Stephen C. Meyer argues that cosmology, physics, and biology reveal a designing intelligence, countering materialists like Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson with evidence from the Big Bang, fine-tuning constants, and cellular information systems. He highlights how early Christian scientists viewed nature as intelligible and notes that design perspectives in genetics successfully predicted non-coding DNA functions confirmed by the ENCODE project. While acknowledging natural theology reveals divine attributes like wisdom, Meyer clarifies it cannot derive specific gospel truths, yet concludes that science increasingly supports a Creator behind our universe. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Self-Appointed Science Spokesmen00:12:58
The film starts with a number of, let's call them spokesmen for science.
One is Lawrence Krause, and I had a debate with him years ago where his opening salvo in the debate was usually when you are debating an issue, it's presumed that the person with whom you are speaking is worth talking to, and the issue that you are debating is worth discussing.
But tonight, alas, that's not true.
Wow.
Wow.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with my friend Stephen Meyer, just a terrific author.
He wrote a book called The Return of the God Hypothesis that I just love.
I recommend it to everybody.
I once teased him that it was such a good book that he made himself obsolete because he explained everything in a way that was inarguable.
His thesis being that science is now, it now points the way to God, not away from God.
I'm not sure whether it ever did, but it really is at least 100 years out of date to think it did.
And he is bringing this out.
As a film, this idea out as a film, a beautifully made film called The Story of Everything.
I haven't seen it on a big screen, but I will go and see it on a big screen because it's just, it's absolutely lovely to look at.
And just, it makes you feel that people who convince you that science has disproved God are not really paying attention.
Steve, it's great to see you.
It's great to be with you, Andrew.
And again, we keep running into each other in different wonderful places.
We do, we do.
And it's always a pleasure.
You're really good at this, I have to say.
It's like, it's not, you know, A lot of times, the people who argue in favor of God, you know, I believe them, but they're not really, they don't really have the facts and the gift to convey how strongly the new science can, you know, it doesn't, you can't prove the existence of God, but it certainly suggests powerfully the existence of God.
Tell me how this film, The Story of Everything, how it came to be.
Yeah, thank you.
I took three and a half years writing the book.
You mentioned the return of the god hypothesis, which was itself a culmination of several decades of work in the different scientific disciplines and in the philosophy of science.
In conjunction with the work of many colleagues, we have a network of scientists who are seeing the same thing that there's evidence of design in biology, there's evidence of design in physics, there's evidence of the beginning of the universe and cosmology.
When you start to add those three developments up and think about them carefully, there's a powerful case to be made for the reality not just of a designing intelligence.
But indeed, designing intelligence with the attributes that traditional theists, Jews, and Christians have long ascribed to God.
And so I'm not alone in this work.
My book, Return of the God Hypothesis, was itself a synthetic work drawing on the work of many others in our network of scientists and scholars.
So it's been a, for me, a lifelong investigation and journey.
Converting the film, adapting it for a theatrical release documentary, a new genre of filmmaking.
There was a company in Seattle called Cypher Films that had had two successful theatrical release documentaries to that point.
They've had a third since then.
And we've been working on it in conjunction with them.
A brilliant young director named Eric Esau, who is a great artist, but also loves the science and loves the philosophical dimensions of that.
So he's been great to work with.
And then the whole team of Producers, which included a very senior producer with a lot of Hollywood credits himself, Brian Bird, and our other colleague, Jason Paymer, who was the main force behind the previous documentaries that Cypher had done.
So we've had a great production team, and it's been with delays for COVID and the need to interview people overseas, like John Lennox at Oxford University and others.
There were some delays, but we finally got it done early this year.
It's a five year labor of love, and it releases in theaters.
Uh, April 30th through May 6th, this week here, coming up.
So, we're excited, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I don't blame you.
And it looks, it really looks great.
I mean, it just is beautiful to look at.
The film starts with a number of, let's call them spokesmen for science.
You know, like guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Carl Sagan from back in the day.
I don't know how many people remember him, but when I was a kid, he was science.
