The Return of the God Hypothesis: Interview with Stephen Meyer

I saw your son there poking his head around the courthouse here welcome everybody we are live here I'm here with a good friend of mine a friend of Biola someone I would consider one of the leading Christian thinkers today dr. Stephen Meyer so I want to thank you for coming on from your home I assume up in Washington is that where you're at right now a home office man absolutely we're doing the old shelter-in-place things so I thank you for letting me get out of the house a little bit and share some thoughts beyond these four walls well we have a lot of people who've been commenting online that are really excited to hear about your new book what you're working on and so for those who are watching right now we're gonna come back and take some questions towards the end but hang on those a little bit so we can unpack this first I also want to say dr. maura thanks for your partnership at Biola you have been such a blessing to us you taught a class about a month before the shutdown we were really fortunate and students just loved it the response was so positive so anybody here watching and wants to learn more from dr. Myers obviously go follow his stuff at Discovery Institute check out his books we're gonna talk about you can also come study with him and us at Biola to get a master's degree and we also have a certificate program if you want to just start and learn the basics with myself dr. Myers for watching this there's a little welcome discount price below well with that said let's jump in to your book now the book you're working on now is called the return of the god hypothesis now wreckless what you're aiming to do in this book what's the big idea that you're researching well in for those of your listeners and viewers today who are familiar with my previous work I wrote two books making the case for intelligent design the first was called signature in the cell and it was an argument for intelligent design based on the discovery of the digital foundation of life and it was particularly interested in the question of the origin of the very first life and I argue that intelligent design provided a better explanation for the origin of the information new to build even the very first and simplest living cells and that and so I made the case for intelligent design I didn't attempt to identify the designing intelligence but rather I said that based on our uniform and repeated experience the kind of effects or artifacts we see in the DNA the digital code that is conveying instructions for building important functional parts but that kind of information sometimes called specified information it's uniformly in our experience the product of a mind and that's so far as I took the argument because that was as far as I thought you could take the evidence by the argument based on the evidence we had it was basically let me jump in for the next one essentially though I explain to students and I've heard you framed this it's just like you get a text and it's legible you traced it to a texture you see drink coke in the sky you trace to a pilot a book to an author information in the cell is best explained by an author or a mind but that's as far as we can take the argument is that right in a way because yeah and it's what I'm arguing is that information functional or specified information especially in a digital form is in our experience always the product of the mind whenever we see information whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or in information embedded in a radio signal or a computer program Bill Gates is that DNA is like a software program but much whatever we've ever created so if we trace information in any of those forms back to its ultimate source we always come to a mind not a material process so the discovery of information at the foundation of life and DNA and RNA and proteins I argue is a compelling indicator of the activity of a prior designing mind in the origin of life that was argument in the book got it okay so that was the first book oh yeah that argument further by saying hey we want one of the responses to pick one was to say well yeah everybody knows we can't explain the origin of the first life but you're just picking out an isolated anomaly once you get that first living cell then Darwinian processes kick in now selection acting on random mutation and then you can explain all other forms of life so you've just picked out that one isolated anomaly and said there's an information problem there but you know we'll solve that just like we solved the problem of all the other forms of life arising from that first simple cell and what I showed in the second book was that that's not true that there's an information problem at many junctures in the history of life in particular when you get massive infusions of new biological form manifesting itself in the fossil record we have these abrupt appearances of new forms of life and I chose one to talk about it was the origin of the first animals okay and that's the an event known as the Cambrian explosion and this is our wins doubt the book that you argue in this book oh I thank you for the free advertisement hey I'm ready I got him I got him standing right here I like the cover of that second book there's a there's an embossed trilobite on the front and I was fascinated when I was a kid with fossils so it was fun but the point of that book is that is that you want to build a new form of life you have to have or that evolutionary process would have needed to develop what would it would have had to have generated new information and you can understand that by analogy to our experience with the computer world if you want to give your computer a new function you have to provide software you have to provide code and the same thing turns out to be true in life you want to build a new form of life you've got to have new you got you with the animals you had to have a new body plan then there's there's two or three dozen different body plans that first arrives arrived very arise very suddenly in this Cambrian period and those body plans require new ways of arranging tissues and organs the tissues and organs require new cell types the new types of cells require new proteins to service them you've got a gut and some of the first animals had guts well then you need digestive enzymes well that those are new proteins and those proteins require digital code and DNA for their construction DNA builds the proteins the proteins service to cell types the cell types service the tissues and organs and the organs and tissues are arranged to form body plans so it's the house that Jack Todd but in any case the point is when you see all this new form arising in the in the history of life in events like the Cambrian explosion and there are others that form indicates there must have been an infusion or a burst of new information and so you have the same problem as you have it at the origin of life where that new information come from may you got a little bit more to work with if you're doing if you're in the field of biological evolution because once you have life you can invoke the process of natural selection but I end up showing in the book that that doesn't really solve the problem but mutations have to still mutational change which is essentially random with respect to survival and and functional outcomes that those random mutations have to search vast spaces of possible combinations in very little time so you're looking effectively for a needle in a haystack probabilistically okay then with even that with natural selection that doesn't really help because the mutation mechanism has to generate all the new information it's the engine that creative gotcha so in itself you're making an information