"Evolution Fails To Explains This" Michael & Intelligent Design | Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
Stephen C. Meyer joins Michael to discuss the scientific case for intelligent design. Drawing from Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer presents evidence from molecular biology, the Cambrian explosion, and information theory that challenges unguided Darwinian evolution and points to an intelligent cause. He addresses common objections and explores the implications for science and worldview. A clear, evidence-based look at one of today’s most important debates.
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Darwinian Artificial Selection00:15:27
The shocking discovery of modern astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy is that the universe, as best we can tell for multiple reasons, had a beginning.
Everyone, if you pushed them far enough and you made them think, they would have to admit that.
There are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages.
How you get from what the primates do to what we do is a complete mystery.
It's a hugely unsolved mystery in evolutionary theory.
Is that information always arises from an intelligent source, whether we're talking about computer code or a paragraph in a book?
Or hieroglyphic inscription.
Information is, in our experience, a product of intelligence.
Your description of that just gave me chills.
Let me unpack it a little bit.
When I was in school, the surest way to be called an idiot was to question the theory of evolution, which is precisely what my guest, Dr. Stephen Meyer, has done.
And he's done a lot more than that.
In fact, he's questioned a lot of everything.
And he has a new movie out called The Story of Everything.
Steve, thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me, Michael.
It's great to be here.
I want to get to evolution.
I want to get to the origin of life.
I want to get to the existence of God.
I want to get to how you have contradicted the entire scientific and philosophical establishment of the 20th century.
I want to start with evolution because truly it was the unthinkable heresy for the entire duration of my schooling.
You come out with a couple other friends.
This would have been what, 10, 15 years ago?
It goes back to the mid 90s.
Okay, it goes all the way back to the 90s.
Craziness started, right?
Yeah.
And you say, actually, Darwin's wrong.
How's that?
Well, an interesting little factoid is that now leading evolutionary biologists.
Are they calling for a new theory of evolution?
And they are calling for a new theory of evolution because they recognize in their technical papers, if not more publicly, that the fundamental driver of the Darwinian, the modern version of Darwinism, the neo Darwinian theory, the mechanism of mutation acting on, or natural selection acting on random mutations, lacks the creative power to generate truly novel forms of life.
There was a 2004 book.
Published with MIT Press, two leading evolutionary biologists said that neo Darwinism lacks any theory of the generative.
It does a nice job of explaining small scale variation, it does a very poor job of explaining large scale morphological innovation, the origin of fundamentally new forms.
And in 2016, there was a conference at the Royal Society in London convened by leading evolutionary biologists who were dissatisfied with the standard so called neo Darwinian.
I've always considered myself a paleo Darwinian.
You're a paleo Darwinian.
Go back further to 1859.
Because there are these different shades of evolutionary theories.
There's Darwin, there's Lamarck, there's what Darwin actually wrote, there's what modern Darwinians actually think.
They all have problems.
Right.
They all have problems.
But the fundamental problem is the origin of novel form.
The mechanism that we learn about in high school and college biology classes, natural selection acting on random variations or mutations, does a really nice job of explaining small scale variation.
The finch beaks that get a little bigger or smaller among the Galapagos finches, the variations in coloration of the famous peppered moths in England and with the so called industrial melanism.
It's the same set of examples.
You always get antibiotic resistance.
But fundamentally, fundamental innovation where you get new body plans, new organs, new anatomical structure, the mechanism does not do a good job of that.
And there's some very good reasons for that that are recognized in the literature in biology broadly, but also even within the more specialized subdiscipline of evolutionary biology.
And so, this 2016 conference convened at the Royal Society in London, arguably the most august scientific body in the world, featured evolutionary biologists.
Calling for a new theory and exploring, looking for some other evolutionary mechanisms that would provide the creative power that is not provided by mutation and selection.
But oddly, at the end of the conference, one of the conveners characterized the conference for its lack of momentousness.
And essentially, she said this was Susan Mazur.
She was essentially, I think, alluding to the fact that the conferees did a very good job of characterizing the problems with the standard theory, the received theory.
but did not come up with any mechanisms that had the power to generate body plans and fundamental changes in living systems.
Because this is the evolution of someone learning about evolution, but also taking the existence of God seriously and taking deeper philosophical problems seriously as well.
Seems to be you learn about Darwin in school, and you're told that everything has come about because of.
Of natural selection working on randomly.
Undirected natural processes.
Yes, exactly.
The indifference of this cold material process.
Right.
Blind, pitiless indifference is the famous Dawkins phrase.
Yes, yes.
And then you say, okay, well, look, maybe God exists and God is just using evolution.
Evolution is an expression of how God creates the world.
Exactly.
And then you start to say, well, hold on, evolution seems to have trouble creating new species, but it can change the length of your fingers or whatever.
So you keep, on the one hand, the materialists and the Darwinists accuse us of being God of the gaps, kind of.
