whatever you got whatever chores are your homework but it didn't seem to be going anywhere and i just had this strange feeling i couldn't really put a finger on it or explain it to anybody else but it was just this haunting sense that that nothing i was doing was going to amount to anything it was just the algebra problems i don't know but um and you know there were other things going on in my life my my folks were having some troubles at the time which they later worked out but uh i wasn't popular at school um i was trying to to excel at sports i loved sports and i was wickedly skinny and uh it just wasn't happening so there were those sort of factors but there was first it was this question about sort of meaning what's it gonna what's anything that you do no matter anything i could imagine oh i know what it was too sean in the hospital my dad gave me this book about the history of baseball and i was wickedly i was into baseball big time and uh but i'd read these stories and they all ended the same way you know you had this great prospect bob feller or stan usual or you know that was the the the uh the history of the game you know willie mays was the same thing they were they were they were scouted they'd come up early they'd have this fantastic career accumulate these records and then they'd retire and then what and that was the sense well yeah and then what but then i kept thinking well it's not just well to me being a baseball player was the greatest thing you could do in my 14 year old mind but if i thought about a surgeon or an engineer or any anybody else you know you do your career and then you die and does any anyone remember in 100 years what you accomplished that was sort of the haunting feeling excuse me just a little trouble with this there we go and uh and then there are other questions i i'd in my cast hobble up to the mailbox every every day to get the newspaper to read the baseball box scores sure and the dates on the newspaper would go by april 22nd april 23rd april 24th and i started and there was a strange thing about time it just every day uh well i could think of any moment you know snap my fingers now think back to that moment i can remember it but it's gone and the moment i'm in now is is is equally ephemeral it's gone so what is it that's the same all the time that is the basis that binds all these passing sense impressions together i mean i didn't really have any and later i could use philosophical terminology to describe this but there was a sense that unless there's something that doesn't change everything that's constantly changing has no lasting reality let alone meaning and then i remember one day looking at my windowsill in my leg cast and there was a you know pattern in the wood and i thought well how do i know that what i'm seeing is really there and not just something that's going on in my brain that's and then at that point i remember having this this kind of surge it was it was an adrenaline rush and if i thought i wonder if this is what it means to be insane and then i got this fear of the questions that was driving the fear that there was something wrong with me and it just it's cycled and you know probably if this was you know probably a little bit before the therapeutic culture got really big but if my parents had taken me into a psychologist or something they would have said well you're having anxiety attacks are you having a panic attack but later when i was in college and taking philosophy and studying the existentialists and jean-paul sartre and he says you know without an infinite reference point nothing finite has any ultimate meaning or value i thought well that was what was bothering me you know there was there was the sense that everything was in influx passing passing passing and nothing had any lasting meaning or value and um and so i later learned that my you know my adolescent anxiety panic attack was essentially a metaphysical anxiety wow which you know the philosophers call angst which is pretentious but it was bothering me and it wasn't until on kind of on my own um it started to dissipate when i got back into school in the fall but it would come back with a vengeance this and i'd call it it because it frightened me i remember one time uh in the middle of the night having this you know this whole anxiety thing and i rushed about halfway up the stairs i was gonna go talk to my parents and i realized there wasn't anything they could say either and i just stopped in the wow on the landing and wow episode come back with the vengeance and um but somewhere around my sophomore year i started reading the bible and um i got you know somewhere in the book of hebrews said you know um jesus christ is the same yesterday today and forever and then i found in the exodus the name of god you know i am that i am and i thought well maybe this is the thing that doesn't change that's that is the basis of all reality which makes because i had this this intuition i can't really it's not a proof or anything but just this intuition that there's got to be something that doesn't change or everything else that does constantly change has no no no substance no reality that's that's uh constant anyway there were various things as i was reading the bible that addressed some of these what i later learned were essentially philosophical questions about meaning about how do you know anything how can be confident that you know things and so i had this very gradual and somewhat tortuous conversion that started in middle of high school and i really wasn't settled till i got out of college when i was in college i became a convinced christian first a convinced theist and then a convinced christian but i also didn't want it to be true there was i was a push pull inside me and um and so it really wasn't it you know it's a long story but eventually i got settled and and but the thing that that that um christian belief the christian worldview the biblical worldview did for me was it gave me answers to basic philosophical questions that allowed me to but what i used to say was i felt normal for the first time like it was like a they it provided foundation for my thinking later i came across the augustinian you know cradle telecom believe in order to know and then i got into you know in philosophy the postmodern problem and epistemological skepticism and a lot of that started to make a lot more sense and unless their our minds are the product of a benevolent creator who made them in such a way as to make it possible for us to know the world as it really is or at least approximately so um we do plunge into a form of profound skepticism about whether what we're perceiving matches what's really out there and whether or not at a deeper level our lives can have any ultimate meaning or purpose so those were the sort of things that were really critical to my conversion but it took a long time and i probably overthought everything and it was definitely neurotic and all of that but anyway so that's that's sort of where you know so for me a lot of the arguments that made sense as far as the case for theism were these presuppositional arguments especially the the