argument that we see in DNA Darwin's doubt it's an information similar kind of argument but in the Cambrian explosion the return of the god hypothesis you're expanding those two arguments as well as cosmological arguments is that right right I'm bringing the cosmology in the physics in because here's after I made okay argument or intelligent design in the second book also made a positive case for design again based on our uniform and repeated experience of what we know it takes to generate information and in doing that I should mention I was self-consciously using the same method of reasoning that Charles Darwin used in the Origin of Species he was using an historical or forensic style of reasoning that has a name is called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or inference to the best explanation of your philosopher you call it inference to the best explanation if you're a geologist or evolutionary biologist you'd be using the method of multiple competing hypotheses but the point is when Darwin was thinking about well how do you determine the cause the remote past he used this method and his key cry to explanation among a competing set was best was what he called Vera Casa or what philosophers would call a causal adequacy criteria okay so in other words if I want to discover what happened a long time ago - cause well if I want to investigate an event in the room past I want to invoke a cause that's known to produce the effect in question I don't want if if I'm positing a cause that isn't known the effect that we're trying to explain it's irrelevant it doesn't have any explanatory power so what I showed was that the cause that we know in the present that produces digital information is a mind so by by using and satisfying Darwin's own criterion I was able to make a scientific case for intelligent design using the same historical scientific method - Eden okay what now this gets to your question okay sorry for the long answer that's all right now this is what happens when you interview people at home they're - they're too formal but so the point is I had basically two complimentary arguments for intelligent design in biology and but my readers and my critics wanted to know well so but who do you think this designing intelligence is Meyer gotcha okay and there's two possibilities broadly speaking either the intelligence is imminent and within the cosmos okay make a space alien or some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence something beyond the earth like in the Prometheus for example there seems to be an intelligent designer who's a smarter alien right well and and Francis Crick actually proposed this in his book lisent life itself no less a person than Francis Crick proposes in 1881 because he knew that explaining the origin of life terrestrially was very very difficult the conditions weren't right here for a spontaneous chemical evolutionary origin of life and Dawkins himself Richard Dawkins the great Darwinian polemicist yeah act floated this idea at the end of the film expelled when he was being interviewed by Ben Stein I was signature in the cell at the time and he said well you know there could be he said a sing of intelligence in in the cell but it would have had to have arisen by undirected Darwinian processes someplace else out in the cosmos so that's one possibility as as the identity of the designer could be an extraterrestrial but imminent within the cosmos yeah the other possibility would be a transcendent intelligence aka God so basically alien or God are the two the two basic options it's not another human being because the first cell the Cambrian explosion the mammalian radiation the angiosperm big bloom all those events which were tested to a massive infusion of information into the biosphere all occurred long before we came on the scene and so so it's a non-human intelligence is it an alien or God so what I do in the in the new book is I address that question head-on and and and the other thing my readers wanted to know was well okay that's the question and what cuz I instead and I'm you know I've been thinking about this for quite a long time and thought you know that science could tell us quite a lot just not the biology the biology leaves the question somewhat open-ended but if you bring in the physics and the cosmology it turns out that theism among the greats it worldviews the the great systems of thought that we call worldviews uniquely can explain what we know not only about biological origins but about physical and cosmological origins kay so yeah one of the one of the key things that was discovered of course was what's known as the fine-tuning started in physics the 1950s with Fred Hoyle the sixties seventies we keep discovering these additional parameters of the universe that are necessary to make life possible so we have we live in apparently what the physicist sometimes referred to as a Goldilocks universe we turn that off that's awkward no problem we'll just pretend that didn't happen keep going it's no problem and I see you've got an interesting planet there planet poster in the background so yes a big discovery the 50s 60s and since in physics is that life in the universe depends upon an exquisite balance of fundamental forces and other physical parameters as well as an exquisitely fine-tuned configuration of mass and energy at the very beginning of the universe okay and this is known as the anthropic fine-tuning or sometimes the entropic coincidences are the anthropic fine-tuning okay can I jump in for a second we're gonna unpack some of these so the theme of the return return the god hypothesis is to take these arguments you did I think signature in the cell and o.9 Dharma staudte fears later respond to critics advance the argument but are you partly saying that these information arguments only take us to a mind but don't answer the question whether it's imminent or transcendent and we need the cosmological arguments to satisfy that criterion is that where you're taking in exact the evidence from fundamental physics and from cosmology suggest that the best explanation of the ensemble of the these evidences that we have about biological physical and cosmological origins is a transcendent mind that is also active in the creation since the beginning of the universe the biology it's us to an active mind after time equals zero but the physic the fine-tuning which is present from the very beginning of the universe suggests a fine tuner who must have transcended the universe no being within the cosmos can explain the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics or the initial conditions of the universe upon which it's very expensive it depends nor could such a being explain the origin of the universe itself that makes say that you need Cendant causal entity and when you combine what we know about the evidence for the beginning of the universe for modern astrophysics and cosmology what we now call the Big Bang Theory and what we know from physics about the fine-tuning of the universe from the very beginning that suggests a transcendent intelligence and then with the biology we also see evidence of transcendent intelligence who is also active and that to me like theism not Diaz atcha or an theism or space alien ism now of course that doesn't answer like imagine everything we've talked about so far a Jew or a Muslim saying dr. Meyer I'm on board now I know you've done some other work are you working on right now and say the Exodus the evidence for the Exodus which would steer more towards a well still the montt great monotheistic tradition would embrace that but it would start to identify who that designer is more specifically is this book still focused on the scientific evidence and monotheism but not specifically the