Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, argues science—like the universe’s fine-tuning, digital cell code, and the Cambrian explosion’s sudden complexity—supports intelligent design, contradicting 19th-century methodological naturalism. He cites Yale’s David Galarenter and German paleontologist Gunter Beckley as shifting toward his view despite institutional resistance, framing it as a heuristic alternative to explain life’s origins. Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis and ReturnToTheGodhypothesis.com detail this case, suggesting science may yet revive theistic explanations after decades of exclusion. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Stephen Meyer.
When people who believe in Jesus Christ, who believe in God at all, talk about science, there are generally three positions they can take.
One, you could call the literalist position, which is that if they read the Bible to say a certain thing and science says that thing isn't so, then they just say, well, the science has to be wrong and they dismiss it.
And I don't believe that that is actually a tenable position, a position you can continue to hold because scripture and nature and reason and science are all gifts of God.
And I think they're meant to speak to one another and be reconciled with one another.
And we have to keep our minds open to the information coming in from all of them.
Then there's the weak position, which is the position I used to hold, which is that there's nothing in science that contradicts the notion of God.
There's nothing here that's going to take away from your faith.
And like I said, I used to hold that position, but I don't anymore.
Now I hold what I would call the strong position, which is that science, in fact, is increasingly pointing toward the reality of God and making it almost impossible not to have faith.
It's almost against the science not to have faith.
And that position, I think, one of the most eloquent spokesmen for that position is Stephen Meyer, who has been saying for quite a long time that the science, to not believe in God because of science, is actually to be stuck about 100 years ago into a way of looking at science that simply does not hold true anymore.
Stephen is the director of the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, which is in Seattle.
He always has a lot to say on the subject, and I'm always happy to see him.
Steve, thank you for being here.
It's great to see you.
I'm delighted to be back in conversation with you, Andrew.
That was great.
And a nice introduction.
That's the three models of science-faith interaction that I present in, I used to present when I was teaching philosophy of science.
The second model being still the most popular among a lot of people of faith, Stephen Jay Gould called it NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria, the idea that science speaks about the facts, religion speaks about values and metaphysics, but there's no possible connection between the two.
So it's a defensive position that leaves people of faith feeling safe, but there's no positive evidence for their belief.
And yet I think there is very strong positive evidence in cosmology, in physics, biology.
The major subjects of science are now revealing things that I think not only comport with theistic belief, but actually point to it.
Yeah, I moved over to that position not only because I was moving over to that position, but when I read your book, The Return of the God hypothesis, that definitely solidified my feeling that way.
For those who didn't watch our interview over the return of the God hypothesis, maybe you could sum up why you feel this is true, just so we know the basis of what we're talking about.
Right.
And just to put it in a little historical context, I'm here in Cambridge, England right now.
And this is the city of Sir Isaac Newton, for example, and his tutor, Isaac Barrow, and before him, John Ray.
And the scholars call this tradition of thought British natural theology.
And that science actually came out of this idea that the natural world was revealing something about the reality of God.
It was the two books metaphor coming out of the Middle Ages, that God reveals himself, as you mentioned, through scripture, but he also reveals himself through nature.
And the conviction of the early scientists was that the witness of those two books was ultimately in agreement.
And that moreover, because God had made our minds in his image, we could understand the natural world that he also made as a revelation.
So this was the idea of intelligibility, that God made our minds.
A rational creator made the universe and he gave evidence of his design in the universe and he built it in an orderly way.
And we could understand that order and design because he also made our minds to function as a reflection of the way he thought.
So that, as Kepler put it, we have the high calling as natural philosophers to think God's thoughts after him.
So science started in this theistic Judeo-Christian milieu.
And many of the scientists working at that period of time also were finding evidence of design in nature.
Newton most dramatically and writing about it in the general scolium, his theological epilogue to the Principia.
But that sort of approach to science was lost in the late 19th century.
And you had figures like Darwin, who had a great origin story, Marx, who had a utopian vision of the future, and Freud and other figures who were operating out of a materialistic framework.
And between them, they answered the great questions that Judeo-Christian religion had answered before.
Where did we come from?
That was Darwin's theory.
Where are we going?
What is our eschatology?
That was Freud.
And then, or sorry, Marx.
And then Freud had an account of what we should do about the human condition and our guilt.
So you get this kind of comprehensive materialistic worldview supported allegedly by our best science.
And the 19th century, people thought it was.
And so you come into the 20th century and you have a kind of sense where most elite intellectuals, especially scientifically informed people, are thinking that science and faith are in conflict and science and faith and God are in conflict.
