Intelligent Design, Atheists, and Dismantling Materialism | The Dr. Stephen Meyer Interview
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to Dr. Stephen Meyer. They talk about Intelligent Design, DNA, and Richard Dawkins. He is a former Geophysicist and college professor, and now directs the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. He is a Cambridge-educated philosopher of science and has written several books, his most recent one being The Return of The God Hypothesis, where he discusses how science is coming back to the idea of an Intelligent Designer. Kyle and Ethan find out what science means along with what scientific evidence there is for God. Dr. Stephen Meyer shows how the materialistic viewpoints are becoming more insane and The Intelligent Design arguments are becoming the more sound arguments. Dr. Stephen Meyer talks about how DNA is even shocking Richard Dawkins and the rest of the scientific community. In the Subscriber Portion, Kyle and Ethan find out what Dr. Stephen Meyer thinks about old earth and young earth. He speaks on the evidence for what has swayed his opinion. They talk on how philosophy and science have created some of the best work for science. They end the interview with the 10 questions.
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Welcome, everyone, to the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Today we're talking to Dr. Stephen C. Meyer.
The doctor.
He is Cambridge-educated.
Science-y.
He's a philosopher.
Dinosaurs.
Geophysicist.
Science.
He was a college professor.
Yeah, and a student.
And he was also a child at one point.
And now he directs the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.
He wrote Darwin's Doubt, The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case of Intelligent Design, Signature in the Cell, DNA, and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, and The Return of the God Hypothesis.
That's his latest book, the new one.
Yeah.
The Return of the God Hypothesis.
Sounds like a third movie in a Star Wars franchise.
Like Darwin Strikes Back.
Yeah, the Return of the God.
The God Hypothesis strikes again.
This time it's personal.
This time it's personal.
But this guy is really smart.
He speaks for himself.
So let's check it out.
Yeah.
He speaks for himself.
Well, he doesn't have a, he's not a ventriloquist dummy.
I'm just saying, we don't need to sit here and be like, oh, he's really smart.
And because once you hear him talk, you're going to be like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We peppered questions in, and he just, he rolled with it.
Yeah.
Because he's smart.
He's a smart dude.
So here we go.
Let's talk to the smart dude about intelligent design and evolution and creationism and all that stuff.
Here we go.
All right.
Well, welcome, Dr. Meyer.
Thanks for coming on.
We appreciate it.
I'm awfully glad to be with you guys.
Thank you for having me on.
Yeah, this will be the most serious, intelligent, highbrow interview that you've ever taken part in.
So congratulations.
This will blow your Ben Shapiro interview out of the water, your Dennis Prager interview.
Who cares?
This is going to be much better than all those.
Right.
I will endeavor to strive for that standard of gravity.
So.
Speaking of gravity.
What What is science?
We were looking it up in the dictionary.
So you wrote Darwin's Doubt and then your latest book, The Return of the God hypothesis, and then a bunch of other books because you write a lot.
Let's start there.
What's the God hypothesis?
Where did it go?
How about returning?
Yeah, maybe I should start with the earlier books, just by background, because this book extends the thesis of those earlier books.
The first was Signature in the Cell, which was an examination of the digital information that is stored in even the simplest living cells and the problem that poses for explaining the origin of the very first life, how you get from simple non-living chemicals in a putative prebiotic soup to the first living cell.
And I showed in the book that all the major theories of what are called chemical evolution have reached an impasse because the chemistry, the chemistry of non-living molecules does not move naturally in a life-friendly direction.
And in particular, you don't get naturally, chemistry doesn't move naturally from simple chemistry to code, to the information.
And yet we do know of a cause that produces information, especially in a digital or an alphabetic form.
And that's essentially what we've found in the DNA molecule.
When Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of that molecule in 1953, they realized that it had the capacity for storing information in a digital or typographic form.
In 1957, Crick expanded on that with something called the sequence hypothesis.
And he showed that the information stored in DNA, or the DNA is literally storing information in a digital form.