But then I think we could probably accuse them of being science of the gaps.
Well, or materialism of the gaps, right?
There's got to be a materialistic explanation for everything.
That's a pre commitment of many scientists.
But what if you're looking at features in the living world or in the universe that are characteristic of the activity of intelligent agents?
And then maybe we need to amend that rule a bit and follow the evidence where it leads.
But yeah, the evolution of study and thinking about evolution is exactly what you describe.
I've been through it myself.
But even the first step, the idea that God is using the evolutionary process to create, is itself a bit problematic.
For one, if you're affirming Darwinian evolution, The idea of natural selection acting on random variations and mutations, the Darwinian mechanism, was designed as a designer substitute mechanism.
And there's a way to get your head around this.
If you think of this, it would be an archetypal Darwinian example.
Imagine that there are some, you're a ranch, or you're a shepherd in the far north of Scotland, and you want to breed a woollier breed of sheep.
Well, what do you do?
Well, you choose the woolliest males and the woolliest females and allow only them to breed, and then you do that.
Through successive generations, and you get a very woolly breed of sheep.
This is a well known phenomenon going back to biblical times called artificial selection.
But at the end of the day, if you're in a cold climate like the far north of Scotland and you've got a very woolly sheep, now you've got a sheep that's well adapted to its environment.
And in the 19th century, biologists thought the strongest evidence of design in nature or in life was the adaptation of organisms to their environment.
Birds live in the air, they have wings.
Allow them to fly, fish live underwater, they have gills and so forth.
So now Darwin comes along and he says, The sheep example is my own, but he has several like it.
And he says, Well, let's imagine that instead of the artificial selection of the breeder, we have a series of very cold winters so that only the woolliest sheep survive.
Now, at the end of, say, 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever winters, we're going to get the same outcome.
We're going to get a very woolly breed of sheep.
And now that sheep is well adapted to the environment.
And so now we've got the same outcome.
We've got design, the appearance of design, adaptation, but without a designer.
Instead of artificial selection, we have natural selection.
We have nature doing the work.
So now, why is that important?
Well, when we want to sort of baptize Darwinism and say that this is God's way of creating, the proper Darwinists will bristle and say, no, no, no, as Darwin himself did, and say, no, you're missing the whole point.
We're getting rid of any intelligent activity.
In the creation of new biological form.
And so it's nature doing the selecting, not God.
It's an attempt to explain the appearance of design without a designer.
And that's actually very hard to reconcile with any meaningful form of theism.
When I was learning about this in school, and the last time I studied this seriously was probably the eighth grade, so it never got very advanced.
Yeah, right.
Though, I don't know, I never got better answers even from my friends in college or elsewhere.
The… The… The argument was, look, we can see the evidence of natural selection in all of these species and all these places of the earth, but we have no idea how life began in the first place.
I said, well, listen to me.
What am I?
I'm a layman.
That seems like a big problem for you.
It seems like a big deal.
Right, yeah.
And the last I heard was that there was this the leading theory is there's a primordial soup and a bunch of molecules were batting into each other, and then just one day, I don't know, enough molecules hit each other.
That you got a life form, a single cell or something.
And scientists had tried to recreate these conditions in various beakers and petri dishes, and they've been successful.
But there were problems with the methodology and they were tainted with germs or whatever.
But anyway, we're pretty sure...
Something like this is what explains it all.
That's how you go from inorganic to organic.
That's how you go from inorganic to organic, and then...
Right.
Then you get natural selection kicking in, and all the new forms arise, right?
So, right.
I did...
This is what I did my PhD on.
It was the origin of life biology.
And I was working in the late 80s in Cambridge on this.
At the time, it was pretty widely acknowledged, including by one of my PhD examiners, that origin of life research had reached an impasse.
She came back from the 1989 ISOL conference saying to me, Steve, our field has become populated with cranks and quacks.
And I hate to say this, but the problem is.
Everyone knows that everyone else's theory doesn't work, but they're unwilling to admit it about their own.
And things have gotten no better in the ensuing almost now 30 years.
And the problem is that, as Jim Tour, the organic chemist from Rice, has pointed out, is that with each passing decade, we learn more and more about the complexity of life.
And if you want to explain the origin of life, you have to know what life is like, what it's made of.
And at the time of Darwin, when people first started thinking about the origin of the first life, because Darwin didn't.
He had one little passage in a letter to a friend where he speculated about life beginning in a warm little pond.
But his famous bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, started to formulate ideas about the origin of the first life.
And he was famous for saying that the cell is a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
That's my wife's nickname for me, by the way.
Homogeneous globule full of undifferentiated protoplasm.
So when scientists thought that, Life was very simple, that it was just a chemical goo, then it was easy to imagine that the essence of life might have arisen as a result of a few simple chemical reactions.
But that view of life did not hold.
