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I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
Is Atheism Dead? 3 Scientific Arguments for God They Can’t Explain
01:11:03
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- [00:03]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, do you have friends that are atheists or agnostics? What is the most difficult argument for atheists or agnostics to answer for God? Some say, well, it's the argument from the beginning of the universe known as the cosmological argument. But in recent decades, scientists, even atheistic scientists, have admitted the most difficult argument for them to answer is, from a atheistic perspective is why is the universe so fine tuned for A, the universe to exist and B, life to exist here on Earth? That argument is so well explained in a brand new film called the Story of Everything. And the brains behind that film is my guest again today, the great Stephen C. Meyer. Again, normally he's in the People's Republic of Washington, but today he's in Washington D.C. and we had him on last week to talk about the evidence for the beginning of the universe from his film, the Story of Everything. Now, Steve, we're going to dive in a little bit into fine tuning. Can you kind of give us kind of an overview of what this argument is all about?
- [01:18]
B
Yeah, sure, Frank, but I would just tell you I'll come on every week if you play that little clapping thing for me that just, you know, gets the juices running. I'm feeling great here. Yeah, well, and one other preliminary comment. I don't think the fine tuning argument is the hardest argument for the atheist to answer. I think it's a very, very hard argument for them to answer. I don't think they have a good answer for it. We'll get to that. They call it the multiverse, I think, but I think the case for design in biology is even stronger than the case.
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A
Okay, we'll get to that, too. We'll get to that, too.
- [01:52]
B
But I don't want to let them off the hook. That's a cop out on their part. Yeah, all right. Yeah. Well, the idea. Let's just start with the phenomenon of fine tuning. And that is that physicists have discovered that the basic parameters of physics, the strength of physical laws, sometimes expressed in what are known as the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe and many other contingent properties of the universe, all fall within very narrow tolerances or ranges outside of which life and even stable galaxies and basic chemistry would be impossible. And the cumulative probability of these parameters all falling in those narrow ranges is infinitesimally small. And so the expectation you would have if there was no intelligence involved is that we would end up in a life unfriendly universe that invariably, if there was only natural processes at work, then we would end up with in one of those many other values that would preclude the existence one of those values would fall into a range that would preclude the existence of life. Instead, what we see is exactly what you'd expect if the universe was a setup job, if there was someone fine tuning things to ensure that there was the propitious outcome of a life friendly universe. Fred Hoyle, the scientist who discovered some of the first of these important fine tuning parameters, was so shaken in his scientific atheism that he was, as you said in our episode last week, he was later quoted as saying, a common sense interpretation of the facts, meaning the fact of fine tuning suggests that a super intellect had monkeyed with physics to make life possible. So fine tuning points to a fine tuner. It provides the basis of a design argument, it seems.
- [04:11]
A
Steve and correct me if I'm wrong, you're the real pro at this. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, when I go to a college campus, one of these, one of the people I'm standing on in terms of the shoulders I'm standing on is my guest today, Stephen C. Meyer, because his work in three seminal books. One is called Signature in the Cell. Other is called Darwin's Doubt. And kind of a. A book that combines those two and goes further is called the Return of the God Hypothesis, upon which this brand new movie, the Story of Everything. The Story of Everything dot film. You want to go there, you want to see this film going to be in theaters April 30 through May 6. That film is based on what is in this book, the Return of the God Hypothesis. Steve When I go to a college campus, I'll mention that there are three levels of fine tuning. There's the initial conditions of the universe, say the amount of entropy, order or
- [05:03]
B
disorder, the arrangement of matter and energy. At the very beginning, it has to be just so to, to end up with stable galaxies and planetary systems.
- [05:12]
A
And the expansion rate, say, would be an initial condition. Then the next level would be, say, the laws of nature and the constants you just mentioned. And then kind of a third level might be the way our solar system is oriented for us to be in the right place so far from the sun and all this. What. Which one of those do you want to talk about a little bit more deeply? Go into One of those three levels
- [05:35]
B
are also interesting and we cover all of them in the film. One of the nice devices that the producers used was a kind of. They presented the different acts of the film as chapters in a book. So you have a Chapter on the cosmological argument. And then there are four leaves that come in as you introduce new layers to the argument and the evidence. They do the same thing with the fine tuning. So there's an opening leaf in that second act on the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics, because those were the fine tuning parameters that are so crucial to the formation of carbon, which Fred Hoyle realized was absolutely essential for life. And then the initial condition, fine tuning is the one that just mathematically blows your mind. It's just so exquisite. And then we have a section on the planetary fine tuning, the local fine tuning parameters that also. With the astronauts in space this last week, that's been pretty cool because so many astronauts get in space, they look at our planet out the windows of their little capsules and they have many times had these kinds of epiphanies where they're looking at the beautiful blue jewel that's suffused with life. And then they look behind it, beyond it, and out into deep dark space, and there's no evidence of anything like our planet. All the other planets in our solar system are lifeless. All the extrasolar planets we've discovered have orbits that ensure that they would be lifeless. Something very special happened on our planet. And it's hard not to have some sense that maybe there was a hidden hand behind it.
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A
Steve, does the film the Story of Everything help us comprehend the degree to which our universe is fine tuned? Because these numbers you really can't comprehend. Just when you look at scientific notation, for example, some of the parameters are fine tuned to one part in 10 to the 40th power. You know, it's one part with one with 40 zeros following it. The initial entropy conditions, what was it? Sir Roger Penrose figured it out. It was like 10 to the 123rd power exponential number.