It stores instructions for building the important protein molecules that keep all cells alive.
And that discovery has essentially brought what's called origin of life research or chemical evolutionary theory or ideas about what's sometimes called abiogenesis, chemical abiogenesis, has brought that whole field to a standstill.
And every attempt to explain where that information came from has failed.
And yet we do know of a cause that produces information, and that cause is mind or intelligence.
Whether we're talking about the information in a computer program or in a hieroglyphic inscription or paragraph in a book, when we trace information back to its source, we always come to a mind, not a material process.
So I argued that the presence of information in DNA, in even the simplest living cells, pointed to the activity of a designing intelligence in the origin of life.
I extended that thesis in Darwin's Doubt, showing that there was an information problem at higher, what are called taxonomic levels in biology.
When you get the first animals, for example, in an event called the Cambrian explosion, not the Caribbean explosion, as Dennis Miller called it when I was on an interview with him, the Cambrian explosion.
And so I argued in both these books that we have evidence of a designing intelligence operating in the origin and history of life, a designing intelligence of some kind.
But I didn't attempt to identify the designing intelligence in part because there were two possibilities, and I didn't want to get into adjudicating between the two.
One is that the intelligence might be an imminent intelligence within the cosmos.
And there have been some scientists who have proposed that life was seeded on planet Earth by an alien intelligence from some other star system or something.
No less a personage than Francis Crick proposed this idea, and Richard Dawkins has even floated it.
But the other option is that the designing intelligence that the digital code and DNA bears witness to is a transcendent intelligence, an agent beyond the cosmos, aka God.
And so in this book, I address the question of the identity of the designing intelligence.
A number of my readers wanted to know, who do you think is responsible for designing life, and what can science tell us about that question?
And so that's what this new book is about.
It's the question of who designed life, who designed the universe, and what can science tell us about that.
So when you say the return of the God hypothesis, does that mean that there's new evidence that's pointing in that direction again?
Like, what did you mean by the return?
Exactly.
The title invites a story, obviously.
And the story is that in the late 19th century, we lost a previous theistic framework for doing science, largely.
That science arose during, there's kind of three phases to this.
The first phase is the period of the scientific revolution from roughly 1300 to 1750, especially between 1500 and 1750.
You have systematic methods of investigating nature that are advanced in Western Europe by scientists who are almost to a person deeply religious and who believe that the scientific enterprise, which they then called, at that time called natural philosophy, was a way of bringing glory to God.
It was a way of revealing the work of the Creator, the mathematical harmony of nature, the evidence of design in specific systems like the solar system or the eye.
And you have figures like Boyle, Robert Boyle, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, Christian Huygens, and others who are pursuing the study of nature as a theological project, as a way of bringing glory to God.
And you can see this in the metaphors they use.
They talk about the laws of nature implying that there is a lawgiver.
In fact, one historian of science has said that the whole idea of the laws of nature was a juridical metaphor of theological origin.
There are laws because there is a lawgiver and law sustainer of the universe, someone who is sustaining the orderly concourse of nature, that being God.
They also believe that nature was intelligible.
So they talked about nature being a book.
Just as there is a book of scripture, there's a book of nature.
And nature is intelligible.
We could understand it because it had been made by a rational intellect who built rationality and order and design into the universe.
And that same rational intellect, namely God, built our minds in his image so that we could understand the order and the design and the rationality and the lawful order that he built into the universe.
And so you find that these theological presuppositions and metaphors are informing the scientific enterprise.
And the scientists doing science are also finding evidence that they think is pointing to the reality of God.
Newton, in something called the general scolium to the Principia, was a theological epilogue to his great masterpiece of physics, where he advanced the universal law of gravity, explains that the law of gravity alone couldn't have, it could explain many things, but it didn't explain the origin of the delicate balance of all the planets and comets and the sun in the solar system.
And for that, he said, to explain that, he said, required reference to the action of an intelligent and powerful being.
So he made design arguments, right, in his scientific work.
