All Episodes
Dec. 17, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:10
THE REAL FREELOADER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep240
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Elizabeth Warren says that Elon Musk, the greatest entrepreneur of the 21st century, is a freeloader.
Well, will the real freeloader please stand up?
I fear we're moving toward the Sovietization of America.
I realize it's kind of a scary phrase, but I'm going to give you eight separate reasons to see why that is the case.
I'll expose Google for attempting to conceal the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
And author Stephen Meyer is going to join me.
We're going to talk about whether we live in a universe so fine-tuned that this tuning could only have been done by an intelligent creator.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks that Elon Musk, the most successful entrepreneur of the 21st century, perhaps the man who is most likely to become the world's first trillionaire, is a freeloader.
Here's Warren talking about it.
Listen. I want to just give you an opportunity to respond to Elon Musk attacking you on social media.
The world's richest freeloader evidently has a very thin skin.
So apparently, which of these two have created new innovations, new products, new wealth, new possibilities for the future?
I mean, one is a visionary, and that's Elon Musk.
The other is a professional fake who's cashed in on pretending to be a Native American.
I mean, what a contrast between these two.
How is Elon Musk a freeloader?
He created his own wealth.
By contrast, look at Elizabeth Warren.
I mean, she freeloaded off the Cherokee.
I'm a Cherokee. She freeloaded off of Harvard by posing as a woman of color.
And now she's freeloading off the taxpayer.
So will the real freeloader please stand up?
You know, in Elizabeth Warren's twisted universe, the Clintons aren't freeloaders.
Even though they set up a foundation, they're collecting money from all these foreign governments, they're selling favors, if you will.
Biden and Hunter Biden, they're not freeloaders, even though they're also offering access and allowing other countries all over the world to pay for this kind of...
They're not freeloaders.
So, in Warren's universe...
Entrepreneurs who build their own companies, create their own wealth, they're freeloaders.
Well, if that's the case, what do you call people who sit on their butts and complain a lot and collect government benefits?
Well, I guess we call them Democrats.
Let's talk a bit about Elon Musk.
I mean, here's a guy who has done all this stuff that the government talks about but can't do.
Governments are, we need a lot more electric cars.
Well, Elon Musk figured out how to make an electric car.
Something that the government, if you...
If you had them do, would probably end up with some sort of a mechanical horse.
Nothing that would actually work.
Elon Musk has taken over from NASA. NASA has basically collapsed.
It can't do its own stuff.
Forget about the days of getting to the moon.
Suddenly, the private entrepreneurs are now taking over space travel.
Elon Musk is at the forefront of that with his company, SpaceX.
And it's SpaceX that's really likely to propel Elon Musk financially into a completely different orbit.
Elon Musk is a visionary.
I mean, some of the stuff he talks about, I kind of have to raise my eyebrows.
He talks about how, you know, we have to face what he calls single planet dependency risk.
And what he means is we're all too dependent on planet Earth.
What if something, what if an asteroid hits the Earth and the Earth vanishes?
He goes, well, we've got to have someplace else to go.
So this is what he calls single planet dependency risk.
He also has what he calls human species obsolescence risk.
By which he means that as artificial intelligence develops, we might have supercomputers that are actually smarter than human beings.
I don't know how we do that without human beings to program those computers.
But nevertheless, what Musk is talking about is perhaps the need to augment human intelligence, perhaps with artificial intelligence to sort of do what Nietzsche only dreamed about, to create, if you will, an augmented human intelligence.
Here's the point about Musk.
I guess Elizabeth Warren's point is, yes, Dinesh, but for a lot of years, Elon Musk paid little or no taxes.
Now, this year, or at least for 2021, Elon Musk is going to pay a gargantuan amount of taxes, where somewhere in the region of 12 billion dollars.
There are years where Elon Musk paid much less, but this is actually a function of entrepreneurship itself.
When entrepreneurs take in their gains and reinvest them in a company to build it up, you want taking the money out as income, so you don't owe the taxes unless you do that.
So that's the point. You'll find this even said about Trump.
Well, there's a year in which he paid no taxes.
Well, yeah, that's because he's building buildings.
That's because he has depreciation.
So the entrepreneurial tax form looks a little different than your tax form or mine.
Now, let's turn to Elizabeth Warren.
I mean, here's essentially a professional scam artist.
Here's someone who has, if you will, been ripping other people off.
Think about robbing the Cherokee.
The benefits for the Cherokee, whether you agree with them or not, are intended to compensate for broken treaties, the Trail of Tears.
And here's Elizabeth Warren, in a sense, cashing in on those benefits.
If that isn't freeloading, what is?
And then if you go on social media, you'll see all these photos of Elizabeth Warren getting off private planes and so on.
And she's talking about freeloading.
So where's the private plane come from?
I realize it's probably not her plane, but that's the point.
People who are in the governmental elite have access to all kinds of benefits that they don't pay taxes on.
They get the plane without having to pay for the plane.
They go to receptions without having to pay for receptions.
They get all kinds of invitations without having to actually pay.
Pay for them. So the real freeloader, I think it's quite obvious now, is not Elon Musk, but one Elizabeth Running Bear Warren.
You know, this guy Mike Lindell never ceases to amaze me.
This is a guy I just found out he's going to be donating 10,000 pillows, 10,000 MyPillows, to the families devastated by the tornadoes in Kentucky.