- [07:53]
B
Yeah, we get into a little of that. The, the thing I think that the film does really well is it engages the alternative explanation, which now there have been several attempts, they've pretty much all fallen by the wayside except for one. And that is the idea of a multiverse. Yes, say the materialist atheist interlocutors. The probability of getting all those fine tuning parameters right in our universe is infinitesimally small. But if there was a gabillion other universes out there, then one of them would have eventually had to get the parameters right. And we just happen to be in the lucky one. That's kind of the alternative explanation that's offered. The problem with that is that if there are separate Universes, even postulating separate universes doesn't solve the problem, because if those universes are separate from our universe, then nothing that happens in those other universes affects anything that takes place in our universe, including whatever process it was that set the fine tuning values. And so that merely postulating other universes doesn't solve the problem. And that's sort of tacitly recognized because what the multiverse proponents now propose is there's some kind of underlying universe generating mechanism or process that spits out universes so that they can portray our universe as the kind of lucky winner of a great cosmic lottery that is generated by some kind of common cause. And so that's a bit more credible, except when you look at the processes that have been proposed, some based on something called string theory, the universe generating mechanisms or processes that have been proposed, one based on something called string theory, another based on something called inflationary cosmology. Those processes themselves have to be finely tuned even to generate additional universes. So you're right back to where you started with unexplained fine tuning. And since intelligent design is, in our experience, the only thing that explains finely tuned systems, think about a finely tuned French recipe, or a finely tuned internal combustion engine, or, or a finely tuned even a radio dial, these sort of things. What we mean by fine tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that all coordinate to achieve a functional or significant end. And when we see finely tuned systems, they are always the product of intelligence. So since the multiverse doesn't get rid of fine tuning, it only pushes it back one generation. Even if it's true, you still have evidence for intelligent design.
- [10:42]
A
Yeah, it's like saying, as Dawkins once said in that movie Expelled, that you were a part of 20 years ago when he suggested aliens deposited life here. That would, if that really happened, it would still put the question off who created the intelligent alien. Right.
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B
Or how did the information necessary to build the first life that got transported here arise? That's an unanswered question in origin of life research. And the panspermia so called hypothesis of a space alien designer doesn't really answer that question because it's not clear that the space alien is designing the life, it's just transporting it from having evolved on some other planet. It doesn't kick the can down the road, it kicks the problem out into space.
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A
You know, cosmologist Paul Davies has called the multiverse hypothesis, and he's an agnostic, but he calls it a dodge. Nobody would be positing multiple universes if this evidence for design wasn't so strong. Comment on that.
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B
Yeah, this. We quote another physicist from Stanford saying the same thing. He says that, that without the, the multiverse hypothesis, we'd be hard pressed to answer the ID Intelligent design critics. So, yeah, this is kind of widely acknowledged that there is a thin justification for positing multiverses that comes out of quantum mechanics. But the main popularity of this hypothesis has resulted from its alleged ability to answer the argument for design from the fine tuning. It doesn't answer it.
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A
No.
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B
It only displaces the problem. It doesn't answer it.
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A
So we played the, the trailer to the movie in the last episode, the Story of Everything, and you have David Berlinski in there. David Berlinsky is a mathematician from France who is an agnostic when it comes to the issues of God. But he says in the movie and in the trailer, I think he's talking about multiverses. Doesn't he say, hey, that's for the movies?
- [12:57]
B
Yeah, and something called the simulation hypothesis that we're all living in a giant simula, we're all part of a giant simulation produced by a mast programmer of some kind. And our existence is essentially an illusion. We're sort of digital bots, right?
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A
Okay, so we're in the Matrix, huh?
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B
Yeah, something like that. And he says, yeah, that's ridiculous. He says
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A
in order to know you're in the Matrix, you'd have to get outside of the Matrix to say, oh, I'm in the Matrix. So it's not something that can be proven or disproven.
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B
Plus it is actually a postulation of a prior Intelligent Designer program.
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A
That's a good point.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So they're in a desperate attempt to avoid it. Why are they in such a desperate attempt to avoid a designer?
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B
Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, once explained this. He said, we, we elect for the. These. He names a number of these hypotheses, these different fanciful or counterintuitive. He says counterintuitive hypotheses, not because they're supported by the evidence, but because he says we can't let a divine, in spite of their counterintuitive nature because we can't allow a divine foot in the door. He says we have a. Because he specifically says it because we have a prior commitment to materialism. And then he makes it even more explicit and says we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.
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A
Why can't they allow a divine foot in the door, Steve?
- [14:33]
B
Well, that I can't tell you That's a psychological diagnosis that I'm incapable of offering. But, you know, look, everybody has prior metaphysical commitments. Everybody has a worldview, and it's very hard to change one's mind about those fundamental commitments. And I think, you know, theists as much as materialists have reasons that we prefer to believe in God. We've got motivations. They've got motivations. The question is, what does the evidence say? The great thing about philosophical training is it does allow you to extract the whole question of motivation from the discussion and look at the propositions under examination and evaluate them in light of their explanatory power with respect to evidence. So that's what I've tried to do in my work. I'm sure I'm not perfect. I don't do it perfectly. Everyone's imperfect at this. But I think we need to eliminate the whole motivation question and just say, what's the evidence say? And I think the evidence is very strongly in favor of a theistic understanding of reality. The story of reality that we haven't heard. We've heard only the materialistic one in universities and. And high schools and forever. But we want to show there's another story of reality, and that's the one that science actually supports.
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A
I happen to have Lewontin's quote here. Let me quote the whole thing because.
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B
Sorry, I was kind of groping there.
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A
No, no, no, I don't have it memorized. I have to have it in writing. So here it is, ladies and gentlemen. This was a Harvard biologist who was an atheist. He said this, Richard Lewantid, back in 1997, I think it was. He said, our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs. That's right. In spite of its failure to fulfill many of the extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just so stories. Because, as Steve just said, we have a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our prior adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door. Steve, what's the motivation? I mean the motivation is interesting. Motivation won't tell you whether something's true or not, but it can't tell you why people hold on to their worldview in spite of counter evidence.
- [17:26]
B
Yes, exactly. I think that. And he's explaining why, you know, Leonard Susskind at Stanford was very, very explicit about the multiverse having the utility of providing an alternative to the intelligent design critics, you know, the intelligent design argument. So yeah, I think that's a fair game. And his candor there is bracing, you know, but this was the great point that Philip Johnson made back in the 90s when he wrote Darwin on trial, is he realized the evidence for evolution, for Darwinian evolution, for neo Darwinian evolution was actually very weak. It only looked strong if you precluded or excluded from consideration the possibility of intelligent design as an alternative. And so the prior commitment to metaphysical and methodological and metaphysical materialism was an indispensable plank in making the case for a purely undirected evolutionary process.