Christian designer so to speak correct I'm looking at the question of what we can tell from nature about okay origin of these big origin events and the the mind responsible for the information presence in life in the universe because the fine-tuning fine-tuning is another way of thinking about information as well so right and and I think I think if you look biblically at for example Romans 1 you get Paul affirms that from the things that are made from the natural world we can we can infer the reality of a creator and also some of the creator's attributes his wisdom and his power sometimes wisdom translated in more modern translations divine nature and power so we can we can identify that God exists and certain attributes of God but the Bible itself does not indicate that you can infer the more about the identity of God than that from nature alone you special revelation for that now it happens that I I'm a convinced biblical Christian so for me to to get from the existence of God is the first building block in a case that you could make for biblical Christianity and when I taught of course I used to do Co reasons for faith that Wentworth Worth fessor yeah I I built the class around three questions does God exist is the Bible reliable and who is Jesus Christ and once you answer each of those three and there I think there are evidential artists that give that support the Christian answer to each of those three the biblical answer to those three but this book only looks at the first of it first of those three building blocks my young colleague Titus Kennedy whose new book the Bible unearthed and who has also taught at Biola Jan term classes in Biblical Archaeology it really addresses head-on those questions about the reliability of the Bible and that helps you answer a little bit more okay if it's a monotheistic God is it the Jewish God in giant Muslim God whatever that makes perfect sense now is it fair to say that in these different arguments that you're making only one of them relies upon a critique of Darwinian evolution namely Darwin's doubt so even if we took that out you could still make a case that there's an eminent designer from DNA and a transcendent designer and I'm asking because sometimes in conversations with people evolution gets so heated and I'll say for sake of conversation you can have it but you still can't explain the origin of life origin of information origin of mind fine-tuning ORS in the universe etc is that it yeah the Darwin's doubt argument was in a sense icing on the cake as far as the biological design argument okay as you can make a bit rate I think a very powerful argument for design at the level of the individual the first simplest cell you know because the whole Darwinian program was always we're gonna explain complexity in the Tree of Life from simplicity at the base of the tree but then big discovery of modern molecular biology was the simplest living thing was enormous ly complex on a scale that no one had ever imagined and not and it's an integrated complexity it's hierarchically organized information rich information processing system that's been discovered in the cell so you've got the digital code in the DNA that's building the proteins but the DNA and proteins are functionally integrated in the protein heed the proteins to read the information on the DNA you need the DNA to build the proteins there's all kinds of cellular machinery that mediates that it's it's awesome and it's on a nice scale so so no you don't need that you don't need to critique biological evolution but it it the evidence of design that you find after the origin of life provides additional evidence that the design agent is active in creation that makes sense so let me play a little bit of devil's advocate with you you also read another book I got here theistic evolution just a mass of text theology philosophy and scientific critique of Darwinian evolution there's been a lot of work I know you're aware of because you've engaged in some of these public conversations of Christian saying hey we can have evolution and historical Adam doesn't mean we don't have a fall we don't mean a purely materialistic kind of evolution part of your project it's much bigger than this but has involved kind of critiquing this Darwinian mechanism why not say all right look we can why not widen the tent so to speak and say believe in Darwinism and Christianity is one possible way to do this ID is another one why not approach it that way would be one question that I would have well my main response is because I don't think it's true and I think we've been waiting through deferential to the punitive authority of the mainstream evolutionary biologists and here's all the to animal secret the mainstream evolutionary biologists know that the the standard textbook theory of biological evolution known as neo-darwinism does not work I attended a meeting in 2016 at the Royal Society of London it was called by people in what's called the Third Way okay and we evolutionary biologists who have rejected the the modern synthesis which is another name for neo-darwinism s textbook evolutionary theory that we all learn in college textbooks and they're looking but they don't embrace intelligent design and so they're looking for some sort of new evolutionary mechanisms that can that would have create the kind of creative power that they know mutation and random random mutation and natural selection lack so quick illustration if you've got a section of functioning computer code and you start randomly changing the zeros and ones are you going to degrade that code to the point of non function first or will you stumble upon a new program or operating system when I asked that as a rhetorical question that programmers in the audience they all start laughing they know that if you start changing digital information in a random way you're gonna degrade that information to non function long before you get to something new or useful the Darwinian mechanism yes there's a the natural selection part which is sort of non-random death there's a sifting part of the mechanism but the innovation must come from the random mutations and yet random mutations we know from experience degrade functional information and this this is increasingly recognized among many other problems among evolutionary biologists so they're looking for some kind of a mechanism that will have the kind of creative power that could explain something like the Cambrian explosion and they haven't found it at this conference in 2016 at the Royal Society one of the the Third Way leaders in the Third Way a science journalist named Susan moszer who's been a mover and shaker in this wrote a post conference review said the conference was characterized by a lack of momentous news in other words we did a great job characterizing the problems with neo-darwinism but we didn't come up with any other mechanisms that really solve the problem that we see the neo-darwinian mechanism has so now we fast forward are our friends in the theistic evolutionary community they want to say that the mutation selection mechanism and other unspecified usually unspecified evolutionary mechanisms are the means by which God created Deborah Hersman who is the head of the BioLogos group a very very nice Christian woman says this explicitly and we want to say Debra teehee friends evolutionary creationists whatever people want to call themselves why attribute to God a why tribute to him why make why attribute the creativity of God to a mechanism that on scientific grounds even secular evolutionary biologists are now acknowledging lacks creativity if mutation selection don't have creativity why say that's how God created it scientifically doesn't make any sense and it it looks to us like one of those attempts to