And by the time you get to the 1950s and 60s and 70s, in this period that historians of science now call the molecular biological revolution, and scientists are learning that inside living cells, there are large, what are called macromolecules, bio macromolecules that contain.
Digital information, and that that information is part of a larger information processing system that involves nanomachinery, and that the cell as a whole can be characterized as something like an automated factory.
Explaining how that arose through a few simple chemical reactions becomes very, very much more difficult.
And so that's the real problem today.
It's the problem in both branches of evolutionary theory.
Where does the information come from that's needed to build new forms?
It's to build biological form, you need information.
And the key question in the origin of life is where did the information in the DNA come from?
Right.
And I mean, at a very basic level, how is it information?
Right.
You know, the very fact that it has meaning, that is intelligible, the very fact that the world is intelligible, would seem to suggest to my totally scientifically illiterate but moderately philosophically interested mind, it would seem to suggest that there is an intelligence that is outside of us.
Let me unpack it a little bit.
Elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule.
By this time, most scientists are suspecting that DNA has something to do with the transmission of hereditary information.
And they unpack the structure.
Famous paper, Nature, April 25, 1953, they announced they've unlocked the secret of life.
Five years later, 57, 58, Francis Crick, upon deeper reflection on all this, realizes that the DNA has this beautiful double helix structure.
And on the inside, there are these.
Chemical subunits called bases or nucleotide bases.
And Crick realizes that these bases are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or like digital characters, like the zeros and ones in the section of machine code or computer code.
And that they are collectively providing instructions for other machinery in the cell to produce the proteins and protein machines that are needed to keep cells alive.
So you've got digital information producing three dimensional.
Even mechanical structures inside life.
The Improbability of Chance00:13:12
And so you've got an advanced form of digital nanotechnology.
And initially people think, oh, this helps explain where the mutations occur.
But then they start thinking, wait a minute, we know where the information is, we know what it does, but we don't know where it came from.
And as you think just in a deeply philosophical way, Just ask yourself the question in a scientific way what do we know about the origin of information?
Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.
Richard Dawkins himself has acknowledged that DNA is like a machine code.
Again, computer code.
Well, where does computer code come from?
Where does software come from?
It comes from a programmer.
It's a mind product, it's a product of intelligence.
And so, what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, is that information always arises.
From an intelligent source, whether we're talking about computer code or a paragraph in a book or a hieroglyphic inscription or the information transmitted as we're talking or across a radio signal, information is, in our experience, a product of intelligence.
And so there have been numerous attempts to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce life apart from intelligence.
This is what my book Signature in the Cell was all about and documented.
But these different attempts have Failed and for very good reasons that we could talk about and explain.
But what is left standing is our knowledge based on our uniform experience, which is that information is a product of mind.
So, this discovery of information at the foundation of life is a powerful indicator.
Of the activity of a designing mind in the history and origin of life.
But if I give a monkey a typewriter and I leave him on a long enough time scale, he will compose.
He'll certainly compose my first book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
He'll do that immediately.
But he'll compose the works of Shakespeare eventually.
And so wouldn't the materialist come back and say, well, yes, we're all astounded by the complexity of nature and all these data that we find in the nucleotides, how cool is that?
I'd like to know you've mastered the lingo already.
Don't tell me you can't do science.
I'm very good at mimicking.
I don't know about storing the information.
But they would tell you, OK, on a long enough time scale, nature will achieve this.
I don't know how long it would take the monkey to write Shakespeare.
Maybe it would be 500,000 years or 500 million years.
Could you calculate how long it would take nature to.
It turns out to be a math problem, actually, interestingly enough.
I did the math in my.
First book on the origin of life, Signature in the Cell.
In the early 50s, the chance hypothesis was still taken seriously among origin of life researchers, people that were thinking seriously about this problem.
There was a famous scientist, George Wald, who said that time is the hero of the plot, and that if you have enough time, enough chances, enough opportunities, chance is a plausible explanation.
But the molecular biological revolution that I've been describing kind of changed all that because the amount of information stored in even a modest length Protein defies what are called the probabilistic resources of the entire universe, the point past which appeals to chance become implausible.
Let me give a simple example.
Chance can be a reasonable explanation under certain circumstances.
Maybe there's a bike outside the building here and it's locked with a standard four dial lock.
If a thief comes along and wants to open it by chance, if he only has five minutes before your Excellent security people come around the corner, it's more likely than not that he will fail by chance.
So that means that the chance hypothesis is more likely to be false than true.
Now, if he's got more time, and I've actually made this calculation for a four dial lock with 10 seconds per spin, if in about 15 hours the thief could sample more than half those 10,000 combinations, in that case the chance hypothesis becomes more likely to be true than false.
In the case of the specific arrangement of the amino acids in a modest length functional protein, there are not enough events from the beginning of the universe till now to have sampled more than half the possible combinations because you've got 20 times 20 times 20 times 20 possibilities running out to 150 sites.