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A
It is quite bracing when you see people admit the motivation and how they don't want theism to be true. I know that both Christopher Hitchens and Lawrence Krauss call themselves anti theists. Chris, Christopher's passed on. But not that he's just an atheist. He's against God, he's an anti theist. I know that as you mentioned in our previous program, a very astute astronomer by the name of Alan Sandage said I don't want God to exist. But nevertheless he was honest enough to become a believer because of the evidence from the big Bang. Correct.
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B
That was so gripping for me when I first heard him speak at a conference that really effectively changed the direction of my life because I got so interested in these deep origins questions. He spoke at this conference when I was, I attended as a young geophysicist and it was a conference on the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin and nature of human consciousness. All the big questions. And the panels were divided between scientific materialists and theists or scientific atheists and theists. And Sanded shocked a number of people by rising to the podium and sitting with theists. And many people didn't know that he had had a religious conversion. He'd been a long time scientific, fairly hard bitten scientific materialist. He was officially sort of a Jewish agnostic. And he not only made a case for the beginning of the universe for the fine tuning and explained that he thought it had theistic implications, but then he very candidly shared the kind of internal struggle that he'd gone through. And the thing that put him over the top was he recognized that there was something in him that did not want the God hypothesis to be true. And yet he also recognized simultaneously that the evidence was pointing that direction. And then he said that led to a question about, well, what's wrong with me? That I don't want this conclusion to be true. Because he prided himself on his scientific objectivity. And he realized at that point he needed to do some soul searching and eventually came to faith in God and I think embraced Christianity as well.
- [20:53]
A
But he came to faith because of the evidence. It's not like he had a religious conversion. And he said, now I gotta go find evidence for this.
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B
No, no, it was the opposite. He was fighting a religious commitment to materialism and realized that he was holding onto that commitment in spite of the evidence, not because of it.
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A
Now, you also had interaction with Dr. Thomas Nagel at NYU, a professor, philosophy professor, who famously said back in the late 90s, I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be this way. But then in about 2011, he wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos. Maybe you could tell that story, Steve.
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B
Yeah, sure. His famous quote is, I don't want the universe to be the kind of place in which there is a person, such as God. Okay? And he's a brilliant, brilliant philosopher of science, epistemologist, philosopher of mind. He's written on many different aspects of philosophy. He made the mistake in 2009, at least from a career standpoint, of commending my book Signature in the Cell for the Times London Times Literary Supplement. And then he was pilloried by a lot of his fellow atheists. Some even said that he was getting senile. But he doubled down in 2012 and published a book called Mind and Cosmos. Subtitle was something like how the Neo Darwinian account of reality is almost certainly false. And his big point was that Neo Darwinism cannot account for consciousness. And yet our conscious minds are one of the things we know best in the universe. And I had the privilege of meeting with him for lunch in New York a couple years later, and we had just a fascinating conversation. He wanted to know why I had become a Christian. He's, I think, a fairly good friend with Alvin Plantinga, the great Christian philosopher who's also a fantastic epistemologist, and wrote that masterpiece series called Warrant and Proper Function, arguing that theism provides the only secure basis for knowledge. And I explained that that was the argument that I had encountered in college that first turned me into a theist, that convinced me of theism. And I started to explain it, you know, the logic of it to him and which was a bit of intellectual autobiography. And he cut me off and he said, no, no, no, no, no, you don't need to explain that to me. He said, there's no question that theism solves a lot of philosophical problems.
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A
This is what Thomas Nagel said.
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B
So, you know, like Jastrow, like Sandage, very candid, honest, agnostic. And his own book was attempting to bring some account of teleology into. He formulated what he calls a naturalistic teleology, some sort of basis, some sort of explanation of the purposive behavior of living systems, but rooting it still in nature and not in God. And he asked me what I thought of that and I shared my critique, but gently, because he's a great philosopher, I'm not in his league, but he's, you know, it was a really wonderful conversation. He's, well, he's a very, he's like my friend David Berlinski. He's a very authentic person. You know, you could sense his internal grappling with things and recognizing that, you know, people on the opposite side of discussion had to have some reasons for thinking what they think too. It's not, these are not, this is not all cut and dry, you know, so.
- [24:52]
A
That's right. Well, the, the movie, the Story of Everything. And again, friends, go to the Story of Everything film to see this beautiful, beautifully done film that you can take anyone to. Not a preachy film. It'll just show you evidence from three major scientific arguments that have come up over the past hundred years that this theistic God exists. So go to the Story of Everything dot film. It was Paul Davies, as I mentioned earlier. He's at Arizona State, I believe as an agnostic. But he is a well known physicist who wrote in the New York Times about 20 years ago, the question, I think the title of his op ed was something like Taking Science on Faith because he was asking his materialistic colleagues what is the origin of the laws of the universe, right? And he said, my inbox, my email inbox was filled with vitriol from atheistic scientists who are saying, you shouldn't ask that question. Those laws are just there. Stop asking that question. So this is related to fine tuning, but it's also related to the idea that we are conscious creatures who can ascertain truths about the real world outside of our skull. So how does Davies question relate to what you're doing in the film the Story of Everything.
