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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2847: DNA Is More Complex Than Any Software Ever Written. So Who Wrote It? | Stephen Meyer
01:46:59
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Jake Grez (Nurse Jake)
Hi, I'm Jake Grez, also known as Nurse Jake. As a travel nurse, I've worked in all kinds of places, different settings, cities and climates. Every assignment brings on a new challenge, which is why I always bring my figs. These scrubs are built for whatever the job throws at you. They're breathable, flexible and comfortable in any environment. No matter where I land, I know they're going to keep me looking and feeling my best. And don't sleep on the details, the pockets, the features, the finishing touches. Everything has a purpose and it makes a real difference when you're moving non stop. The fit is clean, tailored and super polished and they come in a huge range of colors. In other words, they feel great throughout a 12 hour shift and they always look good. See every healthcare professional on Instagram. If you work in healthcare or know someone who does, check out figs and get 15% off your first order at wearfigs.com with code FIGSRX. That's wherefigs.com code figsrx if you want
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Stephen Meyer
to pump your body and expand your
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Justin Andrews
mind, there's only one place to go.
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Stephen Meyer
Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal Destefano, Adam Schaefer
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Justin Andrews
and Justin Andrews, you just found the
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Sal Destefano
most downloaded fitness, health and entertainment podcast.
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Adam Schaefer
This is Mind Pump. Today's episode is a special one. We have Stephen Meyer on the podcast where he talks about how everything started. This is like a big debate, right? Was there a creator or everything just appear? He is the main person when it comes to to arguing the position of intelligent design. He's a director of the center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's a very intelligent man, loves to debate this and in this episode he makes the case. And it's such a compelling case as to why there probably is a designer behind the universe, behind life, behind everything. By the way, he has a documentary coming out tomorrow. If you're listening to this, when it drops, it's coming out tomorrow. It's called the Story of Everything. It's based on his book Return of the God Hypothesis. This is going to be shown in theaters across the country. You got to go watch it. If you like this episode, definitely go watch it. In theaters now. This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, eight Sleep. So eight Sleep is the most advanced sleep system in the world. So this is a device that goes on your mattress, it covers your mattress and it cools or warms your mattress and it monitors your sleep. And adjusts with AI technology, giving you the best night of sleep you've ever had. If you struggle with sleep or you just want to maximize your recovery so you can get better muscle growth, better fat loss, better appetite suppression, all those great things that come from getting a Good night's sleep, Eight Sleep is the place to go. Go to eightsleep.com mindpump Use the code mindpump. That code will actually get you $350 off the Pod 5 Ultra. We also have a brand new program this month, Maps Push Pull Legs. So it's a three day split. Great for building muscle, sculpting the body, shaping the body. It's 40% off right now. Go to Maps PPL. The code for the 40% off is PPL. All right, real quick.
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Sal Destefano
If you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs or training gear over@mypumpstore.com I'm talking right now.
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Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
Hit pause, head on over to mypumpstore.com that's it.
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Stephen Meyer
Enjoy the rest of the show.
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Sal Destefano
Stephen, welcome to the show.
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Stephen Meyer
It's awesome to be here.
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Sal Destefano
It's such an honor. Love what you do. But for our audience who might not be familiar with you, tell us a bit about your background and kind of what you do.
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Stephen Meyer
Yeah, well, I currently direct a research center at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and have founded a similar institute in Cambridge, England. The focus of both institutes is examining the scientific evidence that points to not undirected materialistic processes, but to some kind of intelligent design behind the universe, a mind behind the universe and in life. So there's a term in British intellectual history called natural theology. The idea that nature is pointing to God and we're in essence reviving that tradition. It goes back to figures like Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton and one of Newton's mentors named John Ray and who was the founder of botany. So the early scientists all believed that they were studying nature. As one book title put it, for the glory of God. There's a famous book by a historian of science who published a book at Princeton Press called For the Glory of God about the scientific revolution. And so there's been kind of a rise, fall, rise story in the history of science that initially science came out of a Judeo Christian milieu for very almost biblical reasons. People believed that they could study nature and understand its secrets, that it was intelligible was their word because it had been made in the image of the same rational creator who gave us rationality. So we had rationality that had come from the Creator that enabled us to understand the creation and the order and design that the creator built into it. So our institute in Seattle has a program called the center for Science and Culture. And we're challenging what we call scientific materialism, the idea that there's no mind, no intelligence behind everything. And instead affirming this idea of intelligent design, that there is a mind or creator behind the physical and biological world that we study. And it's a venerable tradition in science and we're reviving it.
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Sal Destefano
Yeah, that's. When did that separation start to happen? Because you said a few things that I wasn't even aware of, not that long ago. I wasn't aware that the early, like the scientific method, the scientific process came out of essentially the church. They were the ones that were putting this forward, funding it to learn essentially the order and the design of the universe.
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Stephen Meyer
And we get such a big different idea today that, you know, science is opposed to faith. I guess that's part of your story. You were pretty hard nosed atheist and you placed your faith in science as opposed to belief in God. But people don't realize that the scientific, what we call the scientific revolution, which is differently dated by historians, but pretty much all agree something really big happened between about 1500 and 1700 in Western Europe in a decidedly Christian context or milieu as the scholars call it. But as you study that, it goes back even further into about the late medieval period. So it's interesting, there's a Jewish contribution to this from the Hebrew Bible. There is a Catholic contribution to this. The Catholic philosophers in the medieval universities were developing methods of studying nature, isolating variables, the kind of things that we learn about in science class. Those were coming out of places like Oxford and the University of Paris. And then there's a contribution from the Reformers, the Reformed Protestant perspective. They especially emphasized both that we were made in God's image, number one. And therefore we had that rationality that enabled us to understand the world. But we were also fallen and that affected our mind. So we had to guard against flights of fancy, expressing biases. We always had to test our ideas against the evidence. So you had. And in the Hebrew Bible you've got the idea of this kind of order that God had built into nature. The concept of the laws of nature arguably comes out of the Hebrew Bible. So it's kind of an interesting ecumenical Judeo Christian contribution to the rise of modern science. And it happens, I think in the west really decidedly between about 1300 and 1700. And then especially those two centuries of the 16th and 17th centuries are really, really dramatic. And so we don't really lose that perspective, that theistic perspective on what's going on in science until the late 19th century with figures like Darwin, Marx, Freud, Thomas Henry Huxley. These are staunch materialist figures, the great materialists who want to answer all the big questions that religion had answered before. So Darwin tells us where we came from. Marx has a utopian vision of the future. Freud tells us what to do about the human condition and about our guilt. Huxley takes Darwin's ideas about the origin of new forms of life and applies it even to the very first life and tries to explain the origin of the first cell from simple non living chemicals. So you get this kind of materialist synthesis at the end of the 19th century, and that becomes the default way of thinking in the 20th century. It affects figures like Lenin and the. The early Marxists in the Soviet Union. They have a materialistic worldview that they express in a Marxist way. The Nazis are very influenced by evolutionary thinking. And that's a really kind of grisly story to tell. And in the west too, we've been affected by a more generic scientific materialism that has kind of, I think, undermined people's sense of meaning and purpose. So the shift takes place late 19th century, early 20th century. We kind of get a default worldview of materialism. But the argument of my book, my most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis, is that the God Hypothesis, the awareness of a mind behind the universe, of a creator, is coming back not in spite of, but because of new discoveries in science.
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Sal Destefano
Can you explain some of those new discoveries that are bringing people back to the possibility that there's a designer?
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Stephen Meyer
Yeah, absolutely. That's kind of the story of my book, Return of the God Hypothesis, and our new film, the Story of Everything. And in the film, we tell the story of very prominent figures in science who have had the same kind of worldview shift that you had as they begin to reflect on the discoveries that have been made. And most of them have to do with biological and cosmological origins. Where did everything come from? And the first big shift takes place in cosmology. It actually starts to happen about a century ago. And it's partly a California story because in Southern California, Mount Wilson, the observatory, they start building these great big dome telescopes. And because of that, they're able to resolve tiny points of light deep into the night sky. And in the 1920s, there was still a debate about whether or not there were any galaxies beyond Our own Milky Way. There were these little smudges that they could see on their photographic plates. But as they got better and better resolution, better photographic technology, they realized the little smudges were galaxies, represented galaxies in their own right. And one of the key figures there was Edwin Hubble, who was able. In a number of my PowerPoint presentations, I actually have his black and white photographic images of the different galaxies, the Spiral Nebula and so forth. And so the first thing they discover is we're not alone. At least there are other galaxies besides ours. But then they discover that the light coming from those distant galaxies is being stretched out, which is indicated by the redness in the color. And they realize that if it's being stretched out, that must mean that the galaxies are moving away so that the wavelengths are stretching out. Like you probably remember from high school science class, the Doppler effect. If a train is moving away, the pitch of the whistle goes, drops. And so the light similarly lowers, lengthens in wavelength and lowers in frequency. And so this was an indicator that the galaxies in every sector of the night sky were moving away from us, suggesting a universe that's actually expanding. And then when that was coupled with Einstein's new ideas about gravity, they became aware that it wasn't just that the galaxies were moving away from us, but that space was expanding as the galaxies moved away, that it was the expansion of space that was carrying the galaxies away. And so that we had literally a picture of an expanding universe outward from a beginning point. And that suggested a creation event.
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Sal Destefano
Now, I just learned this recently, actually, it was from one of your talks. I did not know that there were scientists that really struggled initially with the idea that. Because a lot of the belief was that the universe was eternal, right? That had always been there. Therefore, genesis would be wrong, that there would be a beginning point. And then they discover everything's expanding out, which means, oh, my gosh, if we rewind time, everything started in one point. And scientists, a lot of them were disturbed by this because it kind of pointed back to.