These pillows are going to arrive on Christmas Eve.
And, you know, Mike couldn't do any of this without his loyal customers like you.
The good thing is you can get the lowest price in the history of MyPillow for the classic standard MyPillow.
It's normally $69.98, but now for you, $19.98 with promo code Dinesh.
These wonderful pillows won't go flat.
You can wash and dry them as often as you want.
They maintain their shape.
They're made in the USA. They also have queen size pillows, which are normally $79.98, but for you now $24.98.
King size, regularly $89.98, but now for you $29.98.
And my pillow isn't just pillows.
As you know, they've got over 150 products, everything from sleepwear to my new beds.
Go to MyPillow.com or call 800-876-0227.
Use promo code Dinesh to take advantage of Mike Lindell's special offers on the pillows and on all the other products.
That number again, 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Are we witnessing in America what can be called Sovietization?
By Sovietization, I mean, is America in certain recognizable, unmistakable forms moving towards some of the policies and practices and cultural institutions that can be identified with the former Soviet Union?
I think the answer to that question is yes, and I jotted down some specifics.
Several ways in which we are seeing, you can call it, American Sovietization.
Number one. The creation of a kind of elite class that is above the rules, to some degree above the laws, doesn't play by the same norms as everyone else.
Now in the Soviet Union, this was called the nomenklatura, the sort of privileged ruling class.
We don't call it that in America, but we do have it.
Think about the people who complain about walls but live behind tall walls.
Complain about guns and try to deprive other people of guns, but they've got private security.
Complain about entrepreneurs having tax breaks, but they get all kinds of tax breaks.
They're always warning about insider trading, but they get all kinds of tips and they're allowed to do insider trading even based upon companies that will be affected by laws that they themselves pass.
So we have an American...
Nomenclatura. Point number two.
The Soviet Union was famous for persecuting dissidents.
And now we do that in this country.
Or at least the left does that.
The Democrats do that.
And going after dissidents, which is to say, going after Trump.
Think about it. Can you imagine in a democracy, the ruling party, the Democrats are systematically, in every possible way, Going after the leader of the opposition party.
And they're gonna try to put him in jail one way or the other.
And this is Soviet-style tactics.
This is something that Lenin would have done.
This is something that Stalin, in fact, did do.
And usually with persecution of dissidents goes show trials.
And that's what you have with January 6th.
A show trial is a rigged trial.
A trial in which you first of all punish the accused before the trial.
That's happening with the January 6th defendants who are sitting in solitary confinement even though some of them are not even charged with a violent offense.
They're being tortured prior to the trial.
And then they're being offered these plea bargains, which is a form of legal bludgeoning.
A plea bargain today is not an honest trade.
It's not something where you plead to something you actually did.
It's essentially, if you don't plead, we will put so many charges and penalties on you that you're facing the utter ruination of your life, the dissolution of your relationship with your family, and so on.
So, show trials.
Number three, censorship.
Now, the censorship in America, I think, is approaching the level of severity that we had in the Soviet Union, where only private jokes.
Reagan was actually kind of an expert at picking up and telling jokes that Soviet people told to themselves in private.
But why in private? Because you couldn't say it at work.
You couldn't say it in school.
Teachers were being monitored.
And so what you have here is a society full of taboos.
And the taboos are essentially defined by the ideology of the ruling class.
Number four, the militarization of society to intimidate the population.
So think about it, for example, the tall fences, all the heavy guards, the military parading around Washington, D.C. for months in the Biden administration.
Who's that aimed at? Is that aimed at scaring China?
Or Iran? No. That's aimed at scaring the American people.
And of course, the Biden people are explicit about it.
The greatest threat to America comes from domestic terrorists.
So the opposition is defined, just as the Soviets did, as enemies of the state.
Next. Soviet science.
The Soviets were famous for letting science be dictated by ideology.
Essentially, they would tell you what the science is in advance.
Lysenkoism is the term associated with Soviet science.
This is the name of a notorious Soviet scientist.
A bogus scientist, not a genuine scientist, but one of the leading, quote, scientists in the Soviet Union.
Why? Because he took his cues not from nature, not from experiments, not from hypotheses, but from the ideology of the Soviet state.
Persecution of religion.
That's going on in America.
Can't go to church. So the pretexts may vary, but what you have is, and the Soviets too use pretexts.
They use the pretexts of foreign threats.
The United States is after us, so we have to do this.
We can't afford to have dissidents.
We have to shut down the churches, and this is what's going on in America today.
Disinformation and propaganda.
Now, from the Soviet Union, it came from the state.
I remember years ago, I would read Pravda and Izvestia, the two Soviet publications of the Soviet state.
Well, we don't have Pravda or Izvestia, but we do have the New York Times.
We do have the Washington Post.
We have CNN. And those are no less dedicated to ideological disinformation, to the party line, to covering up the crimes of the government that they support.
So even though they're nominally private, they take their cues from the state, just as the digital censors do.
And finally, the rewriting of history.
The Soviets specialized in it.
They would go back and rewrite the textbooks.
They rewrote the story of the Russian Revolution.
They rewrote the story of people who were very involved in the Bolshevik movement but later had to be wiped out.
They had to be made enemies of the state from the beginning.
So we're seeing this now in America, the rewriting of history with a view to serving an ideological goal.
All of this means that the concept of America as a fully free society...