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B
Steve well, it's another layer of the, the, the mystery of the universe from the standpoint of materialism. This goes back his, the question he's asking goes back to the late or the early period in Enlightenment with philosophers like David Hume, who realize that our belief that there are laws of nature depends upon a prior commitment to a principle known as the uniformity of nature. We never actually see all, you know, every, every law of nature has the form, take the law of gravity, all matter gravitates or all unsuspended bodies fall. We never observe all of the instances of gravitational attraction that might be occurring in the universe. We observe a consistent subset, perhaps, but to know that that subset is representative of the whole of the universe, we have to presuppose that there is a uniformity of nature that is consistent through space and time. And Hume showed that that assumption can only be justified by inductive reasoning. But inductive reasoning takes you right back to the same problem that we only sample instances of alleged regularities. We don't see every case of them. So you get into a tightly circular form of reasoning. And the only way that anyone has ever really come up with for justifying the principle of the uniformity of nature is to presuppose that the assumption that we make about that is true and accurate. The assumption that we make about nature being uniform, that the basic laws and properties of nature will hold through space and time, irrespective of whether we're watching or not. The only basis for assuming that is the assumption that God made our minds with those built in assumptions, and those assumptions are a reliable indicator of the way he also made the world. So when you get deeply into what's called epistemology, the study of how we know what we know, or the philosophy of science, you get this weird paradox where if you want to trust knowledge, you need to trust the reliability of the mind. And the surest and really only secure basis for that assumption is theism, the idea that a benevolent God made our minds and the way we in necessarily process empirical information about the world in a way that matches the way the world actually is. So there's a principle of correspondence between, as John Polkinghorne, the famous physicist, put it, the reason within and the reason or rationality that's built into the world without, in the external world. So, yeah, I think Davies raises a really profound question, and I address this in the last chapter of my book because this was the Argument that first convinced me of theism that if you want science, you better believe in God. If you want to distrust science, then deny the existence of God.
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A
Ladies and gentlemen. This is consistent with. In the beginning was the Word or the Logos, who created the universe with his mind and gave us minds so we could understand it. The world is orderly.
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B
Yeah. That's the basis.
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A
That's the whole. And that's what these early science inventors, or I should say discoverers of modern science believe. Steve, didn't they? Kepler and others.
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B
Exactly. They didn't have what's called a postmodern turn or a postmodern crisis or an epistemological crisis. They believed knowledge was possible precisely because they were operating in a biblical framework in which they assumed that our minds had been made in the image of the same rational creator who made the physical world around us and who built a form of rationality and design into the world. So the design of our minds enabled us to understand the design of the world because they both had a common source in the transcendent mind of our creator.
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A
It's phenomenal the kind of. Of thoughts that C.S. lewis had on this. I just want to read this quote, Steve, and get your comment on it, because it's essentially what you're saying here. Lewis said this back in the forties. He said, suppose there was no intelligence behind the universe. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. Thought is merely the byproduct of some atoms within my skull. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? And then he went on to say, but if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism and therefore have no reason to be an atheist or anything else. Unless I believe in God. I can't believe in thought. So I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
- [31:19]
B
Yeah. I think that's in his essay or a chapter on the self contradiction of the naturalist in his book Miracles, which is brilliant. And yes, there's a quote, a wonderful quote, quote from JBS Haldane that he cites in that essay where I think Haldane says something like the. Oh boy, I gotta get, get. Get it started. Right. It's about the. The he says something like if I'm
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A
thinking of the same quote where he says if my brain is wholly composed of atoms. Is it that quote?
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B
Yeah, exactly. My brain is made of nothing but atoms. Yeah. I have no reason to believe that my, my thinking is accurate. No, no, reason to believe my brain is made of atoms. It's something. There's gotta be something. There's got to be a purely rational dimension of thought. If, if, if my thoughts are. That's it. If my thoughts are determined by. Solely by the motion of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to trust my thoughts and therefore no reason to believe that my brain is composed of atoms. That's the.
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A
Yeah, you're just a moist robot. Why should you believe anything?
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B
Yes.
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A
And the storyof everything film, the storyofeverything film will show you some of the arguments we're talking about here in a very beautiful way, in a non preachy way, in fact. Steve, there was an article that I saw. You actually sent it to me. I read the entire thing. It's in the Hollywood Progressive. It's by actually a gentleman who claims to be Catholic, but he's also a Marxist. But that doesn't come through at all in this amazing review of this movie. His name is Peter McLaren.
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B
Yeah. Yeah.
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A
And he is so over the top with praise for the movie, the Story of everything, that he's urging everybody to go see it. And he keeps saying over and over again that the, the film brings you along in a very gentle way to a conclusion that seems inescapable.
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B
Yeah, Peter is a really super interesting figure. He's, you know, kind of comes out of that Jesuit tradition of something like liberation theology, which combines a more left wing view of politics with Christianity. He's, I think, a very deep and sincere believer. And I think that's great because, you know, the film and my book that underlies it isn't a political message. You know, it's about the ultimate worldview questions. And so I was thrilled to get his review or to see it. He published it at the Hollywood Progressive and told me that a lot of Hollywood people read this because a lot of Hollywood people are left of center in their politics. So we were kind of thrilled at that. There's a review coming out and maybe out now by the time this goes live on April 16, I think in the Wall Street Journal on the other side of the political spectrum by another Peter called Peter Robinson, who wrote the famous Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall speech for Ronald Reagan. So we've had really positive endorsements of the film in the form of thoughtful reviews by people on both sides of the political spectrum, which I think is sort of poetically just. I really liked that.
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A
Yeah, we're gonna put both of those reviews in the show notes so you can read about them. The one that Peter McLaren wrote in the Hollywood Progressive. I mean, it took me at least 45 minutes to read the whole thing. I mean, he just, he must have watched your movie five times in order to say all these things he said in it in the.
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B
He's just, he's very perceptive, you know. Yeah. And yeah, I kind of learned things about the film reading the review. He appreciated that. I thought, you know, oh, the producers really did a good. The young director did a really good job with that. I noticed that before. So, anyway, yeah, so.
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A
So, Steve, we've talked, we've talked a little bit about the first two discoveries over the past hundred years. The creation of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe. Let's talk a little bit about the discoveries in biology. And this was really the subject of your first major work called the Signature in the Cell. Tell us a little bit about how the film unpacks that argument.