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Stephen Meyer
Yeah, one guy with really bad hair who failed to match his socks in particular, did not like this. You know, Albert Einstein, and he had this awesome new theory of gravity. And it's been borne out in so many tests. It's called general relativity. And the idea of general relativity is that massive bodies, in some strange but literal way, curve the space around them such that if you pass light by them, you'll see the light take a curved trajectory. But Einstein realized that if his idea about gravity was true, if massive Bodies are literally curving space. Then if that was the only force at work in the universe, in the vast cosmos, then we should essentially we should be in a black hole that every massive body would congeal the space around it which would then every other massive body would do the same. And eventually that space would get drawn in and everything would get drawn into one big glump and there should be no empty space in the universe. But he realized we don't live in a universe like that. We live in a universe where there's empty space. So there must be some sort of anti gravity for some outward pushing force that's counteracting the inward pull of gravity. And he called that the cosmological constant, the constantly pushing outward force that's responsible for the growth of the the cosmos. But then as he began thinking about that, he realized that implies a dynamic universe, one that's expanding outward, which again implies expanding outward from what? From some kind of a beginning point. He did not like this idea at all initially. And it kind of violated a deep metaphysical prejudice he had that the universe must be eternal and self existent and static. So what he did is he fiddled with his own equations arbitrarily. He just set a value for that cosmological constant which was precisely opposite the value of the inward pull of gravity, so that he could depict the two forces as being perfectly balanced and the universe as being static and having neither beginning nor end. And then he breathed a sigh of relief and said, okay, we've got an eternal universe again. But then some other physicists, in particular a French, a Belgian named Father Lemaitre, he was a Catholic priest. He started working with Einstein's equations and showed that even with his fine tuning, his fiddling, the equations weren't stable. That the slightest perturbation in matter this way or that way would cause either a re collapse or an expansion. And then further, Hubble was discovering when he looked at the actual evidence that the universe was expanding. And so Lemaitre and a Cambridge physicist named Arthur Eddington challenged Einstein on this. Eddington urged him to get out to California and see what Hubble was seeing. And so there's some famous newsreel footage. We can even get you a little clip of this if you like. It's really awesome where Einstein is going in the telescope with Hubble and looking. We've got it in the film, it's pretty awesome. And they go up this kind of elevator to the telescope and they're looking out and. And then two weeks later, Einstein gives an interview to The New York Times. And he says, well, this is the three hardest words in the English language. I was wrong. And he says Hubble and his colleague Humason had shown that the universe was not static, it was dynamic. Therefore, it had a beginning. And he later said that his fiddling with his own equations to obscure the reality of the beginning was the greatest blunder of his life. I misquoted him in the book. I said it was greatest blunder of his career. He was more emphatic. It was the greatest blunder of his life. He allowed his philosophical prejudice to obscure the evidence.
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Sal Destefano
Another point that I've heard you make is that space, time and matter, one of them can't exist without the other two coming into existence at the same time.
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Stephen Meyer
This is part of the Einsteinian gravitational idea, is that he would talk about space, time, the three dimensions of space and, and the one dimension of time. And they're all. They're all connected intimately. And this is to fully unpack that. You got to get into relativity. But the basic idea is, yeah, if you. If you think about collapsing the universe back in time, if you think about back extrapolating at a previous time, you have this from the observational astronomy, the galaxies are moving outward. From the Einsteinian idea that space is expanding with the expansion of the galaxies, then if you wind that back in the forward direction of time, the matter would be getting more and more diffuse. In the reverse direction of time, the matter would be getting more and more densely concentrated. And if the matter is more densely concentrated, the space gets more tightly curved. And. And as you go back and back and back, you eventually get to a limiting case where you can't go back any further. And that marks the beginning of the expansion and arguably the beginning of the universe itself. And there's a whole lot of interesting, complicated physics debates around this tiny, tiny smidgen of space where you have not only Einstein's gravitational effects, but quantum mechanical effects as well. And what do we make of that? But I think the most straightforward interpretation is that the universe looks as you would expect it to look if it were expanding outward from the beginning.
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Sal Destefano
Yeah. And talk a little bit about the. Just the fine tuning of what is required for us to even exist, for Earth, to even be here, for us to have water, for life. Like, how precise does it have to be?
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Stephen Meyer
Even basic chemistry is finely tuned. The idea of fine tuning is that there are all these fundamental parameters of physics, like, for example, the cosmological constant or the strength of gravity. Just those two forces are exquisitely finely Tuned the mass of the universe, or, sorry, the mass of the elementary particles, the quarks, for example, all these different physical parameters are fine tuned in the sense that they fall within very narrow tolerances outside of which life and even basic chemistry would not be possible. Stable galaxies would not be possible. And the degree of fine tuning is so exquisite that physicists now sometimes talk about our living in a fortunate universe or a Goldilocks universe. That's the kind of idea I had a professor at Cambridge when I was there who came and gave a talk to one of our, our groups. And his name was Sir John Polkinghorne, famous, famous British physicist. And he used to depict the fine tuning by asking you to imagine that you had flown out into space on a spaceship. You docked it on a spaceship. You go in and there's this big room and it says universe creating machine. So you go inside and sure enough, there's this console. And on the console there's a, a dial for the strength of gravitational attraction. There's a dial for the strength of the electromagnetic attraction. There's a strength for the other fundamental forces of physics, a slider that sets the speed of light. There's a little dial that sets the mass of the elementary particles. You have all these parameters that make the universe possible, and they're all set to very precise values. And then he unpacks his little thought experiment says, and so then you make some calculations, because you're a physicist, of course, right? So you pull out your slide rule or your calculator and you start making some calculations. And you realize if I turn that dial one click this way or one click that way, something catastrophic would happen and life would not be possible. So take that cosmological constant, the outward pushing force that we were talking about, that Einstein talked about. Turns out that it's fine tuned. An accepted value among physicists is one part in 10 to the 90th part power.
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Sal Destefano
Wow.
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Stephen Meyer
There's only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the entire universe. So to get that right by chance would be like putting a blindfolded man out in space trying to locate not just one elementary particle in our universe, but looking for one elementary, one marked elementary particle somewhere in 10 billion universes our size. It's, that's the, that's the degree of fine tuning. There's, there's, there's another fine tuning parameter that's even more exquisitely fine tuned than that, and it's called the initial entropy. And that has to do with the configuration of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe. So it's as if it's all finely tuned just from the beginning to make it possible for there to be stable galaxies. So this is kind of one of the first scientists that discovered this was another Cambridge physicist named Sir Fred Hoyle. And he was investigating, trying to explain the abundance of carbon in the universe because he knew carbon was critical for forming life. It forms long chain like molecules that you need to store information which is necessary to life. And he finally came up with a process by which it might happen. He got it tested out at Caltech. He made a very specific prediction related to the process that he had in mind. It came bang on. And he realized this is probably how it happened, this is probably how carbon was formed in the bellies of stars. But then he realized for that to happen, there needed to be this whole series of just right parameters where the relationship between gravitation and electromagnetism was just right. All these parameters fell within these very narrow sweet spots again. And he had been a staunch atheist. He actually gave the Big Bang theory the name. Oh wow, the Big Bang, because he wanted to stigmatize it. He was trying, it was a pejorative term for him. Hahaha. The Big Bang. Yeah. No one believes that stuff. Well, he ended up, and he did that because he was very much a staunch scientific atheist. And he completely changed his worldview as a result of his own discovery about the fine tuning. And he was later quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry in order to make life possible. So he was so like Einstein, Hoyle changed his mind. And we've had in the film, the story of everything that we have coming out at the end of April, April 30, we tell the story of these discoveries, but also the stories of the scientists who have changed their minds about the big questions, in particular the God question, as a result of, of some of the discoveries that they themselves have made.
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Sal Destefano
And a lot of this boils down to these scientists finding that the odds, the probability of these perfect circumstances, like you had mentioned earlier, one of the odds you had mentioned was greater than the amount of particles in the, in the entire observable universe. They're so astronomically impossible that it's essentially impossible. Now what I would hear sometimes people say or argue is that, well, if you give it enough time that this could possibly happen, explain that first. Because they'll say they give the term like the God of time, essentially that becomes their God.
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Stephen Meyer
Yeah. Well, we call this. There's a term in probability reasoning called probabilistic resources. So if you've got something that's super improbable, you can say, well, that wouldn't happen by chance. Well, you can't say that right away. You have to know how many opportunities there are for it to happen by chance. And if the number of opportunities are sufficient, then something might happen by chance. Simple example. Think of a bike lock. Imagine there's a nice bike locked up outside and you got a thief that comes along and you've got a four dial lock. So that's 10,000 possible combinations. If the thief has five minutes before the security guard's going to come around the corner, it's more likely than not that he will fail to open the lock by chance. He doesn't have enough opportunities. But if he's committed to staying there 10,000 hours. Yeah, right. I actually did, I think it was 15 hours. I calculated if he did one combination each 10 seconds, then he'd get to more than 5,000 combinations within 15 hours. At which point it would be more likely than not that he would open the lock by chance. Okay, so you always have to know the probabilistic resources. But the kinds of probabilities that we're dealing with in relation to the resources available remain small, remain infinitesimally small. Unless in the case of the fine tuning, you invoke something called the multiverse.
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Sal Destefano
Yeah, well, that's the.
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Stephen Meyer
I love to talk about that. So I'll cue you up to Marvel Loves.
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Sal Destefano
Yeah, so tell me a little bit about the multiverse. When did that come out?
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Stephen Meyer
Good question. Yeah, really good question.