He was the guy who came on the shows.
And they all have these things that they say with a great deal of certainty and self-assurance and almost kind of sneering superiority.
Where they basically say, oh, this is ridiculous.
There's nothing out there.
It's all, you know, you die, you die.
And yet, even I, a writer of detective stories, can pick apart their arguments pretty easily.
And yet, they're the guys who are always elevated.
There is an element of smugness in the way that we communicate.
I'm glad that someone as smart as you detects that.
It's not just us.
I had a debate with one of the other spokesmen for science, and that's what I call them too.
You know, they're self appointed spokesmen for science.
One is Lawrence Krauss, and I had a debate with him years ago where his opening salvo in the debate was usually when you are debating an issue, it's presumed that the person with whom you are speaking is worth talking to, and the issue that you are debating is worth discussing.
But tonight, alas, that's not true.
Wow.
It went all pear shaped from there, as the Brits say.
But you know, we let these guys have their say in the film, especially in the opening, because it's so helpful to frame the issue.
I love Dawkins because he's so good at framing issues.
And he has this famous quote where he says, The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Well, no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference is shorthand for materialistic philosophy.
He's espousing a materialistic worldview.
Or metaphysical hypothesis.
And I love the quote because, first of all, it implies that metaphysical hypotheses, our big grand narratives, are as testable as our scientific hypotheses.
How do we test them?
Well, we see if the world that we look at, the properties we observe, match what we would expect to be the case if our grand theory, our meta narrative, our metaphysical hypothesis were true.
That's how you test scientific theories as well.
So that's very helpful.
And secondly, he lays it on the line and he said, well, the properties we observe.
Are much more consistent than what we'd expect if scientific materialism were true and theism were false.
And that's, we take that up in the film and we ask the question well, is that the case?
And it turns out that there are three major discoveries about biological, physical, that meaning the structure of the universe as a whole, and cosmological origins that are clearly not what materialists expected.
They're what you would expect if a theistic worldview or metaphysical hypothesis were true.
And so we kind of, we, uh, Let Dawkins issue the challenge.
We take it up and then we tell the story in the film of three great discoveries that are leading scientists to reconsider and, in many cases, reaffirm a belief in God based on the scientific evidences.
That is to say, because of the scientific evidence, not in spite of it.
Quite the contrary of the impression you get from those very vocal scientific atheists.
What were the three discoveries?
Well, the first is that the universe, as best we can tell, based on observational astronomy, multiple evidences from observational.
Astronomy and developments in theoretical physics had a beginning.
It wasn't eternal and self existent.
It seemed to require, because it came into existence a finite time ago, to give a causal explanation for it, you need to posit something that's external to the universe, some sort of external cause or creator.
And in fact, when you look at the possible candidate causes, the idea of a transcendent creator with a mind and great power, volition, is, I argue, the best explanation for what we've learned in modern cosmology.
The second discovery is that the universe, from the very beginning, Has been, as the physicists put it, finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life.
There's a whole range of physical parameters the strength of gravity, the strength of electromagnetism, the strength of the other fundamental forces, the strength of the force pushing the universe apart, the expansion of the universe that astronomers observed, the masses of elementary particles.
I could go on and on.
This whole range of parameters that fall within these very Narrow sweet spots, these very narrow ranges outside of which life and even basic chemistry would be impossible.
And the collective probability of all those parameters falling in those just right sweet spots is infinitesimally small.
And so, if we were just operating, if we were thinking in a materialistic frame and saying, well, the fundamental things, the laws of nature alone explain everything, well, these are contingent features of the laws of nature.
They don't explain themselves.
They don't explain the original, the laws of nature don't explain the original configuration of matter.
So, if we take basic philosophical naturalism or materialism, we would expect to see overwhelming probabilities that we should have a life unfriendly universe.
But that's not the kind of universe we see.
We see a universe that looks like it was a setup job to allow for life by getting all those parameters just right against all odds and for no underlying physical or logical reason.
And so this is a shocking discovery to many physicists.