In the 19th century, we kind of lose that perspective.
We get the rise of what scholars call scientific materialism.
There are a whole series of theories about the origin of things that imply that the solar system, the mountains, the canyons, the great features on planet Earth, the geological features, and especially life arose by unguided, undirected processes.
And so by the end of the 19th century, science has a much more materialistic framework.
And we kind of inherit that in the 20th century.
And this conflict idea that science and religion are at war comes out of that.
And the story of the book is the return of that original framing for science, or at least evidence that should bring us back to that, because of three great discoveries that have been made since the roughly over the last hundred years, since about the 1920s.
And those three discoveries are that the universe has a beginning.
The universe has been finely tuned in its basic physical parameters since the beginning or very soon thereafter.
And thirdly, that inside even the simplest living cells, as I've already said, we have discovered digital code, information, but also a complex information storage, transmission, and processing system that is similar to the kinds of information processing systems that computer scientists are now designing, but superseding those systems in its integrated complexity.
So we have evidence of design in life in the universe and then evidence that the universe had a definite beginning as well.
And those three things together, I argue, are best explained, not just by a generic design hypothesis or a designing agent of some unspecified kind, but by a designing agent who has the attributes that Jews and Christians, for example, and other theists have ascribed to God, transcendence, intelligence, and therefore personhood.
We're talking about a mind here, not an impersonal force.
And also an agent who is active in the creation long after the beginning.
So not a deistic creator.
So that's the thesis of the book, that the scientific evidence is actually pointing to God, to a theistic notion of a designing agent.
That first one's interesting to me, the Big Bang, because we kind of take it for granted that secular scientists will point to the Big Bang now as being the origin of the universe.
So before this, people didn't know that there was a beginning to space and time.
They thought that the theory was it was just what, an everlasting progression?
Or what was the theory before that?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, this is an ancient debate.
It goes back to the Greeks.
Is the universe eternal and self-existent, or did it come into existence into existence a finite time ago?
It's fascinating to me, and I tell the story of this discovery in the book, that modern science has been able to, as best we can tell, settle that question.
We have multiple lines of evidence pointing to a beginning, or what sometimes the physicists refer to as a singularity, past which you cannot back extrapolate.
And so the view in the 19th century, the default view, was that the universe was eternal and self-existent.
It had always been here.
Space and time were thought to be infinite in scope.
And one physicist in the 1960s, Robert Dickey, explained why this was so significant.
And this reversal, the reversal of this perspective was so significant.
He said that an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.
Once we discovered that matter, space, time, and energy likely had a beginning, then you have a big question that arises.
The Big Bang didn't cause the origin of the universe.
The Big Bang was the first effect.
What produced that first effect?
It's not matter, space, time, and energy, because those are the things that come into existence at the beginning.
So the causal profile of any postulated explanation for the origin of the universe is going to be something that is eternal or that will transcend those domains of matter, space, time, and energy.
And also apparently capable of changing and making a dramatic change of state from nothing physical to everything that exists.
So we're looking at a very powerful transcendent cause is what's required.
As one commentary on my book said, does that remind you of anyone or anything?
So this discovery has revived something called the cosmological argument.
We can unpack that a little more rigor if we like as we talk more.
Yeah, it seems like the, You know, all these explanations almost take for granted the craziest, deepest part of humanity.
I mean, consciousness, thought, imagination.
It's like we take for granted that all that just, oh, that just evolved, obviously.
Like, how did, you know, rocks floating in space ever get that?
And I mean, what is the secular explanation for that?
Well, these are the two great systems of thought that we're dealing with.
There are others, I look at others, but the two great systems of thought that have vied for supremacy in the West are theism, the idea that a pre-existing transcendent mind is the thing from which everything else came, a conscious being with great power and intellect.
On the other hand, the other view is known as materialism.
That is the idea that matter and energy are eternal and self-existent and require no prior explanation.
