Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (2:32)

I think it winds us all up in a way because it has such profound implications. On the one hand, there is a motivation, a desire to believe in God because it provides the basis of belief in an afterlife and ultimate human meaning. On the other hand, we all have a motivation not to believe in God, because I think we'd all prefer not to be more morally accountable to a being beyond ourselves. And so we have these conflicting motivations in every person's heart and mind. And what we try to do in the film and what my colleagues and I have tried to do in our scientific and philosophical work on this topic is extract the motivational questions and look and see what does the evidence actually say? What have we discovered about the scientific questions that would bear on the question of whether or not God actually exists?

Piers Morgan (3:23)

What's really interesting is that there was a recent Pew center survey that polled a random sample of 2,533 members of the American association for the Advancement of Science. And he came up with some pretty remarkable stats. 33% said they believed in God. 18% believed in a universal spirit or higher power. 41% said they didn't believe in God or a higher power. 7 didn't know or refused to answer. What do you make of those statistics?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (3:56)

Well, I don't think they're all that significant in that they roughly reflect the kind of breakdown in the general public, although I think they have skewed over the last century in a direction that is more agnostic and atheistic than the general public. But the story we're telling in the film is the story of many scientists who are reconsidering and even reaffirming belief in God, not in spite of the scientific evidence, but because of new science, scientific discoveries, especially about biological and cosmological origins, about where the universe came from and where life came from. These are unanswered questions from within a materialistic framework. And this is the way we contrast. This is the kind of the. Explains the title. Of the film. We contrast two competing grand narratives, two stories of reality. The one affirms that life and the universe are. That the universe is eternal and self existing and self organizing, organizing and self creating, so that everything, both life can be explained as a result of an unguided, undirected, purposeless process. And the other story is the equally ancient story goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, that there is a great mind behind the universe that is responsible for the creation of the universe and for shaping matter and energy to bring into existence all the intricate things that we see around us, especially those in the living world. So we've got these two competing narratives or essentially worldviews or philosophies. And so I think the, the, the stats about the scientists just reflects that reflects the fact that since the 19th century, the 19th, the materialistic narrative has been dominant. But the story of the film is that that's shifting and shifting very rapidly. I think that's actually one of the reasons that you're seeing so many high profile people in our culture begin to reconsider the God question. It's bubbling up to the surface as, as your last segment indicated.

Piers Morgan (5:50)

Yeah, I mean it always for me, I was raised a Catholic, I remain a Catholic. I've never had any doubt that there is a God. But then my kind of scientific brain, if you like, is just computing the reality that if we are this tiny pinprick in the universe and there are gazillions of galaxies and all these things, the idea that a, we're the only people that exists in the whole thing is preposterous. I think there obviously must be other stuff out there. But secondly, no scientist, no atheist, nobody I've ever spoken to, from Richard Dawkins to anybody else, to Ricky Gervais, whoever it may be, to Professor Stephen Hawking, no one can ever explain to me what was there before. Nothing. And because the human brain cannot answer that question to me, self evidently there must be something more powerful than a human brain, a greater entity than a human brain that could at the very least answer that question or clear up that quandary. Because we can't do it. Our brains can't answer that question.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (6:58)

Well, it goes back to that very fundamental philosophical question, why is there something rather than nothing? And the answer that the materialist scientists gave for a very long time was that there has always been something, something material, something physical. And the assumption was that the universe, the physical universe, was eternal and self existent and therefore did not need an external creator because it had always been here. Alas, beginning about a century ago with discoveries in observational astronomy and then subsequent developments in theoretical physics and then more discoveries in observational astronomy, we've discovered that the universe itself, as best we can tell from these multiple lines of evidence and inquiry, definitely had a beginning. And that raises that fundamental causal question all over again. Because we can no longer say the universe is the eternal self existent thing in the way that theists have long affirmed that God is the eternal self existent thing. Instead, the universe had a beginning and therefore requires some sort of external cause or creator. And I think I saw your interesting interview with Richard Dawkins responding to the conversation that you and I had before. And Dawkins said, well, because time itself began, we can't really talk about what came before the beginning of the universe. Well, okay, fair enough. But that doesn't make the Causal question, go away. What caused the universe to come into existence? What could have caused time itself to come into existence? Well, clearly the kind of cause you would need, what would need to be postulated to explain the origin of matter, space, time and energy, is something that is separate from or which transcends matter, space, time and energy. And as you survey the available candidates, it turns out that the God hypothesis provides, in my view and that of many scientists and philosophers, the best explanation of the origin of the universe. And that's one of the three big discoveries that we look at in the film, is the discovery of the beginning of everything. And why that is bringing back consideration of what we call the God hypothesis.