Sir Fred Hoyle, who was a strident scientific atheist, changed his mind about that because of discoveries that he himself had made.
We tell that story in the film.
And we've even found some of the original footage from some of the and reel to reel tape interviews with some of the scientists out at Caltech who were shocked to find that Hawk or that Hoyle.
Hoyle's predictions came exactly true.
And that was one of the things that made him realize that the universe was so exquisitely finely tuned.
And he was then later quoted as saying, a common sense interpretation of the physics suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible.
So he came to an intelligent design view after years of being one of those spokesmen for scientific atheism.
And the last discovery is just the complexity of the interior of living cells.
The smallest unit.
Of life are not the simple homogeneous globules of plasm that 19th century contemporaries of Darwin thought.
Instead, they contain digital code in large bio macromolecules like DNA and RNA.
That code is part of a complex information storage, transmission, and processing system.
The information in that system is processed with little nanomachines, and the information builds complex protein enzymes and Other nanomachines in the cell.
It's just an extraordinary realm of digital and nanotechnology on a miniaturized scale.
Dawkins himself has admitted to being knocked sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data processing system inside living cells.
That's not something you'd expect from blind, pitiless indifference or no purpose at work in the universe.
These are systems that have all the hallmarks of intelligently designed systems.
We recognize the hallmarks because of our own digital technology now.
So, in all the three of these areas in cosmology, with its affirmation of the beginning, in physics, with the fine tuning since the beginning, and then the discovery of life with all this exquisite miniaturized technology, long.
A Mattress That Knows You00:02:03
After the beginning, all these things are pointing to a mind behind the universe, is the way we like to put it.
So imagine this you spend all day like me fighting the madness of the culture, then you go to bed on a lumpy old mattress that feels like it was designed by a diversity committee.
That's not like me.
I used to do that.
I used to have to toss and turn.
My back ached.
I would wake up feeling like I'd been sleeping on a pile of rejected DEI statements when in fact I hadn't been sleeping at all.
Then I got my helix and I'm still not sleeping at all because I never sleep.
It's really comfortable lying awake.
I took their little sleep quiz and they matched me with a mattress that actually knows what side I lie on when I'm lying awake.
It knows how firm I like it.
And that's my back is older than the Republic and needs to be treated with the same care.
The difference has been as dramatic as someone who hardly ever sleeps can make it.
When I do get to sleep occasionally, I sleep deeper with no more midnight back complaints.
And when I wake up, I feel that I've actually rested instead of just spending eight hours losing arguments in my head.
This is a truly fantastic mattress.
And like I said, You won't know how great it is because you'll be asleep, but I lie awake and I can vouch for this mattress.
Helix ships it right to your door.
It unrolls like the miracle of Western civilization that it is.
You get a 120 night trial, a limited lifetime warranty, and it's the most awarded mattress brand by places like Forbes and Wired, which are right about this, if not about a lot else.
Go to helixsleep.comslash Claven for 27% offsite wide.
That's helixsleep.comslash Claven for 27% offsite wide.
Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you.
That's Helix Sleep.com.
And I know what you're thinking.
Oh, he's going to say Clavin again, but how do you spell Clavin?
That is the question.
And the answer is K L A V A N. You know, this week they've been putting out a picture model of the cell as we now see it look like.
And it looks like a factory, a Rube Goldberg factory from like a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory type fantasy novel.
Exactly.
Biblical Implications of Nature00:16:12
The idea that it just fell into place is kind of absurd.
You know, Piers Morgan asked me about that on the.
On his interview yesterday, he showed a picture of it and it's quite extraordinary.
But it only shows the organelles, it doesn't show inside the nucleus where all the information and information processing is going on, which is even more exquisite.
And that's one of the great things about the film the producers and the director were able to animate that.
There are 400 visual effects in this film, and the producers take you way out into space.
You see the galaxies, you see the god's eye view of the expanding universe, but they take you deep into the inner workings of the cell as well.
And see all the exquisite machinery and information processing going on.