Those are the things from which everything else comes, and that they arrange themselves by the laws of nature, some kind of unguided forces to produce the chemicals that produce the first cell that evolved by Darwinian means to produce us, that eventually produce intelligent agents like us who have an idea of God.
So there's always a God in the materialistic worldview, but God is a concept in the mind of man, not as a reality.
This was Sigmund Freud.
God did not create man.
Man created the idea of God.
So you have these two systems, these competing systems of thought that have essentially competed in the West.
And the argument of the book is that the three big discoveries of the last 100 years about biological, physical, and cosmological origins all point in the theistic direction, not the materialistic direction.
So the go-to materialistic explanation now is something called the multiverse.
And it's the idea that, and this mainly pertains to the second discovery, that I mentioned, the discovery that the basic parameters of physics are exquisitely finely tuned against all odds and for no underlying physical reason to produce, to make life in the universe possible.
So physicists will often say we live in something like we live in a Goldilocks universe or a fortunate universe because the expansion rate of the universe that's driven by something called the cosmological constant.
That's the outward pushing force that shows that we have an expanding universe from a beginning.
That force is finely tuned.
Most common estimates are to about one part in 10 to the 90th power.
There are only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the universe.
And so getting that fine-tuning right would be roughly the odds, you know, to get a sense of the probability of that, it'd be like setting a blindfolded person out into space, floating freely, looking for one marked elementary particle out of 10 to the 80th, except not just in our universe, you would have to be floating in 10 billion universes our size looking for just one and hoping to find it by chance.
That's the degree of precision that's required, the degree of improbability associated with this one fine-tuning parameter.
Now, to explain this and the other ensemble of fine-tuning parameters that are just right, the materialist or atheist go-to explanation now is something called the multiverse, the idea that, well, yes, it's incredibly improbable that we get all those physical parameters finely tuned against all odds just right.
But if we could conceive of gabilions and gabillions and gabilions of other universes out there, then our universe or some universe that was life-friendly would eventually have to arise by sheer chance alone.
Two problems with that.
First, if these other universes are causally disconnected from ours, then they would have no effect on anything in our universe, including the probabilities of whatever set the fine-tuning parameters.
And in virtue of that, multiverse advocates have recognized that in order to portray our universe as something like the lucky winner of a great cosmic lottery, that there must be underlying universe-generating mechanisms.
And so there are two that have been proposed, one based on something called string theory, one based on something called inflationary cosmology.
But as you delve into this, it turns out that even in theory, these universe-generating mechanisms must be themselves exquisitely finely tuned in order to produce other universes.
And so the multiverse hypothesis ends up presupposing prior unexplained fine-tuning, and you're right back to where you started.
So the evidence, fine-tuning, by which we mean something like an ensemble of improbable parameters that jointly function or that jointly work to perform a function or exemplify a set of functional requirements and produce a significant outcome.
And when we find finely tuned systems in our experience, whether they're French recipes or internal combustion engines, they're always the result of intelligence.
So, given that the multiverse has not actually explained the ultimate origin of fine-tuning, but just pushed it back a generation, the hypothesis of intelligent design and, indeed, a theistic design, I think, stands as the best explanation.
You've got to admit, the multiverse is a pretty cool idea, though.
Oh, it's very cool.
The point is that even if it's true, it doesn't circumvent the need for intelligent design.
It just pushes it back to the universe generating mechanisms.
Yeah, but then you could have all these different Spider-Mans.
Awesome.
You could be.
Yeah.
Different universes, different Spider-Mans.
Every gender.
Yeah, there could be multiple.
You know, we're just throwing that out there.
Is there a multiverse in the multiverse?
Is there one where intelligent design is true?
Well, that's actually a good question.
Yeah, that's a good question.
There's something called a physics.
It's not quite the multiverse.
It's a slightly different idea that's called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
But some have argued that if the many worlds of interpretation of quantum mechanics is true and that every logically possible universe exists in some possible world, then there must be in one of those universes an omniscient God who's responsible for the production of all of the universes.