So I won't go into all the math on the show, but I do it in the book.
And here's the thing.
It's not controversial.
There is no serious origin of life researcher today who thinks that the chance hypothesis is plausible.
They're looking for other types of materialistic explanations, not relying on chance.
As we're sitting here in outer space, well, it kind of looks like outer space and it also looks like a double helix.
Beautiful set.
There's even a DNA molecule there.
Kudos to your set designers.
They're good.
They are intelligent designers.
Beautiful.
But as we sit here and I'm looking at outer space, there's an issue that has really divided the Daily Wire.
Specifically, me from my colleague Matt Walsh.
He believes in aliens.
do not believe in aliens.
And regardless of what one thinks about E.T. and Little Green Men, the thing that drives me the craziest, whenever I mention anything about the supposed aliens, is I say, I don't see any evidence for them.
And people tell me, Michael, the universe is just so big, the odds that life wouldn't spring up somewhere else, I mean, it's zero.
There's so much to say about this, Michael.
Yes, and it drives me.
I want to put my head through a wall when they say this.
What do I know?
I don't know anything about probability, but I said, It seems to me if we are to ascertain the probability of something, we need to know anything at all about how it comes about.
And if you can't do that, then you can't possibly ascertain whether or not something is likely.
Am I crazy?
You're not crazy.
Let me answer the question you didn't ask first, and then I'll segue to answer the other one.
Because what is really fascinating in the origin of life discussion is that very serious scientists, biologists, no less a figure than Francis Crick himself, have Posited an alien origin of life that they then propose was transported here to planet Earth.
Why?
Because the conditions on the early Earth were not hospitable to the spontaneous chemical evolutionary origin of life or even the slow and gradual chemical evolutionary origin of life.
And so instead, they've posited that life might have arisen on another planet designed by an alien intelligence.
Why designed?
Well, when Ben Stein asked, Richard Dawkins, about whether there was a possibility that intelligent design could be part of the answer to the origin of life problem, which Dawkins acknowledged is a problem.
He speculated that, well, maybe there, he said, there is a signature of intelligence, but it must have arisen by an intelligence in outer space.
Well, that solves it.
Yeah, that's right.
It doesn't, of course, because there's no accounting for where the information ultimately came from in space.
It just doesn't kick the can down the road, it kicks it into outer space.
But this is the so called panspermia.
Theory, but it shows you just how deep the impasse is in origin of life research as far as people trying to explain the origin of life from undirected chemical evolutionary processes.
That one, though, I've had friends who have presented that idea to me and say, you know, I don't believe in God.
That's crazy.
I just believe in a big God shaped alien.
You say, well, all right, that's a lot more credible.
Okay, sure.
Well, that's still an intelligent design hypothesis, right?
Yes.
The problem with that hypothesis is well, first of all, there's never any specificity about how the information came from.
It's not clear whether they're saying the alien designed the genetic information or whether the alien simply transported what had evolved on some other planet.
And it's usually the latter, which means they haven't solved the information problem.
Of course.
But now back to your other question.
Yes.
Solving for the alien.
Where did the alien put the information from?
Well, exactly.
Because we also have this problem of fine tuning that the universe is exquisitely fine tuned in its basic physical parameters and properties.
And that fine tuning has been present from the very beginning of the universe, and it's an absolutely necessary condition of any future possible evolution of life.
So, no alien within the universe could be the explanation for the origin of the fine tuning upon which its subsequent evolution would depend.
Right.
Nor could the alien explain the origin of the universe itself.
So, it's a bad overall theory of biological and cosmological origins.
But this whole question about well, is life inevitable somewhere in the universe?
And it's a numerator and denominator problem.
If you go back to just basic math, it is true that the universe is vast beyond anything we had any inkling of even 100 years ago.
In Return to the God Hypothesis, I used the figure 200 billion galaxies, and I was wrong.
It's actually the more current estimate is closer to 2 trillion.
So you weren't only a little wrong.
I would say everyone was only a little wrong.
Order of magnitude, what's an order of magnitude among friends in physics, right?
So, yeah, the universe is vast.
There's lots of places where life could have evolved.
But the problem is that people who just simply assert that are not reckoning on the number of parameters and the improbability associated with each to make a life friendly universe to start with.
Just one of the fine tuning parameters, the initial entropy of the universe, calculated by Sir Roger Penrose as one chance in 10 to the 10 to the 123.
It's a hyper exponential number.
There's not even enough elementary particles in the universe to represent the zeros in that number.
It's just ridiculous.
So you have this ensemble of cosmic fine tuning parameters that have to be just right.
And then you have to have all the localized fine tuning parameters to get a life friendly solar system and planetary system.
And so when you do the math, the localized fine tuning parameters are more relevant to assessing whether there would be life somewhere else in the universe.