argument from epistemological necessity which i i tell in the book i had a chance uh to have a lunch with a great uh philosopher of science thomas nagel himself an atheist and he asked me over lunch he said well why did you become a christian i started to explain the the epistemological argument from necessity that really only theism grounds our belief in the reliability of the mind the mind is designed well to match the way the world works and it's various presuppositions about how the world works then we can have knowledge and as i started to explain it nagel just interrupted me and he said no no you don't need to explain he said he said there's no question that theism solves a lot of philosophical problems wow wow and that was a very memorable conversation for me so it sounds like your journey was more philosophical and theological than it was scientific definitely the science the science bit came later i was at the same time i double majored in well i had physics and geology on one side and then i would i took a minor in philosophy and uh but uh it was the philosophical stuff that that was going on in my head you know when i encountered for example hume's argument from epistemological skepticism and realized that he started with the denial his premise was there is no god and then he realized that you know the mind was making certain assumptions about the way the world works that was that were essential to formulating any reliable knowledge of the world and then i realized well you know god then you get skepticism no god no science but what if you start with god and then you have a grounding for your belief in the reliability of the mind and the assumptions that it makes about the way the world works that there's a uniformity of nature for example which hume doubted so those sorts of arguments it said essentially for me it came down to you know it was either it was either theism or a radical form of atheistic existentialism that that left you in archer put it anguish for lordness and despair and an inability to know the world around you including other people so to me those are the two consistent philosophical choices one of our mutual friends jay warren wallace as an atheist cold case detective became convinced that mark was eyewitness testimony and reliable before he understood why jesus even had to die that followed from it sounds like christianity solved these philosophical existential questions for you was there a kind of moment or a process where you realized oh my goodness doesn't always solve the problems but jesus says i'm a sinner who desperately needs grace was there that moment or was it more just of a journey of adopting the christian world it was all happening kind of at the same time because i remember first reading um the first part of the bible that i read was the gospel of matthew and i it was just the day i picked it up as a big fat white catholic family bible we've been raised sort of nominally catholic okay i mean no many devout catholics now and love them sure you know so it's it's just a wonderful thing the way the christian world is is sort of coming together with what paul johnson called a highest common denominator ecumenicism of the spirit you know the people in all the different denominations that um are are uh sincere and devout in their faith but at the time we were in a uh a catholic parish where the theology was pretty political if it was sort of social justice stuff and there wasn't a whole lot of gospel and i um and i started i just started reading but i when i picked up the bible it fell open to this picture of christ between the two testaments and it was it was a manly carpenter and i just thought this looks kind of interesting and it had the the verse underneath was the passage from matthew 11. come unto me all ye who wow you know our labor and our heavy laden and i will give you rest and i thought that sounded pretty interesting and i was just shocked reading through it it was like i had to read a chapter at night because it settled this something in what i was reading was settling this underlying metaphysical anxiety panic thing that was going on with me and it was about my sophomore year in high school i began to think about and then i remember halfway through my junior year i just told myself i've got to stop thinking about christianity i've just got to take two weeks off and stop thinking about it because i it was like my and i didn't know anybody else that was thinking about these things and i find religious radio broadcasts you know all the all the people on the broadcast had southern accents and they were from texas or oklahoma you know you know so um anyway so you know i i said the sinner's prayer several hundred times probably kept thinking that the skies would part or something would change you know and so and later my senior year in high school i began to meet uh other christians at the high school and i was tell apparently i was talking about it all the time the reunion people would come up to me and tell me that they had found faith and that they knew i was a christian because of and i thought i didn't think i was a christian in high school i was just obsessively thinking about this and all these other questions so the things were happening kind of in parallel um but by by college i had a pretty good understanding of what it was about and and um i think i considered myself christian but i wasn't sure i wanted to be you know there was this push-pull yeah um so there's just you know there were there were a lot of factors but it was several years after um after college i got a job as a in dallas i was working in a for an oil company as a geophysicist yeah by that time i was settled and and and had this sense yeah i i think i it was everything was making sense the i had yeah i had also these sort of moral objections to cr to christianity and the whole idea of of divine sovereignty over my life why should he rule and i serve as the condition of my of my happiness which i understood was a condition of it um and it took me a while to what what really what what what does the kid say now wrecked me was the recognition of the humility of christ that uh this wasn't a question that god was asking he didn't really care about who ruled and who served except in so far it was uh the way he designed things was for our benefit and that christ himself who was the creator and who was um um uh you know what in christian belief one of the three persons of the trinity came in human form and suffered on our behalf and did not hold the things of his position as philippians says things to be grasped he emptied himself and i thought well if god himself manifests that sort of humility then maybe that maybe it isn't devaluing or dehumanizing for um me to let him uh have that position in my life so it though those were some of the you know there was just it took a long time but but by about 24 i was uh in a new place i was um working and um and a conference came to town a couple years later and that's when i first encountered the the early leaders of what we now call the intelligent design movement and with that the the evidence the evidence the