Now, we're free in certain ways.
I would not claim that we've reached Soviet-style totalitarianism in America.
By and large, we still have a lot of scope to live freely in America today.
But we're moving in the Soviet direction, and this is why the chilling phrase, the Sovietization of America, does to some degree apply to our time and our place right here in the USA. Want to get a super cool Christmas present for your loved one?
Well, how about giving them a new iPhone?
That's right. Pure Talk has iPhone 12 starting at just $479 through the end of the year.
And yes, they have the 13s too.
Now, I switched to Pure Talk and I'm getting great nationwide 5G coverage.
Yes, it's the same coverage as the big guys and you can too.
The average family saves a lot, over $800 a year.
And that's just smart. Now, I wouldn't tell you to use a service I'm not completely happy with.
make the switch with Pure Talk's 30-day risk-free guarantee.
You literally have nothing to lose.
Unlimited talk text, six gigs of data, just $30 a month.
And like I said, the iPhone 12, like mine, take a look, is just $479.
Go to puretalk.com and shop for the plan and phone that's right for you, and enter the promo code SAVEHALF, and you'll save 50% off your first month, and you'll save on a new phone.
That's puretalk.com.
Promo code SAVEHALF. Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless.
Some restrictions apply. See site for details.
Inflation is becoming a very serious problem.
We have inflation rates now that are closing in on 7%.
And that's the highest since 1982.
In 1982, the inflation rate was 7.1%.
And we are creeping in on that.
It's quite possible that we will surpass that.
Now, what does this inflation mean for you?
Well, it means higher prices.
And annually, the ordinary American family is going to spend $3,500 more in expenses given the rate of inflation, according to a new analysis.
This is coming out of the Wharton School, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania.
It's called the Penn-Wharton Budget Model.
And it shows that in order to keep your standard of living the same, And because prices are higher, you now have to spend more to, so to speak, run in place.
How much more?
Well, you're going to spend $3,500 more on average.
But that's only an average.
The interesting thing is that poorer families are going to end up spending proportionately More.
Why? Because inflation is highest on necessities.
It's highest on things like food.
It's highest on basic things like buying a car.
It's highest on gas prices and energy prices.
And so if you take a poor guy and a rich guy, a rich guy will spend less of his or her annual income on, say, energy than a poor family, proportionately.
And so inflation in that sense is regressive.
It hits the poor guy.
Harder than it hits the rich guy.
I've been trying to learn more about inflation, and I came across a really interesting paper by the Mises Institute.
It's about how inflation creates wealth inequality.
Wealth inequality. And it goes into the process that causes inflation, which is essentially the printing of money.
I mean, think about it. The government is kind of the only scoundrel that can create money.
Now, in the old days, you couldn't do that when money was tied to gold.
Then you have to, there's some limit on the money supply.
Why? Because gold is a physical object.
It has to be mined. Gold doesn't just sort of fall out of the sky.
And so the simple fact that there's a cost to getting gold, there's a mining cost, creates a kind of lid, or at least a kind of rain, On the money supply.
But now we live in a society in which the Federal Reserve can essentially simply hit a button on the printing press, and so you have monetary expansion.
But the kind of the genius of this paper by the Mises Institute is it follows the trail of that money.
Because think about it, the money doesn't fan out into the whole society where everybody basically faces the same types of costs.
Not at all. According to this article by Jonathan Newman in the Mises Institute, number one, the money typically starts off with banks.
Banks get it first. And since banks get it first, banks have sort of the inside track on the money.
Why? Because they can spend the money before the inflation has kicked in.
Banks can invest in this, they can invest in that, so they get the full benefit, since they are the sort of early recipients, you can call it, of the new money.
They can even make long-term investments that will pay long-term dividends into the future.
So to quote the article, once a dollar is created, somebody gets to use it first.
And the point of the article is that that guy's got the best deal.
Now as the money goes to the number two guy, and the number three guy, and the number four guy, they are able to spend the money, yes, but in the meantime, prices have already started Why? Because there's more money already chasing the same number of goods.
And so the point is, I'm now quoting from the article, quote, at the end of the chain, we have the last receivers of the new money.
And the article says, and I think this is just a clinically accurate and logical statement, quote, this group has been paying the higher prices from everybody else's spending spree.
And what does that mean? It means that by the time the last guy gets the money, the prices have already fully kicked up.
So this guy getting the same dollar is now only going to be able to buy less with that dollar.
And there are all kinds of perverse incentives and disincentives that come out of that.
So there has been, quote, a shifting of real resources away from the later receivers of new money toward the first spenders of the new money.
And the point of the article is that this is where the inequality is.
The inequality occurs because the early spenders of the new money are sort of the guys who get a bonanza.
And the late receivers of the new money are the ones who pay the real price.
There's a redistribution of wealth away from the last receiver toward, you may call it, the first spender.
You've seen the news, and it's big, and it's not good.
U.S. consumer prices soared 6.8% compared to last year.
Well, it's the biggest increase in 40 years.
Since 1982, we need to protect our investments from this out-of-control administration, or we're not going to have a whole lot left for the future.
You've got to save, and you've got to put your savings in the right place.
You're making a mistake if you're not diversifying your savings.
Hold gold in a tax-sheltered account, or just hold gold at your home and you're safe.
I buy my gold from Birch Gold.
It's the only company I trust and recommend.