- [35:44]
B
Yeah, it's a. There's a really great scene where the, the filmmakers take you visually from deep in space and then you just zoom into planet Earth and eventually you plunge into an ocean. And then there are all these one celled organisms and you plunge inside them and you go from the macrocosm to the microcosm. And there we discover an exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology. Little tiny miniature machines that have been constructed as the result of instructions that are stored in the DNA molecule. And there's a section of the final chapter of the film that deals with the miniature machines and some of the things that Michael Behe first made famous in the 1990s. And bringing that discussion up to date with some of the exquisite machinery. You've got little turbines, you have rotary engines, you have sliding clamps, you have, all on a miniaturized scale, little robotic walking motor proteins that tow vesicles of material along other tracks made of other kinds of proteins that are functioning essentially like railroad tracks. You've got an automated factory inside cells that includes machinery and a complex information storage, transmission and processing system. In fact, two information processing systems that do two distinct things with the information. One builds the proteins and protein machines. One allows the cells to replicate. It's just exquisite. And what we. We have all these beautiful visual effects and animations that bring this to life so people can actually see what's going on. And, you know, I write these long books, so this is a case where one picture is worth a thousand words, a couple hundred moving pictures are incalculably more effective than reading about this stuff. So you get to see it. But along the way, the filmmakers tell the story of these discoveries. And it starts with Watson and crick. In 1953, they elucidate the double, the double helix structure of DNA. But then five years later, Francis Crick formulates what he calls the sequence hypothesis, where he proposes that the four chemical characters along the spine of the DNA, the chemical subunits, are functioning just like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in a machine code. That hypothesis is eventually confirmed, and we now know that at the foundation of life, we have something that is functioning very much like software. Bill Gates says DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. There's a mic drop moment in the film where Richard Sternberg, the evolutionary biologist with two earned PhDs in the field of biology, mentions that one of the great physicists of the 1950s realized that the, those subunits along the spine of the DNA molecule could be represented as a digital bit string. And there's this kind of aha moment where you realize what's actually that molecule isn't just a bunch of chemistry. It's code and it's doing something. And the film shows exactly what it's doing. But it also raises the big question, where did that code come from?
- [39:18]
A
And you even say that. I don't know if is Dawkins in the movie saying this, but Dawkins, you say it in the book Return of the God Hypothesis.
- [39:26]
B
Yeah, we don't quote him saying that, but in. Well, at the very end of the film, I quote him from a couple summers ago where he said that the digital processing, the digital information processing system, that he was knocked sideways with wonder at the digital information processing system at work inside the cell, something to that effect. And all to make the point that this is not what you would expect to see if you were a materialist. No, you'd expect to see if there was a master programmer for life.
- [40:01]
A
No, I remember looking at it just earlier today, this quote from Dawkins about him saying that it does appear to be code, but codes always come from coders. Messages always come from minds. Software comes from programmers. So, Steve.
- [40:18]
B
Yeah, he says the machine code of the, of the genes is uncannily computer like. That's a direct quote.
- [40:26]
A
So where, where, where do atheists go with this, Steve? Where do they, where do they, when they see something that they know in all their prior experience points to an intelligent mind? How do they get around that to remain atheists and say the code we see and the machines we see and living Things are not the product of intelligence.
- [40:48]
B
Well, you know, you're right. It's not that hard of an argument. Here's my iPhone. I got in a discussion with a Uber driver the other day who was very intrigued. He said, but the problem I have is I can't see God. And I said, but you can't see Steve Jobs either.
- [41:02]
A
Right?
- [41:03]
B
You can't explain the origin of the iPhone apart from Steve Jobs and the engineers that he employed to build it. The code and both the hardware and the software inside a phone is the product of a mind. We know that. And that's reasoning, as you said before, reasoning from effect back to cause. There's established methods for doing that. And that process can be either fraught with uncertainty or it can be done very rigorously. And I show the difference between the two modes of reasoning in my books and show how to make a very rigorous inference from the presence of functional information in DNA to the need for and the reality of a designing mind who must have played a causal role in the origin of that information. Whenever we see information and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not an undirected material process. Think hieroglyphic inscription or paragraph in a book, or the information we're transmitting to each other right now, or. Or computer code. All of these forms of information have their ultimate source in the mind, and we know of no other source of such information. So when we find that kind of information, called functional or specified information in a living system, it points powerfully to the activity of a designing intelligence in the origin and history of life. You know, Steve, how do the atheists get around that? Yeah, they issue promissory notes and say, we'll come up with, we don't have a theory yet, but we'll get one later.
- [42:40]
A
Oh, so it's a faith position, or
- [42:42]
B
they say, your argument is not science. But that just takes you right back to the presumption of materialism, because their definition of science is that to be scientific, you have to limit yourself to strictly materialistic explanations for everything, even the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of the information that's necessary to build life or anything else.
- [43:07]
A
You know, Steve, they often say that, well, the reason we can't believe in this designer is because we don't see him. So for a. You, For a Uber driver, I might. I might posit a, you know, one of those Waymo cards cars, you know?
- [43:21]
B
Right, right.
- [43:22]
A
They're, they're. They're all around Phoenix. Whenever we Go to Phoenix. We see these driverless cars, these Waymo cars. There's no driver in them, but they, they know where to go. And just because you don't see the driver doesn't mean that there isn't an intelligence behind that machine that created it.
- [43:39]
B
Great example. Here's another one that a friend gave me is the 3D printers. What the 3D printers do is they take digital information. They use digital information to construct three dimensional parts, something for a garage door or, you know, or another similar technology is the CAD CAM technology, computer assisted design and engineering that engineers use. So like up in Seattle at the Boeing plant, you've got an engineer write some code, goes down a wire that's translated into another machine code that can be read at a manufacturing center or apparatus, and then that manufacturing apparatus takes the code and directs the placement, for example, of rivets on an airplane wing. You've got digital information in both cases, the 3D printer, the CAD cam, digital information directing the construction of three dimensional structures. That's exactly the kind of technology we have at work in the cells. It's not just that there's some code on a molecule. The code on the molecule provides information or instructions for building something specific, proteins, protein machines, and molecular machines made of multiple proteins. And you get all of that. So it's an absolutely analogous technology, precisely the same kind of technology. And we know in the case of the Boeing or the 3D printer, the ultimate source of the information that makes that whole thing work is from a mind.