scientific evidential basis of belief in god which i found super interesting so it was for me theism was a philosophical necessity indeed of sanity and um but then also to discover that there was evidence for the reality of god and sort of a on a different track that really really ignited me and uh yeah i can imagine as you know i grew up in a home with a well-known influential apologist but i went through a season of doubt and that doubt how my father responded to it really shapes the way i speak and i teach and i try to interact with other people you said the questions played you at 14 and at 24 it seemed to come full circle that's really a decade of wrestling with these questions how does that shape the way you interact with skeptics with agnostics with non-believing scientists or even with christians who have doubts with their about their faith i i just love people like that you know because there's often an authenticity in that that easy easy answers don't necessarily um uh people who are comfortable with easy answers sometimes are lighting or sweeping aside the difficult questions and um i had a professor in college norman krebs he was a philosopher never wrote much was a brilliant teacher and so it wasn't really well known except to students at whitworth college where i went to sure you know and i met other people later who said oh yeah i minored in krebs too you know i i i i was pre-med but i minored in crabs it was a philosophy thing but you know this one professor really attracted a lot of students and he had been a presbyterian minister until the age of 40. and he left the ministry went did a phd in philosophy at the university of washington and uh was a kantian scholar and said well he went into philosophy because we christians he said knew all the answers but we didn't know the questions and so when i was then teaching um the the sort of students that i was would find me somehow you know i i'd get the kids from the english department or the the philosophy majors or the science students you know just the students who were asking questions and um i i love those conversations and uh so you know and i just have i i have a you know tremendous sense of empathy for people that are wanting to find meaning and significance in life and uh i got an email just the other day from a really bright professor who just read return of the god hypothesis he said yeah i think i'm sold on the argument for theism but i don't know where to go next you know which which brand you know and uh so you know and i i should say that i in in my work on intelligent design uh my our case has been for a designing intelligence of some kind i've extended the argument beyond that um to explain why i think that theism provides the best overall explanation of the scientific evidence but not everyone who's a darwin skeptic or a proponent of intelligent design or even someone who's accepted say the argument of my most recent book is necessarily a christian like i am and i wasn't trying to argue for that in those those books but rather just looking at what does the scientific evidence say first within biology and then within a broader context i think within biology you get to a mind of some kind when you open the search window up and look at the cosmological and fine-tuning evidence and physics i think it certainly points to to theism and then you've got other questions if you're you're going to follow it sequentially right now you've written darwin's doubt signature in the cell most recently return of the god hypothesis will you give us a sense of some of the emails or contacts you hit obviously without mentioning mentioning any names of the kind of things that might surprise people of other scientists who are either questioning this darwinian model you've questioned or like you just mentioned a scientist who's open to belief in god or is it all like critical like what are the kinds of emails you get give us a sense of what it's like this feedback that comes your way yeah it's kind of fascinating um and it's changed over time uh with when intelligent design was first sort of first broke on the scene you know mike b he's great book darwin's black box 1996 and bill dempsky had a series of just really seminal work starting with a design inference there was a there was a period where we were just kind of on a roll and and it was we had reframed the issue wasn't about the age of the earth or different interpretations of genesis it was design or apparent design and people liked that framing because that was the big question it wasn't you know for christians had gotten kind of hung up on arguing with each other about how to interpret the first chapter of genesis and we've you know given the the atheist side of the argument a free pass you know that they only had to they only had to argue with with uh you know the six thousand year interpretation of or flood geology when there was much bigger questions in play and for us it was you know is there designer no design which ends up being a surrogate for materialism versus theism at the worldview unless you want to go with panspermia which i've argued against in a recent op-ed yeah yeah so in any case um then there was a dover trial in o5 which was something we didn't want which we urged the the school board not to pursue um and there was a period after that where you know the media's you know it was kind of the mantra was it's over after dover there wasn't as much media attention around intelligent design and in the end i think that was a really good thing and a number of us started to write a second generation of books and scientific articles we're now closing in on 200 peer-reviewed articles wow you know advancing the theory of intelligent design um so after i uh wrote signature in the cell in 2009 i started to get a lot of a lot of mail and correspondence and but and one particular this this might be illustrative and i can share a name here it's uh i got i got an email in 09 from a german scientist gunter beckley and he asked if i would please not reply to the email and not uh call him at the office number that was in his buy iceland you know details at the bottom but to call him at home and his story was that he had created an exhibit at the art museum of natural history the largest natural history museum in europe and he was curating that exhibit it was a bicentennial exhibit celebrating the 200-year anniversary of darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of darwin's publication of the origin of species and he was the public spokesman for darwinism at this very prestigious natural history museum one of his colleagues had said hey gunter if you're going to represent us to the media and you better read the books about intelligent design and the reason he did this gunter had created a scales of justice uh as part of the display where on one side was the origin of species and on the other was all the books about intelligent design had five or six id books on one side and the origin on the other and then the caption underneath said the one book that outweighs them all darwin went like this so he started reading so he got in touch after he had