And when you buy gold from Birch Gold by December 23rd, they'll send you free gold for every $10,000 that you purchase.
First time they've ever offered free gold.
With thousands of satisfied customers and A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, you can trust Birch Gold to protect your savings.
Text Dinesh to 989898 to claim eligibility for their free gold with purchase offer by December 23rd.
Again, text Dinesh to 989898.
And protect your savings today.
Was Abraham Lincoln a Republican?
I think we all know the answer to that one.
But according to Google and according to Wikipedia and according to a leftist on social media named Diane Rawson...
This is where I found out about it.
And this is a guy who's chastising me.
I'm just going to read the quote, and it's obviously not about him.
It's leading me into my topic.
He goes, quote, Lincoln left the Republican Party and joined the National Union Party.
How do you not know that?
Dinesh D'Souza is not a historian.
All right. Abraham Lincoln left the Republican Party, and I'm like, where does this nonsense come from?
And I find out, yes, it comes from Google, and yes, it comes from Wikipedia.
You can try it for yourself.
Just go to Google and search Abraham Lincoln, and you'll see the site that comes up right at the top.
It's actually the Wikipedia graph, and I'm going to sort of hold it up, but maybe we can put it on the podcast because you may not be able to see it very clearly.
But here we go. Abraham Lincoln, photo of Abraham Lincoln, And then all you do is peek a little bit down and it says National Union Party.
National Union Party. Now, let me sort of unravel this a little bit.
Abraham Lincoln was, in his early career, and this is obviously well known, he was a Whig.
This is when the only two parties, or the two leading parties, were the Democrats and the Whigs.
Then the Whig Party collapsed in 1854.
The Republican Party was founded.
Abraham Lincoln was one of the founders.
He's obviously the first Republican president.
And he was a Republican from 1854 to 1864.
For a whole decade. Now, in the 1864 election, in the middle of the war, in fact, as it turned out, one year from the end of the war, the Republican Party decided, look, this has now become a sectional conflict between the North and the South, and there are Democrats in the North.
We want to win the votes of the so-called War Democrats.
So not the Copperheads who were the Democrats who were in sympathy with the Confederacy, but there was a portion of so-called War Democrats who supported the Union.
So in the 1864 campaign, the Republican Party decided to campaign under the National Union Party because, of course, they had been arguing from the beginning of the war that this is a fight over the Union.
And so, the National Union Party was simply the name that the Republican Party temporarily took for the 1864 election.
I'm now quoting from a Civil War scholarly site, quote,"...the National Union Party was the name used by the Republican Party for the national ticket in the 1864 election." And it goes on to say that state Republican parties continue to call themselves Republican parties.
There was no change in the nature of the Republican Party.
Quote, Republicans loyal to Lincoln created a new name for their party.
Notice, not a new party, a new name for their party, quote, in order to accommodate the war Democrats who supported the war and wished to separate themselves from the Copperheads.
And then here's the key point, which just shows how unhistorical Wikipedia is and Google is, and this is where, of course, this moron and others get it.
Quote, historians regard the National Union Coalition of 1864 as part of the Republican Party lineage and heritage.
So, the point here is Lincoln never left the Republican Party.
The Republican Party, you may say for branding reasons, in a single election, the 1864 election, decided to call itself the National Union Party.
Now, after Lincoln was assassinated, a Democrat came to power.
This was Andrew Johnson, and he continued the National Union label for some years, but upon the expiration of Johnson's sole term in 1869, the National Union Party was dissolved.
They stopped even using that name.
It was back to the Republican Party.
Historians recognize there's a line of continuity in the Republican Party.
Yes, they decided to sort of use a different label for the 1864 election, but the idea that Lincoln left the Republican Party was somehow not a Republican.
I think the fact that they're listing him as National Union Party is simply an effort by people who should know better, and perhaps do know better, to conceal the fact that Abraham Lincoln was on our side.
Ever since I was a kid, my mom would say to me, Dinesh, you've got to eat your fruits, you've got to eat your vegetables.
And I was kind of okay with the fruits, but not so okay on the vegetables.
And it turns out there are relatively few Americans who actually eat the recommended servings of produce every day.
I guess part of it is taste.
Part of it is difficult to prepare that much produce daily.
Well, here's a solution. It's called balance of nature.
By taking Balance of Nature, you're giving your body all the nutrients it needs to increase your cell's vitality.
Get the nutrition that can only be found in whole natural fruits and vegetables.
Debbie and I take 10 daily servings of fruits and veggies.
They're all in six small capsules.
Boom, there. No trouble swallowing.
Always fresh. Nothing artificial.
They smell great. And Debbie also swears by the fiber and spice.
I'm taking it too.
We like it. Invest in your health.
Invest in your life. Join me and experience the Balance of Nature difference for yourself for years to come.
For a limited time, All new preferred customers get an additional 35% discount and free shipping on your first Balance of Nature order.
Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751.
Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a guy who is a real scholar, a real thinker.
His name is Stephen Meyer.
He got his PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge University.
He directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.
His most recent book, he's written a bunch of them.
The most recent one is called Return of the God Hypothesis.
Stephen, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
Hey, I hear you're also doing a series of Prager University videos on the themes that we're about to talk about.
I did some videos on the American founding.
Your videos are on the issue of origin.
Say a word about the PragerU videos and what they are about.