So it's an interesting twist on the ontological argument for the existence of God.
That was my first Babon B article is Atheist Believes Multiverse Theory of Every Possible Universe Except the Biblical One.
Except the Biblical.
That's pretty good.
Pretty good.
There are philosophers who actually developed that as an argument for theism.
If you go with the many worlds interpretation, which is often used as a way of circumventing the problems, different types of fine-tuning, you end up inadvertently affirming a theistic view in spite of yourself.
And that's actually one of the themes of the book and one of the, I think, new wrinkles on the arguments on theistic arguments that I develop in the book.
I show that a number of these cosmologies that were developed to circumvent the problem of the beginning, one called, in particular, called quantum cosmology.
So it's the other kind of go-to materialistic explanation.
Lawrence Krauss, the well-known physicist from Arizona State, wrote a book called Universe from Nothing, popularizing this idea of quantum cosmology.
And I argue in the book, and I think show fairly decisively, that even if the quantum cosmological account of the origin of the universe is true, it has its own theistic implications.
They're subtle, but they're there.
And so the quantum cosmology was proposed as a way of circumventing the problem of what's known as the singularity, the definite beginning of matter, space, time, and energy.
And yet, taken at face value, it seems to imply that prior to the material universe, there was a mathematical reality that existed independently of matter, space, time, and energy.
And one of the proponents of this quantum cosmological model, Alexander Vilinkin, the physicist whose work Krauss popularizes, has noted that if you have pre-existing laws of nature that are purely mathematical,
because there's at that point no physical system for them to describe, he says that's kind of a strange discovery because that would imply a realm of pure thought that pre-exists the universe because math exists in the realm of mind.
And so he says, if we're saying that the universe, the material universe came out of math, are we really saying that there was a mind that predated the universe?
And that's one of the kind of, if you begin to think deeply about some of these proposals that have attempted to circumvent the problem of the beginning, you find that even if they can explain the origin or even think get rid of the beginning, they still have a pre-existing mathematical realm that seems to imply at least philosophical idealism, if not theism.
And I develop that argument in some detail in the book.
I think that many of these, allegedly atheistic cosmologies have their own implications that point to God.
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It's kind of like how in movies now they're making all these prequels.
It doesn't actually fix anything.
It just makes it more complicated.
Well, it's the prequel to the prequel to the prequel.
Yeah.
Just like science.
Yeah, good.
That was good.
Thanks.
That was good.
I feel like I'm getting a compliment every night.
Almost like I'm.
Good job, buddy.
Good job, Champ.
Yes, like when I tell jokes to my kids and have to tell them why I think they're funny.
I want to hear a Dr. Stephen Meyer joke.
Yeah, you really don't.
So the quantum physics, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Two quantum mechanics walk into a bar.
I'm really only funny when people make fun of the big words I use.
Completely accidental.
I don't want to make a joke about quantum mechanics.
I know.
So, yeah, so you got these breakthroughs.
The universe had a beginning in space and time.
There's this Goldilocks universe.
And then you talk about DNA.
And this is interesting to me because when Darwin proposed his theories in the 19th century, like we didn't know anything about the cell, right?
Like we didn't know anything about DNA, the cell.
He was just kind of like, yeah, he thought it was a glob.
The glob.
Yeah.
His contemporary advocate, his so-called bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, said that the cell is a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
He was one of the great scientists of the 19th century, and he was completely ignorant of what we now know.
So you can quote him and feel very smart because we know so much more.
But of course, he couldn't have known this.
And Darwin didn't know.
He didn't know about the molecular machines.
He didn't know about the cellular organelles.
He didn't know about the information stored in DNA.
And he didn't know about the complex information storage, transmission, and processing system that is at work in our cells moment by moment.
There was a tweet the other day by Richard Dawkins, the foremost scientific atheist in the world, even more prominent than Professor Krauss.
And he said he was knocked sideways by the digital data processing system that was at work in DNA replication.
And he posted in this tweet a link to an animation by an Australian medical group who had animated the process known as DNA replication.