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Sal Destefano
And what's that all about?
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Stephen Meyer
Well, this is an attempt to inflate the probabilistic resources to say that the thief has an infinite number of opportunities to crack the code on the lock. And the idea is that, well, yes, the probability of landing on the correct ensemble of fine tuning parameters is infinitesimally small in our universe. Taking into account elementary particles, seconds since the Big Bang, any factor you want to figure in the probabilistic resources within our universe are way too small to expect that you would settle on those fine tuning parameters by chance. But what if there was a gabillion other universes out there? Just a made up number, as big as you want. Big as you want. Okay. And each of those universes has their own set, their own combination of fine tuning parameters. So different strength of gravity, different arrangement of matter at the beginning of the expansion in those universes et Cetera. Well, then you would have arguably enough opportunities for the right sets of dials to align. Align. Perfect word. Thank you. But there's a problem with that that leads to an even deeper problem. The first problem is that other universes, by definition, are separate from ours. We don't know about them, we're positing them. But if there are other universes that are separate from our universe, what happens in those other universes has no effect on what happens in this universe. Including those other universes would have no effect on whatever process it was that set the fine tuning parameters in this universe. So simply positing other universes doesn't solve the problem. But in virtue of that, multiverse advocates have essentially recognized that, and they've proposed instead universe generating mechanisms so that you can think of our universe as the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery, where there's an underlying process that's spitting out universes. So there's a kind of connection to a common cause. And so that would potentially work. But the problem there is that those universe generating mechanisms, some based on something called string theory, others based on something called inflationary cosmology, those universe generating mechanisms themselves turn out, even in theory, to be finely tuned, even in theory, to have to generate new universes, the universe generating mechanisms have to be finely tuned themselves. And so no one has been able to get around this. And so what it shows is that the fine tuning can be explained by positing other universes, if you posit an underlying universe generating mechanism, but those mechanisms themselves have to be exquisitely finely tuned. And so you're right back to where you started, which is unexplained fine tuning. And yet we know in our experience that finely tuned systems, think of a radio dial, think of a French recipe, think of an internal combustion engine. Finely tuned systems, where a lot of parameters have to fall within narrow tolerances to achieve a significant outcome, those systems always are the product of intelligence, of a mind. So since the multiverse hasn't gotten rid of ultimate fine tuning, I think you're right back to where you started, which is a very strong indicator of a fine tuner, of a priority of prior intelligence.
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Sal Destefano
Isn't the very fact that we find laws of the universe that there even are laws that could lead or lead us to believe that there is a designer? I find it interesting. I posed this question on one of our episodes where, let's just say, theoretically, we landed on Mars and we found an advanced computer, and we could get on the computer, and we figured out ways to make it work and it can do these calculations. No scientist would look at that computer and say, well, this must have happened by random chance. We would immediately, there was alien life here that designed this. Why is it that we look at something so many times more complicated like life, and try to explain it away without there being someone that put it together?
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Stephen Meyer
Well, there are two questions embedded in that, and they're both good. The first having to do with natural laws. That there's something mysterious about the regularities of nature themselves. And Newton and other early scientists thought they were a mode of divine action. God was holding the universe together by what we call the laws of nature. And there's a whole big literature on that. And there's a theistic argument from natural laws. The fine tuning argument is, in a way, a kind of wrinkle on that, because in addition to just the brute fact of regularities, the regularities have very particular strengths. Gravitation could be stronger, could be weaker. There's no underlying logical or physical reason why it has exactly the strength it does. But if it were just a little different, then you wouldn't get life or even basic chemistry. So that's back to the fine tuning argument. So it's not only the fact of regularities, which some philosophers think point to have theistic implications. They're better explained by theism. But it's also some of the features of the regularities that also seem to point to God in the sense that they reveal fine tuning. But then when we get to biology. I love your example. We have a little video right now about the iPhone and the complexity of the iPhone. There are features of design systems that we recognize from our own designs that happen to be present in living systems. And there are two things that actually three things that jump out at me. One is the digital code that's in the DNA molecule. Okay, and we run an iPhone off of code, right? So we know where code comes from. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but more complex than any we've ever created. Richard Dawkins, the staunch, formerly Oxford scientific atheist, says that the DNA contains machine code. Well, what do we know about the origin of machine code or of digital code or of software? It always comes from a programmer. And in fact, whenever we see information and trace it back to its source, whether it's in software or in a paragraph in a book or hieroglyphic inscription, or the information that we're transmitting with acoustic waves right now, information always ultimately comes from a mind, not a material process. And the most fundamental discovery in modern biology post Watson and Crick is that the DNA molecule and other large information bearing structures in cells are information bearing, they contain information. So that suggests that life owes its origin at some level to a mind. There's a master programmer behind life. This was Francis Crick's big insight. He and Watson elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule 1953, 1957. He realizes what the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA are doing. He realizes they're functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or zeros and ones in a section of software. And they're providing instructions for building the proteins and protein machines that all cells need to stay alive. And this becomes known as the sequence hypothesis. In others we have, Bill Gates is right. It's like software program or, or like a 3D printer where we take digital code and we use digital information to, to construct a three dimensional structure. That's what's going on inside cells. And so that just kind of revolutionizes biology and also raises this huge question, what, where does the information come from? Because what we know from experience is that information always comes from a mind. And so that's one of the key arguments for design is in my book Signature in the Cell and also it's the third act in the film we have coming out.
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Sal Destefano
Wouldn't the presence of DNA in all living things, couldn't that point to the fact that we all came from some original living thing and evolved out from that?
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Stephen Meyer
Well, there was an argument for a while that said, well look, we have a universe. There's a universality of the code, that all organisms use the same genetic code. They have different text, different instructions, but the text is translated according to the same genetic code. That turns out no longer to be the case. There's I think, something like 22 different codes that have been discovered. So the idea that the universality of the code points to a common ancestor, I don't think works. There's other reasons, I think, to doubt the universal common ancestor thesis. And that's coming out in a lot of different branches of science. One has to do with another thing that's been discovered in the genome, which is these are called orphan genes. And that is that if you look across the phylogenetic landscape of all the different kinds of animals and plants, there are, on a Darwinian view of things, every gene, every sequence of A, Cs, GS and Ts, the genetic letters should have some closely related sequence in some other organism. And what we're finding is that across the landscape of different types of plants and animals, that there are these genes that have no known similarity to any other genes. They're discontinuous. And so that's not what you'd expect on a Darwinian view of things. The Darwinian view of things, you'd expect everything to be closely related to something else so that you could depict the history of life as a great continuous branching tree. Instead, we have these discontinuous representations of gene sequences that do completely unique things in different phylogenetic categories of life. But also, you have the problem in the fossil record that the major groups of organisms was just going to ask you about that.
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Sal Destefano
Yeah, because they'll point to the fossil record, say, hey, we have fossils that seem to show an intermediary between this animal and this animal, and looks like this one was like, in between them.
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Stephen Meyer
Very few, and they typically are at what are called the lower taxonomic levels. But instead, the big story is that the major groups of animals, plants and animals, especially in the animal kingdom, arise abruptly in the fossil record. I wrote a book about one of the big, abrupt events called the Cambrian explosion and explain what that is.
- [37:15]
Sal Destefano
What is the Cambrian explosion?
- [37:16]
Stephen Meyer
Well, in Cambrian is one of the oldest periods of life, as documented by the sedimentary geological record, typically dated about 520 or 530 million years ago, depending on whom you ask. And in that, in a narrow seam of sedimentary rock all around the world, you get roughly two thirds of the animal body plans that have ever existed on the planet arising in that narrow window so suddenly, suddenly, abruptly. And a body plan is a unique arrangement of body parts and tissues, a unique way of putting an animal together. So you might have some animals with hard exoskeletons, like trilobites or the arthropods. You might have some with have an internal notochord or a spinal cord, the chordates, completely different body logic. And so you've got these different types of animals with completely different body logics arising in that narrow window of time. And as you investigate, as paleontologists have investigated the strata beneath the Cambrian, they do not find the transitional intermediates, the precursors of that you would expect. And we've been looking for a long, long time. So it's very, very abrupt. There are a few Precambrian animal forms, but they are much simpler. They don't connect morphologically to the ones that arise abruptly. And the attempts to explain the absence of the animals as a result of incomplete sampling or incomplete preservation have failed for various reasons. So leading paleontologists saying, hey, we have to recognize this this, this is what Darwin called a saltation, an abrupt appearance of new form. And in 2017, I wrote an article with the German paleontologist Gunter Beckley about not only the Cambrian, but we documented, I think it was 17 or 19 other major abrupt appearances of new forms of life throughout the fossil record. It's not only the Cambrian, it also happens at other levels. Not only the phyla, but the classes, the orders. The first mammals, the first turtles, the first sea reptiles. Just go down the list of the major groups of organisms. The first flowering plants. These are, in fact, the flowering plants arose so abruptly that Darwin called it an abominable mystery.
- [39:43]
Sal Destefano
Wow. And I've heard evolutionary scientists point to the fact that we have been able to breed animals and plants and we can show radical changes in them just by our own selective breeding, and then that they use that as evidence that, well, evolution must work that way.
- [40:02]
Stephen Meyer
I think it's pretty widely recognized that we can produce modest adaptive changes through artificial selection within limits that very fairly quickly the genetic variability that's inherent in the genome is exhausted through those types of experiments. You can make dogs only so big or only so small, and you can change their form very modestly, but you can't turn dogs into felines. That's a different kind of form. Now that has not by itself been perceived as a problem for sort of a neo Darwinian view because artificial selection doesn't induce any mutations. And the mutations are kind of the go to source for innovation in the neo Darwinian scheme of things. But there are other kinds of problems that I think limit the creative power of the natural selection mutation mechanism.