read a bunch of these ideas interesting and he said look i i'm i made a mistake i shouldn't have read those books and um you guys are being unfairly maligned there's a lot more science to this than i realized can i come out and see you guys and so we hosted him in seattle and he then embarked on a kind of experience similar to what i had done starting he became a darwin skeptic and then within a year or two he was pretty convinced of the evidence for id um he was uh um not a theist or christian or anything when this whole process started he was sort of into process philosophy and but anyway long story short by 2016 he did have a a not only an intellectual conversation to to id and to theism but then to christianity he's now a devout catholic and at that point he thought hey i need to be open about the my scientific change of mind as well and uh and so you know there have been a number by about 15 16 there was quite a number of high-profile professors uh at mainstream science universities or institutes who had one way or another got in touch and said hey we've been reading your books i like what you're saying and so there's there's a kind of a new phase in our work where some of those people are now doing some really cutting edge research using id not so much not making an argument for id like bihee and demski and doug axe and i have done but more using i the concept of intelligent design is what scientists call a heuristic a guide to discovery using it to make predictions about what they ought to find in living systems or in the physical universe etc so um so i've had a lot of those really interesting behind-the-scenes conversations with people who are in process and weighing all this stuff and uh uh and finding that the evidence and the arguments that we've made are a lot more powerful than they would have wanted to say in public even you know a few years before they first contacted us whether professionally or personally who are some of the people that have just most shaped your life whether it's another thinker a writer maybe a coach or a neighbor either well known or not who are some of the people that shaped your life and how did they do so well you know it's kind of humbling i was thinking about this the other day about the number of people that have made very significant investments in my life from you know my parents my uh my mom indulged my long philosophical musings at 12 13 14. even told me i remember one time at 12 i think you're going to be a philosopher my dad is an engineer science math guy really encouraged achievement in that area and in college i had two major professors that made big investments in me one edwin olson a geochemist and geophysicist who was major my major professor and then this professor krebs who was the philosopher who's so many of his philosophy classes had a big effect yeah out of college um uh i was fortunate to meet charles thaxton um who i understand worked with your dad for a time yes charles was i had just written mystery of life's origin with walter bradley and roger olson i attended this conference in 1985 in dallas wow which posed leading theist and leading agnostic atheist materialists discussing the big questions the origin of the universe the origin of life and the origin and nature of human consciousness and i was you know privileged to listen to those conversations i heard alan sanders's first public announcement of his conversion from agnostic materialism to christian theism and his explanation of how the scientific evidence of the fine-tuning and of the beginning of the universe the cosmic singularity had played a role in his realization that uh his materialism was an inadequate worldview i heard dean kenyon's announcement at that same conference that he no longer accepted his own theory of chemical evolution afterwards i met faxton and for for about the next eight months i was i was often at his office after work discussing the origin of life problem and his work on mystery and and so when i i went off to cambridge in 86 i had a project in mind i was at that time actually not completely convinced of the argument that he and bradley were making for what they called an intelligent cause but i was super intrigued with it the idea that information was the key feature of life that was creating a a an impasse in origin of life studies and which they thought pointed to what they called an intelligent cause of some kind i thought was a really super intriguing idea especially i was working in seismic digital processing which is an early form of information technology so that the whole question of the origin of life and the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell really seized me and it was one of the topics i addressed in a master's here in cambridge and then decided to do my phd on origin of life biology i i love in the book how charles stackson spent that much time with you you'd come in and ask questions and he invested probably hundreds of hours if not more pouring into you and how deeply that shaped you probably two or three years after that he moved to san diego county where we lived and his son and i became good friends and still touch base now and then so that's that's fantastic that's that's a fascinating intersection now what what books for people that are are watching this would think of you know what books really shaped you it could be a biblical book it could be non-biblical book could deal with spiritual life philosophy science what books come to your mind that were just formative at some stage in your life uh the great divorce is still my favorite book by c.s lewis um okay i was you know during my uh you know extended ankhs period in college i had a roommate who was an english major who was you know wrestling with the same sort of stuff i was and we had all these very sincere christian people around us would come up and say you need to read this book and be a devotional book that was not really hitting hitting either of us where we were uh at the time wrestling and uh people say you need to read this book and it almost became a joke between the two of us and one christmas break i got a little package wrapped in brown uh you know paper bag from the grocery store addressed to me from my roommate who at the time lived in alaska it was a tattered copy of the great divorce with a little sticky note on it saying you need to read this book you know and uh and it was terrific um i could go on about it but i also loved um uh oz guinness's book uh the dust of death which really spoke to i i actually had a philosophy class my freshman year that was based on guiness book and the lectures were this was a norman krebs class and the the monday night night class lectures on the chapters in guiness book which was about the counter culture about the various worldview options that were in play uh as an alternative to christianity it was just absolutely electric lectures on this and it was world view shaping and um probably where i became a convinced christian oh wow that and then uh francis schaefer's books especially because they are not silent which was a sketch of the epistemology epistemological argument from