Piers Morgan (9:07)

Yeah, fascinating. Let's talk about some other aspects to the film. It features many prominent scientists from across the major disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology. Let's talk about physics first. And the cosmic fine tuning argument. What is that?

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Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (9:59)

Yeah, thanks. That's a fascinating set of discoveries and a fascinating ongoing discussion. Beginning in about the 1950s and 60s, physicists began to discover that the very most fundamental parameters of physics, the strength of gravitational attraction, the strength of electromagnetic attraction, and of the other fundamental forces in physics, the masses of the elementary particles, the expansion rate of the universe, and the outward pushing force called the cosmological constant responsible for that. And even, and maybe even especially the configuration of the matter and energy, the arrangement of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe. All these parameters are what physicists will call. They call them finely tuned, meaning they fall within very narrow ranges, outside of which life in the universe and even basic chemistry would be impossible. And the collective probability of getting all those parameters to fall in each of those sweet spots is infinitesimally small. And consequently, many physicists have come to the conclusion that, as Sir Fred Hoyle put it, a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible and that there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about. Now, that's an especially telling quotation because Hoyle was early in his career a rather strident scientific atheist. He even coined the term the Big Bang to kind of stigmatize the idea that the universe had a beginning. And in the end he ended up coming around to some kind of, to an affirmation of some kind of intelligent design behind the universe because of this fine tuning that he and now many other physicists have discovered and explicated with further inquiry.

Piers Morgan (11:56)

On a personal level, what is the kind of unfulfilled Eureka moment for you that you dream about happening in your lifetime? A discovery? What is the thing that would be most exciting to you?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (12:11)

Well, I think the thing that first gave me a eureka, which just absolutely has fascinated me for now nearly 40 years, is the discoveries that were being made in molecular biology that started in the 1950s and 60s with Watson and Crick elucidating first the structure of the DNA molecule, and then Francis Crick five years later realizing that along the spine of the DNA molecule there are chemical subunits that are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like digital characters in a section of machine code. In fact, one of the great physicists at the time, George Gamow, looked carefully at the Watson and Crick model and realized that these so called bases that contain the information were functioning like a digital bit string. And so the information revolution came into biology in the late 1950s and 60s, and since then it has absolutely changed our understanding of the nature of life and posed a fundamental challenge to the origin of life studies as well. In the 19th century, around the time of Darwin, his great bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley said the cell is a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. When scientists thought that the cell was a simple enclosure of Jello like that, it was pretty easy to imagine how with one or two simple chemical reactions, that protoplasmic substance that was, they thought, the essence of life might have come into existence in a completely undirected way. But as we've learned more and more about the interior workings of the cell, and there's much more to discover, and that would be some of the eureka things that I'd hope to learn about in the future. But we've now learned that the cell not only contains digital information, that digital information is part of a complex information storage, transmission and processing system that rivals in fact exceeds anything we've developed in our own high tech digital computing world. A couple years ago, our friend opposite, Professor Dawkins, said that he was knocked sideways with at the miniaturized Intricacy of the data processing system inside the living cell. Now, that's not the kind of thing that you would expect to arise by undirected chemical processes. And, and in fact, there is an impasse in what's called origin of life research today, precisely because no one can explain how you get from chemistry to that kind of intricate code and the whole system for processing it. Now, as far as what I would hope to see in the future, we've now learned that the information in DNA is not in any way the whole story. There must be other information inside living cells and inside the whole process by which animals are developed. And so I'm very eager to see what we discover in the future about the higher levels of information. We do know that life represents a hierarchically organized system of information storage and processing, but we don't know where all the necessary information is to, for example, build an animal farm.