- [45:13]
A
Yeah, the same thing is true with, if you Google something or you go to an AI chatbot, you know it, you don't see anybody in there. There's no human being in your computer who's, you know, sending you the information,
- [45:26]
B
but trace it back to its source, you ultimately get to a programmer. Right? So, huh.
- [45:31]
A
And, and so that's the position that we'll find a source for this someday. It's a faith position, in other words.
- [45:39]
B
Well, the reason that Signature in the Cell was such a big, fat, long, fat, you know, a fat book, was my editor let it run long because he said, look, you bear a big burden of proof and you're using a method of reasoning called inference to the best explanation. So you got to look at all the competing explanations. All right? So in Signature in the Cell, I look at explanations for the origin of biological information, which is necessary to produce the first life, that are based, explanations that are based on chance, explanations that are based on natural laws, explanations that are based on the combination of the Two and then more current and updated versions of all those same approaches. That's actually an exhaustive set of possibilities. And they all fail for very, very easy to explain reasons.
- [46:29]
A
Go over that again. What are the exhaustive possibilities?
- [46:31]
B
So explanations that are based on chance, that would be stochastic low probability processes. Explanations that are based on laws, those will be regular high probability processes. Explanations that somehow combine the two. And that's an exhaustive set of possibilities. And then I look at all the different types of explanations that exemplify those basic approaches. And they each falter with this problem of the origin of information for reasons that I explain in about 500 pages. But so, but when you say, when
- [47:08]
A
you say chance, correct me if I'm wrong here. It seems to me chance is not a cause. Chance is just a word we use to discover our, to cover our ignorance. Chance is still saying that laws are involved, we just don't know how they're involved. Is that fair?
- [47:21]
B
There may be some sort of. You could have non law like processes. Things that are like what don't conform well. Molecules bouncing around because of the way the initial conditions in the universe were set up. Okay, okay. Laws are actually not causes either. They describe, they describe regular patterns of events. So a chance event would be something to which we are unable to ascribe any discernible cause that conforms to a regularity.
- [47:54]
A
Okay, so to say that laws aren't causes either. The forces behind the laws, the four known forces we know about, gravity, strong and weak, nuclear and electromagnetism.
- [48:07]
B
We're getting into some deep waters here in the philosophy of science. This is what my PhD thesis was about. But causes invariably are past antecedent events, something that precedes an effect. Now we can describe certain types of patterns of cause and effect in a way that allows us to formulate laws. If there's a regularity that emerges where you always have a certain antecedent producing a certain consequent, then we can have a law that describes a relationship where the antecedent is a sufficient condition of the outcome. And so that would be a type of law. But laws are the patterns. They don't refer to the antecedent, which is the. They're different from the antecedent which might be described in a law, which is the actual cause.
- [48:58]
A
Right, right.
- [48:59]
B
Sorry. This the. To movie viewers, it's not this heavy.
- [49:03]
A
Yeah, no, it's not. No, no, no, no. We're just getting in the weeds. Problem.
- [49:06]
B
He's probing. That's smart, right?
- [49:09]
A
Because we're both nerds on this stuff. So we're, we're, we're inside baseball. But the movie, the story of everything is anyone can understand. It's beautifully filmed and beautifully illustrated with all sorts of animations that will help you grasp the concepts that are provided for these three great observations. That the universe had a beginning, it's fine tuned and biological life appears to be the product of intelligence. In fact, Steve, what is the nature or the status, I should say, of origin of life studies from a naturalistic perspective right now?
- [49:45]
B
It's been a state of impasse since the mid-80s at least, and there are new proposals. I was discussing one yesterday on Jim Tour's podcast called Assembly Theory. It's been formulated by a Scottish origin of life researcher. There was a brilliant MIT trained math physics guy on the Tour podcast yesterday named Onsi. His last name is hard to pronounce, I won't try, but, but he's done a really great takedown of this and he shows that Assembly Theory does a great job of essentially characterizing the amount of specified complexity or specified information. It characterizes the effect and then it hands it back to you as if it's an explanation for the effect, but it isn't. All it is is characterizing what needs to be explained. So we're not making a lot of headway.
- [50:39]
A
It's a just so story, Steve well,
- [50:41]
B
there's not even much of a just so story. It's characterizing what is and acting as if that characterization explains what it doesn't. So there's not a lot of progress being made from a naturalistic standpoint. And one of the more recent reasons for that is the entrance into this debate of Professor James Tour from Rice University who has been performing a chemical I perform an informational audit on these origin of life theories. Jim Tour performs a chemistry, organic chemistry audit and shows that these scenarios are often extremely implausible from a chemical standpoint. He's got a great line in the film where he says, he's very animated. He says molecules never move towards life. They never ever, ever move towards life. They don't do that. Molecules don't have an impulse to survive. They decompose if you leave them on their own. And in the simulation experiments that are used in origin of life research to simulate how you might have moved the basic, the most simple molecules in the direction of more complex molecules that are a little bit more life relevant. What is always left out of the discussion is the fact that these chemical systems are being manipulated by intelligent chemists. And so I always ask the question. And Jim Tour and I actually have
- [52:12]
A
an article coming out.
- [52:14]
B
We ask the question, what's being simulated? Then if you're simulating what's needed to move from simple to more complex life, relevant chemistry. But to do that, you always have to apply an extensive amount of human intelligence, excluding some possibilities, removing molecules that would cause interfering cross reactions, using only purified reagents. What are you simulating? Well, you're simulating the need for intelligence to generate life.
- [52:44]
A
So yeah, if they ever generate life in the laboratory, it'll prove intelligent design, Steve, because it will show that it took a lot of intelligence to do it.
- [52:52]
B
Exactly right. Exactly right.
- [52:55]
A
So the film does a wonderful job of pointing all this out, ladies and gentlemen. Again, it's called the StoryOfEverything film. That's where you go if you want to see the film and you should want to see it. It's in theaters only April 30 through May 6. So April 30, May 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. If it does well, and it should, given the right publicity, it'll be extended in theaters. But pastors and others, if you're in a small group, tell other people about this. You can go buy your tickets right now at the StoryOfEverything film. In fact, we have a little short one minute video that shows you who is behind this film. Here it is right here. Check this out.