And the story of the book, Return of the God Hypothesis, is the story of three great scientific discoveries that are returning that theistic perspective or bringing that theistic perspective back to many scientists, or should be, I think, if people haven't quite gotten the memo yet.
So, and those three discoveries are that the universe had a beginning, that the universe has been finely tuned against all odds from the beginning to make it possible for life to exist, and that within even the simplest living cells,
we have an exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology, digital code that's directing the construction of sophisticated proteins and protein machines that bears all the hallmarks of an intelligently designed system that we would recognize from our own world of high-tech digital technology.
And so, we have evidence of a creation event, evidence of design from the beginning of the universe, and evidence of design down the timeline when you see the first life arising.
And even what in Darwin's time, people thought of a very the first cell was very simple and thought that therefore it would be easy to explain how you could evolve the complex starting from the simple.
We now know that even the very simplest, the simplest thing is extraordinarily complex, and it contains information in a digital form, which is an indicator in our experience of the activity of a mind.
So, that's the argument.
All right.
Well, no, I have some questions I want to ask that have occurred to me since reading your book.
Sir, before I do, in the arts, which is my field, you know, I see Jesus being edited out of places where he would normally occur.
So, in biographies of men who believed, like Dostoevsky, he's kind of minimized in movies of Johnny Cash, who dedicated his life to Christ.
There's a seven-second scene where he sort of looks at a church longingly, and that's it.
And I see this happen again and again.
Is the same kind of thing happening in the scientific world?
Is the idea of God being edited out of science?
Well, this was a major shift that took place in the late 19th century because science, as I said, started in this Judeo-Christian milieu in Western Europe.
And historians wonder about, you know, this was something that fairly recent scholarship in the history of science, people finally tumbled to.
They were asking a question, the why, then, why there question.
What was different in Western Europe that accounted for the rise of modern science with its systematic ways of investigating and interrogating nature?
And Herbert Butterfield and AC Crombie and leading historians of science finally came to the conclusion that the thing that was different was the presuppositional context of Western Christianity and that the assumption that nature was intelligible, the assumption that there was an order there to find.
But then in the late 19th century, the framework for doing science shifted.
And part of the argument that Darwin made was not only an argument for the causal power of an undirected, unguided, purposeless creation process, which he called natural selection acting on random variations, but also the idea that science must, by definition, limit itself to strictly materialistic explanations for everything.
And philosophers of science have a term for this canon of method.
It's called methodological naturalism.
It's a big, it's a mouthful, but all it means is that if you're going to be a scientist, you must explain everything by reference to undirected material processes.
And that means you cannot see evidence of design.
You cannot talk about evidence of design as an explanation for why things are the way they are.
Now, that was a departure from the way science had been done up to that point in the 19th century.
Newton made design arguments.
Kepler made design arguments.
Rodber Boyle made design arguments.
This was part of the warp and woof of science.
And that in the late 19th century, coming into the 20th century, there was a methodological prohibition against considering creative intelligence as an explanation, even for the origin of the universe or for the origin of life.
So, and that just meant it didn't matter what the evidence said.
Scientists increasingly thought it was their duty to explain everything by reference to these undirected processes.
The Perfect Gene Debate00:03:02
Fast forward, and you get the molecular biological revolution in the 1960s.
You get the discovery of fine-tuning in physics.
And scientists start discovering things that on their face look as though they are the product of intelligence.
Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.
Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that DNA contains machine code.
Well, what do we know about what it takes to generate software?
It takes a program.
And so people have been trying for 50 years to explain the origin of the information necessary to build life by reference to undirected material processes, as the principle of methodological naturalism requires.
And they've come to a complete impasse.
Because what we're looking at, the information in the cell is of a kind that we know from our uniform and repeated experience always arises from a mind.
And so it's a kind of a barking up the wrong tree sort of phenomenon.
And yes, in many ways, it's analogous to what you're describing in the arts, where it's here, no design, see, no design.
We're not going to consider that as the possibility, even though we're now looking at attributes of life, attributes of the universe, which in any other realm of experience would immediately trigger an awareness that a creative intelligence had acted.
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So, all right, now this raises real questions for me, even though what you're saying makes perfect, it makes so much more sense than the materialist science when materialists, when guys like Dawkins, who really seems like a lovely fellow, but is obviously talking nonsense when he starts to talk about theology, which he knows nothing about.
Causal Origins Theory00:15:09
But now, my question is this: first, let me ask you this: Do you believe in evolution as a process that creates species?
That never mind, I know Jim Torr is always talking about the fact that no one has come close to understanding how life begins.
But once life begins, do you believe that evolution is a process that creates more and more species out of other species?
It generates small-scale variation, which and variation sufficiently different enough from the original form that we sometimes will identify the new groups as separate species.