Piers Morgan (15:26)

Right. So, talking of cells, Cambridge University scientists only this week actually released an incredible image showing one of the most detailed 3D reconstructions of a human cell ever produced. And people say that this points towards intelligent engineering rather than random chance. What are we looking at here? I mean, for those who are not as skilled in this kind of thing as you are, what are we looking at?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (15:56)

Well, it looks like we have a cross section of the cell, and in that cross section we're able to see a dynamic representation of the movements of the various cellular organelles. The organelles are structures within the cell, but at an even more fine grain level. If you go down further, this looks like a eukaryotic cell. So this one would have a nucleus. Inside the nucleus would be that DNA protein synthesis system whereby the instructions on the DNA would build the molecular machines made of proteins and the protein enzymes that are necessary to process the information in D, but also to catalyze at very rapid rates, all the necessary reactions that keep cells alive. Molecular biologists will very quickly, and cell biologists will start to wax lyrical and describe the interior workings of the cell as something like an automated factory run by digital code in which the code is processed by little nanomachines. So it's information processing, miniature machinery, and it's automated to a degree that it's just mind blowing. The idea of the simple homogeneous or homogeneous globule of goo is long, long ways back in the rearview mirror. It's a completely new day in biology. Of course, when the main evolutionary ideas of Darwin and others were formulated, first formulated in the late 19th century, they knew nothing of this. This is especially for the field known as chemical evolution, or the theory known as chemical evolutionary theory. The theory that purports to explain how we got from the simple chemicals in a alleged prebiotic environment or soup to the first self replicating organism. Those theories are at a state of complete impasse. No evolutionary biologist has a compelling, persuasive or even plausible theory of how you get from chemistry to, to a full living cell. I know your producer has been also seeking an interview with my colleague James Tour, who is in the film. Professor Tour has over 850 peer reviewed publications. He's one of the top organic synthesis experts in the world, also a specialist in nanotechnology, and he's been a very outspoken critic of scientists who present to the public the idea that we understand how the living cell came about through undirected chemical processes, when in fact no such thing is the case. So that little snapshot you just showed gives just a flavor of the complexity. In the film we go a little bit deeper to the nanoscale and show the way the information on DNA is being processed. We show the machines that are being built. And once you see this, you can't unsee it. You realize you almost don't need to make an argument for intelligent design because you can see that this is obviously an intricately designed system on a miniaturized scale.

Piers Morgan (19:06)

I mean, the human body in all its complexity, with everything that's involved, is unbelievably brilliant and complex and a stunning piece of engineering, never mind anything else. Can you see a situation where artificial intelligence, which is obviously developing at a ferocious rate at the moment, where rather like with when they bought out chess computers and they were these gigantic things and a human could beat them. And then very quickly, I think Garry Kasparov, who was a world champion, lost to one of them, Deep Blue, and then that was it. Nobody can beat a chess, chess computer. Are we going to see a situation, do you think, in two, three, maybe five years, whatever it may be, where artificial intelligence can solve all the problems about the human body that we are currently incapable of, of solving, including, for example, cancers, diseases and so on?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (20:02)

Well, it's a fantastic knowledge and I think it obviously augments our human intelligence beautifully and we can use it for good or for ill. But there's an interesting problem that's developed with these large language models or the kind of ChatGPT style, latest generation AI. And I think it's a really interesting tell. It's called the problem of model collapse. And the idea is that if you feed into the AI system A body of text that's written by conscious intelligent agents. And then you use the AI system, the LLM, and something like ChatGPT to query that system, ask it a question, you'll get an output, you'll get an amazingly coherent answer. But if you use the output as data, what's called artificial data, and then you query that output, the next output ends up being quite a bit less coherent. And if you keep doing that over multiple iterations, the whole thing breaks down. You get what? There's a parallel problem in origin of life research. When people have attempted to simulate the origin of genetic information with various physical processes is a problem known as error catastrophe. You have this buildup of incoherence over time, and I think that shows that the system as a whole, there's a fundamental asymmetry symmetry. The system as a whole, the artificial intelligence, is fundamentally dependent on the initial input of meaningful or functional information from a conscious intelligence. That's one of the key principles that allows us to detect design in living systems as well. We see a large amount of functional, or what we call specified information in DNA and RNA and these other large information bearing macromolecules in the cell. And we know from our experience that that type of information always arises from a conscious intelligence. In fact, there's an early pioneer in the application of information science to molecular biology, a man named Henry Quassler, who said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. So when we find that kind of information at the foundation of life, something like digital code in a computer program, it is in fact very reasonable to infer that a conscious intelligence was ultimately responsible for that information, in the same way that our AI systems won't work if we don't have that initial input from conscious agency as well.