But they end up dwarfing, the improbability of that ends up dwarfing the probabilistic resources provided by the two trillion galaxies, at least in the reckoning of an increasing number of physicists.
This is at least now a very active area of debate.
There was a book years ago in the mid 2000s by two astronomers at the University of Washington called Rare Earth.
Two colleagues of mine, a few years later, wrote a book called Privileged Planet.
And there's apparently a new book out by some Italian physicists making the same point that, yeah, big universe, but the probabilities are so small that even this vast universe doesn't render life inevitable.
And again, even in a very favorable planetary environment like ours, we have no explanation for where the origin of the first cell came from and the origin of the information necessary to build it.
So the complexity of life dwarfs.
The vastness of the universe in that kind of a calculation.
But then when you tell people that, I don't say it verbatim as you do.
It was a little more eloquent than my version of it.
But when I tell people that, they say, so you just think we're special?
That's what it comes down to.
What you think, this vast universe that we cannot possibly even begin to fathom, you just think that we're special?
And my answer is Yes.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that?
And what's your evidence to the contrary?
We're the only meat creature that can reason and receive universals in our intellect, which by all accounts appears to be a power, a spiritual power of a rational soul.
Right.
That's pretty special to me.
The qualitative differences between humans and other, even the highest primates, are staggering and they're obvious and we hardly ever talk about them.
Yeah.
Our ability to.
Chomsky and the Origin of Language00:02:51
And the primates surely don't talk about them.
They surely don't.
And this problem of the origin of language, which has been a persistent problem.
For evolutionary theory, and has been acknowledged by people who are otherwise disinclined toward theistic belief, like Noam Chomsky.
How do you get a language going without a language to determine what the language will be?
Or, to put it more precisely, how do you get a symbol convention established without an agreed symbol convention by which to establish the tokens of the symbol convention?
You could conceivably get to simple sort of nouns by pointing and grunting.
And stimulus response.
This was the Skinnerian idea of the origin of language, which was closely aligned with Darwinism before Chomsky came along.
If I point at this, and I say table, does table mean gold?
Does it mean the object that's holding up the glasses?
Does it refer to the glitter?
I mean, there's any number of things that.
Does it refer to the act of tapping?
Does it refer to the act of tapping?
Maybe it's a verb, not a noun that I'm trying to get across.
That's a simple problem.
How do you get across with.
In a stimulus response evolutionary system, how do you get across the idea of something like what I would have done?
Right.
The subjunctive tense.
Or what you should have done, Michael, the imperative.
These things are difficult to contain.
What I will have done tomorrow.
Exactly.
The future perfect.
And see, I didn't take those courses.
You did.
You just wasted your time on science.
On science.
Yeah, the linguistics and languages, Latin.
Every single human language has this complexity and suppleness of expression.
All the tenses and the declensions and so forth.
So, this was Chomsky's mantra.
There are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages.
And how you get from what the primates do to what we do.
Is a complete mystery.
It is not, it's a hugely unsolved mystery in evolutionary theory.
I do get a kick.
But it underscores our uniqueness as well, doesn't it?
And I like, though I know it's erroneous to appeal to authority, and in this way I'm kind of doing, in a way I'm appealing to the opposite of an authority because Chomsky's wrong about everything, but he's pretty good on language.
I like that people who don't share my priors about a lot of things.
Right.
Increasingly seem to be coming to the same dilemmas and making concessions about really fundamental issues.
A Common Cause for All Universes00:13:08
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So, okay, to take it all the way back to the beginning, which you touched on just a moment ago, the fine-tuning of the universe all the way from the very beginning of the universe, which itself cannot really be explained in some naturalistic way.
As a boy, I was told that there was this thing called the Big Bang.
Right.
And if you were one of these religious kooks who didn't believe in the Big Bang, you were just a big dummy and there was no hope for you.
And so then I just did a little modicum of research into the Big Bang and I discovered it was Posited by a Catholic priest, Father Georges Lemaître.
Lemaître.
And I said, Well, I'm pretty sure he believed in God.
Yeah.
It depends on which order of the Catholic, you know, the Jesuits or what.
But anyway, I think Lemaître believed in God.
And indeed, it was called the Big Bang as a kind of mockery, a term of derision to make way for God in this scientific theory.
We tell that story in the film because Fred Hoyle, who was early in his career a staunch scientific atheist, despised the Big Bang.
Actually, one of the astronomers, cosmologists in the film, Brian Keating, actually mentioned that Hoyle thought that the Big Bang had been formulated because the The cosmologists were relying too much on the Genesis 1 1 narrative, which he then said was laughable because, of course, the bias in science was heading in an entirely other direction at the time.
But, right, so yeah, it's a fascinating story.
Lemaître synthesizes two lines of evidence.