kind of mimic what supposedly is required of us culturally you know to be sort of with it scientists we want to be you know we don't we don't want to be denying in fact many of our teehee friends will just say well you know if you deny evolutionary theory you're bringing scientific disrepute to the church and we want to say let's not let's not do our scientific analysis by analyzing consequentially what it's going to do or not do for us culturally or apologetically let's just analyze the evidence and let's not then try to synthesize a theistic understanding of creation with a failed evolutionary theory okay so whether or not there's theological issues is secondary to you because you just don't buy the Darwinian or other neo-darwinian mechanism as sufficient to complete explain the diversity and complexity of life I think there are equally formidable theological and philosophical issue ok ok I did I was in a seminar held by a couple of Christian philosophers who critiqued our theistic evolution critique book ok the one who held up the big fat white one it was it the even it's called its theistic evolution a scientific philosophical and theological critique we call there you go in case you forgot your title held out there for taking our critique which was great and we had a session at the evangelical philosophical Society meeting and and so there were there were four and a half of them and two of us in on the on the panel and Paul Nelson and I were the two defending the book and we really didn't have enough time reach at 20 minutes so we we both chose to make some very formidable scientific critiques of the evolutionary mechanisms by way of saying not answering the question can you synthesize a meaningful doctrine of Providence or creation with evolutionary theory but rather should we are we on there any epistemic obligation to do so and we argued I think pretty persuasively that no or not okay but downstream from that if even if you say well maybe maybe we must then I do think there are theological and philosophical problems still along with that I want to return back to your book the return of God hypothesis sir for those who are watching in June actually having on one of your colleagues who's a colleague of mine at Biola Doug axe and Josh Swami das coming from different perspectives to kind of talk this through so both sides can be heard so well we'll come back and we'll explore that issue of evolutionary creation forward in the future but on your book I'm curious when you say the return of the god hypothesis is this that the new atheists are dead from a decade ago so now it's returning is this Time magazine was wrong in 1966 on the cover when it said is God dead or you go back a few centuries to like the Enlightenment saying all Western history has been misguided and God is back what do you mean by the return of the god hypothesis well I started it's great that you asked that question in that way because the title I meant the title to invite a story good and I tell a story in the book and and the story is the story of the rise of modern science and historians date that to between 1500 and 1750 or even earlier if the if the historians of science are more friendly to the Reformation they typically say the rise of modern Stein science started about 1500 if they're more Catholic oriented they'll see the roots of modern science in the great Catholic philosophers like gross test and others in and Roger Bacon back in Oxford University eros and others back to the 1300s but in that period of the late Middle Ages the late medieval period and the and the Reformation both Catholic and Protestant Christian thinkers brought to the study of nature certain presuppositions that made what we call modern science possible when we think of science as an organized system or system systematic and organized way of studying nature one of the key assumptions was the idea of intelligibility and the idea that nature could be understood by the human mind that there was there was pattern and there was order and there was design in nature that we could understand because our minds had been made by the same mind that made the created order that made the natural world and so there was a principle of correspondence there was a reason or a rationality built into nature that we were uniquely capable of understanding because we our rationality had the same source in the creative god this is so that was one of the key ideas another one was the idea of the intrinsic order of nature and there were many others a night so I tell the story of the rise of modern science at the beginning of this up through about the time of Newton and then in the 18th century you're right you get the enlightenment philosophers some of whom are still theistic aliy oriented like Kant others the more skeptical like Hume but in the 19th century then you have a series of scientific theories that are established mainly at first to explain origins we have Laplace is nebular hypothesis which isn't a theory about the origin of the solar system then you get the great geologists explaining the origin of the mountains and canyons river deltas all by strictly undirected unguided processes then Darwin comes along with his theory of natural selection and random variation is the explanation for the origin of new forms of life his evolutionary ideas are extended to explain in the backwards direction the first flight and in the forward direction the first human life with this book descent of man then you get other materialistic thinkers like Freud and Marx in the 19th century Huxley and heckle and by the end of the 19th century you have this sort of science-based worldview that scholars called scientific materialism ok and the sense that you explain everything the origin of the solar system the origin of the planet the origin of the features on the planet and the origin of all forms of life right up to human beings in this seamless materialistic way with as Laplace put it no need of that hypothesis no need of the god hypothesis or the design hypothesis that was of the way science was done with Newton and Boyle and Kepler they not only assumed the nature was intelligible they thought they saw evidence of an intelligence behind nature and the perspective was lost in the 19th century and so what the book is about is them is the resuscitation of that view as the result of these three great discoveries that we've been alluding to number one from astronomy the universe had inning number two from physics the universe has been fine-tuned since the beginning ok from the beginning and then thirdly since the beginning we've had these huge bursts of information in our biosphere suggestive intelligence who's been active from the beginning all the way through creation okay a few people have asked it seem like the book was gonna be released in March and now it's like indefinitely we're not sure what's the status of when the book that's it the dates fixed its March of next year 2020 next year okay yes and it's March the 30th we had pushed for in November opening the the Harper people for reasons having to do with promotion timing and their book schedules and stuff thought we'd be better to do it in the spring and so we're building a good promotion campaign around it it is available for pre-sale now on Kindle it will be presale available in in hardback but right now it's in Kindle as it gets closer let us know and we will do what we can at Biola to get the word out because one things I love about the way you write is obviously you've done PhD Cambridge highest level work but I read it that's not my field in science I can understand it you tell a story you translate very very well so I appreciate that I look forward to seeing the story that you do in this book this book as well but let