Yeah, absolutely. The PragerU people do a great job of distilling a lot of interesting content in a very short period of time.
So they have these usually five-and-a-half-minute videos.
I did a five-part series on some of the main elements in the argument that I developed in the book.
It's a series on the scientific evidence for the existence of God.
When I left after filming the last one, they said, well, congratulations.
Next to Dinesh D'Souza, you've I've now done more PragerU videos than anyone else we've worked with.
So you've done, of course, a wonderful series on the American founding.
Well, it's incredible the kind of reach those videos have.
And let's talk a little bit about the type of work that you do, Stephen, because, you know, here you have in the Bible, in the Old and the New Testament...
Kind of oracular pronouncements.
You know, God said, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
But what you do is you approach those questions, you may almost call it from the other way around, you approach it along the pathway of reason, looking at the discoveries of science to see if these oracular pronouncements hold up or not.
And would you describe what you're doing?
Am I describing what you're doing accurately?
Yeah, that's a very good description.
I've always been interested in questions that are at the intersection between science and philosophy or science and religion.
And some of the most important questions of that type have to do with ultimate origins, the origin of life, the origin of the universe.
And what I do in this most recent book and previous books is look at the scientific discoveries, what we've discovered scientifically about those discoveries.
Those key issues, those key subjects, those key questions about where things came from, and also then look at what the scientific discoveries imply about the larger worldview questions.
One of the big questions that every worldview has to answer, every philosophy, is what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes?
Is it a mind or is it an undirected material process?
This is a debate that's gone back to the ancient Greeks.
And what I argue in all three of my books, but particularly in this last one, is that the evidence that we have about biological and cosmological origins, the scientific information we have, suggests that the mind-first view of reality provides better overall explanatory power for what we see in the natural world.
I mean, it seems like you're very much adopting a scientific methodology.
I mean, even the title of your book, when you use the phrase, the God hypothesis, it's almost as if you're saying, look, provisionally, let's treat it as a scientific hypothesis.
Let's test it against the evidence.
So let's actually do that right now.
You offer three separate lines of argument that are argued in exquisite detail in your book, but I just want to touch upon the highlights of them.
Let's start with the first argument, which is the huge discovery, basically in the last 100 years, the absolute positive proof that this universe of ours, not the Earth, but the whole universe, the whole shebang, had a beginning.
Now, talk about why that is so significant and what does that simple fact that the universe had a beginning tell us about origins?
Yeah, well, the story of the discovery itself is fascinating, but it does conclude with exactly that proposition that I'm defending, which is that the universe had a beginning.
And when we talk about the universe, we're talking about matter and energy and space and time as well.
It's an implication of our best theory of gravity called general relativity that Einstein developed about 100 years ago.
And the idea that if the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy itself came into existence, it becomes impossible, or at least highly implausible, to posit a prior material state.
Because after all, it's matter that comes into existence.
Before the matter originates, before the energy originates, there's no matter there to do the causing.
So the discovery that the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy...
At the beginning suggests a cause, a profile for the ultimate cause that has the following attributes.
It must transcend matter, energy, space, and time.
And it must also be capable of initiating a great change of state from nothing to something.
And that sounds like a volitional act of an agent of great power Who is outside of time and space in some sense, transcendent in the way that theologians have talked about.
So, positing a theistic creator, a God with those attributes, actually provides a satisfying explanation, what philosophers call a causally adequate explanation for the phenomenon, whereas a materialistic worldview, which proposes an eternal self-existent universe, is inconsistent with the evidence and does not provide a causally adequate explanation, because there's again no matter there to do the causing before matter comes into existence.
I mean this is such an interesting and profound point.
I want to try to state it a slightly different way and see if you agree with my way of putting it.
Sure. What you're saying is that at the moment of the Big Bang, the so-called singularity, that kind of infinite point at which the universe comes into existence, that prior to that—and in fact, we even have to put the word prior into quote marks because prior implies a point in time—but there was no time,
and there was no space, and there was no matter— And therefore, it makes no sense to talk about either matter or space or time as being the cause of the universe, because they are the consequence, not the cause.
There has to be a cause of the universe that is not bound by space, that is not bound by time, and that is not material.
Is that true or false?
Yeah, that's beautifully put. And another way to turn that is just to say, on theism, a creation event, a beginning to the universe, is expected given theism.
It's completely unexpected given scientific materialism.
Therefore, the discovery of a beginning confers greater support on a theistic worldview than on a materialistic one.
I mean, you have a beautiful quote, which is from one of the discoverers of the so-called Big Bang, where he says what?
Oh, this is probably Arno Penzias.
He says that the best data we have, the best scientific data we have concerning the beginning, are exactly what I would have expected if I had nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.
And now we're all familiar with the first words of the Bible, in the beginning, and that's, of course, exactly what modern astrophysics has discovered, that there was such a beginning to, as you put it, the whole shebang, the whole universe.
But in the Psalms and in the Hebrew prophets and other places in the Bible, in the New Testament...
As well, you get an affirmation that time is a created entity and that the universe is expanding.
There's about a dozen separate references to the universe either being, the God either having stretched out or God stretching out the heavens.
And this was a very striking aspect of the biblical view of the origin of the universe.
And a number of cosmologists have noticed this, that that's exactly what modern cosmology has discovered.
the universe is expanding outward in the forward direction of time, but that's been revealed by the characteristic signature of light coming from distant galaxies.