And once you see that, you hardly need guys like me to make arguments for intelligent design.
Yeah, although, you know, you say that, but there's a wonderful story that I'd never heard before in the film.
And the film is called The Story of Everything about Albert Einstein, who didn't want to admit that the universe was expanding because it meant it must have come from somewhere.
It must have basically exploded into being.
And he just plugged in in one of his.
Equations.
He just plugged in a number essentially that would make it not happen.
He obscured the implication of his own theory by fine tuning the value for the outward pushing force that acts in contradiction to gravity.
He later said it was the greatest blunder of his life.
I mean, do you feel that there is a kind of knee jerk hostility toward the idea of a creator?
No, of course.
But this is historically contingent.
This has only been the case since the late 19th century.
It wasn't the case during the period of the founding of modern science.
What historians often refer to as the scientific revolution in the 15, 16, 1700s.
Those scientists were typically devout men of faith, usually Christians, and they were studying nature for decidedly Christian reasons or biblical reasons.
The concept of the laws of nature is something that comes right out of the Hebrew Bible.
The idea of the contingency, or rather, the intelligibility of nature, was something that was also a biblical concept because God had made our minds.
In the image of his own rational mind, then we could understand the rationality that he built into nature.
And that gave scientists confidence that they could study nature and that had secrets, patterns, lawful order, designed to reveal.
And we were capable of understanding that movie because we were made in the image of nature's own author.
So that was a key presupposition that got science going.
And all of those early scientists made design arguments.
They felt that they were also looking at evidence of design.
So this idea that That science necessarily, as one philosopher put it, needs to be atheistic or cease to be itself.
That was not the case.
So that's why I titled the book Return of the God Hypothesis.
Science arose in a Judeo Christian milieu in Western Europe for Judeo Christian biblical reasons.
And we lost that thread in the late 19th century and through much of the 20th century.
But the science of the 20th and 21st century is bringing the God hypothesis back precisely because it Helps us understand where things came from, where the universe came from, where life came from.
You know, when you began, you said that there's not only evidence that there's a God, a creator, but evidence that the creator is very much like the one that we meet in the Bible.
Aside from what you just said, aside from the fact that it was the ideas that came from the Bible that led us to science, which I obviously did, is there more to that than, you know, I was interested in that you said that.
Is there more that gives you the idea that this is a loving God or this is a God of, you know, very much like who fits into the Standards of Jesus Christ when he's talking?
Is there more?
Well, it's interesting.
The book of Romans affirms what's called natural theology, the idea that, from the paraphrase, from the things that are made, the unseen qualities of the Creator are clearly known, his eternal power and divine nature.
The term divine nature has often been equated with scientists who've reflected on this with another biblical attribute of God, which is his wisdom.
In the Psalms, it says that in wisdom thou hast created all things.
So you get the sense from the biblical text that you can infer.
The power and the wisdom of the Creator, but you can't get the whole of the Christian gospel.
You can't decide whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or some other theistic religion is the right one.
And the Bible itself seems to place limits.
It not only affirms the legitimacy of natural theology, of learning about the reality of God and some of his key attributes from nature, but it also places limits on it.
You can't derive the whole of the Christian gospel message or decide which theistic religion is true just from observing nature.
I think you could also probably infer that God is a great artist, that he loves beauty, that he's loving.
Yes, there are things that have gone wrong in the world, but the biblical text also has an account of that and tells us to expect that.
But the beauty and grandeur of creation and the way it's so beautifully suited to our needs, I think, could underwrite a legitimate inference to the loving nature of the Creator as well.
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
You've been kind enough to invite me to a couple of conferences where people discuss things like that.
And the things that I'm always, in my annoying way, kind of buttonholing scientists about is what.
What would it look like?
I mean, for instance, evolution, you have talked about the fact that evolution is flawed, and more and more it begins to seem like a flawed theory, and it doesn't account for the kind of changes that we see over time.
But the thing that always stops me about that, because I can see why that's true, but at the same time, I think, well, what would it look like?