- [41:00]
Sal Destefano
Explain that, explain that. Because I've heard people say, well, there were these random mutations that turned this sea animal into a land animal. What do mutations typically lead to? And is that a possibility or is
- [41:15]
Stephen Meyer
that, yeah, mutations can sometimes be favorable, and they can sometime, but they're more often deleterious. But they can sometimes be favorable, but they typically lead to very limited biological change and they don't change body plans. And let me just. I'll give you a little bit of a biology lesson, but I think it's a fun one. So there is something that some Caltech scientists have discovered called developmental gene regulatory networks. So the idea is that as an organism is going through development, fertilized embryo, fertilized egg, and it then will divide from one cell into two, into four, into, you know, geometric expansion. And as the organism is developing, more and more cells come online and the cells have to differentiate themselves one from another. You have cells Some cells become muscle cells, some cells become nerve cells, some become maybe bone, et cetera. Now, when the scientists have mapped out what's controlling the different expression of genetic information in different cells at different times, they map that out and it looks like an integrated circuit. There's this integrated control of the expression of information so that a. A gene will produce a gene product, a regulatory RNA or a protein, which will in turn either turn on or turn off some other part of the genome. So it's all carefully choreographed and integrated. So when they map all this out, it looks like an integrated circuit such that. Well, and what they found experimentally is if you start to perturb these regulatory networks, the animal will shut down. If you change them very much at all, then the animal development will just shut down. The animal will die before it reaches full development. So here's the problem. You have this gene regulatory network. It's absolutely necessary to build an animal body plan to get all the cells in the right place so that everything is differentiated and is performing its correct function. So the bones are in the right place and the nerves are in the right place, and the muscles are in the right place, etc. So you got to have these developmental gene regulatory networks. So you got developmental gene regulatory network A makes animal form A. Now you want to change animal form A into animal form B. But you know, you got to have a developmental gene regulatory network, right? But what do we know about developmental gene regulatory networks? You can't change them very much at all without destroying the animal form. So you got to get from here to here, from one animal form to another. But the underlying thing that makes animal form animal form can't be changed without destroying the process that would produce the animal form in the first place, which would terminate the evolutionary process. And so get, there's a. So mutations here are. If the mutations are big enough to make a change that would produce a body plan, they're big enough to destroy the animal, the developmental gene regulatory network. And you're not going to get from A to B in the underlying architecture that's necessary to make animal form. And the scientists who discovered this, no friends of creationism or the theory of intelligent design, but they say that neo Darwinism is a catastrophic mistake because it cannot explain this fundamental need to transform things at a body plan level in the underlying architecture of these developmental gene regulatory networks. So it's just one of a legion of problems that scientists are coming to recognizing that the mutation natural selection mechanism has very limited creative power. It does a nice job of Explaining small scale variations, the finch beaks getting bigger and smaller, that we all. The stuff we learned about antibiotic resistance, the peppered moths changing their coloration, superficial stuff, is a fine explanation. But to extend it beyond that, to explain fundamental changes in architecture of animals, it does not have that creative power. And any number of leading evolutionary biologists have pointed this out. I attended a conference in London in 2016 convened by evolutionary biologists who were calling for a new theory of evolution because they know that the neo Darwinian theory that we all learn about in our textbooks does not work. It lacks a mechanism, a creative. A mechanism with a creative power to generate fundamentally new forms of life. So we're all. We're in need of a major overhaul of what we're being taught at the high school and college level, because the people at the, at the highest levels of the field know this. And it's not percolating yet.
- [46:01]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
But what about, what about time and carbon dating and how accurate that is? Because back to Sal's point earlier, that seems to be like. The argument to go to is just like, if you give it enough time, you know.
- [46:11]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:11]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
I mean, how.
- [46:12]
Sal Destefano
Discovered it yet?
- [46:13]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
How accurate is our carbon dating system that we use to depict how old things are?
- [46:18]
Stephen Meyer
I think carbon dating is generally accurate. You can have contamination of samples. Carbon dating isn't really relevant for these big time scales we're talking about with the origin of animals or on an evolutionary scale. It's more on the tens of thousands of years old, more relevant for archaeological artifacts. But there are other radiometric methods like potassium argonaut. I generally think these are pretty accurate methods. But the question is, do we. The question of do we have enough time is still there. It's still a big problem. And in Signature in the Cell, my first book, I calculated the probability of generating a functional protein by chance in a prebiotic environment, prebiotic soup or other environment. And the probabilities are astronomically small, even in relation to the probabilistic resources of the universe. If you took, if, if every event in the universe had been devoted to searching for a new protein sequence from the Big Bang till Now, call it 13.8 billion years. Not nearly enough opportunities to search a space as large as that which corresponds to a protein sequence. So, so the. And then Jim Tour, James Tour, the. The very prominent organic chemist at Rice University has recently come out with a paper showing that the processes that degrade biomolecules in a presumed prebiotic environment happen much faster than the processes that would be required to build biologically relevant molecules. So time is not your friend, he argues, it's actually the enemy. It degrades. Things degrade faster than they get built. Which means time is. Time is working against you, not for you.
- [48:02]
Sal Destefano
A common critique that I've heard is that intelligent design isn't falsifiable or testable. You can't make predictions with it like you can with other scientific methods. How do you answer something like that? Are there things that we can use intelligent design to test or to make predictions?
- [48:20]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah, absolutely. First thing to say though is that, is that many scientific, scientific theories are tested in different ways. We test theories not only by the predictions they make, but also by their comparative explanatory power. If you have one model that can explain facts that we already have better than another model that confers support on the model that does the better job of explaining. We know, for example, that if we're talking about the digital code in DNA, we know of a cause that produces digital information, and that is intelligence or mind. The alternative causes that have been proposed, those based on chance, those based on natural laws, those based on some combination of the two. I go through this in great detail in some of my books. These have failed. And this is why the origin of life research, as it's called, has reached a state of impasse. There are no known materialistic causes that can explain the origin of digital information. But we do know of a cause that can do that, and that is mind. So we have this fact that we already know that DNA contains information in digital form. We know of only one cause that's sufficient to produce that. Therefore only one thing that can provide an adequate explanation for the origin of that information. And so that is itself a kind of test. It's an important test. It's the test of explanatory power. Intelligent design provides a better explanation for the origin of information than other competing hypotheses. But it also generates predictions. And one of the predictions it generated was that the so called junk DNA that scientists were talking about would turn out to be importantly functional.
- [50:03]
Sal Destefano
And are we finding that?
- [50:04]
Stephen Meyer
Absolutely, we're finding that it's a confirmed prediction of intelligent design over and against the prediction and expectation of the neo Darwinists. When, when the non coding. So a little background, you have a long stretch of DNA, about 2 to 3% of it, plus or minus codes for building proteins. But the rest of it was for a long time terra incognita, incognito. We didn't know what it was doing. They called it junk, they called it Junk. And the Neo Darwinists sort of jumped to the conclusion that the non coding regions were non functional and that they were the holdovers from the random trial and error process of mutation and selection. It was an accumulation of mutations over time.
- [50:53]
Sal Destefano
In other words, evidence that you've had mutations over time. It just didn't work.
- [50:57]
Stephen Meyer
Exactly. It was a great way to think. If you're working in a neo Darwinian framework, this is what we'd expect. We'd expect to see a lot of, when scientists call it flopsum and Jepsum, you know, just the genetic garbage accumulating over the millions and millions of years. And we looked at that and said the ID people starting in the 1990s, Dean Kenyon, Forrest Mims, William Dembsky, any number of ID proponents said, well, you know, that is a logical prediction of neo Darwinism, but our model's different. We think that the information in life was designed and we would expect, we think mutations are a real process. We'd expect to see some mutational accumulation, but we wouldn't expect the signal to be dwarfed by the noise. And so we're going to predict that those non coding regions perform very important functions that have yet to be discovered. And 2011, the ENCODE project comes out. One of the early scientists working on this, one of the scientists working on this first was a man named Richard Sternberg who was in the early 2000s predicting function for non coding regions and was starting to find it. But then this massive federally funded project called the encode project published 2011 and it turns out that at least 85% of the non coding regions are being transcribed, ergo, doing something. And we now know that the non coding regions of the genome are not only importantly functional, they're functioning much like an operating system in a computer program that's controlling the timing and that's regulating, controlling the timing and expression of the, excuse me, of the coding files. So there's a, there's a deep functional integration of the function in the non coding and the coding. And it means this is a really an awesome system. I started to tell about the three big things we found in life that are obvious indicators of design. One is the presence of digital code. The second is an intricate information processing system and the non coding regions are part of that. And the third is the miniature machines that we're finding.
- [53:18]
Sal Destefano
Explain the miniature machine.
- [53:19]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah, well this is a kind of an awesome thing. Anyone who sees this has to say,
- [53:23]
Sal Destefano
wait a minute, wait a minute, I've seen this. So I've seen like like images of, you know, parts of the body or mitochondria moving. And they seem to be moving like a machine across a cell transiting information.
- [53:37]
Stephen Meyer
It's mind blowing stuff. We have a whole, a whole section in the film story of everything about this because the, the producers have, they went out to some great animators and depicted these things with some real precision. But inside living cells today we have found rotary engines, we have found sliding clamps, we have found turbines, we have found little walking robotic motor proteins that tow large vesicles of materials along tracks that are effectively, they're like railroad tracks.
- [54:15]
Sal Destefano
I've seen them, they're so incredible.