And it is just phenomenal to watch this animated in real time.
And it's a very accurate animation as to what we understand about how DNA copies itself.
And it's not an easy task.
The engineering involved is really impressive.
And it's happening many, many, many times a second in ourselves.
Dawkins then went on to say, well, and he was equally impressed with the science and the scientists who had worked this all out.
But what he didn't say was that he had any explanation for how it had come to be.
There was no materialistic scientific explanation for the origin of the information in DNA or for the DNA replication system or the gene expression system or any of the information processing that's going on inside the cell.
And in a 2008 documentary, Expelled, he was interviewed by Ben Stein.
And at the end of the interview, Ben Stein got him to acknowledge that, quote, no one knows how the first life originated from the so-called prebiotic soup.
And Stein went on to ask him, well, then, what do you think the chances are that something like intelligent design might be part of the explanation for the origin of life?
And Dawkins went on, I think he now regrets this.
He's even said he regrets it, but he speculated that, well, we might indeed be looking at a signature of intelligence, is what he put it, but it would have to be a signature of an alien intelligence that had seeded life on Earth, and that that alien intelligence would have evolved by some scientifically discernible means.
This is the hypothesis known as panspermia.
I addressed this in the book as well.
Is it a transcendent intelligence or an alien designer?
And it turns out that panspermia hypothesis isn't so good for a number of reasons.
First, it doesn't explain the ultimate origin of biological information.
It just pushes it out into space because any alien intelligent being would have had to evolve from simpler organisms, including some presumably first cell.
And therefore, it would have the problem of the origin of the information necessary to get life going is not solved by simply saying that life here was seeded from some alien being in space.
But secondly, no being within the cosmos can explain the origin of the cosmos itself or the fine-tuning of the universe that has been present from the very beginning.
No being within the cosmos could explain the conditions that make its own existence possible.
So when you look at the whole ensemble of evidence that we have from biological, physical, and cosmological origins, I think the theistic design hypothesis explains the whole suite of those evidences best.
Wow.
I got panspermia out of that.
I got hung up on that word.
That sounds like a magical place because they're flying across the universe spreading seed.
And I was trying to think of like life is seeded here from outer space.
If we were evolved by an alien being who created us, then he had to be evolved by some even crazier alien.
That's why I think that like these, you know, we get accused as Christians of believing insane things like, oh, you believe animals can talk?
Like the snake talking in the Bible?
I'm like, don't you believe that every animal could talk and eventually they're all going to talk?
Like it might even be that, it might even be that that snake had evolved to the point of talking at that point and then when it's extinct.
Like you believe we're just talking monkeys, but like, isn't that the evolutionary idea that like all animals eventually are going to talk and wear suits and stuff?
And also that we're eventually, this is just like the beginning.
Like, who knows?
We could be like 10% evolved.
Like we could be getting like seven arms and nine eyes.
Who knows where we're going?
Well, indeed.
But to amplify the other comment, one of the things I show in the book is that the atheistic argument now depends on extremely convoluted and esoteric kinds of explanations.
As opposed to the postulation of a single transcendent intelligence to explain digital code and fine-tuning and the origin of the universe, the go-to materialistic explanations are now things like the multiverse, alien designer, panspermia, the panspermia, alien designer hypothesis, phantom fields, inflaton fields,
conjoining all of the multiple theoretical entities that are inherent to string theory with all of the multiple purely theoretical postulates and entities that are inherent in inflationary cosmology in order to explain the fine-tuning, which is explained by one single theoretical postulate, again, a transcendent intelligence.
So the theistic argument at the fundamental level of explaining fundamental causal origins is much simpler in an Occam's razor sense.
And the basic ideas of naturalism, like the Darwinian evolution, now have to be supplemented with very exotic hypotheses like the multiverse, like the space alien designer, like quantum cosmology with the notion of super space and a mathematical realm of existence that somehow produces matter, space, time, and energy.