But you may remember from high school biology that species are at the lowest level of the biological hierarchy and classification.
And the higher taxonomic ranks, there's an old acronym about, well, you have phyla and classes and orders and families and genus and down to species.
So small-scale variation enough to create differences in species, yes, probably enough to create differences in the genus, maybe up to the family level.
But the higher order differences, the larger differences in biological classification, which represent differences in body plan, fundamentally different ways of arranging body parts and tissues.
This, the evolutionary process does not explain well.
And increasingly, even people in evolutionary biology are acknowledging this.
It's the problem of the origin of body plans or the origin of the higher taxonomic categories.
So to make that more concrete, we probably remember the, your viewers will probably remember the example from biology of the Darwin's finches or the peppered moths.
These are the classic examples of natural selection in action changing things over time in discernible ways that represent, you know, you got two different colored moths or finches with different shapes and sizes of beaks.
But so the mutation selection mechanism does a good job of explaining that level of variation.
It does not do a good job of explaining the origin of birds and mammals and animals in the first place.
And there's a number of reasons for that that have to do with the way things work at a mechanistic level in biology.
But I go into that in my book, Darwin's Doubt, and show that there's a real problem with explaining large-scale, what they call morphological innovation.
Small-scale variation, yes.
Large-scale morphological innovation, no.
And we have many instances in the fossil record of big jumps in form, that would be morphological innovation, that occur abruptly without ancestral intermediates or precursors in the lower strata beneath the place where those new forms arise.
And so the picture of life in the fossil record is one of, yes, small-scale variation, but big jumps or discontinuity when you get to those higher levels of classification.
And that's the problem.
Where do the big new things come from?
So this may seem like a silly question, but I am going somewhere with it.
If I had a camera that could take pictures of the past, what do you think we would see when a new, you know, when birds come into existence?
What do you think would be in front of us when that happened?
Yeah, that's what I don't think we can really answer.
What we see in the fossil record is this abrupt appearance.
I wrote a whole book about maybe the most dramatic such instance.
It's called about the Cambrian explosion, which is where most of the major animal groups first arise.
So the first fishes, the first arthropods, trilobites, for example, the first echinoderms.
I mean, these major differences, and they arise very abruptly.
And there's just, you go in the lower Precambrian sedimentary strata, and there's just nothing like most of these major groups.
So if those of us who are God believers can imagine that, you know, God created something de novo, completely new, there's just simply no evidence of a gradual transformation.
So if you have a camera there, I mean, is it a poof event?
I mean, we really don't know.
The way I argue the case is not prospectively trying to get people to imagine, oh, what would it have looked like happening, but rather look at the evidence we have and then retrodict to the kind of cause that would be necessary to produce the effect in question.
And here's where the information thing comes into play again.
If you think about our, just in our own modern high-tech digital world, if you ask someone, what does it take to build a new program or operating system?
You want to give your computer a new function, what do you have to give it?
Well, we now know you have to give it code.
And the same thing turns out to be true in biology.
This was the great discovery of modern late 20th century biology following the Watson and Crick revolution is that inside even the simplest living cells, but in all living organisms, there is information.
And if you want to build a new form of life from a pre-existing form, you need new code to build the new parts, you know, the new proteins that would service the new cell types that would service the new anatomical structures.
So you got to have new code.
So biological form requires new biological information.
What we see in the history of life in the fossil record are repeated instances of new biological forms entering the biosphere as preserved in that fossil record.
That means there needed to be new information infused into the biosphere to generate those forms.
And it's at that point, I think we can safely say that we see evidence of intelligent design.
How the intelligent designer did it is in some ways as mysterious, biologically speaking, as the mind-body problem in our own that we encounter just in encountering another mind.
You and I are communicating, but we really don't know how we go from the mind-brain interface so that, you know, I have a thought and I communicate it.
And eventually there's some airwaves that are modulated in a way that you can then interpret and understand in your mind.
But we don't understand how the human mind interfaces with the brain to communicate, to generate information in our own experience.
But we know that minds do have that capability.
So when we see information, we can infer back to a mind, even if we don't know exactly what the mechanism was of transference of information from the mental realm to the physical.
So then my question is this.
I mean, I know what it looks like when you're talking to me, and I know you have a body and a brain and certain things go on in there that cause all these things.
And I understand that still what's being transferred has absolutely no physical being whatsoever.
The idea that you're speaking to me is not made of anything.
It's not made of the words you speak.
It's not made of the light in your head.
It's not made of any of those things.
But at least I understand what a scientist could do to sort of search for this answer.
If you're talking about a puff event where suddenly poof, there's birds, would that be the end of science?