- [54:16]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah, it's called kinesin walking motor proteins. And so we have animations of all of these in the new film because you really got to see them to believe them. And it beggars belief, strains credulity to think that any of these machines could have arisen through an undirected mutation selection type process. The problem is, and this is what Michael Behe, our colleague at Lehigh University showed back in 96 in his famous book Darwin's Black Box, is that these machines time and time again have a property that he calls irreducible complexity, or what an engineer might call functional integration. Where you need a very large core set of these parts that make up the machines that to be present in the right configurational order with each other for the machine to have a function at all. And if you remove one of them, the machine shuts down. So imagine you want to build this machine in a gradual, step by step, Darwinian way. And you've got a 30 part flagellar motor that's, you know, it's got a whip like tail, it's got a rotor, a stator, a drive shaft, it's got bushings. I mean, when you look at these things, it looks like something Mazda designed. Right. Okay. So you start removing any of the core parts of that system and the
- [55:36]
Sal Destefano
whole thing stops working.
- [55:36]
Stephen Meyer
It doesn't work. So how are you going to build that up? Gradually the natural selection selects for functional advantage. But if there's no functional advantage until you get the whole set of those parts working in close coordination, there's nothing to select, there's nothing that will be preserved and passed on to the next generation. So you effectively have to build the whole thing all at once or not at all. And building the whole thing all at once strains credulity because it places an enormous burden on purely random processes.
- [56:08]
Sal Destefano
Yeah, the probabilities just continue.
- [56:09]
Stephen Meyer
The probabilities at that Point. Blow out the. Yeah.
- [56:12]
Sal Destefano
And smaller. Do you find it interesting that. Because as you're talking, I just think, you know, as you know, the Christian Bible says we are made in God's image, that the way that we design things, the way that we create things, would to a much lesser degree, but somewhat mirror what we're finding in nature. Like these machines that you're describing, when we're looking at cells, inherent knowledge, where did that come from? Look very much like machines that we create before we even knew that the cells were. It's not like we copied them.
- [56:42]
Stephen Meyer
We didn't even know that they exist. Somebody's trying to get our attention, right? Oh, we, we've made something like that. You know, I had a, I had a. We had a Microsoft, one of their elite architect level programmers working in our lab in Redmond. He granted his time to us for two years, took some time off of Microsoft, and he wrote 10,000 lines of code to help us simulate what's called the gene expression system, the way that. Or sometimes called the system for protein synthesis. How the digital code in the DNA directs the construction of the proteins and protein machines, the machines that the proteins make because each of these, like the flagellar motor or the ATP synthase, the little turbine, they're made of proteins that have very specific shapes that fit together with other proteins with very specific shapes. So they're like mechanical parts of a, of an integrated system. And so he wrote, you know, 10,000 lines of code to help us simulate and not remember from civics class how a bill becomes a law. It's how a gene becomes a protein. How the information in the gene become. Directs the protein synthesis. And one day he walks into my office and he throws a book down on my table. He's a big tall guy, about six, five. He's got shock of wild hair, genius type programmer. And he says, I get an eerie feeling that someone figured this out before us. And he points at the book. And the book is called Design Patterns. And it's a standard manual for computer programmers for writing code for what are called computer design patterns. And a computer design pattern, he explained to me, is a, an established method of processing digital information, of storing or processing digital information. And he said, I'm learning the gene expression system. I'm recognizing all these established design patterns from computer science.
- [58:38]
Sal Destefano
Wow.
- [58:38]
Stephen Meyer
We have automated error correction, right? We call it spell check. There's automated error correction in the transmission of genetic information. If something goes wrong and you get the wrong amino acid in the wrong place, there's A little. There's a big protein that comes along, excises it and puts the right one in place. He says, we have hierarchical filing. We've got within the genome, you've got files within file, you've got files within folders and folders within superfolders. And so you have this kind of hierarchical organization of information. And he just started to tick these things off. And he said, and then he repeated the. I get an eerie feeling that someone figured this out before us. It's as if we're stumbling in our own information age. We're stumbling onto an awareness of a deeper form of information technology that was invented long before us and upon which our very existence depends.
- [59:37]
Sal Destefano
Oh, how often does it happen that a scientist who starts out atheist or maybe even agnostic, and the deeper they get into their studies, the more they start to go, maybe there is a God. Do you see that often?
- [59:54]
Stephen Meyer
Well, this is the story. We tell several of these stories in the Story of Everything. Einstein never came to a fully orthodox kind of theistic belief. He believed in some kind of mind behind the universe. He came to recognize that the universe definitely had a beginning. And the reason he didn't like that was he thought it smacked too much of the kind of Genesis account or pointed to some sort of immaterial, a need for a transcendent and immaterial creator. Hoyle thought the same thing. He very explicitly said he didn't like the Big Bang theory because it reminded him too much of the Genesis account. He thought that the scientists who were proposing it were being too influenced by the Genesis 1. One thing which is kind of comical because that's the last thing, I think, that was happening. So you have these kind of conversions away from materialism, sometimes to fully Christian belief, sometimes to some sort of theistic belief, sometimes to a rudimentary awareness of a designing mind behind things. But there is this shift taking place with a lot of scientists. And in the film, we tell the story of another, a great cosmologist and astrophysicist named Alan Sandage. And I happened to have heard him speak when I was a young scientist at a conference and he gave a presentation on the evidence for the Big Bang, and then announced in his talk that he was no longer a scientific materialist. He had been a longtime Jewish agnostic about religious matters. And he announced that he had become a Christian and. And that his conversion to theism, to a belief in God, was a consequence of his awareness of these scientific developments. He became a God believer because of, not in spite of the scientific Evidence. And what he described was the evidence for the beginning of the universe and its fine tuning. And there was a memorable line and we found the footage of this. I saw this myself. This is one of the things that rocked my world as a 27 year old scientist. A year later I was off to Cambridge to get to start studying these things. And he's looking into the camera, not too happy about this. The sense of, you know, he was a reluctant convert to this position, but he said, here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There's no way this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it. Why? Because the realm of physics as we know it comes into existence at the beginning of the universe, at the Big Bang. Before that, there's no physics to do the explaining, there's no material to explain the origin of matter. And he recognizes this deep problem and then ultimately comes to belief in God. And through soul searching, he ends up having a specifically Christian conversion.
- [62:41]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
What about your own personal story? Did you come from a place of always believing in intelligent design? How did you get so passionate about what you study?
- [62:50]
Stephen Meyer
Now that's a great question. I was maybe like you guys, really into sports as a teenager and I broke my leg in a skiing accident. And I also, I think I was somewhat neurotic, probably not too stable mentally. I just was, my mind was always spinning. And during this period in which I was sort of confined to a full leg cast, my mind was just spinning out of control with all these questions that were, I didn't, I didn't know to label them as such at the time, but they were kind of existential or philosophical. I had this question about, well, what's, what's going to matter in a hundred years? And as far as part of this started because my dad gave me a book about the history of baseball while I was convalescing and I was reading about all the, the stories of the greats. You know, I wanted at that, at that stage, I was 14, I was really into, into baseball and basketball. And the thing I wanted more than anything was to play shortstop for the New York Yankees, you know, but all this, all the stories of the sports heroes ended the same way. They would, they get scouted, they'd come up to the majors, they'd have this amazing career, they'd amass records, maybe, you know, home run records or ERA, or they'd win World Series, then they'd retire at 36, 38 maybe they'd play on to 40 and then they'd live out the rest of their lives enjoying the celebrity of having been a great athlete. But then what? You know, they passed away at some point, they died. Ted Williams is no longer with us. I think he had the greatest swing ever. I, you know, I read his book on hitting, but at the end of the day, there's a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper, and that's the measure of a person's life. Or is it. Could there be something more? And then I raised this with my mother, who hated sports. And she thought it was, you know, the grown men. Chasing a ball around was her thing, always. And. But, you know, she said, well, that's because you should be a surgeon. You shouldn't. Well, okay, what if I'm a surgeon? Then I'll save people's lives and they'll live for a while, but then they'll die. And so what's, you know, it was like that old Charlie Brown cartoon where, you know, Lucy's skipping rope and then suddenly she stops. You know, it all seems so pointless after a while. And I could see this rhythm to life of routine, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. And then I had weird thoughts about time, which also really freaked me out, because you could take an event. Okay, I can remember that event. It just happened, right? But it's already gone. Where did it go? And I just had this weird feeling There had to be something, somewhere that didn't change, or everything that was constantly changing was of no ultimate significance. And I didn't know how to explain it any better or worse than that. I just had. And I could go on, you know, spinning, spinning, spinning. And one day I had this thought, maybe this is what it means to be insane. And then I had. I had a panic. I had a panic attack and a surge because I don't see anyone at school asking these kinds of questions and nobody was talking about this. And so then I had about just an extended period of like six months. Still in the leg cast. Can't do anything. Overactive mind. And it's like this dark thought. I get afraid of the thoughts I'm having because it might mean that I'm insane. And then I get afraid of the thoughts that I'm insane. And then it's a fear of a fear of a fear. And it's just a downward maelstrom and it's just utter darkness. And I remember staring at some pattern on my windowsill, thinking, my life is over. Just nothing makes sense. And so I have a happy go, lucky brother who's my alter ego. I'm a philosopher. He's an entrepreneur. You know, he's just. And he kind of started to pull me out of this. His school started up again in the fall. I got out of the cast. But I'd have these recurrent bouts of this kind of metaphysical panic. And I didn't know what it was until I got to college. And I had a philosophy professor, and he was teaching the work of the atheistic existentialists, Jean Paul Sartre and the depressing French philosophers. And one of them, Sartre, had this quote. He said, without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. And I thought, oh, that's what was bothering me. And I rushed up after class to talk to the professor and I said. Because I told him about some of this stuff that had gone on with me as a teenager. And I said I wasn't insane. I was just a