But then if you back up that time clock and in your mind's eye back extrapolate, that expanding universe in the forward direction of time would at every progressive point in the reverse direction of time be closer and closer and closer together until finally you can't extrapolate back any further. And that point marks the beginning of the universe.
Very interesting. Let's take a pause. When we come back, we're going to move on to argument number two, which is generally called, and you call it, the fine-tuned universe.
Who would have guessed that I could offer you a solution to pain, to aches and pains, which come to us all eventually, whether from a normal wear and tear of time or from injury.
But now, there's a 100% drug-free solution.
It's called Relief Factor.
Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation.
That's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor order more.
Why? Because it works for them.
Debbie's been suffering with frozen shoulder for a couple of years now.
She said, okay, I'm gonna give it a try.
She found it works amazingly well.
The pain, poof, was gone.
And Debbie knows if she doesn't take it regularly, the pain's gonna come right back.
So she's made a vow never to be without Relief Factor again.
Hey, being able to lift her arm and exercise is super important to her.
And Relief Factor is the tool she needs.
she's glad she's got it. Now you too can benefit. Try it for yourself. You'll see.
Order the 3-week quick start. It's only $19.95, discounted price. Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more about the offer.
Again, the number 833-690-7246 or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. I'm back with Stephen Meyer, the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, author of Return of the God Hypothesis.
Stephen, we were talking about the argument from beginnings, from the fact that the universe has a beginning.
Before I jump on to argument number two, I do want to mention and have you spell out that Einstein, whose own equations and theory of relativity predicted a beginning, Was unhappy with the idea of a beginning and in a sense fudged his equations to try to make that not be so.
Talk a little bit about why Einstein, a great scientist, might have been motivated to do that.
Well, at that time in his career, in the late teens and early 20s, he was still very much a dedicated scientific materialist.
I think there was a shift in his worldview over time.
But a great physicist from Princeton in the 60s, Robert Dickey, explained the unease that many physicists felt about the Big Bang Theory when it was first proposed.
He said, an infinitely old universe Would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.
If the universe has always been here, then we can say that the universe is the thing from which everything else comes and materialism holds.
But if the universe itself comes into existence, then as I was mentioning in the last segment, it becomes very difficult to explain the origin of the universe materialistically because, again, it's matter that comes into existence and there's no matter before that that could have caused that event.
Einstein was acutely aware of this.
He actually accused...
George Lamatra, the Belgian Catholic priest, who was probably the ultimate author of the Big Bang Theory, of doing so on the basis of Christian theology.
And Lamatra bristled at that and said, no, actually, it's your worldview that's holding you up from seeing what the scientific evidence is showing.
And what Einstein did was his theory of general relativity implies that matter actually curves space.
And there's a space-time.
And so if the only force that exists in the universe was gravity, then we should live in a giant black hole.
But since we don't live in a giant black hole, since there's empty space between all the bodies, the galaxies and so forth, there must be some outward pushing force that counteracts gravity that's creating the expansion that creates the space.
And that was the natural implication of his theory.
But he fiddled with the equations to try to get the force of gravity and the force of the outward pushing force exactly balanced so he could continue to portray the universe as static.
As I like to say in the book, the heavens talked back and the evidence showed that the universe is actually expanding.
And later Einstein recanted, he went out to California to Mount Wilson, visited the astronomer Edwin Hubble and saw the evidence for himself and later said that denying the evidence for the beginning of the universe was the greatest blunder of his life.
Let's talk about the second argument that you unfurl in the book.
An argument that is sometimes called the fine tuning argument.
You use the phrase, which I guess other physicists do as well, that we live in a Goldilocks universe.
And I take it by Goldilocks, the idea that the universe is sort of cooked just right.
It's not too hot. It's not too cold.
Say what we mean when we talk about the phrase, a Goldilocks universe.
Yeah, it's just a colloquial way of talking about the fine-tuning, that there are this ensemble of physical parameters that, for no underlying physical or logical reason, have very precise values or strengths, We're good to go.
And the question is, why do we have a universe where the outward pushing force I was talking about is called the cosmological constant?
It's fine-tuned to one part, and then the 90th power is an accepted value.
That's just one of those parameters.
There are only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the entire universe, so the odds of getting that one parameter...
Right. It would be roughly the odds of sending a blindfolded man out into space, looking for one marked elementary particle, but not just in our universe, but in 10 billion universes our size.
The degree of fine-tuning is beyond exquisite.
We don't really have adjectives to capture it.
So as one physicist, great physicist, Sir Fred Hoyle, Put it, a common sense interpretation of the physics suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible.
The fine tuning suggests a fine tuner.
And I mean, I think these statements including Hoyle's statement are important because it's not as if Hoyle was happy to say that.
It's almost as if these physicists Are themselves leaning in the atheist direction but are dragged, kicking, and screaming by the fine-tuning evidence to say, we don't see any other way that this could have come about.
Now, there is a sort of a fallback position, as you know, and there are scientists today who recognize that the combination of elements producing our universe is so unlikely that the only way to sort of explain them is to hypothetically posit, without a shred of empirical evidence,
that there are Millions, if not an infinity of other universes, and out of this kind of unbelievable infinity of universes that just happens to be one, ours, that happens to have all these exquisite qualities that make possible life, why do you think that this notion of an infinity of universes never observed and never detected by any scientific instrument, why is that not something that is easy to believe in?