Piers Morgan (22:32)

Fascinating. Let's just turn quickly to arguments against God. One is that the universe is so large, 93 billion light years in diameter, and so old, 13.8 billion years, that mere probability dictates that life has to exist somewhere, and we just happen to have won the cosmic lottery. What do you say to that argument?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (22:54)

Well, I'm completely agnostic as to whether life exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We just don't know at this point. What I would say is that, well, two things. First, if you run the probabilities, it's not a slam dunk that life must exist anymore. People used to think that making calculations on something on the basis of something called the Drake Equation, and on the basis of the number of galaxies that there are in the universe, about 2 trillion. It's an amazingly vast expanse we live in. But the improbability associated with getting all the parameters right, both at the cosmological level and in the local level that are necessary to build a life friendly solar system, are equally daunting in the other direction. So it's not clear. But what we do know for sure is that to build life you don't just need a friendly planetary system, you've got to create something, has to create the information necessary to create self replicating organisms. And in our experience, again, information is the product of mind. So my argument would be if life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, odds are it was also it was produced by an intelligent agent, as indeed. I think the life that we know of must have been based on the features that it possesses that are invariably indicators of the activity of a designing mind.

Piers Morgan (24:22)

And what about this bonkers theory? But then it was bound to be bonkers. And some of the best theories in the world turn out to be true and they're bonkers. What if it's not God, but it's an advanced alien scientist? It was designed a simulation that we're all living in and he sort of rather enjoys the suffering.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (24:43)

The fact of that postulation having been floated by very prominent scientists, including no less a personage than the great Francis Crick. Even our friend and colleague Richard Dawkins, who's been on your program, floated that idea of what's it's called pansperm, the idea that life was either designed elsewhere by an intelligent alien or evolved elsewhere and then was transported here to Earth by the intelligent agent. Now, in fairness, I think Professor Dawkins later disclaimed that speculation that he made in a documentary. But the fact that scientists have had to go there shows just how difficult the problem of the origin of life is. Notice too that that is actually an intelligent design hypothesis, but the designer being postulated as an intelligent alien rather than something like a transcendent intelligence that we would associate with God. A couple things to say about that. First of all, it doesn't really solve the ultimate problem of the origin of the information necessary to produce life, which is the fundamental unsolved problem in origin of life research. It merely kicks the problem not down the road, but but boots it out into space. But even more fundamentally, the alien designer hypothesis doesn't account for the origin of the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics and initial conditions of the universe that we were talking about. That fine tuning has been present from the very beginning of the universe and clearly, no alien being or any other being within the cosmos could explain the origin of the fine tuning that would allegedly make its future evolution and origin possible. So there's a huge unsolved problem

Piers Morgan (26:29)

with

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (26:30)

the alien designer hypothesis and one other, and that is that no alien intelligence within the cosmos can explain where the cosmos itself came from. So I've argued in return of the God hypothesis, my book, which is the basis of the new film the Story of Everything, that the theistic design hypothesis does the best overall job or the best job of explaining all the ev we have about both biological origins, but also physical origins, the fine tuning and the origin of the universe itself, the cosmological origins.

Piers Morgan (27:04)

I asked Neil Degrasse Tyson recently who was the greatest scientist there's ever been that we know of, and he said, Isaac Newton. Who would your candidate be for that title?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (27:15)

It's hard to beat Isaac Newton, but James Clark, Maxwell and Einstein. Newton, Clark, James Clerk Maxwell and Einstein are generally regarded as the three greatest physicists. Einstein said he stood on the shoulders of Maxwell. Newton also used that same quote to talk about the importance of Galileo and Kepler. So a lot of great scientific minds I was very fortunate to get to study at Cambridge University, and a lot of those people were there in the history of science at Cambridge. I wasn't there with Maxwell. He predated me. But he had inscribed on the great Cavendish Laboratory a Psalm, Psalm 111, which says, Great are the works of the Lord sought out by all who take pleasure therein. I used to gain a lot of sort of confidence in my own developing thought to realize that many of the great scientists who got science going, going back to Newton and Boyle and Kepler, but right through to Maxwell and beyond, were men of deep religious faith. And they saw that. They felt that what they were doing in studying nature was explicating the work of a great mind that lay behind the physical universe they studied. And that's inscribed there for all to see on the entrance to the historic Cavendish Laboratory there in Cambridge.

Piers Morgan (28:38)

Let's just quickly reference a report on today's show about the possible discovery of a very famous biblical artifact, Noah's Ark. Take a look at this.

Noah's Ark Documentary Narrator (28:50)

Imagine these mountains millennia ago, submerged by floods, and in this beautiful biblical landscape, named in the Old Testament the shape of a ship. The book of Genesis says Noah landed here in the mountains of Ararat. So could this really be Noah's Ark?