philosopher. And he said, well, but there's a fine line between philosophy and insanity. But what happened for me is you mentioned the biblical worldview. So I started. I don't know, I was maybe a sophomore in high school. A couple years later, I picked up the big, white, fat Catholic family Bible. We were sort of lapsed Catholics, nominal. And I opened it, and it fell open to the page between the two Testaments. The picture not of, you know, Jesus with lipstick on. You know, the kind of. Sometimes you see the. In some sacred art. But it was no. It was a manly, muscular carpenter. And it had the. The verse underneath from Matthew 11:28. Come unto me all ye who labor and are burdened and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And I thought that sounded pretty good. And I just started reading the next page, which was the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. And I couldn't get through more than a chapter a night, but I had to read a chapter a night because it was settling something inside me. And as I read further. Oh, then I got, you know, all kinds of new questions. I remember sometime in my middle. My junior year, I resolved, I'm going to stop thinking about Christianity. I'm going to stop thinking about Christianity. I have to stop. But I couldn't. I couldn't. But what I found was there were things that I encountered in the sort of the general. Call it. Of the worldview of the Scripture that were addressing these questions. I was having about time. For example, I got to a passage in the Book of Hebrews. It said, and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. And then I found in the Exodus that When Moses wanted to know the name of the voice from the burning bush who was sending them. And the voice says, tell them that I am, that I am has sent you. I'm the eternal self, existent one. And so there were. Oh, I sensed there had to be something that didn't change or else everything that did would have no meaning. Well, maybe there is something that doesn't change. And so I began this sort of exploration. And so I, ultimately through college I took a lot of. I did a double major in science, but I was always sneaking over and taking philosophy classes. And I had this great Christian philosophy professor who kind of helped me start to make sense of all this stuff. And so I became convinced that Christianity was true in the middle of college, but I wasn't quite ready to. I didn't want it to be true quite yet. I didn't really settle to my first year out of, out of university in my first job. And then soon after that I attended this conference where Alan Sandage was, where Dean Kenyon, one of the origin of life scientist who also changed his mind from being a chemical evolutionary theorist to a proponent of intelligent design. I started to encounter some of these early proponents of the, of the idea of intelligent design. And then, and I just got seized with this. So I had my, my reasons for conversion were mainly philosophical and somewhat biblical. And then, and then I found that was this scientific support for the basic worldview of biblical theism as well. And that's what, that's what then I just got, I got lit, you know, I got ignited and you know, I went back to this old professor after I had been at this conference and told him about in particular the DNA argument, the idea that the digital code in DNA was pointing to a pre existing intelligence. And he said this is, he said, you get in the middle of this stuff as fast as you can. He said, this is the most significant thing to have happened in philosophy in 300 years. This is about. What you're talking about is the reformulation of the design argument. And if there is validity to that, that changes everything in philosophy and in our whole Western culture. Because that's where we lost the conviction that there was public evidence of God. And if that comes back, that's going to change everything.
- [71:09]
Sal Destefano
He said, wow, do you think breaking your leg was a blessing in the end?
- [71:13]
Stephen Meyer
I do, yeah. Boy, it was a miserable time though, I mean, you know, because I had no structures to make sense of anything. But yeah, I think back on that and I still have the book my dad wrote me a very Moving inscription in the baseball book. You know about the experience of the broken leg. I lost him. He died a year ago. Came to faith late in life in some significant measure because of reading. He read a book by Lee Strobel called Case for Creator. And the Strobel book had two chapters in it about his kid, about me. So he had to read it. And he was an engineer. And then the intelligent design stuff started to make sense to him, and one of his best friends became a believer. Having attended one of my talks and seen the animation of how the digital code in the DNA directs the construction of the protein machines, he walked out of the talk, turned to my dad, fellow engineer. They'd been buddies and co workers at Boeing and other aerospace companies for, like, 50 years. He walks out and turns to my dad and says, chuck, did you see that animation of the interior of the cell? My dad nods and he says, he said, chuck, there's got to be a God. And so these two old codgers in their 80s start taking themselves to church without the wives prompting them.
- [72:33]
Sal Destefano
That's great. One of the first things that I. That, you know, moments I had reading the Bible where I was just. It just hit me, and it sounds silly, but for me, it was such a big deal. It was in Genesis. It was the first time I'd ever read from beginning to end or actually any of the Bible. And it was literally in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I said, time, space, and matter have to exist at the same time. It literally sets it right here in Genesis. And it completely.
- [72:58]
Stephen Meyer
There's an astrophysic physicist in our film name named Sarah Salviander who has some very interesting videos about how just the first couple verses of Genesis comport so beautifully with our modern cosmological understanding of the origin of the universe. It's definitely worth a look. And she's in the film. She's awesome.
- [73:16]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
So has anyone made that? I know you've had the opportunity to debate other people on the other, other side. Has anyone made a good argument that's made you go back and, like, check and research and feel like, oh, wow, that's a good argument.
- [73:29]
Stephen Meyer
Well, can I make one more comment about Sal's and then come back to your question? The other thing in the Genesis account and also in what's called the John IX prologue, the first chapter of the Book of John, so you get this connection between God creating and information. In the beginning, God said, in Genesis, okay. And then in John 1, it's, in the beginning was the Word. And One of the scientists that I heard at this initial conference where I also heard Sandage, a man named Dean Kenyon, was, he was a leading chemical evolutionary theorist who repudiated his own theory because he realized it couldn't explain the origin of the information in DNA. And so he had this, this kind of interesting multi phase intellectual, first intellectual conversion where he shifted from chemical evolutionary theory to, to saying at this conference it's time for the theologians and the philosophers to reopen the natural theological question. In other words, is nature pointing to God because of the information in DNA? And so he first shifted from being a chemical evolutionary theorist to being a proponent of intelligent design. And then he came across the scriptural passages also in one of the letters of the Epistles of John, it talks about, about Jesus Christ being the word of life and this recurrent idea that the Word is necessary to creation. And he realized that's what we're seeing in biology. You can't build life, you can't build biological form without biological information. So he ended up having a full on religious conversion as well as a scientific conversion. And it was predicated by some of these insights that he was having scientifically in which he was also finding an echo in the biblical text. So yes, many debates, some really great interlocutors. One just hat tip to a gentleman I like very much who passed away last year, Michael Ruse. We were frequent friendly debating partners going back to my first year out of grad school. Oh wow. Yeah. And he was very kind to me, offered, even though we were on the opposite sides of the issue, he offered to help me get established in my career in the philosophy of science. And so I always appreciated him very much. We have a book coming out in the Cambridge University Press next year that's co edited by my colleague William Dembsky, a leading proponent of intelligent design, and Michael Ruse, who passed away before the book had come out. So it's a posthumously edited book by Roos, so I just give him a hat tip. There's an interesting debate going on right now about the origin of the universe. There are leading physicists and cosmologists who are still uncomfortable with the idea of a beginning. And there has been a proliferation in recent years of new cosmological models that attempt to restore the idea of an infinite universe. There are infinite universe cosmologies. And I had a debate in Oxford in October with a science writer journalist named Phil Halper who's worked closely with a lot of these cosmologists who are formulating these infinite universe cosmologies. And Halper's argument and the argument of one of his co authors, a Persian cosmologist named F. Shorty, is that, look, there are lots of these new models, so we can't really say that the universe had a beginning after all. And my counterargument in the debate, and this was really interesting, it's going to be a very current debate going forward, is that yes, it's always been possible to model the universe into infinity. Okay, this is what Einstein attempted to do. Remember that he set the cosmological constant at just the right value so he could portray the outward push and the inward push in kind of an equilibrium. But it turned out not to be consistent with the evidence. And what's going on now is that people are very cleverly reintroducing for completely different ways, infinite universe cosmologies. But what we found in studying all of them is that they have a high cost, a high cost in terms of credibility or evidential support. The cost is that, number one, most importantly, all of them involve some kind of unexplained fine tuning. Remember that Einstein's model, he had to fine tune the cosmological constant to get it to balance the gravitational force in order to depict things as static. Well, if you bring fine tuning in, add new fine tuning, you're just providing additional support for the theistic argument, but on other grounds. Okay, so you're not getting around theism by getting rid of the beginning in your modeling. You're just providing additional support for it. A lot of the models have very wonky physics too. Physics. They invoke physics that violates established physics in order to bring the infinite universe back into currency. Some of them involve some mathematical sleights of hand, kind of funky things that other physicists are saying, wait a minute, that's not a move you can actually make. And lots of them involve postulating purely unobserved ad hoc hypotheses. So they end up violating Occam's razor because they're so convoluted and baroque. In all of the pure theoretical postulates, you invent a kind of force or a field that doesn't, of which we have no experience. But it helps you reposition the universe as being infinite. So yes, you can remodel the universe as being, you can model it as being infinite. But the cost of doing so, there's a huge cost to the credibility of the models. And even if you, even if you posit these models, you don't get around theism because you have this unexplained fine tuning to deal with. And so this was a major focal point in the debate that he and I just had. And it's very, very current. He wrote me a nice inscription in his book afterwards that it was the toughest debate he'd ever had. And I have to give a hat to him. He was a very good debater, too. But I think the framing that we're offering here really gives you a roadmap to all this proliferation. It's not a healthy thing in the history of science to have a proliferation of models. If the community can't settle on something, it's usually because you're trying to put a round hole or a square peg in a round hole. And if you just look at the observational astronomy, you've got an outward expanding universe. The evidence suggests outward expansion in the forward direction of time and a collapse or contraction in the reverse direction of time to a stopping point past which you can't not go any further. There's nothing in what we're observing that suggests a static universe from infinite past. What we see is exactly what you'd expect. If the universe is expanding outward from a beginning point. Yes, you can cleverly model your way out of that, but only at a cost.