Well, it's fantastic and exotic in that sense, but it has, even if we posit it as a logically possible explanation, it has a very serious defect.
It's called the multiverse and the multiverse hypothesis requires as a condition of its success Not just the existence of all those other universes and there in a millions wouldn't wouldn't do it It would have to be quasi infinite to account for the degree of fine-tuning the improbability of those parameters We're talking about but a condition of the success of that explanation is not just that there are the other universes But there's some type of underlying universe generating mechanism that allows us to portray our universe as a kind of
Lucky winner in a great cosmic lottery if we just have other universes that are causally disconnected from our own Then what happens in those other universes has no effect on our universe including whatever set the fine-tuning parameters So therefore in virtue of that the multiverse proponents have proposed these underlying universe generating mechanisms And that's where the rub comes in Even in theory these universe generating mechanisms some based on string theory some based on what's called inflationary cosmology But even in theory these universe generating mechanisms
themselves require prior unexplained fine-tuning So the fine-tuning is never actually explained.
It's just pushed out a few and located in the fine-tuning mechanism, the universe-generating mechanism, ultimately, but without explanation.
So I think they fail to explain what they're trying to explain, which is the source of fine-tuning.
Not to mention the fact that the fine-tuning argument, I mean, what I love about this, Stephen, is that there's a breathtaking simplicity here.
We're using the logic of Occam's razor.
Hey, gee, if we see all this fine-tuning, the most obvious explanation is a fine-tuner, right?
And it doesn't take a whole bunch of faith to go from the fine-tuning to the fine-tuner.
It seems to me to take a lot more faith to go from the fine-tuning to go, wait a minute, The reason that we have this particular symphony is there's an infinity of symphonies out there with all kinds of random noises, and one of them just happens to be, you know, Mozart, and that's our universe.
I mean, that seems to be far more ridiculous to require far more faith than simply to go, we've got Mozart's symphony, and you know what?
There's probably some Mozart who came up with it.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just all the other universes.
It's also the theoretical entities that are presupposed in these speculative cosmological models of inflationary cosmology and string theory.
You actually have to conjoin them to explain all the fine-tuning.
And then you have to believe in extra unobserved dimensions of space.
With string theory, you have to believe in something called an inflaton field with the inflationary cosmology.
And I actually count them up.
There's about 10 different theoretical entities, pure theoretical postulates, for which we can have no direct empirical evidence.
Now, we obviously can't have direct empirical evidence of God either.
But the question is, since we have to posit something unobservable Observable to explain the origin and fine-tuning of our universe.
What's a simpler explanation?
One God or many universes and all those underlying theoretical entities that come with the universe-generating mechanisms?
Let's take a pause.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Stephen Meyer about the third line of evidence that points to the God, the accuracy of the God hypothesis.
Cool thing about MyPillows, they not only have a cornucopia-wide array of products, but they're always introducing new products.
Mike's latest product, MySlippers.
Mike has taken over two years to develop these slippers, designed to wear indoor or outdoor all day long, made with MyPillow foam and impact shell to help prevent fatigue.
They're made with quality leather suede.
Perfect Christmas present for yourself or for family members, for anyone else.
For a limited time, Mike is offering 50% off the new MySlippers.
The MySlippers are so comfortable, you're going to want to get some for the whole family.
We actually did. Here's Danielle with her moccasins.
Of course, Debbie and I just love ours.
I got the moccasins.
Debbie got the slip-ons. Go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Dinesh.
You'll get deep discounts, by the way, on all the MyPillow products.
The Giza Dream bedsheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, the robes, the MyPillow towel sets.
Call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure you use promo code Dinesh.
I'm back with Stephen Meyer, the Director for the Center of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, author of Return of the God Hypothesis.
Stephen, we've been talking about two lines of evidence, the idea that the universe had a beginning, positing that an immaterial force might have created it, also the idea of a fine-tuned universe pointing to a fine-tuner, Let's turn to the third line of evidence.
And here I want to introduce the atheist Richard Dawkins, who once made the statement that it was Darwin, he says, who made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
And I think what Dawkins was getting at, and this comes right out of his book on The Blind Watchmaker, he basically says that the argument from design...
To a designer has been invalidated by Darwin.
Why? Because we can now explain the appearance of design, the fact that human beings appear to be, and other beings appear to be, functionally adapted to the environment.
We can explain this by natural selection, by survival of the fittest, by the various ingredients of what can be called Darwinian evolution.
But your argument ingeniously takes off from a point That is almost, you can say, prior to evolution.
So try to lay out the argument you're making and how it is in no way, not only refuted, but not even challenged by evolution.
Right. Even before you can get an evolutionary process going, you have to have life.
And the origin of the first life turns out to be a scientific mystery from a materialistic evolutionary standpoint that is now universally acknowledged.
Even people, especially people, working on the question of abiogenesis called origin of life researchers.
And this is what my Ph.D., It was addressed in Cambridge was origin of life biology.
People working in the field acknowledged that we're nowhere close to explaining the origin of life materialistically.
And I mean, my own supervisor told me that coming back from an origin of life conference, we're at a complete impasse.
He said, our field is becoming dominated by quacks and pranks.
Everyone knows that everyone else's theory isn't working, but they're not willing to admit it about their own.