What do you think it looked like when a new species came into being?
Was there like a big finger came down and snapped the finger?
And I've never gotten an answer to that.
I wonder.
I guess my bigger question, that's my smaller question, but in that is the bigger question would science look different if it were performed by people who had faith?
Oh, I think so.
It's already looking different.
You've met at one of our conferences Jim Tour.
Oh, yeah, he's great.
Amazing work he does.
He's a deep believer who has first started investigating the, he first started creating himself little tiny nanomachines and then started investigating the nanomachinery inside the cell and realized, well, this isn't going to evolve by undirected chemical.
Evolutionary means.
But bringing a design perspective to the understanding of living systems does generate some different predictions and different expectations about what we ought to see in the living world.
And one clear example of that was something I think you may have also met Richard Sternberg at one of our conferences, but he was one of the first scientists who was saying, you know, all this talk about junk DNA doesn't ring true to me.
He said, if you're looking at the, it turns out that In the genome, only about 2% to 3% of the sequence of sequences of the information carrying bases in DNA code for building proteins.
The other 97% was for a long time terra incognita.
It was not understood as to what it does.
And the Darwinists assumed that it was, that they immediately assumed that it was junk, that it was the byproduct of the random trial and error process of natural selection acting on random mutations.
And our team said, well, We accept that mutation and selection is a real process, but we would not expect that the signal, the 2% or 3%, would be dwarfed by the noise.
So we predicted that the non coding regions would turn out to be importantly functional.
Richard Sternberg was one of the first to predict that.
William Dembski predicted that.
Dean Kenyon predicted that.
Forrest Mims predicted that.
We had four different ID proponents who were predicting non coding functionality on the basis of intelligent design theory.
And that has turned out to be the case.
And so, in a big project called the ENCODE project that was published in 2011, confirmed those predictions.
And it shows that looking at life from a design perspective generates discriminating, different predictions than you would generate if you were looking at it as the product of bottom up, undirected material processes.
So, it has already turned out to be fruitful in that realm and several others that we could talk about.
So, some science would be.
The same irrespective of which origins theory you adopted, but the origins theories do have different implications about the nature of life itself and therefore what we ought to see when we investigate it carefully.
Well, that brings me to another question, which seems to me kind of important.
It's one thing to look at nature as it is and deduce that it's a created thing.
But religion also puts forward a lot of other truth claims.
And I'm wondering if you think that these are things that fall outside the realm of science or if science could find them.
For instance, the idea of life after death, the idea that the person who is talking to you right now is not a momentary flash in the pan, but will be around to annoy you forever.
Do you feel that science has anything to say about that, or do you feel that that's where the door should be?
I tried.
We have indeed.
Well, you know, there's a neuroscientist in our network, Michael Egner, who's just written a book called The Immortal Mind.
And his next book is going to be on these after death experiences.
And he thinks there is actual scientific data that, because not all, but quite a number of people who have these after death experiences, or these near death experiences, rather, have experiences, Or they have.
Get have perceptions of things that they couldn't that turn out to be accurate about the operating theater they were in and and uh that that could not have possibly been known if they were, if they were uh not not continued to be conscious after they were were medically dead.
And so there's there's something there to investigate the.
It happens that the, the filmmakers that uh produced this film cipher's previous film was was called after death, and they did investigated some of that as well.
So I think Some of that may be subject to scientific investigation, but maybe the majority of that may have to wait till we each find our own end and see what happens.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you feel that there is any chance that there is some place, how can I put this, that there is some place where we begin to communicate with the immaterial?
I mean, there does seem to be this feeling at some point when you delve into quantum physics that there's some place where science stops.
Maybe that's an illusion.
Maybe that's the God of the gaps or something like this.
But there seems to be a place where this absolute nugget of mystery sort of marks the border of our ability to find things out.
Do you think that that's an illusion?
I was one of these people that completely overthought the process of Christian conversion and it took me forever to accept that maybe I had become a Christian.
Yeah, I know the feeling.