Would that be where science would just say, like, you know, it's God and we don't understand?
Or is there is your point of view potentially leading to a science of God, a way of doing theology in a new way where science informs our theology?
Or what used to be called natural theology, yes.
And here it's important to understand, give a little more nuance in the philosophy of science and understanding that we always talk about the scientific method.
But it turns out that there are many more than just one, there's more than one scientific method.
And the scientific method that Darwin used was a distinctively historical way of reasoning.
He was reasoning from effects back to causes.
And there are many sciences that do this.
There's archaeology and cosmology and there's forensic science.
And so what I did in my PhD thesis was study Darwin's method of historical scientific reasoning and also how origin of life researchers, the people that Jim Tour is talking about, how they reason about the past.
And it turns out that the case that we've developed for intelligent design uses that same historical method of scientific reasoning.
And the key, the method has a name.
It's sometimes called the method of multiple competing hypotheses.
Sometimes it's called the method of inferring to the best explanation, where the best explanation posits a cause which we know from our uniform and repeated experience, giving you a little jargon, that is capable of generating the effect in question.
So when I came across this principle of reasoning, it's in Darwin, it's in the great geologist Lyell, I asked myself the question, well, what is the cause that we know of from our uniform and repeated experience that's capable of generating information, generating digital code?
And I came across a passage from an early scientist who was analyzing the informational properties of DNA.
And he said, well, you know, it's interesting because the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.
In our uniform and repeated experience, we know of only one cause that generates information, and that's a mind.
So if we do the historical scientific thing, we infer from the effect back to the cause based on what we know about cause and effect.
We now have an historical science of intelligent design because we have reason, we have a uniform, we have wide experience of minds generating information.
We find information in an artifact, a cell, absent any knowledge of what actually produced it.
We didn't have observational knowledge of that.
So we have to make an inference backwards in time to the most plausible causal entity.
What cause do we know can produce that information?
And there's really only one.
It's a mind.
So there's an historical scientific inference backwards in time to a causal origin story.
But then once you've inferred design, the science that you do going forward can look very different.
If the cell is a design entity, then that should lead us to see things inside living systems that we know intelligent agents produce.
So there was a big debate a number of years ago about the so-called junk DNA.
And all the Darwinists jumped to the conclusion that the non-coding regions of the DNA that don't code for proteins were the random, the products of the leftover product of random mutation and natural selection.
It was the kind of the flopsom and jetsom of the evolutionary process accumulating over time.
We thought, well, no, wait a minute.
We accept that evolution, natural selection is a real process, that mutations occur.
But on our point of view, we wouldn't have thought that 98% of the genome would be junk and only 2% would be signal.
We didn't think that the signal should be dwarfed by the noise.
So we predicted based on our conviction of intelligent design that the non-coding regions of the DNA should be importantly functional.
Whereas the Darwinists were content to assume that those regions were the product of random mutations and non-functional.
Well, lo and behold, 2011, 2012, you get this the ENCODE project starts publishing all of the results of the studies of the non-coding regions of DNA, and the intelligent design prediction turns out to have been the correct one, that all that non-coding DNA was importantly functional.
So one of the things that we're suggesting is that we can go out and look for known design patterns that we know from computer science, from computer engineering, and look for those sorts of things in living systems.
If life is designed, it should look differently than it would look if it were the product of a bottom-up, undirected material process.
And we can give you a lot of examples of where that design framework is leading to better science.
It's helping us make discoveries that wouldn't have been made otherwise.
That is actually like a shattering statement because the idea of scientists in a conversation with the creator is so much, so different than what you were describing before, this kind of methodological materialism.
It would actually be sort of a revolution.
Does it bother you as we enter the age of AI and possibly human enhancements?
I mean, they've already, Elon Musk has already got a guy hooked up to a computer.
Does it bother you that that's not the way science is being done?
I mean, it seems to me.
Well, sure.
Yeah, I mean, we're not only making an argument against Darwinian evolution or against chemical evolutionary theory.
And just again, to be clear, there's two contexts of science here.
There's the science of what happened in the past, and we have a different causal origins theory.
Okay, so that's a form of science, and it's not a science stopper.
It's just an alternative scientific theory about what happened.
But then going forward and examining how life works, our framework, because of our design framework, we have different expectations about the sorts of things we ought to find in living systems.
And we're making predictions about the presence of those things, and we're going and looking and we're finding them.
So it does lead to a more, we think, a more fruitful science.
The term for that in the philosophy of science is that our theory has heuristic value.
It's a guide to discovery.
And so we think that that is a very exciting and new way.
It leads to exciting new things.