And there's really a more fundamental reason for that, and that is that the big discoveries of modern molecular biology have shown that what we once thought of as the simple cell is not simple at all.
It's a complex information storage, transmission, and processing system, or rather it contains one.
It's chock full of miniature nanomachines, little miniature molecular machines in a form of informational nanotechnology.
And the attempt to explain these systems by reference to undirected material processes has utterly failed.
And instead, each of these things that I just mentioned, in particular the digital codes stored in the DNA, reveal, I think, the activity of a mind.
They're the kinds of things that we know only minds produce.
So I think there's a positive case for intelligent design to be made about the discoveries of modern molecular biology, not just a critique of these evolutionary ideas.
Let's come back to the digital code or the computer code that is inside of the cell and makes up its DNA. Is it a fact or is it not a fact that when Darwin was talking about evolution, he was talking about how one life form can transition into another?
In no way did Darwin even attempt to explain how did we get life in the first place.
Darwin is talking about how you go from life form A to life form B to life form C, but what you're focusing on is you're saying, listen, all of life has something in common, and that's DNA. And as we burrow our way into the cell, we discover inside of it not just a complex machinery, but a complex code.
And the code is an information code, and the information code suggests some form of a directing intelligence that Because who put it there?
Where do we get the code? Right, right.
This is the great discovery that Darwin knew nothing about.
1953, Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of DNA. Five years later, Crick formulates something called the sequence hypothesis, in which he posits that the chemical subunits that run along the interior of the twisting double helix molecule, they're called nucleotide bases,
so that these bases are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language, or like the zeros and ones, the digital characters that we use in software today, which is to say it's not the physical or chemical properties of these Chemical elements that give the DNA its function, but rather their arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention that was later discovered and is now known as the genetic code.
So we have a genetic text translated by a genetic code, and that's what's going on inside the cell.
What we know from experience is that information, especially in an alphabetic or digital form, always comes from an intelligent source.
Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever We know that software comes from programmers.
We know that information in a book or a radio signal or a hieroglyphic inscription similarly always comes from a mind, not an undirected material process.
So I argue in my first book, Signature in the Cell, and in this more recent book, that the digital information present at the foundation of life provides a powerful indicator of the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.
I mean, it's so telling to me that Francis Crick, who was, of course, a kind of dyed-in-the-wool atheist, when he recognized that from the very beginning, in the simplest form of life, you had to have this highly complex organization.
He actually said, well, listen, there's no way.
He knew that there would be no way this could somehow just spring into existence on the Earth.
So he said that intelligent aliens from out of space must have shown up and seeded this kind of life on Earth.
I mean, you can see the extent to which these guys have to engage in science fiction fantasy in order to try to explain something and avoid having to use, well, let's just call it the G word.
Yeah, it's the analog to the multiverse hypothesis in the other subject area we were discussing.
Scientific atheism is getting kind of weird.
We're positing multiverses and simulation hypotheses, whether we all exist in the mind of a computer programmer idea, or alien designers, the panspermia idea.
Even Richard Dawkins has floated that idea in an interview with Ben Stein in a film several years ago.
And Dawkins this summer said he was knocked sideways with wonder at the complexity of the informational data processing system inside the cell.
He acknowledges that it's the machine code of the genes, he says, is uncannily computer-like.
Well, hello, that's not just the appearance of design, that's evidence of actual design.
And it is so because of what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning.
This is how Darwin reasoned in the origin of species.
The present is the key to the past.
What we know in the present is that it takes a mind to generate information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form.
So the discovery of information in even the simplest living cells points to the activity of a designing mind.
That's what we know about the cause and effect structure of the world.
It's not an argument from ignorance or a God of the gaps argument.
This is a scientific argument based on, again, our uniform and repeated experience of what it takes to generate information.
We know of no other cause that creates coding systems or digital code.
And isn't it also a fact, Stephen, that let's just say, let's just go with the Crick idea and say, let's say that intelligent aliens from outer space came and deposited this complex machinery on Earth.
Well, where'd the aliens come from?
Where'd they get their creative intelligence?
Who put it there? So, in other words, it just kicks the question again off away from Earth to Mars or some other planet, but in no way does it explain the origin of intelligence, does it?
It doesn't explain the origin of the information that would be necessary to get the evolutionary process going on that planet Which would have ultimately resulted in an intelligent alien and the other thing it doesn't explain Dinesh is what we were talking about in the last segment the fine-tuning of the universe Which much of which was set from the very beginning of the universe?
So no being within the cosmos that arises long after the beginning could explain the origin of the fine-tuning Present from the beginning of the universe nor could such an alien designer hypothesis explain the origin of the universe itself the Big Bang So again, what I argue in the book is that theism provides a better, more comprehensive explanation because it accounts for the three key evidences that we're looking at, whereas maybe panspermia, the space alien designer, can account for biological design on Earth,
but it doesn't account for fine-tuning or the origin of the universe.
Similarly, deism might account for the origin of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe, but it doesn't account for the evidence of design that arises long after the beginning, because a deistic creator doesn't act except at the beginning of the universe.
And materialism doesn't explain any of these three things, and yet that's the dominant worldview still held by many prominent spokespersons for science.
I think that's changing, and that's why I call it the return of the God hypothesis.
Wow. Thank you, Stephen Meyer, for a really stimulating conversation.
I really appreciate it.
You too, Dinesh. Great questions and good discussion.
Export Selection