necessity yeah um were very influential things early yeah and then lots of things since then sure sure yeah those that's three great examples those of you is joining us we're here with dr stephen meyer new york times best-selling author intelligent design pioneer but just taking a behind-the-scenes look at his life and the people that have shaped him in just a few minutes we're going to take some live questions from you less on science but more so on just who he is his life experiences his books uh etc is what we're we're looking for here now you described in the last chapter of book again just absolutely fascinated me the last reflections of stephen hawking what they were and why that saddened you would you share that if you don't mind well i i i i just i only had one encounter with hawking personally it was extremely impersonal actually i attended a lecture series that uh he gave second or third year of grad school it was right about the time that he brought out the little book a brief history of time and the lecture series the book was based i'm sure in part on the lecture series or there was or the lecture series was the popularization of the book okay and um so he was you know i i walked out of class and you know nodded to him touched his wheelchair i think you know so i i didn't know him at all but i found him an absolutely fascinating figure because it was clear he was a kind of god-obsessed atheist he was really interested in the deep questions and in 19 in the 1960s when he was a phd student was first diagnosed with als he nearly dropped out of his phd and then decided to press forward and the phd thesis which i have in chapter three he develops this first mathematical proof of a cosmological singularity and he uh was thinking about black hole physics so the universe is expanding outward in the forward direction of time which by the 1960s he and other physicists knew then in the reverse direction of time according to einstein's theory of general relativity since massive bodies curved space the curvature of space would have been tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter as you went back in time till finally finally you'd reach a limiting case where you couldn't go back any further because the curvature of space had reached an infinite a limiting case that was the cosmological singularity marked the beginning of the universe no later work he did with george ellis he said this was essentially this marks essentially the creation of the universe um from that point in the mid 60s he then published some technical papers with roger penrose establishing the singularity using more rigorous even more rigorous mathematics than he'd used in his phd and then with alice in 72 and there was an obvious theological implication to this or theistic implication because if the physical universe of matter space time and energy if even space and time have a beginning then prior to that if you're going to explain the origin of the universe uh you need something external to that whole system uh you need something that is not does not reside solely in time and space has the power to initiate a great change of state from nothing physical to everything physical uh you're looking at the need for an external creator and um people have seen the little film the theory of everything um uh which was i think based on a book that his uh ex-wife jane wrote um he was he was well aware of these these uh theological implications he he was looking for an alternative and so in the mid-80s uh he wrote a piece he wrote a technical article on something called quantum cosmology which was attempt to explain the origin of the universe as a consequence of underlying physical laws that existed in some way independently of matter space time and energy okay and and um then he wrote a little book on this a brief history of time in 1988 which is a monster bestseller and so uh his he attempted in a sense to solve the problem of the origin of the universe without invoking god i mean he was very explicit about this in his in his popular versions of the work and and kind of doubled down on that and some things he wrote just just before he died where he was forget the exact title what was about the big questions and i i found hawking to be a kind of i mean he was a brilliant scientist a brilliant physicist and i found his kind of metaphysical metaphysical tension inside him to be fascinating because it was something i could definitely relate to and yet it saddened me because i think it came to the wrong answer i think he he was a brilliant physicist but his philosophy of science was a little off he said you know because there is a law such as gravity uh therefore uh we don't need to invoke god to explain the origin of the universe because there is a law such as gravity the universe can and will create itself but another advocate of quantum uh cosmology name alexander valencia who had the same idea a similar idea which was that there are pre-existing laws basically the physics of quantum the physics the quantum world in some way pre-exists a material realm of matter space time and energy because there is such a physical these physical laws pre-exist the origin of the universe and somehow cause it to come into existence therefore we can explain the universe from nothing that was the idea that lawrence cross popularized but valencian whose work popularized said well wait a minute if these physical laws exist prior to there being matter space time and energy what tablet could they be written on the laws of physics describe the interaction of matter and energy right they don't tell us where matter and energy came from in the first place if they exist independent of matter and energy existing if they exist before matter and energy exists that's really weird because then all you have is math that's all the physical laws are mathematical expressions but math is a concept it exists in a mind so the lincoln says are we therefore in positing these pre-existing purely mathematical laws implying that there was a mind that predated the universe and talking himself tumbled to something like that when he said what puts fire in the equations that gives them a universe to describe and so in a way i argued in the new book that the the quantum cosmological model implies a prior mental realm it implies a prior transcendent mind and there's some other reasons for that more than what i've indicated here sure but so and i also thought it was so i thought that that even that hawking the lincoln if these guys are right then even if they're right or conceived for the pr the premise that they're right you still have a theistic implication wow and i thought and i thought i thought hawking missed that and i also thought that that when he said that the you know the laws of physics um because there is a law such as gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing no need to invoke god to light the blue touch paper because and i thought no that's that's a misunderstanding of what the laws of nature do and what they are this is a philosophical misconception on his part the laws of nature describe how matter and energy interact