Einstein is thinking about his new theory of gravity and realizes that it can't be the whole of the story, that there's got to be an outward pushing force to counteract gravity, to account for the empty space in the universe.
So there's There's the theoretical physics of Einstein is suggesting an outward pushing, an expanding universe outward from a beginning point.
Einstein initially doesn't like it, but it has to come around.
And then the astronomers are discovering that the light coming from the distant galaxies is stretched out, which is indicated by a change in its wavelength.
And it looks redder than it should otherwise look if the galaxies. Are a constant distance away from us.
So you've got this evidence from observational astronomy suggesting that the universe is expanding, the galaxies are receding from us in every quadrant of the night sky, and Einstein's theory implies the same thing.
And Father Lemaitre pulls these two lines of evidence together and formulates what's now known as the Big Bang Theory.
Now, he doesn't do this on the basis of the Genesis 1 1 account.
Of a compartmentalist, a Noma guy.
He said, keep the science and the religion separate.
Yeah, I recall that he quite resisted, actually.
He did.
He actually resisted this, but the connections between the two are obvious.
First of all, there's an affirmation of a creation event.
Yeah.
And secondly, there's a kind of confirmation of the first words of the book of Genesis, which is that there was a beginning.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
So this sets off a fascinating century long dialectic.
And cosmology, where many, many astronomers and physicists and cosmologists have resisted the Big Bang theory precisely because it challenges a materialistic understanding of the cosmos, which presupposes that the universe is made of material stuff, matter and energy that is eternal and self existent and has always been here.
So there's also this kind of irony that a lot of religious people think that the Big Bang is contrary to a theistic worldview or to a concept of creation.
But in a way, it's the ultimate creationist theory.
Yes.
I had a friend of mine, a very serious evangelical Protestant, and he was inveighing against me, this was many years ago, for believing in the Big Bang.
I said, Look, I'm not - it's not a matter of dogma for me.
I don't - I'm totally scientifically illiterate.
You know, it was formulated by a Catholic priest, and I don't know, it seems to jive pretty well with Genesis.
So, yes, people resist it because it's science y, but.
Well, the confusion, Michael, comes in when people think that the scientists are saying that the Big Bang is the cause of everything.
Yeah.
That it is the creator, it's the first cause.
But the Big Bang is not a theory of the first cause, it's a theory of the first effect.
Of course.
There's a fancy word in philosophy of science, a retrodiction.
You're inferring backwards in time.
To the first effect, to the place where all the physical stuff comes out of, well, we're not sure.
Certainly not something physical.
Right.
Right.
So it becomes profoundly anti materialistic because, independent of the hot, dense starting point, independent of all the matter and energy of the universe, there is no matter, there is no space, there is no time.
So something that transcends those dimensions is a.
Better explanation of the origin of matter than matter itself.
Right.
Matter can't explain its own origin, that's the problem.
So.
But people have tried to, like the materialists and the libs have tried.
And I've only seen this in popular writing, but they say, well, no, you know what happens is you have the singularity of this really hot, dense starting point, and it expands into the cosmos as we know it.
And then eventually it's going to contract again, collapse, and rinse and repeat.
It's going to go in.
Or they'll say, well, yeah.
It's known as the oscillating universe model, and by the mid 80s was dismissed.
On physical grounds.
Which is, of course, why.
There's not enough matter in the universe, even counting the dark matter, to cause a recollapse.
Even if you got a recollapse, you would have no energy available left to do work.
The entropy buildup would mean that you wouldn't get a subsequent expansion.
So that was one of many cosmological models that attempted to retain the idea of an infinite universe, temporally infinite.
And the one before it was known as the steady state.
And I'll tell you, there's a whole Suite of new models being formulated because the mind of the mathematician and the physicist is infinitely creative.
And there has been an impulse to try to retain the idea that the universe is infinite in duration.
If the universe has always been here, we don't need to think about what created it.
But the best evidence we have points to a beginning.
Yeah, okay.
Because that model, that's interesting, that it doesn't give you infinite space, but it does give you infinite time.
Right.
Ad infinitum, in and out, in and out, in and out.
Yes.
But you're saying that one was debunked in the 80s, basically.
Right, exactly.
Okay.
Well, that makes sense that it still, to this day, appears in popular.
Exactly.
Well, the chance hypothesis for the origin of life is, you know, it's in every sophomore dorm bowl session.
Right, right.
It's not credible.
So then the next one that they all offer, of course, is the multiverse.
Right.
That, well, yeah, it's amazing how finely tuned the cosmos is, and the Big Bang is interesting and all.
The reason that that occurred, it's not that it was designed, it's that everything that could possibly occur in a certain sense occurs, and we just live in the one in which life could.
Right, correct.
We just happen to be the lucky one.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Notice the move, though.
That's an attempt to, what we would say, inflate the probabilistic resources to give you more chances, more opportunities.
So there's a certain kind of logic to that, right?