- [80:55]
Sal Destefano
I wanted to ask you, just personally, this. Something I've been tripping out on ever
- [81:00]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
since I've read about this.
- [81:02]
Sal Destefano
And I know quantum physics, very complex, like the theory of it and everything, but the double slit theory and then the observer effect. And if you could kind of explain
- [81:10]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
that a bit for me.
- [81:12]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah.
- [81:13]
Sal Destefano
Maybe how that. How that kind of weaves into. By the way, side note, quantum physics is one of the first things that made me go, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is weird. Yes, it's really weird. And doesn't act, you know, according to the.
- [81:25]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah. One of my colleagues, George Gilder, likes to say that quantum physics has shown that the heart of matter, at the heart of matter is a mystery. If matter can be both spatially extended, if you get. If it gets small enough, matter can be both spatially extended and spatially discrete at the same time. What kind of a thing is that? Well, maybe it's not actually a thing. Maybe it's more of a. Well, they call it a wave function. You know, it's more conceptual than it is material. Yeah. So I do explain that nicely in. And I worked hard at this. I got help, you know, retooled with some. I did a physics major. But some of this stuff you have to go brush up on before you write on it to make sure you get it right, and we've got a great network of scientists. So I explained this in chapters, I think 17 and 18 of return of the God Hypothesis, the experiments that give you this idea that that matter can, it's the double slit experiment that it can be small bits of matter may act as waves and particles at the same time. This becomes relevant in the cosmological context for a really interesting reason that relates to what I was just saying. One of these infinite universe cosmological models, maybe the most popular one, is called quantum cosmology. And the idea is that when you go way back in time, you get. The universe would be small enough that in addition to whatever's going on with Einsteinian gravity, there would be quantum effects would start to take over. And so when the universe is super, super, super small, whatever that is is going to act in a quantum way. It's going to be spatially extended and spatially discrete at the same time. And if it's spatially, spatially extended and spatially discrete, can you really say that it's the kind of thing that would cause curvature like, like, like most matter does in, in, in larger chunks of matter do in Einsteinian gravitational physics. And so there's this worry, well, maybe we can't back extrapolate all the way to the beginning because we just don't know what things would have been doing in that kind of a, of a regime when things are that tiny. But here's the interesting thing that our best attempt to depict that is we've applied one of the equations from quantum physics called the Schrodinger equation, and adapted it to that cosmological context. And that new. That adapted equation is called the Wheeler DeWitt equation. And when the physicists try to solve that equation, they get a picture of all the different types of universes that could emerge. The different universes with different gravitational fields and distributions of matter, different spatial configurations and distribution of matter. And so they depict that the solution, you got a big hairy equation. If you solve it, then you get what's called a psi function, a wave function that describes an ensemble of possible universes that exist in superposition. So different universes, they're different from each other, but they exist simultaneously. But they don't really exist physically anywhere. It's more of a mathematical, It's a mathematical expression. It's a function, okay? And so out of that they say the universe comes. So you have this weird paradox where out of math comes matter, space, time and energy, number one. And secondly, to get the right math, the right Wave function that would include a universe like ours, which would allow the physicists to say that we've explained our universe. You have to solve this big prior hairy equation. But the equation has an infinite number of solutions unless you artificially constrain what are called. They're called the boundary conditions. So you've got to restrict the degrees of mathematical freedom of this big hairy equation to get an output that you want that enables you to say, well, our universe could have come out of that. But what are you doing? You're inputting information into the math to get the output you want again, which is to say you are modeling the intelligent design of the universe. So this is supposedly a model that gets you around the beginning and around the implication of a creation event, but it just brings in a need for transcendent design on other grounds. So this is what I was talking about. It's unexplained fine tuning. It's a kind of fine tuning. So I explained this. So there's a big quantum dimension to all of this, but it doesn't solve the problem of the need for a creator. It actually reinforces it in a different way. And also, what is this thing about matter coming out of math? Math is conceptual. Math is an idea. And one of the great quantum physicists, Alexander Vilenkin, has said, you know, if. If before there was matter, space, time and energy, if, if. If these equations, this realm of equations existed before matter, space, time, and energy, what could that be? Because equations, math, this is the realm of these are conceptual. And so are we really saying that the universe came out of a mind? He actually poses that rhetorical question at the end of one of his books.
- [86:52]
Sal Destefano
Why do you think so many scientists are uncomfortable with the idea of a designer?
- [86:58]
Stephen Meyer
There has been a deeply rooted default way of thinking for at least a century and a half in science. And I think it's the same reason Christian people get uncomfortable people if someone challenges their beliefs. You know, it's a human thing. You know, if we have a deeply. If we're deeply have a deep conviction about something, we tend not to want to give it up easily. And. And so there. There's a Michael Ruse, the gentleman I mentioned, philosopher of science, used to. He wrote a book arguing that Neo Darwinism functioned as a kind of religious system of thought for many people working in evolutionary biology. Why? Because it answered one of the great worldview questions. Where does life come from? The most fundamental worldview question is, what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes? And evolutionary Biology, Neo Darwinism in particular, provides a partial answer to that. It says that life comes from this undirected materialistic process. And so Rue said that this is functioning in a quasi religious way for many of his own colleagues who. He was a neo Darwinist himself. And so I think all of us feel when those kind of deep convictions are challenged, we, we react in a human way and we don't want to rethink those things and we don't do so readily.
- [88:29]
Sal Destefano
Have you ever had anybody who's come to your talks, or maybe even someone you debate, change their mind, come to the faith as a result?
- [88:38]
Stephen Meyer
I get a lot of mail from people who've read my books that have had that kind of experience, particularly the last book on Return of the God Hypothesis. Sometimes people that have had 30, 40 year careers in physics or in biology or whatever debates I have had, people make interesting concessions and debates about specific points. In fact, in the debate I had with Phil Halper, at the end, he said the moderator asked us each to give the other guy a hat tip on something and say, was there anything you learned? And he acknowledged, I'll have to think about this point Steve made about these cosmological models invoking unexplained fine tuning. I haven't thought enough about that yet. But there was one debate we had about the bacterial flagellar motor where I explained that the genetic evidence showed that the parts of the flagellar motor had not. The flagellar motor had not evolved from simpler parts, but it rather. Oh, no, excuse me, there's the flagellar motor. There's another thing called the Type 3 secretory system, which is a kind of. It's got the inner workings of the flagellar motor, but not all the, all the, all the, all the accoutrements. And some people have proposed that the type 3 secretory system was the ancestor from which the flagellar motor evolved. And in the debate I explained that the genetics showed that it was the other way around, that the flagellar motor was the aboriginal form and the type 3 secretory system was a devolutionary byproduct of the system or something that had arisen independently. And after the debate, one of the guys on the other side came up to me and he said, I won't say the name of the other scientist, but some other scientists had given him the argument about the, the type three being the ancestor. And I said, I told him it might be the opposite. And now you've made me look foolish anyway. You have people that do debates that want to win at all cost. And you have people that do debates to want to get to the truth. And I've encountered both. And I think it's coming on me and my side, our side also, to when we get something wrong, we got to, we got to own up to that.
- [91:06]
Sal Destefano
So my, my favorite current theory is the simulation theory. That, which, which is like. Well, aren't you kind of saying. Brought that up?
- [91:14]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah.
- [91:14]
Sal Destefano
Aren't you kind of saying the same thing? But it's funny, that same thing. It's just.
- [91:18]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah, well, it is, it is obviously a design hypothesis, right? Saying that, look, there's this, we're seeing all this evidence of information, information processing. This looks like it's got to be a process like a computer world in a living setting. There must. Maybe there's a master programmer behind everything and we're just a simulation. And that's where it gets a little wonky. I mean, why say you infer to a master programmer, but why say that our experience is just simulation? It goes back to the old Descartes argument about the evil demon persuading us that we exist when we really don't. If the evil demon is the evil demon, then is too clever by half because if he's persuaded us that we exist and we're aware of our existence, which is a necessary condition of being persuaded that we do exist, then we do exist because we're aware. So the simulation hypothesis, I think is subject to the same problem that we're not a simulation in someone else's reality. If we're aware ourselves of having conscious experiences, then we have a reality too. But what's interesting about the simulation is it seems to imply that there's a mind behind everything.
- [92:31]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
You referenced Genesis a couple times. What's your belief on the. The six days of creation, on how long that actually was?
- [92:39]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah, very, very, very contentious question within the Christian world, I guess.
- [92:45]
Sal Destefano
Right.