with each other once they already exist right they do not cause anything they're descriptive and they certainly don't cause the origin of matter space time and energy that's a category error and so hawking placed his or arrested his skepticism in the existence of god i think on a philosophical misconception of the nature of natural laws that's that's a really thoughtful and helpful response let's let's jump to the questions here's one i was going to ask you anyways and uh this is great it's from ash leatherwood and he says what advice would you give to your undergraduate or graduate self what do you wish you knew x number of years ago i won't guess that you know now in other words what advice or thoughts would you give to an aspiring philosopher scientist maybe who wants to make a contribution in intelligent design well that's a kind of a different question let's take the harder one first okay i'm not really sure that i could have you know sent myself a little telegram um with with an answer that would have made sense at the time i i honestly think because of the way i later learned that i was wired i probably had to go through that somewhat tortuous and certainly not pleasant process but i definitely think having come to faith in that manner it's made it's made it a lot a lot easier for me to talk to and appreciate people that um are coming from different points on the compass ideologically or speaking from you know from a worldview standpoint so i i recently had an unbelievable discussion on a uh podcast called buddha at the gas pump okay just a terrific guy who's you know has set up this podcast for spiritual seekers interesting one point in the conversation he said we were described i'm talking about pan and theism and pan psychism and pantheism and all the different worldview options for making sense of the world and and he said well he said okay now let me tell you what i think and then you tell me what i am from from a philosopher's you know just okay it was just a very open-ended and and energetic conversation so so i wish i could say i i'm a a very a turning point for me in addressing some of the is god fair the more what i call the moral objections to faith was reading the great divorce by cs lewis um but um uh you know they've been there were there there were seminal things along the way key people key ideas but i i don't know that i could have sent myself an email and said okay sure here's how to get from a to b a lot faster than you know whatever it was that it took did they have email when you were in college no they didn't i didn't you didn't have to answer that we didn't have we didn't get the personal computer still later so would it help me because i am a terrible typist here's a question i think is interesting you could take this arrangement different ways he says can you understand other scientists like brian greene or others who are more drawn not to have an assault foundations or reference points so in other words what do you make of other scientists or philosophers who just see it very differently and say yeah we don't need a reference point in the way that you've described well uh i end up you know i i don't um when i mean reference point i mean um a premise that ends up giving the kind of explanatory power that brings coherence to your worldview and it's true there are people who don't feel the need to have coherence to the worldview or to be able to explain things deeply but i'm not sure that well i think there's a difference between what people and i i don't know brian green's work that well i know he's very good popularizer of physics so i'm not speaking about this directly i'm not saying anything directly in relation to his work but um there are many people who sort of embrace the postmodern turn the idea that we no longer can have a logo centered universe or a a comprehensive explanation of reality uh but i i people and that you know questions of truth aren't important anymore only questions of identity or questions of relationship and i found that actually not to be true of people that i know i found that not to be true of students for sure i was i i offered a course called reasons for faith when i was a professor at whitworth and some of the older 60s vintage faculty sort of gave me a hard time about it because you know the uh already by that time the idea was that we were in a post-modern world people didn't really care about questions of truth but i had huge enrollments and um it seemed to scratch where students were itching they had these questions when you offered good answers to underlying questions that maybe people weren't even comfortable asking anymore people were really attracted to that i think we're wired to want to know what's true you know what what does god exist or not if if if god exists is god personal or impersonal he's an eastern god or a western god you start putting those sorts of questions in front of people and they're intrigued i did an op i mentioned this op-ed over the weekend i wrote for the new york post you know and i i you know pivoted off of the discussion of the of the unidentified aerial phenomena and just pointed out that scientists have actually been talking for a very long time about um uh alien intelligences because they are having such a hard time explaining the origin of life and they've they've posited a space alien designer and i explained a couple reasons why i thought the space alien designer doesn't explain either the origin of life or the origin of the fine-tuning of the universe and i could have added to that the origin of the universe itself we got a huge surge in interest in the book as a result of this op-ed great and i i think this big question it's a big question you know if there's evidence of design as it appears there is who is the designer people are actually deeply interested in questions like that and so um so i i think that the the need to have a coherent worldview is a human need it's not just the need of some some philosophers or some scientists who have a particular weirdo turn of for weirdo personality like i have you know i i think this is is a fairly universal need from a human standpoint we all want to know where are we going why are we here what's the meaning of my life and if there are answers to questions like that i think most people want to know them that's my experiences as well when when i wrote the updated evidence with my father i did an op-ed in in fox news and it launched the updated version to number 16 on all of amazon books for a few days and it just told me i was like there's a lot of believers and skeptics who want to consider evidence so that matches matches my experience as well i'm really glad to hear that here's you know one of the things just a quick hit on this too sean is that there's been this you know difference of opinion among theists and christians in particular about whether evidential or presuppositional apologetics are are better i think they're both effective and they're amen and in fact i think there's a logical under uh structure underlying uh both presuppositional and evidential apologetics that's basically the same it's you're using