- [53:36]
B
In a culture told that science has made belief in God obsolete, one scientist stepped into the debate. Dr. Stephen C. Meier, philosopher of science, former geophysicist and New York Times best selling author, has spent decades examining the evidence behind life in the universe. His groundbreaking book, Return of the God Hypothesis reignited one of the biggest conversations of our time, arguing that modern discoveries in physics, cosmology and biology point not away from God, but toward him. The book sparked national media attention, major podcast appearances and wide ranging debate, including conversations with thinkers like Jordan Peterson. And became a bestseller for its bold case that science and belief are not enemies, but allies. Now that conversation explains expands beyond the page. From the ideas that challenged a generation comes a cinematic experience exploring the biggest question of all. Where did everything come from? This is the story of everything in theaters April 30th.
- [54:35]
A
And ladies and gentlemen, as we've said before in this program, science doesn't say anything. Scientists do because they have to gather and interpret the data. But Steve, tell us a little bit about how scientists now are moving more toward the God hypothesis. What evidence do we have that they're actually realizing that the way to interpret the data. The most fair way of interpreting the data is there does appear to be an intelligence behind all of this. The universe, the fine tuning and biology.
- [55:06]
B
Sure. Well, in 2004, I published a paper at the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a journal that was published out of the Smithsonian Institution here in Washington D.C. where I'm speaking from, from where I'm speaking today. And it caused a huge furor. It was possibly the first peer reviewed article in a mainstream scientific journal explicitly advocating the theory of intelligent design. There might have been one or two earlier, but we were not sure. In any case, the, the reaction to the article was just amazing. They couldn't get at me. But the scientists at the Smithsonian and the powers that be there really came down on the editor, Richard Sternberg, who allowed the article to go through publication, go through peer review. And then having decided to publish it, he eventually left the Smithsonian. The climate there was so hostile towards him having done this that his position there was untenable. 22 years on, I just got a research report from Casey Luskin, our research director, our brilliant research director, he's a Dynamo. And 328 peer reviewed articles. Our fellows at the center for Science and Culture have published over 300 books in 30 years. Some of them address other facets of the debate, the sociological, cultural implications of materialism. But many of the books are also scientific and some of them peer reviewed as well. So there's just been a flowering of research around this that is an expression of this interest in the design of life in the universe. And it's essentially evidence that many, many scientists are now finding the design framework, a more fruitful framework for doing science. And that if you look at life as a design system, you're more likely to actually discover how it's put together because you're thinking about the logic of the system, the engineering principles at work in the system. If you have any background in computer science or engineering, you're recognizing what are called design patterns, established methods for storing, transmitting and processing digital information. So there's just a really exciting research program that's developing out of all of this. Not only there are many of our books and articles posit intelligent design is a better explanation of things we already have known about. But the intelligent design paradigm is also generating testable predictions and suggesting promising avenues of research that would not have been suggested or predicted within a strictly Darwinian or reductionist materialist framework. So it turns out to be a better way to do science, as well as providing evidence for a strong case for the existence of God.
- [58:16]
A
Six years ago, Michael Behe wrote a book. It was in 2020, and he starts the book out by saying that in the past 20 years, the past two decades, about the time you put that article out, Steve, in 2004, he said there have been a number of books written on Darwinism and none of them think that the classic neo Darwinian view actually drives life, actually is responsible for life. So people are moving away. And you were at an actual conference at the Royal Society 10 years ago, 2016. Tell a little bit about that and then we'll wrap this whole thing up.
- [58:57]
B
But 2016, now, 10 years ago, it's hard to believe, but leading evolutionary biologists convened the conference. Most of them had been calling for a new theory of evolution. The conference was meant to explore not only the explanatory deficits of neo Darwinism, which were explored extensively in the opening talk by an Austrian evolutionary biologist named Gerd Muller, but then it was also meant to evaluate proposals for new theories or new mechanisms of evolutionary change that might supplement the perceived deficiencies in the existing theory and in the existing mechanism of mutation and natural selection. Increasingly, actually, for quite a long time now, people have recognized that natural selection, acting on random variations and mutations, lacks the creative power to explain major changes in the history of life, does a nice job of explaining small scale variations, but does not do a good job of explaining major, what are called macro morphological innovations, major innovations in form in the fossil record and in the history of life. And after the conference, one of the conveners commented very candidly. She said that the conference was characterized by a lack of momentousness. Effectively, it did a good job of characterizing the problems with the established theory, but didn't really come up with anything that would supplement the limitations in the creative power of mutation and selection.
- [60:38]
A
Has anything happened in the ensuing 10 years till now from the naturalistic perspective?
- [60:43]
B
Yeah, I think I wrote in Darwin's doubt about 6, 7 or 8 different post Neo Darwinian theories of evolution. And people have continued to try to develop those. What I showed in Darwin's doubt, and I think this remains true today, is that those new theories of evolution either presuppose unexplained sources of information or they posit processes that do not actually generate new information. So they're not really solving the ultimate problem of where the information comes from. And you can't. It's just like in our computer world. You can't give your computer a new function without providing new code. You can't build new biological form without information to generate it. So this is a fundamental question that not only afflicts origin of life research, but also theories of biological evolution as well. So it's a ubiquitous problem that has not been solved. And yet again, information is a mind product. This is what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning. So the case for Intelligent Design is well grounded scientifically, both evidentially and methodologically. We're using the same method of reasoning that Darwin used in the Origin of Species, reasoning from effects back to causes which are known to have the power to produce the effect in question. And the effect in question, again, is information. The cause that can produce it is an intelligent mind.