Or infinite cycles of prior universes that somehow, with each cycle, allow the entropy of the universe to be reset to a very low level.
We know nothing that does that in actual physics.
So we have to posit the existence of fields that have god-like properties in order to explain what the God hypothesis explains.
I think one of the themes of the book is not only that theism provides the best explanation for the range of these evidences, but also that the scientific materialists, in order to explain these things, have had to resort to very convoluted and exotic explanations that are ad hoc, convoluted in Occam's razor sense of postulating multiple, purely theoretical,
but...
explanatory entities.
So it's it's.
It's a wild wild west of weirdo explanations out there.
Now to account for what Theism accounts for very simply, um, what is the state of intelligent design, you know, in the scientific communities and stuff?
Are you guys still like uh, you don't get to sit with the cool kids at the lunch table?
Are there uh, is it growing?
Are there more and more scientists that are coming on board?
Yeah we, we still don't get to sit with the, the allegedly cool kids at the lunch table.
But we're we're uh, we're populating more and more lunch tables of our own and uh, and a few of the cool kids have come over to our lunch tables.
So I think i'm quite bullish about intelligent design as a research program, especially in biology, where we're seeing tremendous growth.
Many younger scientists who've been through our summer seminar, whose research we've supported, are now faculty members at various institutions around the world quite a number, a couple dozen.
We have research projects at mainstream universities with uh senior professors who are who are friendly to intelligent design and who are overseeing research that's being conducted from within the framework of an ID perspective and we're making discoveries.
Initially, the intelligent design was an argument, properly so.
It was the kinds of books that Doug Axe and Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells and I wrote were making the case for intelligent design based on already known facts.
There's a new wave of research now that's happening with the intelligent design movement, and that is that many scientists are taking the idea of intelligent design and using it in the laboratory to, as called a heuristic, as a guide to discovery.
They're using it to make predictions and saying, look, if life was designed by an intelligent agent, there are certain sorts of things that we would expect to see in living systems that we wouldn't expect to see if it had evolved by undirected processes in a kind of bottom-up, simple to complex mode.
And so predictions are being generated based on an ID perspective.
And in several striking cases recently, they've led to some interesting discoveries that would not have been expected on a Darwinian view.
So we think ID is now in a kind of a new phase of a maturing phase as a research program where we're not only positing ID as an explanation, but using it as a guide to prediction and discovery.
And so one obvious example of this is the debate over so-called junk DNA.
And when my first book, Signature in the Cell, came out, some of the critics said, well, if the information in DNA is the product of an intelligent agent, why do we see so much junk?
So much of the DNA doesn't code for proteins.
And one of the predictions that ID proponents made and that I repeated in the 2009 book is that those non-coding regions would be shown to be importantly functional.
And lo and behold, 2011, something called the ENCODE project comes out, establishing that the vast majority of the non-coding regions of the DNA are importantly functional.
They're functions much like an operating system in a computer that's controlling the timing and expression of the coding files or the data files.
So just one example of intelligent design anticipating a new discovery or in other cases, actually leading to new discoveries.
One of the scientists who first wrote about the ENCODE project, James Shapiro, said that though my colleague Richard Sternberg and I have different evolutionary philosophies, Sternberg being a proponent of intelligent design, he said it must be acknowledged that Sternberg first saw that the non-coding DNA would be functional.
And Sternberg was writing on this as early as 2001 from an ID perspective.
So we're very bullish.
We think that the movement's growing.
There are a tremendous amount of younger talent all around the world that's interested in these ideas.
And I think the research is moving into a very fruitful and maturing phase.
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What about the young Earth creationists?
Do they not even get to sit at your table?
They have an even less cool table that they have to sit at.
We're a big tent with lots of tables.
So we have many young earth creationists who are proponents of intelligent design.
But of course, not all proponents of intelligent design are young earth creationists because the intelligent design argument or idea paradigm, if you will, is not really about the question of age.
It's about the question of whether the design that we see in life in the universe is real or, as the Darwinians say, merely apparent.