It makes sense.
But there's a problem with it.
And the postulation is that there's a gabillion other universes out there, so many, in fact, that one of them had to arise with the right combination of fine tuning parameters.
So that even though in our universe the odds associated with all those fine tuning parameters arising is infinitesimally small, if you've got enough universes, we can breathe a sigh every little bit.
You get the works of Shakespeare.
We can posit our universe as kind of the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery.
But there's a problem.
And the problem is first that if you have these other universes and they're causally disconnected to our own, which is what we mean by a separate universe, then whatever happens in those other universes does not affect what happens in our universe, including whatever process was responsible for the fixing of the fine tuning parameters.
Nothing in those other universes makes the fixing of the fine tuning any more probable in this universe because there's no causal connection.
Right.
So, in virtue of that, multiverse.
Proponents have proposed a kind of underlying common cause of all the universes.
It's not just that those universes exist, it's some kind of universe generating mechanism that spits out universes like a lottery machine.
And then we can portray our universe as the lucky winner of this giant cosmic lottery.
But that's where the real rub comes in.
There's a catch.
And that is that every universe generating mechanism that's been proposed, whether it's based on something called string theory or based on something called inflationary cosmology, The universe generating mechanisms themselves have to be finely tuned in order to produce new universes.
And so then you're right back to where you started, which is unexplained fine tuning.
And we know from our experience that fine tuning, what we mean by fine tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that are just right to accomplish some significant end or purpose.
So, what are examples of fine tuning?
An internal combustion engine, a French recipe.
A radio dial, the relationship between hardware and software in a computer.
A clock.
A clock.
Yeah, exactly.
So every system that we know of that we would describe as being finely tuned is the product of intelligence.
That's part of our knowledge base, our uniform and repeated experience again.
So since fine tuning always points to a fine tuner, and since the multiverse, even the multiverse, doesn't get rid of fine tuning but only displaces it to an earlier.
Because you can't just have a random universe.
Generating?
No, no.
Here'd be a good example.
Imagine, go back to your monkeys at the typewriter.
If you have enough time, yeah, you could type Shakespeare, provided the keyboard includes the H for Hamlet.
But if you don't have the H, if the keyboard isn't fine tuned in a particular way, it doesn't matter how much time you have, you're never going to get the outcome you want.
And so this is the problem that every universe generating mechanism does require fine tuning to get to, even in theory, produce new universes.
So you're back to unexplained fine tuning.
And since the only real explanation of fine tuning that we have is intelligence, we're back to intelligent design.
In other words, even if the multiverse is true, intelligent design is still the best explanation.
Then, how come when I go on Wikipedia, Steve, and I look up intelligent design, it tells me that intelligent design is a pseudoscientific creationist nonsense made by people who have insufficient brain cells and who are afraid of the dark?
Simulation Hypothesis and Intelligent Design00:03:12
And wear white shoes and are from Appalachia.
All the stereotypes, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, in my own Wikipedia page, it says that I am a pseudoscientist.
I regarded that as an upgrade because the previous description of me on Wikipedia had me as an American theologian as a way of stigmatizing our work.
I have no degrees in theology.
And so, in a way, that was an upgrade, too, I suppose.
Well, this is the attempt to win the debate by pejorative, by ad hominem.
And so it makes it more fun, I think, really.
The other epithet we get is creationists and cheap tuxedos.
And my wife took that one very much to heart because she's, we've paid a lot for that check.
It's outrageous.
That's outrageous.
I love my Taylor.
Yeah.
But no, if that's the best the other side can do, we smile and appreciate that.
When I'm in debates and my opposite number starts with a lot of ad hominem or trying to characterize me or the Discovery Institute or my colleagues in the intelligent design research community rather than address the issues, Quietly smile inside because I know he or she is wasting time that could be better spent making arguments.
I think invariably people see through that stuff.
I think the growth in our movement over the last 20 years, where in around 2004 and 2005, there was a court trial that brought us a lot of bad media.
But I think we're in a very different day now.
I think that those kinds of arguments are not working.
Once we get past the multiverse, the next thing that the denizens of Reddit at Wilta, they ask, well, don't you think we might just be living in a simulation?
Simulation.
Yes.
Yes.
Is that.
Are we?
Well, Berlinsky has an hysterical line about the simulation hypothesis in the film.
So, if people are interested, they should check that out.
Well, the first thing to say about the simulation hypothesis is the idea that we have a kind of faux existence that's a consequence of some master programmer programming us as kind of bots or.
But notice what's implied there is that it is an intelligent design hypothesis.
The implication is that there's a mind behind everything.
So I would say the simulation hypothesis is at least halfway there.
Where it falls down is that if the programmer has convinced us that we actually do exist, that we're not just have a faux existence in a simulated computer domain, then the Master programmer has outsmarted himself and created real existence.