But it does bother us that, in fact, the way to say it is that we're not only making an argument for intelligent design, we're challenging the way science has been done for the last 150 years and trying to take it back.
It's actually taking it back to the way science started.
No one has, people will say that Newton, because he believed in God and he believed that God was the ultimate cause of gravity and things like that.
They'll say, well, he was guilty of a God of the gaps argument, and therefore that was his theistic views were a science stopper, except that Newton was the most productive scientist in science.
He developed the theory of gravity.
He invented the calculus.
He developed the binomial theorem.
He made fundamental advances in optics.
I mean, so a belief in God can lead to a very productive science where the motivation, in fact, the title of his great book, The Principia or Principia, depending on how you like your Latin pronounce, was meant to, it had a subtle theological implication.
What was he discovering?
He was discovering the principles, the mathematical principles that govern the universe.
Where did those mathematical principles come from?
They were an expression of the ordering power of the creator.
And so he had his, Newton's tutor was a man named Isaac Barrow, a great mathematician, whose tutor was John Ray, who was the founder of British natural theology.
And Ray wrote a book called The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation.
And Newton was very much working in that train of thought.
He was expressing that natural theological idea that nature reveals the handiwork and intelligence, the mind of the creator.
So this brings me back elegantly enough since we're running out of time.
It brings me back sort of to the beginning.
You are actually proposing a revolution in the way science is done, the way science is thought about.
And it's a revolution that seems to me to make absolute sense.
If you have this institutional hostility to the idea of God, this fear, I think it's a fear that you will basically be saying to them, there's a place where science ends.
Young Talent Revolution00:02:47
Is anybody listening to you?
Are you making inroads?
Yeah, I think very much so.
We've had a number of high-ranking scientists either quietly or publicly announce a significant change of view.
Some rejecting Darwinism.
You may have seen the essay in the Claremont Review of Books a few years ago, just a few years ago, by David Galarenter, who wrote the chairman of the Yale Computer Science Department, who encountered our mathematical critique of the mutation selection mechanism and wrote an essay called Darwin Afon Farewell.
He said, you know, it's a beautiful theory.
It just can't account for the origin of the information that's necessary to explain new forms of life.
Gunter Beckley, a very prominent German paleontologist, was curating the 200-year bicentennial celebration for Darwin in the largest natural history museum in Stuttgart, Germany.
He created a display that subtly mocked the idea of intelligent design vis-a-vis Darwin.
And his colleagues said, well, if you're going to make fun of the intelligent design people, Gunter, you better read their books.
And now he says, that was my mistake.
And several years later, he announced publicly that he had come to, that he affirmed the theory of intelligent design and was now doing his work as a paleontologist within that framework of understanding.
So we had a number of cases like that.
But what to us is most exciting is the young talent we're attracting.
Our summer programs are busting out with young scientists who are ready to look at life in a new way, and they're finding it incredibly fruitful in their research, or they're interested in finding out about how to apply it in their research.
We also have an engineering research group that's working closely with biologists because it turns out that engineering principles are essential to explicating what's happening in biological systems.
Well, what does that tell you about their origin?
And what framework are those people working out of?
It's a design framework.
And so there's this whole revolution in biology that's sometimes called systems biology.
We don't just look at the molecules.
We look at the logic of the systems and how they were put together to understand them best.
So, yeah, and that way of looking at life is attracting a lot of young talent.
And so I think, you know, sometimes I think Thomas Kuhn said that scientific revolutions happen one funeral at a time.
And we don't wish anyone ill, but it is simply a fact of the matter that as a younger generation comes into science and they're finding, they're getting, they're connecting to people like Jim Tour on the internet or Gunter Beckley or many others, they're saying, hey, maybe there is a different way to look at living systems and maybe it's going to be more fruitful.
And I'd like to pursue my science within that framework.
Well, this has been one of my favorite interviews, which is only what I expect from Stephen Meyer.
Systems Biology Revolution00:00:47
Steve, thanks so much.
It's great to see you and really fascinating.
I know people can find your work at the Discovery Institute.
I know there are videos there that are just terrific.
It's always great to talk to you.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Yeah, fantastic.
Best website for our content or my content right now is the one for the new book, ReturnToTheGodhypothesis.com.
We've got animations and debates and then you can navigate to the work of other people in our network from there.
So that's a good site for people.
But thank you to be on.
Thanks.
Great to see you.
Thanks.
Excellent.
Okay.
Thank you.
Really fascinating.
Absolutely great talk.
I always love seeing him and talking to him and hearing what he has to say.
Go find him.
Return of the God Hypothesis is his site.
And my site is the Daily Wire, where you can see the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.