- [62:20]
A
I've got one more question for Steve. Before I ask him that, I just want to mention some events coming up. We're going to be with the great Rob Schneider on April 27, this coming Monday in Charlotte. That is going to be at Freedom House Church, Cornelius. It will be live stream. If you're not in the area, check that out. Then Thursday I'll be with Elisa Childers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We're going to be covering progressive Christianity. She almost left the faith because of that. And we'll give you evidence as to why she didn't. Then we'll take your questions that'll be live streamed as well. Then on cinco de Mayo, May 5th will, Lord willing, be out at the University of New York, Mexico in Albuquerque. And the following day I will be with my friend Skip Heitzik at his church, that's Calvary Church there in Albuquerque. We have more coming up in May. Check all that out. Let me go back, Steve, for one final question on this great movie, the Story of Everything, which really does a beautiful job of summarizing the major arguments that you put in the return of the God hypothesis and arguments for the existence of a theistic God that have really come to the forefront in the scientific world over the past hundred years. What does this mean? If we can establish from us even a scientific perspective that there is a theistic God, what does this mean to the Christian faith and people who are scientifically minded now?
- [63:45]
B
Well, for one thing, it opens up the it provides a different framework for evaluating the reliability of the biblical text since the late 19th century, in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, there was the kind of emergence of the higher critical method that presuppose that the historical narratives of the Old and New Testament could not possibly be historical narratives. The narratives could not possibly be historical because they included descriptions of miraculous events. If you presuppose philosophical materialism or naturalism, the probability of a miracle is exactly zero, because a miracle is an act of God, often an act of God in which he initiates a new line of cause and effect within the matrix of natural law that he otherwise sustains and upholds. So if you deny the existence, if you presuppose that there is no God, then there can be no God to act, and therefore miracles can't be possible. But if there is evidence for the existence of God, then you have to evaluate those narratives with a more neutral, metaphysically neutral, from a more metaphysically neutral framework, and evaluate the historical evidence with an open mind that perhaps what was observed was in fact miraculous. And the overwhelming testimony of archaeology and documentary history is now showing that in every particular in which we can check the historical claims of the New and Old Testament, those narratives are turning out to be incredibly accurate. There's extensive external corroboration of those documents. And therefore we have every reason, on metaphysically neutral grounds to accept them as historically accurate, which I think puts the whole question of the reliability of the text in a completely different context and framework. So I know you've had Titus Kennedy on your program and his amazing books, and there's a lecture he gives about the seven figures that are mentioned in the Gospel narratives about the trial of Jesus. And over the last 60 or so years, every one of those has been corroborated by external inscriptional evidences in the archaeological record, from Pilate and to Caiaphas to Herod Antipas to Peter, to Annas the other high priest, to Jesus himself. Even a very obscure figure, Simon Cyrene, has been recently corroborated. So there's such a mountain of evidence supporting the reliability of those biblical texts, it may be time to reassess our assumptions about whether or not they could possibly be historically accurate. And I think the evidence that we have that God may in fact exist means that we have to look at those narratives much more objectively and take the historical. I would argue, take the historical evidence supporting the reliability of those narratives much more at face value, ladies and gentlemen,
- [66:55]
A
if Genesis 1:1 is true, every other verse in the Bible is at least possible. And Steve and his team at Discovery have really handed you a gift with this film, because you don't have to even read a book. You can just sit down with your friends in a theater, watch the story of everything. The story of everything dot film, and then go out for dinner or have a meal or whatever, and Talk about the evidence, the three major arguments, the beginning of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, and the intelligence which has just written through all of life. When you see those three together, you realize the best explanation for that is there is an intelligence out there that created and sustains all this.
- [67:41]
B
And a great, a super intelligence, as Fred Hoyle put it. Yes, transcendent intelligence, who has the capability of bringing an entire universe into existence, finally tuning it so that life is possible. And then the exquisite realm of, of what I call digital nanotechnology really needs to be seen to be believed. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's. It's stunning.
- [68:07]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, take your small group to this film. Pastors, you may want to suggest that you go see the film during the week to your congregants.
- [68:17]
B
Can I sing there, Frank? Encourage college students and. And high school students to see Good Idea. They are the ones that are exposed to the other story in exclusion to evidence or arguments that would support an alternative theistic story of reality. And this will inoculate Christian students and other students who believe in God against the atheistic propaganda that they often get from college professors where they're kind of. And it will also give them a sense of confidence in the faith they hold. And then students that are searching who are wondering if their lives have any meaning or purpose, which is. In a recent Harvard study, a huge proportion of college students have that persistent nagging question about whether or not their lives have any meaning. That's a byproduct of scientific materialist thinking. And it was for me. And so this is the people ask, what's the target audience? Well, this is a film for everybody, but it's especially for young people who are trying to make sense of the world and answer those deep worldview questions. So especially get them out, ladies and gentlemen.
- [69:32]
A
Films like this, which are so well done, they can be like they're coming right out of Hollywood. Cost a lot of money to make, but their gifts to the Christian world and the non Christian world, yet they have to be supported if future films are going to be made. So please make an effort to support the film. Again, it's called the storyofeverything Film. You can buy your tickets right there. It's only in for six or seven nights, April 30 through May 6. It'll be extended if it does. Well, if it doesn't, it won't be extended. So please support the film. You can just support it even if you don't have time to go, go buy the ticket and don't go. Okay, fine.
- [70:14]
B
But buy the ticket and give it to a young person of your choice.
- [70:17]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.
- [70:19]
B
So.
- [70:19]
A
And trust me, I've seen the film. It's extremely well done. It's something that you're going to be proud of as a Christian when you see it. So, Steve, thanks for taking all the time to research it, write the book, oversee the film, and now you're. You're on the road, just out there trying to promote it. So thanks for all you're doing.
- [70:38]
B
Thank you, Frank. And thanks for the time to share, tell your audience about it and unpack it a little bit. So.
- [70:45]
A
Absolutely, absolutely. Ladies, gentlemen, the great Steve Meyer.
- [70:51]
B
All right.
- [70:52]
A
Thank you, brother. Thanks for doing all this.
- [70:53]
B
Get me through the rest of my day. Thanks. Yeah, that's right. That's right.
- [70:56]
A
All right, friends, we'll see you here next time. Lord willing. God bless.