a mode of reasoning known as inference to the best explanation the presuppositionalist starts with an a presupposition and defends it on the basis of its explanatory power the evidentialist starts with a piece of evidence and then posits an explanation and then defends it on the basis of its perhaps wider explanatory power that the way that it can explain not only the fact that first attracted our attention but a wider ensemble so there's this kind of iterate iterative approach between positing an explanation seeing how well it explains possibly modifying the explanation in light of new evidence and going back and forth to with the impulse towards coherence i want to understand the world as it really is i i want an overall explanation that allows me to explain the widest class of facts and the widest aspects of my experience in a single coherent way that's a great simple way to put it here's a question from an excellent apologist a graduate of our biola apologetics program and he wants to know dean meadow says what is your greatest doubt about the existence of god or christianity um i think the hardest question that we've faced specifically in the id movement has been the question about uh natural evil um i'm quite just as a side i have a huge side interest in uh in archaeology and yeah and a colleague who's uh of ours discover you sometimes taught at biola uh young uh titus kennedy a phd in art archaeology he's got some great books out and i'm very persuaded of the historical reliability of the biblical text from you know abraham to jesus those sorts of questions don't bother me uh just the opposite it's it's an amazing evidential testimony i think to the reality of the or to the to the accuracy of the of of the the biblical narrative the hardest question that we typically have faced is the question about well what about systems that don't look to be well designed or seem to have a kind of malevolent aspect to their design they are killers for humans bad bugs bad virai in particular and uh i think that's that's probably the biggest challenge to theism there's a huge positive case for theism but how do you weigh it against that challenge in recent years there's been some new developments that i think have been very helpful for me thinking about this and i put this in a biblical framework because uh not all again not all proponents of intelligent design are biblical christians as i am but sure uh based on my reading of the scriptural text i think we should expect two things about nature one is that uh that nature should show evidence of design um the heavens declare the glory of god saint paul says from the things that are made the unseen qualities the creator clearly manifest okay do we see evidence of design i think we do very powerful evidence at multiple levels uh in different aspects of nature saint paul also says something really interesting later in that same letter in romans 8 he says that the creation itself is groaning for its redemption and it's in bondage to decay so in addition to seeing that nature nature's evidence an aboriginal design a good design we should also see evidence of things having gone wrong that there's something that the original design has decayed in some ways and one of our colleagues scott minnick a microbiologist who studies virulent strains of bacteria and viri has shared with me this very kind of uh common insight of people in his field that virulence is typically the result of a loss of genetic information and so we've been arguing that the presence of genetic information is an indicator of design good design okay but the degradation of that original design occurs as a result of a loss of genetic information typically by mutational processes of some kind and it's now apparently possible to map the origin of uh to to to yeah to map the genetic changes that have produced the most virulent strain of bacteria ever on the planet the origin of the plague and microbiologists can show that there have been four significant losses of genetic information that turned a harmless bacterium for which we had an inbuilt immune response into one of the greatest killers on earth and so i think um that's just one example but this there's something really profound going on here where the the an input of information is an indicator of an act of mind the degradation of information is is the result of nature in bondage to decay destroying or degrading what was there before and so whereas the darwinians have attributed creativity to the process of mutation and then neglected to see evidence of positive design i think what the id people are doing is inverting that and saying no the evidence of positive design is the presence the input the the big burst of information we see and it's the loss of information by mutation that is responsible for what we call natural evil so anyway i think there's a lot there to explain it's a question that has you know been been a serious one for a long time and one that i thought a lot about and i think uh i think there's definitely some avenues of investigation that are providing some some uh some possible good answers to that but i think that's a that's a big question that i think i've wrestled with and uh it's worth wrestling with well problem of evil and different incarnation was the biggest and is the biggest ongoing question that we naturally ask it's all over the scriptures so that's i'm totally uh persuaded by the um you know the kind of free will defense of the as far as it applies to the problem of human evil um that has always made a lot of sense to me but the the problem of natural evil which doesn't seem to be the direct result of any human action that's been that's been a more difficult one but i i think if i were only looking at that problem from the standpoint of an id theorist or even a theist i think the problem would be much more acute i think if you look at it from the standpoint of an you know theism id conjoined with the explanatory resources of biblical theism i i think it's it uh there's actually what we see in nature is basically what we should expect to see how it all came to be the way it is and there's still some questions there's a ton of other questions here for you you won't have to get oh yeah it's time to get to it oh no no that that that wasn't my point it was a call out to them there's questions about the historical atom how you fit the geological model into genesis um maybe sometimes you're free we'll have you come back and we'll just do question and answer on id and intelligent design this is more to take a look kind of at your life behind the scenes let me just ask this last one just kind of maybe a just kind of a couple quick points for younger philosophers apologists who want to make a difference in culture you've been doing this a long time you stayed faithful on the message what are some tips you would give to younger people who want to have an influence similar to what you've had well um there's the old maximum about wisest serpents and guy lisa stoves and i think that applies in to people who are wanting to make a difference in the thought world and are probably therefore going to