And Richard Dawkins has said that DNA is, no, he said that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
And we framed this argument initially in opposition to that point of view.
Dawkins and Krauss and others do a great job of framing issues.
And I think this is a great example of that.
Dawkins said that the key issue in biology is the appearance of design.
Is it real or merely apparent?
And so within the ID camp, there are people who hold that the Earth is very old, as I do.
There are people like my colleague Paul Nelson who thinks the Earth is young.
We also have, there are certain types of theistic evolutionists who are also design proponents.
Others are not.
There it turns on the crucial question of do you think the design is detectable in nature or not?
And there are some proponents of theistic evolution who think that the evolutionary process shows evidence of design against the backdrop of what nature ordinarily does without intelligent assistance.
And they would fall within that big ID tent, if you will.
Are there any proponents of incompetent design?
Dumb designer?
Well, actually, that's one of the counter arguments to the intelligent design hypothesis that's put forward by proponents of Darwinian naturalism.
If nature really shows the evidence of design, why do we see systems that either seem to be broken or in some way malevolent?
And I think that's a very serious and important objection for us to address.
Not all proponents of intelligent design are theists or biblical, certainly biblical theists, let's say.
And if you just hold to the design hypothesis simpliciter without any other auxiliary hypotheses, bad design in nature might stump you.
And you got this sense actually reading Paley in the late 19th century, or in the, not the late early 19th century.
You read the end of his work, you get the sense that he's never left a Cambridge or Oxford garden, you know, that nature, he expects that nature will be perfect.
I'm a design theorist, but I'm also a biblical Christian.
And so if you have a biblical theology of nature, you would expect to see two things.
If you can join that with the idea of intelligent design, you'd expect to see aboriginal design.
If you look at Romans 1, for example, St. Paul says that we should be able to see the attributes of God, his eternal power and divine nature.
Divine nature, sometimes in earlier translations, being rendered as wisdom, intelligence.
But then in Romans 8, he also tells us that nature is in bondage to decay and that something has happened that has perverted the original design of nature.
And so as a biblical theist who is a proponent of intelligent design, I see exactly what I would expect to see based on that biblical worldview.
I see evidence of aboriginal design, good design.
That is the dominant signal, I think, when we look at life.
But there is also a corruption of that that we see.
And interestingly, we're seeing this even at the molecular level.
We can discern this at the molecular level.
Studies of virulence in bacteria and viruses are showing that when a virus or bacterium is virulent, when it's harmful to humans, it invariably is the result of a loss of original genetic information, a degradation of the original information that is responsible for producing the virus, the bacterium.
One of our microbiologists, Scott Minick, is doing work on this, showing that, for example, the plague bacterium, which is responsible for killing an awful lot of people, perhaps the worst pandemic in history of the human race, is the consequence of four successive mutations that can now be tracked in the study of the genome.
And in each case, and cumulatively converting a harmless bacterium for which we had an innate immune response into something that was a killer.
So we see this evidence of decay.
And interestingly, decay in information.
We're saying that information is the hallmark of intelligence.
And the mutational processes that degrade it are actually, I think, the explanation for what we call natural evil.
So it's a tough question for people, for theists, to answer the question of natural evil.
But I think work that's taking place on intelligent design or about the structure of organisms at the informational level are shedding light on that question.
And I think they reveal what you would expect as a biblical theist who is an advocate of intelligent design, design and decay.
Fascinating.
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We'll go young earth, old earth, dig into that.
Did man write on dinosaurs?
What else?
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All kinds of fun stuff.
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Because my understanding is you lean old earth.
So what is the key evidence that makes you lean that way rather than you?
Well, there are two things.
So usually I don't even answer questions about this because my views on this are kind of irrelevant to what we're trying to do.
But you guys are good guys and you ask me if you're a question, so I'll tell you.
So why is it so hard to believe that that could be happening on a different scale?
I think that's actually a wonderful argument.
Well, thank you.
Actually, no, I really do.
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