me ask you this I'm curious it correct me if I'm wrong about three decades you've been writing speaking in the intelligent design movement is that roughly correct I finished the book and the book is finished by the way it's off to the publishers there don't get all that kind of stuff so it's yeah it's it's not so the the the the date this one specified is now a hard date so that's good okay yeah it was a little bit of a bad boy I needed a little more time you know okay I did I did a deep dive on something called quantum cosmology I'm really excited about okay it may have encountered some of these guys who say like Lawrence Krauss or Alexander Lincoln or the late Stephen Hawking I would want to say well even though the universe had a beginning we can explain the origin of the universe from nothing by reference to the laws of physics and I showed that those laws of physics are actually themselves information rich expressions that imply prior mental active and so even if you can explain the origin of matter and energy from nothing you can't explain the origin of the information that gives us the kind of structured universe that we have and so there's even if there's an information based cosmological argument that I've developed in the book that I'm I'm very excited about and that took a I did some retooling I went back to my physics background and really took a deep dive on that stuff but anyway I forgot what your your actual yeah so let me get back to the other one well that's okay this seems like a novel argument that I haven't heard that I've heard from Krauss and others that universe can come from nothing now of course what they mean by nothing are quantum vacuums it's not literally no thing you're giving a meta argument saying even if it did come from what they understand is nothing it still would require remind you this quantum argument you're making yes that's the bottom line let me just unpack it a little bit he's a bit more the the the field is known as quantum cosmology and it was in tempt to explain the singularity at the beginning of the universe which Hawking proved in his 1966 dissertation and then proved further with his dissertation supervisor Roger Penrose and then with his colleague George Ellis very much still alive and with us a great South African physicist and Hawking was trying to circumvent later I mean he he came face-to-face with the evidence for the beginning not just from the astronomy but from fundamental physics and he he and his colleagues solved the field equations of general relativity which was a huge deal and they showed that there was a singularity at the beginning of the universe and that a temporal beginning in a spatial singularity now there's a little possible loophole that you could avoid and that is when the universe is you think of the universe expanding out were in the forward direction of time okay and this is what got hot Hawking thinking he said well in the reverse direction of time then matter is going to be more and more densely compacted but if matters more densely compacted according to general relativity then space is going to be more tightly curved and as you'd back extrapolate farther further and further farther and farther back you get to a point where you get you get to a limiting case where the curvature of the universe approaches an infinite and the and the matter is is infinitely dense densely compacted and that marks the beginning of the universe the beginning of the expansion and arguably the beginning of the universe itself but in quantum physics there's this thing called plot time if things are there and there's a plot length and if when things are when you're just small enough smidgen of space then quantum effects start to kick in where it think things can act like waves and particles at the same time where you have that weird duality where things can be spatially extended like a way but spatially discrete like a particle depending on how you look at it and what Hawking and his colleagues did was they applied the math of quantum mechanics to the early universe when it was so small that it was legit to describe it using quantum mechanical laws okay and then they said well maybe instead of having a quantum way of describing all the possible places a particle could be maybe we could write a wavefunction for the universe that would describe all the possible kinds of universes we could have all the different gravitational fields that might exist with different shapes of matter you know different compaction of matter and different shapes of space and so they wrote a wave function and that's fairly easy to it's hard math but it's something straight forward but the point is it's basically imaginative ok and it's saying well maybe the universe was described by this function that describes all these possibilities but the the there were two problems with this and Alexander Vilenkin one of the as far as and then they tried to use it to say well we can get the universe to pop out of the wavefunction we don't need a creator that's basically the move okay and vil in Caen in a very reflective moment he's one of the three three or four people who've worked on this said well but wait a minute if we're saying the universe came out of a universal wavefunction that's a mathematical expression and math in our experience only exists in a mind are we then that the universe came out of a mind a universal mind and he raises it as a rhetorical question near the end of his book many worlds in one and then never answers it Wow he raised the exact same rhetorical question in a different context he said what is Ville Incans worldview by the way I don't know enough about his background he's probably an agnostic trending scientific materialists but this statement was a little platonic right you know minds have to exist in a non material substrate and and in our experience that's always a mind or rather math doesn't isn't Amit and this was an interesting part of the quotation he said if if the universe came from these this mathematical expression what is the tablet that the these laws of physics are written on the laws of physics we have today are describing something in the physical world this is math describing something as describing something before there isn't physical universe because it's trying to explain where the universe came from so you don't have it's not a description of any physical process it's just a description of pure mathematical possibilities and he says that kind of pure math only exists in in mind so that's one thing it's a problem we call array of like math there's a second even more profound thing that universal wavefunction it has a symbol in physics is called sign the size function yep but the size function is the solution to a prior equation it's a type of the equation called a functional differential equation and those types of equations can only be resolved if you specify suit what are called boundary constraints that you have to constrain the degrees of mathematical freedom those in other words said those types of equations have an infinite number of solutions so to get a a size function that describes our universe as one of the possible universes that could exist you have to solve this prior equation and you can only do that by inputting information constraining degrees of mathematical freedom and so what I there's what's really being simulated there is the need for mind to specify the conditions that would allow a universe like ours to pop out of them and so what they're really doing is they're modeling the need for intelligent design to explain the information it's necessary to build a universe this isn't even higher you might say meta kind of design similar to when Einstein says one of the most incomprehensible things about the