- [92:47]
Stephen Meyer
As I mentioned, I don't have any problem with the basic accuracy of the radiometric dating methods. I think they're pretty good. You can have always have contamination of samples. So I accept that the universe is. That the Earth is very old, that the universe is very old. I think the evidence we have of light coming from distant objects in space, et cetera, provides pretty compelling evidence for a very ancient universe, but one that's still finite. And if you set that finite date at whatever you like, 13.8 billion, it's not enough time to explain the origin of the fine tuning by chance alone or to explain the origin of proteins on planet Earth. Same thing. People think that that amount of time gives you the probabilistic resources that you need to explain life in the universe. It doesn't because life is so immensely complex and the probabilities are so small, even in relation to those kind of big numbers. It happens though I have a bit of a hybrid view. Oh well, the other thing is I don't think the Genesis account teaches a young earth. That's the shocking thing to a lot of my Christian friends. I'm a Bible believing Christian. So not all proponents, I should say not all proponents of intelligent design are. And because it's a evidence based argument, not everyone comes to the same conclusions about religious stuff. But I am a Bible believing Christian, but I don't think the Bible teaches a young earth. And one of several reasons I have for thinking that is that if you do really careful exegesis on the Genesis 1 text, you get to day four, and in day four it says that God either created or caused to appear. There's a Hebrew verb, hayah, that has either meaning. Doesn't really matter though, because what the text says is that he either created or caused to appear the sun and the moon and he gave them as markers of the seasons and the days and the years, the days, the years and the seasons. So they're time markers. But wait, we're in day four already. We've already had the days of creation established. We've had three yoms of creation already. So it's hard to. So it's almost like a little signal. Be careful not to impute your method of timekeeping to the timekeeping that's going on in the Genesis account. Because we mark time as the result of the movement of the sun across the ecliptic, across the arc of the sky. And we have more sophisticated ways of doing that now. But we have always in human history had solar denominated days. Right. So if the sun is not around to be marking time, if it's either not visible because it hasn't yet appeared, or it's not been, or it's not there because it hasn't been created, either way, we do not have time markers available to us until day four. So whatever was going on in day one, day two, day three, and arguably in the rest of the days of creation, because they're also linguistically linked to yoms, biblical Hebrew days, we can't at least know that they were 24 hour periods. Right.
- [95:55]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
So theoretically there could be a million years between each day, arguably.
- [95:59]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah. And so I think we have to look to the science, to the evidence of the natural world to date the universe and the planet in which we live. It happens. I think that the sequence of events that are recorded in the Genesis days align remarkably with what we know about natural history. And there's the whole thing we could do on that, but it's. To me it's quite remarkable.
- [96:23]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
I'm interested in that. Explain that, explain that to me.
- [96:26]
Stephen Meyer
Well, the sequence of life forms in day five and day six, the you have the waters. Day two or day three, you have the waters below and they're all gathered into one place. Well, the corollary of all the waters being gathered into one place is the land is in one place. Well, early on in our geological history, we had this idea about Gondwanaland, one giant continent, or Pangea. The text also starts with the most shocking statement of all, in the beginning. This is what cosmology has revealed, that there was a beginning. So as you walk through the days and you go through sequentially, the sequence of events is remarkably accurate to what we know scientifically. I don't think the Genesis account is meant to be a science account, but it's not comprehensive. It doesn't tell us everything we want to know about the history of the planet or the history of life. But what it does tell us is representative and it's accurate. There's a poetic structure in Genesis. The things that are created on day one are ruled by the things that are created at day four, day two, day five, day three, day six. There's all kinds of things going on in the Genesis account. It's very, very rich. It's full of interesting, it's full of insight about human nature, it's full of insight about metaphysics in particular. It's the only ancient account in the world that suggests that the universe is not eternal and self existent, but it's dependent on an external creator, which I think has more and more and more credibility as we learn things cosmologically. So I think it's an amazing passage, but I don't think it teaches a young earth.
- [98:13]
Sal Destefano
I think it's really interesting that, that you would look at. I think sometimes you take it for granted. I know I did, but when I looked at biblical scripture and I looked at it and said what human mind would invent this or create this? It became obvious that no person would come up with this idea. It just doesn't, doesn't make any human sense. You know, part of, part of that was me realizing that a lot of the ways that we. Things that we take for granted, like where we believe that we have protected rights. Where did that come from? Nobody would have invented that.
- [98:47]
Adam Schaefer
If I looked around, I would never
- [98:49]
Sal Destefano
guess that we all have, you know,
- [98:51]
Stephen Meyer
that we're all inalienable rights.
- [98:52]
Sal Destefano
Yeah, that makes no sense. We don't look the same. We're not the same intelligence. We're not the same, you know, strength and power. And so to me, it was like, oh, this. This obviously was not something different.
- [99:02]
Stephen Meyer
Definitely not the same strength as you guys been working out. But I got a ways to go. Yeah. So, no, this is. Is Tom Holland, Tom Holland's point. The British historian has written the book Dominion, and he's been in the news. He was for a long time calling himself. He was for a long time calling himself a Christian atheist because he discovered the importance of Christianity to the west, to our culture, to our civilization. He says we're swimming in Christian waters and we don't know it. Where do we get this idea of human rights? He said, this is. Apart from the biblical idea of being made in God's image. This is an utterly exotic concept. Yeah. You know, nobody else would come up. No one else has come up with this. It's a Western concept that's come out of. Out of Judeo Christianity. So, yeah, that's a great point.
- [99:50]
Unidentified Mind Pump Co-host
That's a great way to. That's how I would have termed you a Christian atheist. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's how I.
- [99:55]
Sal Destefano
Well, this makes sense.
- [99:56]
Stephen Meyer
But I don't think Tom is still an atheist. I think he's. He's. If not. If he's not, cross the line. He's close.
- [100:06]
Sal Destefano
Are you finding interests around intelligent design growing recently? It seems like there seems to be much more interest, and I think it's tied to more scientific discoveries or maybe just people feel like we need a sense of purpose and meaning.
- [100:22]
Stephen Meyer
I think I was going to say, oh, my. Yes. In 2004 and five, we were in the media a lot. There was a court trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, where a little school district tried to get a book about intelligent design placed in their library, I remember. And they wanted teachers to tell students about it. And the aclu, excuse me, reacted as they would. And there was a big court trial. We actually thought that the school board had framed the whole thing in a kind of counterproductive way, urged them to withdraw the policy. They didn't. Went to trial. And in a school in a jurisdiction in central Pennsylvania, it was. Intelligent design was ruled unconstitutional, but it had no. It has no. That ruling has no applicability beyond that, that area of central Pennsylvania. But what was interesting was afterwards the kind of scientific atheists were, were very quick to dance on our graves and say it's over after Dover, that was their mantra. And now we're in. And in 04 I had published one of the first peer reviewed scientific articles in a mainstream journal. It was a journal published out of the Smithsonian Institution called the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. And that that caused a huge furor. The editor got, got persecuted and hounded, eventually ended up leaving the Smithsonian for having allowed the article to go through peer review and getting published. Now we're 20 years on from that or more. And our latest count was 328peer reviewed articles in scientific journals and lots more, almost 300 books. And our message is getting out. We're attracting, I think we're attracting young people, young scientists much faster than the opposite point of view. We have the energies on our side, but beyond that I think there's been a shift in the culture. The new atheists of Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, these guys, I think massively overplayed their hand. Dawkins is not quite a figure of ridicule in the uk, but you can't use him as a foil anymore because it's understood that he overplayed his hand. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of his sidekicks for many years, has recently announced a conversion to Christianity.
- [102:57]
Sal Destefano
I read about this.
- [102:57]
Stephen Meyer
Yeah. To your point, she's said, among other reasons for her becoming Christian is that the Bible and Christianity belief in God answers that fundamental question of meaning and that scientific atheism, that scientific atheism simply can't answer. I had an interview with Piers Morgan a while back and we got into a discussion about this whole issue of life after death and meaning. And I said nothing can mean anything to a rock or a planet or a DNA molecule. Things only mean things to persons. This is what was bothering me as a teenager, by the way. And yet we, our persons, all die. So unless there's a person whose life persists beyond our graves, there's no possibility of ultimate meaning for human beings. Ultimately, what's the point? What's the point? And that. And I got into a discussion about this with Piers Morgan on air. He revealed that he'd had a long conversation with Ricky Gervais about this. And what Ayaan Hirsi Ali was saying is that scientific materialism has no answer except one in the negative to that question. Now that's not in a sense, strictly speaking, an evidence for belief in God, but in her view, it was evidence of a failed worldview. It was a worldview you couldn't live with. And she's since been, I know, having long conversations with a colleague of mine, John Lennox, and, and finding out that in addition to that deep sense she had that this just won't work, is that there's a lot of evidence for belief in God as well. But. So there's a lot of factors going into this, but there's a Harvard study that came out of young people showing that something like 56% of young people in the 18 to 30 range acknowledge having persistent doubts about whether or not their lives have any ultimate meaning or purpose. And I think that that's, that's a culture, that's a civilizational crisis.
- [105:00]
Sal Destefano
Yes.
- [105:00]
Stephen Meyer
And, and, and I think as a consequence of that, a lot of people are opening themselves up to the kind of, to the kind of journey that you've been on. You know, could there be something more? And the journey that I was on, you know, and, and, and I think the scientific evidence that we're marshaling and citing is a, an important, can be important to people as they realize it's not just that I maybe want this to be true or hope something like this could be true, but there's actually evidence for it that God actually is a reality.
- [105:32]
Sal Destefano
My big fear, and what I just like to encourage scientists is that there's evidence for this. It does give you a sense of peace, purpose and meaning. But we also need it to be true because science divorced from the subjective morality is not good. It turns into scientists not asking if we should, but rather can we? And it turns into all kinds of crazy, grisly, scary experiments because there is no underlying moral foundation. And then it just becomes a question of can we? And gosh, there's been enough sci fi movies to demonstrate what that could look like. And our human imagination can't even.
- [106:17]
Stephen Meyer
Well, you know, you just as simple as something as abortion on demand or, you know, the kinds of experiments that the Nazis did, you know, it's just awful stuff. That was very well said. I should be interviewing you. Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [106:32]
Sal Destefano
Appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [106:34]
Stephen Meyer
Well, thank you guys. This has been great conversation.
- [106:36]
Sal Destefano
One of my absolute favorite interviews. I really appreciate you making the trip down here. This has been so great.
- [106:40]
Stephen Meyer
It's been just a delight.
- [106:42]
Sal Destefano
Thank you. Thank you.
- [106:43]
Justin Andrews
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