Piers Morgan (29:17)

What do you think of that? Do you think Noah's Ark existed and that's some evidence towards it?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (29:25)

I'm. I Am Again, I'll plead agnosticism. I do not know what to think of that particular discovery. I know archaeologists on both sides of that debate. But I would tell you that the trend line in archaeological discovery over the last 100, 150 years has been to repeatedly confirm the historical reliability of the biblical text, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Many of the figures that were described in the Gospels as having been present in the trial of Jesus have been independently attested by archaeological inscriptions, most prominently Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest. If you go to the British Museum in London, the whole story of the interaction between the empire Kingdom of Judah under Sennacherib on the Assyrian side and Hezekiah on the Jewish side is attested in the Assyrian record. So you have this external corroboration of the biblical text. So that's something that fascinates me on an avocational level. Don't know about the recent discovery that you just highlighted, but I do know that there's an awful lot of archeological evidence, surprising amount that many people just don't know about, that has confirmed the historical reliability of the narratives that we find in those ancient scriptural documents.

Piers Morgan (30:50)

Well, that brings me neatly to a conclusion. Polymarket, the prediction market, says there's over $60 million currently invested in the return of Jesus by 2027. So a 4% chance that it will happen. Biggest spikes seen since last November and in early February this year. So a lot of money coming in on Jesus potentially reappearing on this planet. What do you feel about that?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (31:18)

Well, I wonder if. If their predictions come true, who will get the payoff?

Piers Morgan (31:24)

But I think.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (31:27)

I think wars and rumors of wars tend to do that to people and get eschatological intuition focused on the other end of the timetable. Where did everything come from? And that's, of course, what our film is about. You've been so kind to let us share some of that with your audience.

Piers Morgan (31:51)

I interviewed Russell Brand last week. Several clips went viral, including him spending several minutes trying to find a Bible passage from there. Do you think we are, in this era, slightly prone to a new phenomenon of performative religious conviction where people adopt it late in life as a bit of a PR crutch?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (32:15)

I'd like to dodge that question because I never like to speculate about motivations. But what I would say is that we certainly are in the last seven or eight years, in a period where, first of all, I think the new atheism has run its course. I think it overplayed its hand. And I think there's a renewed interest in the God question, and it is bubbling up to the top of the culture in the form of discussions with many surprising people. I think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in your country, Tom Holland, the great historian in our country, the social scientist Charles Murray, who's recently written a book called Taking Religion Seriously. Some of the leading talk podcasters are discussing this. I've been on Wikipedia described as a pseudo scientist because in challenging the strictly materialistic definition of science by posing the idea of intelligent design or developing and arguing for the intelligent design, I'm violating a convention that many atheistic scientists believe is normative for scientists to accept. We're challenging that assumption or that normative prescription because we think it prevents scientists from following the evidence wherever it might lead. And it was certainly never a normative prescription in the time of Newton and the great scientists who got science going. Putting all that aside, it's interesting that the founder of Wikipedia has recently announced a Christian conversion experience and he cites our work on intelligent design, the alleged pseudoscientific perspective that the site still stigmatizes as a big factor in his conversion to Christianity. So it's at least opening. I think we have a lot of things going on in science, philosophy and culturally that are opening people's minds to the God question and in a way that even five, six years ago was not. Was not happening.

Piers Morgan (34:17)

Yeah, 100%. I think that's the purest definition of irony you just laid out there. Dr. Stephen C. Mayer, great to talk to you again. I could talk to you for hours, but we sadly run out of time. The story of Everything. This movie based on your best selling book, Return of the God Hypothesis. How do people get to see it? I know it's out today, Friday. How do people get to see it?

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (34:36)

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for asking. People can get tickets in the U.S. it's out in theaters right now. People in the U.S. can get tickets by going to a site thestoryofeverything. Film, Film for film, the storyofeverything film. And it will be out later in the summer on digital platforms, but I would recommend seeing it on the big screen. It's visually stunning. The producers have done a great job. There are 400 visual effects. They take you way out into space to see the galaxies close up and deep into the interior of the cell, to see all that digital and nanotechnology we've been talking about. So it is a visually stunning cinematic experience.

Piers Morgan (35:19)

Brilliant. Dr. Meg, great to see you again. Thank you very much. Indeed for taking the time for Uncensored.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer (35:25)

Thank you for having me again, Piers. It's always a pleasure.

Piers Morgan (35:31)

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