universe is that it's comprehensible why is it even understandable that our minds match up with it and this comprehensibility is built into the universe you're also saying not only comprehensible but this mathematical structure points towards a mind because it's not physical because it's order so even if something did pop out of nothing according to the laws there still has to be mind behind that for that even to be comprehensible very good fun yeah and and more than that that the mathematical structure has to be constrained to be relevant to its meaning our universe and those constraints anytime and you say I want this not that I want this bit I want this zero not that one you're imparting a bit of information so to winnow among this infinite number of solutions down to a version of this hairy equation it's called the wheeler DeWitt equation it's the analog to the Schrodinger equation in quantum physics but to winnow all those those possible solutions down to one that will include just include our universe as a possibility you have to input a huge amount of information and who does that who does that it's not the universe the universe doesn't exist yet it's not there's no physical system that determines constraints on the equation it's the mind of the theoretical physicist and so what turned me on to this was that was what is what goes on in in prebiotic simulation experiments you may know Jim tour has been critiquing these yeah because in order to get the chemistry to move in a life friendly direction the chemist has to constrain the range of possibilities and outcomes artificially and that constraining of possibilities is imparting information and it's being done by a mind and and a perfectly analogous thing is being done by the cosmologists so I think we've got an information-based design argument at the very foundation of the universe that compliments beautifully the information arguments that we made based on the in biology house one or with your book because it's broader if you're going to advance this Intel story if you have or if you had some novel breakthroughs no I knew I thought he's got to have some novel breakthroughs and this sounds like it so let's go back let's go back to the argument signature in the cell you wrote that over a decade ago what might be the most significant challenge to that book over the decades since you wrote it that in the return of the god hypothesis you respond to well thank you I as if you read the manuscript already the the book had three parts when was the initial story of the rise of modern science and then the fall the the the the rise of scientific materialism then I look at the three big I just I tell the story of the three great discoveries of modern science that have brought the the god hypothesis back and then I used some fairly sophisticated philosophical reasoning to explain why he isn't provided explenation of that ensemble of evidence than other competing worldviews including example I look at panentheism and pantheism and you know the whole range and in my first book I didn't do much with Bayesian reasoning I did it all with a qualitative inference to the best explanation method that's typically used by practicing forensic or historical sciences scientists but in this I supplemented the that use of inference to the best explanation with some some Bayesian analysis to show why ok theism was a better explanation and then in the last part of the book I respond to objections and that's where this stuff about the quantum cosmology comes from yep that makes it but I also look at objections to the biological design arguments that I made in the preceding books and probably the biggest one scientifically is the argument from what's called the RNA world I didn't that critique that in signature in the cell but there's been a lot of work on that since then ok and what I show is pretty much what we were just talking about is that when people invoke RNA background for people not in the know about RNA world but are the in the cell you need DNA to build proteins you need proteins to process the information on DNA the information on DNA is transmitted to a molecular factory called a ribosome on the RNA strand a single-stranded RNA and it was discovered that RNA could both store information and catalyze a few chemical reactions like proteins do and so some people thought hey we can split the horns of this chicken-and-egg dilemma got it by pumping RNA is the primal molecule and that at some point RNA would begin to self-replicate and then there'd be kind of a Darwinian process that would kick in at a molecular level turned out and this was a proposal that was advanced in critique of signature in the cell I did address it and signature in the cell but there were scientists that were still pushing it and and we had an elect the exchange and The Times Literary Supplement about this with some British chemists after Thomas Nagel the NYU philosopher of science gave my book a commendation in The Times Literary Supplement and their their books issue for 2009 and it elicited a vicious response from some of the British chemists and and they were citing this work on RNA world so this is all after the publication and so I explained that big problem of the RNA even if you had a RNA molecule that could copy itself and therefore get some kind of molecular Darwinism going you would need an RNA molecule that was chock-full of very specific information we've had in the lab a scientists attempt to build self copying RNA molecules they've only been able to build a molecule that can copy about 1/10 of itself but only if the sequence of the the genetic letters the nucleotide bases are arranged in a very precise way so even to get the molecular molecular prebiotic selection mechanism going you need you need an RNA molecule with a whole lot of baseline information and so what I showed is that there's multiple problems with this scenario but just analyzing from an information standpoint it presupposes on find information which to be a recurring theme in the new book because the people trying to explain the origin to fine-tuning in physics do that they presuppose prior and explain fine-tuning the cosmologists do it as we were just discussing and the biologists do it as well information seems to have only one known source and that's mind and and so so I dressed these is more recent scientific critiques I'm signature in the cell in the new book you're correct that's interesting when when a demske and I wrote understanding intelligent design in 2008 the RNA world seemed to be most popular then and people are still holding on to an advanced unit it just required a higher level response I've heard I've heard some other claims about material on Jim Jim tour by the way it's done some very good working particularly because to all of these prebiotic simulation experiments RNA world included require the use of an intelligently designed recipe and multiple interventions from intelligent chemists for the for the chemistry to get anywhere in the direction of life and and Jim's stuff on this is fantastic really even if it solves the chicken and the egg problem which is an if it still doesn't account for the origin of information which is your basic challenge exactly there any other materialistic processes I've heard people point to say for example cancer sometimes as cancer and mutates and changes novel information arises well what you have in circumstances like that and pretty much in all counter examples that have been offered as refutations of the way i made the information case in Darwin's doubt which is about already existing life it is it is certainly possible and we have evidence of of mutations altering pre-existing protein folds and optimizing them a little bit okay but we don't have