Yeah, I know the feeling at times and was waiting for something more to happen.
We used to get very, very annoyed at people.
Talking about having a personal relationship with Christ and what does that mean?
And as I've gotten older and matured in faith, there's both an objective basis for faith in empirical evidence, both historical and scientific and psychological.
But I also think there's a subjective aspect to this that's very much real that the Holy Spirit is something that's promised to live in individual believers.
And as I've stopped overthinking things, I start to perceive that in my own life.
Sometimes get very clear guidance about things that come in the form of communication.
So, yeah, I think it's possible, even in this life.
And do you think, I mean, one thing that I'm reading a lot about now is that scientists sort of began with the ideas we're only going to look at the objective world and we're not going to look at the question of consciousness.
And what was interesting about that is they then ceased to believe in consciousness, essentially, because they were ignoring it.
But now it's kind of come back because of quantum physics, because of the Idea that light changes as we perceive it and things, the uncertainty principle, where once we find out one thing, we can never find out another thing.
All these things where consciousness seems to affect the world.
Do you think that that branch of science is going to go in a particular direction, a theistic direction?
I think it kind of already has theistic implications.
The whole, you know, Bell's work on, you know, the action at a distance and the whole collapse of the wave packet in physics, all those sorts of things, I think, suggest that at least at the heart of matter is a mystery.
But if you need a mind to observe something before, A material thing manifests itself in a particular way.
Maybe mind is even more fundamental than matter, and maybe that's what physics is telling us.
Yeah, yeah.
Listen, this is such a good movie, The Story of Everything, Stephen Meyer.
Did you write this yourself, or did you get someone to write it?
Well, I did write the film in conjunction with Eric Esau, the director, and the producers.
And Eric chose to use a really interesting storytelling device where they intercut the testimony of the scientists and scholars themselves.
There's no narrator, there's no host taking you on a journey.
They use the motif that was used in the big short to tell the story of the financial crisis.
And it makes for, I think, a faster paced narrative that builds some dramatic tension in each of the three acts and around each of the three discoveries that we argue have theistic implications that point to God.
Steve Meyer, thank you for coming on.
We're looking forward to the story of everything.
I want to go see it on the big screen because I was watching on my computer, and it's just obviously got a lot of huge, huge special effects and beautiful imagery.
It's always great to talk to you, and I wish you well with us.
I really hope people get to see this because I think it will just put minds on the obvious right track.
And I think that's a major work.
Anyway, great to see you, Steve.
Thanks for coming on.
Thank you, Andrew.
Sorry that we couldn't see me to the end for the technical difficulties, but always appreciate the conversations with you.
All right, I'll talk to you again soon.
All right, we lost Steve.
Obviously, the demons don't want you to know about God, so they cut him off visually, but you got to hear him right up to the end.
This movie, The Story of Everything, you know, really, I know that most of the people watching this already agree that science is not denying the existence of God, whether you believe or not.
I don't think that you can say that in any reasonable way anymore.
But I think it's great to be informed about these things.
So when people, you know, deliver that smug, self-assured, oh, who would say, you know, that there could ever be a God, you can tell them why you say it and why you think it and that you have.
Looked into these things.
And as I pointed out on my show this week, you know, some scientists, like Carl Sagan, said he looked at this world that's all emptiness and we're just this little planet and we're just clinging to it like bugs clinging to a piece of fruit.
And then the astronauts look at the same view and say, wow, there's so much emptiness around us.
We must be very special.
We must be special to somebody and talk about their faith and the fact that only faith really explains the things that they're looking at.
Defending Faith with Evidence00:00:33
So much of this is you only see.
What you want to see.
And for too long, people have not wanted to see God because he strips us of some of our freedom and wants us to do things that we might not want to do, like be kind to one another.
I'm very much against that.
But it's good to be able to know why you think what you think, why you believe what you believe, so you can explain it to others.
Stephen Meyer is the producer, basically, and the film is called The Story of Everything.
Go see it and come see The Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.
I'll be there and I would love to see you there as well.