pursue advanced degrees uh i think it's really important not to put all your cards on the table too soon i think that's the wisest serpent side of it and in our summer seminar we've mentored a lot of a lot of uh rising phd students uh who now we've several dozen have gone on to to faculty positions and science philosophy various subjects quite exciting but until you get the phd you're super vulnerable and your job as a student is not to convince your major professors or your supervisors of your worldview but it's to do really good work and so there's a period of time in your career when you are probably pretty smart to to keep your own counsel and not to be shooting off your mouth all the time about what you happen to think about the big issues uh because it might end up in a career-ending uh there is ideological bias right you have to take account of and at the same time the other end of the spectrum are people who delay indefinitely explaining what they think and why and they end up depriving themselves of the influence that they could have in the lives of other people by being by self-censoring indefinitely and you know and there's always a justification you wait till they get the phd that's good uh well then you get your first faculty appointment or postdoc if you get a postdoc you've got to wait till you get your first faculty appointment if you get your first faculty appointment you gotta wait you'll get tenure when you get tenure then you've still got research grants to worry about the next thing you know you're 60 years old and you've never said anything and and and and and usually if you're self-censoring you will start to modify your views to conform in other ways okay so that's the um if you're going to be guileless as a dove if you're going to be innocent if you're going to be if you're going to have integrity at some point you need to reveal to the world who you are and um and you need to to have a witness you know so finding that sweet spot is different there's a need for case-by-case reasoning we've we've known students who've just been so full of zeal about intelligent design or their faith or whatever that they have been imprudent in the way they shared their perspective in a way that's made it impossible for them to progress academically but we've also known people that have have been so cautious and so timid that they've never had an uh had an impact on the world so um that i i think finding that sweet spot and and being willing to seek guidance from people that have been in that academic world longer um it's good but praying about it as well is very important so i think that that would be one of the keys the other thing is is something that was that uh we we have a student a former student who's now a professor he's done very well and he ca he was in our summer seminar he got up and he spoke and he told about hearing a um a debate between philip johnson and will provine back in the day oh yeah you know and yeah afterwards he approached professor johnson and he said i want to be a part of what you're doing he said what do i do and he said well he said go get go take a uh you know do it do a degree in the hardest science field that you can that you can master and then go on and get a phd in the in the in the most uh prestigious university you can find he said so i did i did biophysics at unc i went and finished my phd at unc and now i'm doing a postdoc at harvard and he says now what do i do he was like ready to go you know but i think that's you know another a piece of advice is challenge yourself okay take the hard courses great find the hard major find this a subject that has a worldview sensitive element to it and begin to think about what your world and life view your christian world and life view has to say about that subject so that when you are in a position of influence you can you can wield it for good that's great and if you're interested in going to one of the sites and contributing to intelligent design check out the discovery institute summer sessions you guys lead bring in and mentor young students and scientists love that have suggested that to many through the time well we're at the point where a couple minutes over i apologize but here's three questions that were asked one was advice to yourself back in the time segment was what about other scientists and thinkers that don't think they need reference point and the third one was your biggest doubts about the faith which one for whatever criteria you want do you feel like was the most interesting question because we've got a free copy of evidence signed by my father and i coming to that person i like the middle one best okay answered at least well uh but the one about what what would i have sent what message would i have would have sent to my young self uh to help me out of my angst uh that's a great great question terrible answer but dude that's a really good question now i wrote the name down of the two people that asked the other questions that one i did not write the name down i apologize if you asked the question about professor greene wanting dr meyer's thoughts on those who don't need a reference point email in to apologetics at biola.edu apologetics at biola.edu and we've got a signed copy of evidence coming to you dr maura thanks so much for coming on really appreciate your work and i want to commend again return of the god hypothesis we didn't get in the details of this but in many ways it's really the culmination of the work you've been doing three decades plus in one text and even skeptics who don't believe i think really need to interact with this and see what they think of your arguments so appreciate that but always the tone and the spirit in which you do it very quickly those of you watching we've got a lot of live streams come on actually tomorrow we've got owen strocken coming on to talk about his book wokeness and christianity so a very different direction but we're going live noon tomorrow a professor to talk about what is wokeness why should we be concerned about it as christians or non-christians how do we best respond so make sure you hit subscribe we've got a bunch coming up and we also if you've ever thought about studying apologetics we've had dr meyer come in regularly others from the discovery institute teaching our biola program we're 100 distance now so we would love to have you there's information below in the description if you have an undergrad degree you are a potential candidate we would love to partner with you and train you we even have a program specifically in science and religion that we'd love to have you check out so again dr meyer thank you so much for coming on hang 30 seconds afterwards just so we can say goodbye but the rest of you make sure you hit subscribe and we will see you tomorrow at noon to talk about wokeness and christianity thanks sean you

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 13,432

Rating: 4.9550562 out of 5

Keywords: stephen meyer, faith, God, hypothesis, cambrian explosion, story, belief, Christian, testimony

Id: Sg6PILQ6pnM

Length: 66min 6sec (3966 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021