is mutation evidence of mutation and selection building novel protein folds and a protein fold is the sort of fundamental unit of innovation in the biological world and what when Doug axe did his important work on showing the rarity of functional proteins what he was really showing was the rarity of protein folds and these are proteins have three levels of structure and the tertiary structure is what corresponds to the fold and that's the the basic structure that allows proteins to have this hand-in-glove fit that allows them to catalyze reactions or build molecular machines or process information so there are several thousand protein folds as fundamental structural units in the living world and they are incredibly rare among all the different ways there are of arranging their subunits that make them up called amino acids so that's what we that's what we dispute mutation selection can find is a new protein fold we're perfectly happy to acknowledge that that mutations can sometimes optimize existing folds and give them a slight difference and that's when people point to new information arising by mutation it's typically a slightly modified or optimized pre-existing protein fold okay how about in the return that God hypothesis Darwin's doubt was newer but clearly there have been some naturalistic attempts to explain the Cambrian explosion what's one of the leading ones and maybe a response that you give well that's actually one of the big ones right there is the earth because because at the fundamental level what I argued was that new protein folds are beyond the reach of the mutation selection mechanism acts found that in one particular protein that he was studying a beta lactamase that for every sequence of amino acids that did form a stable what he called a function ready fold it fold capable of performing biological functions therefore every one that did there were 10 to the 77th power amino acid strings or sequences that did not and and so he had this very powerful mathematical argument against the plausibility of randomly searching a space of possibilities at large in the given you know history of life on Earth and so there have counter-arguments to that one made by some of the theistic evolutionists in fact Dennis venema and Deborah Hersman and I responded directly to that they claimed for example that a protein called nylonase which is a protein that can gobble synthetic nylon which has only been around for about 40 years I showed that axe was wrong because a few a few simple mutations and voila while law you had a new protein that was functional and they sort of imply that it was a fold but when you went back and looked at the original Japanese research group that that studied the nylonase nylonase protein it turned out that it was a couple of simple point mutations within an existing fold structure they did not alter that fold and the Japanese researchers were only explicit about that and then I also responded to a critique I got from Lawrence Krauss and a debate that we did and that was echoed by Dawkins in a follow-up blog post and he was saying and I misunderstood the the mutation selection mechanism it's because I characterized it as a random process and and I made very clear both in the debate and of course in the my writing on this that there is an in illimitable element of randomness in the mechanism it's the mutation part but there's also a part of it that's not random it's the natural selection part and they really mischaracterized my characterization okay so really as you know okay gotcha hey for those listening in number one if you're enjoying this give us a thumbs up helps us with the YouTube metrics to get this discussion out there second if you have questions I've seen some that have come up throughout and I apologize if I missed them now is your chance to state the question clearly and succinctly for me to ask dr. Maier but let me ask you kind of a broader question I'm really curious you've been in these discussions two three decades in that realm maybe plus how have you seen the conversation itself change maybe within the church and outside of the church maybe for positive and maybe some elements that concern you well I think that's the question leads to a very exciting answer is there's a lot of buffeting in this work there's a lot of people that don't like it there's a lot of ad hominem abuse and the number of our even are very some of our very best people have encountered very significant abridgements of their academic freedom some have lost positions at prestigious institutions and so there's been a there's been a fair amount of that but we're also seeing a tremendous surge of interest in the case for intelligent design the concept of intelligent design the applicability of intelligent design to research problems ok around the globe and and we have a we're attracting talent in the younger generation at an incredible clip okay and we've also had a lot of number of high-level scientific conversions in recent years I point for example to Gunter Beckley the german paleontologist who was the curator of the the Bicentennial darwin anniversary exhibition at the largest Natural History Museum in Europe at the stroke Art Museum of Natural History yeah mm and and he made an exhibit that ridiculed some of the books about intelligent design in the process of the extolling the greatness of the Origin of Species one of his colleagues challenged him to read some of the books because if you're our spokesman gooder he said you're going to need to be able to answer questions one of the media asking questions about those books and good turns later said that was my big mistake and now he's he and I co-authored a piece in that big theistic evolution book about not just the Cambrian explosion but about 17 such major fossil explosions of new form and information and Gunter's now become a really powerful proponent of intelligent design who is a world-class paleontologist and was acknowledged as such but even on Wikipedia until he announced his support for intelligent design then his Wikipedia entry was erased so you can see the the push-pull there interest you know very thing that this type of high-profile scientists coming into the intelligent design research community but also always with a price and so that makes it kind of interesting it's a it's an intellectual adventure for sure hey let me jump in here to ask you this I'm I'm not as in-depth in the weeds in this intelligent design movement as you are but I've written on this spoken on this had a lot of conversations and I try to follow this as close as I can and so in your book with demske is a wonderful primer on intelligent design you should feel very proud of that that's a great for people who are just saying kind of dialing into this it's a great place to start you know what is this all about what's this one of the basic tenants of this this idea it was a really fun project and it seemed like when that came out about a dozen years ago you had the Dover trial you have the the book or the movie expelled there was a lot of press on intelligent design a lot of that has gone away so I think some people might get the impression that the movement is fading away what you're arguing is behind the scenes there's more young talent there's better arguments that are being made you're actually encouraged about it overall despite the larger press that it's sometimes given or not given oh massively so I mean okay the side decided that quote it was over after Dover and we never wanted to fight in a in a you know obscure Pennsylvania School District we wanted to win the argument at the highest levels of the scientific Academy and what we're finding we have and we have research projects now all over the world we have research huge research group in Brazil a group in Hong Kong group in in Israel in fact we have a Israeli by about complexity society or Institute rather in Israel there's a German Austrian group with a formal presence and a UK group and then really high-profile professors here in the United States and so we've been doing a lot of we've been sponsoring a lot of scientific research where we've shifted from just making the case for intelligent design which is what I did he did demske did and now we have people taking intelligent design and using it as what historians of science called it I call it heuristic a guide to scientific research we're using it to make predictions and and then testing the predictions in the laboratory so we've got some really exciting research coming out some of that is yet to be compiled and published but there's going to be a lot more coming out so I'm Hugh really optimistic about the essentially what we've seen is exponential growth where it matters and that is in the scientific research community of scientists interested in and who are using intelligent design as a concept and guide to research there's a question I see here from Michael Britten it's a great question how should we engage the concept of the historical Adam no I'm not going to defer that to you because just two weeks ago I had fuzz Rana on with reason to believe who takes kind of an Old Earth model joschwa Manas who actually takes an evolutionary model very interesting conversation I would I would suggest you go listen and I think that'll be very very helpful here's a question I've seen you address this before but it comes up a lot from Jerry it says is it plausible that God set in motion all particles in the universe in such a perfect way the evolution unfolded as it did possible in the sense of the logical possibility implausible in the extreme scientifically and this is actually one of the I have a whole chapter devoted to this because if you could conceive of the evidence of design being all front-loaded at the beginning of the universe you could you could hold that deism was an equally plausible metaphysical hypothesis these are the theism for an X as an explanation for the whole ensemble of evidence that we see but what we see in the natural world is an infusion of new information in the biosphere long after time equals 0 long after the beginning of the universe and just to get a little bit of a taste of the scientific arguments that I make against this front-end loaded concept of design imagine well with the physicists tell us that it wasn't until about 380,000 years after the Big Bang that the universe cooled enough even to form atoms so imagine trying to four to have some you know amorphous Plaza of plasma or elementary particles in a plasma soup with any kind of information that would be biologically relevant or specific and then transmitting that with fidelity across ten billion years of cosmic history is not going to happen you know the information will be destroyed it's going to be subject to in try degra Gatien it's going to be subject to quantum fluctuations and I show that an even more specific way in the book because what I show is if you look at the DNA molecule it has three basic components sugars phosphates and bases and if you have all of those in a really life friendly prebiotic soup there are not bonding affinities between the three components that determine the sequential arrangement of the the genetic letters the nucleotide bases that constitute the information in DNA and therefore like what we can show pretty definitively is that the information for making DNA isn't even in the subunits of the DNA molecule it's extrinsic to that and if it's not in the DNA subunits it sure as heck wasn't in the plasma or the the elementary particles a 10 or 13 billion years before you know before even the universe cooled enough to make atoms so it's not a scientifically plausible idea information comes into the biosphere and it doesn't long after the beginning and it's it's not information that could have plausibly been encoded from anything that was present at the beginning great stuff let me ask you one more question and then we'll wrap up it comes from Andrew he says is there an example of information having a scientific explanation by law or does it always presuppose a personal explanation and this will be our our final question for you right that's the fundamental and most important question laws of physics or chemistry describe regular patterns that repeat over and over again information is by definition what information scientists call complex it is not reducible to a simple rule or algorithm that is repetitive in that sense so imagine for example that that were and that and you can see that in the DNA molecule you don't have originally repeating sequence like a ga ga ga ga ga ga G okay if you did in fact you couldn't build all these intricate and complex protein structures it's the the complexity of the information we're really complexity is one part of what we mean by functional information if it's complex and it's complex in a way that's specific to do a job we say that the sequence has functional information the kinds of patterns that laws describe are rigidly repetitive I dropped the ball at Falls I dropped the ball at Falls I dropped the ball at Falls sunup sundown Sun ups and down or in chemistry na binds to CL and you've got the crystalline structure that's highly ordered and law like but it's not information-rich it's what information theorists call redundant a redundancy so laws describe well what doesn't need describing in biology at the foundation they describe redundant order not information the two things are categorical that categorically distinct you can't use laws to explain the origin of information its laws describe patterns that are not information rich so it's specified but not complex information is specified complexity right hey love it I can't wait for this book to come out there were a ton of comments and people saying they're geeking out they want to pre-order it right now promise me and this is unfair that you'll come back before and lower absolute like this we just surfaced when we get into in January February next year and we'll go into detail by the way for those watching there actually is a 30 page article you wrote called the return of the god hypothesis which is kind of a lengthy abstract or summary of where this book is going and I put a link to it in the notes for this youtube channel below so if you want to find further I would suggest that you check that out in the meantime you can pick up dr. Myers book Darwin's out if you haven't read it yet even if you don't embrace intelligent design very interesting well-written book that's i opening as well as his book signature in the cell so don't go yet dr. Maier but on behalf of Biola R Paul Josh program we appreciate you a ton want to encourage you to keep up the good work and those watching think about joining dr. Meyer and myself at Biola come get a masters we have a degree in science and faith and also one in apologetics and dr. Meyer is one of our guest lectures every chance we can get them and we also have a certificate program if you're thinking I don't want to get a masters but I want to get started and have a process way to work through there's a discount code below for checking out and join us for this conversation so thank you all for joining us there's been a wonderful conversation have a great night Thank You Sean yeah

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 17,668

Rating: 4.9270239 out of 5

Keywords: science, discovery, evolution, evidence, proof, interview, stephen meyers, DNA, history, information, book

Id: JV-FSYQiE5s

Length: 64min 35sec (3875 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020