It's a little bit like the old Cartesian argument about the evil demon that's convinced us that we exist, but we really don't.
But realizing that if the evil demon has convinced us such that we think we exist, well, then we at least do exist.
We at least do that.
New Atheists and Cultural Benefits00:15:31
The rest of Descartes' proofs may not be that effective, but I think he refuted the idea that we can be.
Talked out of an awareness of our own existence.
Yes.
And I think the simulation hypothesis implies that as well, and I think it fails on that grounds.
But it does affirm the need for an intelligent agent to account for the things we see, which I think is kind of curious and gets us halfway there.
Many, I would say actually maybe the most popular pastime for conservatives is to figure out when everything went wrong and whose fault it is.
Yeah.
And so sometimes we say, oh, it was William of Ockham.
Yeah.
He says, sometimes it was the liberals of the 60s.
I don't know.
Yeah.
But I might give it to Descartes.
Descartes just convincing us that everything that we can trust is in our own heads.
A lot of confusion comes from that man.
Well, it's an interesting thing to comment on, actually, because what Descartes tried to do was to establish the reliability of the mind and therefore a basis for knowledge.
And his first move in doing that was to try to prove the existence of God.
Well, he wanted to prove the existence of himself, then prove that he had thoughts that implied the existence of God, his famous trademark argument.
Which not even theistic philosophers think has any force.
It is a really bad argument.
And then from there, he wanted to, since there was a God, then we could trust the reliability of the mind.
There's an element of truth in all that.
The existence of God does provide a solid grounding for the belief in the reliability of the mind.
But because he tried to do all of that deductively and with absolute rational certainty, he ended up setting philosophy back three or four hundred years.
But he also showed something, which is that trying to prove things with absolute certainty is a fool's errand.
On the other hand, then Hume came along and tried to base everything on empirical data, and he ended up proving that we couldn't know anything at all based on that premise.
And so the rationalist premise and the empiricist premise, the strict rationalist, strict empiricist premise, both failed to provide a foundation for knowledge.
And I think there's a kind of echo of that in theistic thought where.
On the one hand, we've had the strict rationalists who have tried to prove God's existence with absolute certainty using deductively certain arguments.
And that's turned out to be a very high bar to meet.
And on the other hand, we've had people who've said, well, since you can't do that, we just punt and we're going to have faith and faith alone and do the fideism thing.
Or the Kierkegaardian take a leap of faith and deny that there's any rational basis for faith.
I've, in my work, focused on a middle way where.
Making the claim that you can have very strong reasons for belief in God.
You can have good reasons to believe in God, such that you can even affirm that you know you have knowledge of God, but without the kind of proof that's really only possible in mathematics and geometry, and even then only if you presuppose certain self evident axioms.
So I think we've had an epistemological crisis of belief in the West because we've oscillated between strict rationalism on the one hand.
And a fideism and skepticism on the other.
And the title of a course I taught for years was Reasons for Faith.
You can have strong reasons for faith.
You can infer to the theism as the best explanation for things without having to meet the bar of absolute certain proof.
Yes, obviously I don't go with Kierkegaard and I'm certainly not a fideist.
But there is something I really took from him that I love.
In that book, Fear and Trembling, when he's talking about the sacrifice of Isaac, and he says, well, how can.
How can God command something that's so manifestly immoral?
And he says, he uses a phrase that I like to use in my own personal life, which is the teleological suspension of the ethical, which is a great justification for when you want to do something wrong.
You say, no, no, no, you stole my donut.
No, no, no, it was the teleological suspension.
You have that third cigar.
Yeah.
No, there's much to appreciate in Kierkegaard, but not his epistemology.
I think his religious epistemology, I think, is one, in a sense, it conceded that there was no rational, evidential, or other. similar grounding, cognitive grounding for belief in God.
And I think that's one of the reasons that so many young people lose their faith when they get to places where they're expected to think, namely the university.
I am noticing just anecdotally, but the plural of anecdote is data.
Yes.
I've just noticed that back then people who, well, ultimately people who believed in God, but people who believe in an intelligent designer or who don't believe in aliens or who believe in the rational soul or any of these attendant issues, Non materialists.
People who think something other than matter and energy exists.
Yes.
Which is actually most of us because that's the way we live.
We believe there are moral principles.
We believe the human mind is reliable.
We believe we have a conscious agency that is not just a matter of chemistry in our brains, the rational soul.
Like, basically, everybody would seem to.
Everyone does behave that way.
Right.
And everyone, if you push them far enough and you made them think, they would have to admit that.
It does seem to me now that it's totally flipped.
That really, the materialists now, when they say some nonsense from a Christopher Hitchens interview or something, I don't know, the reaction I see even just on the internet is you'll say, hey, go over to reddit.com, sir.
This is for a serious discussion.
Yeah, right, right.
Okay, enjoy tipping your fedora.
We're going to, the adults are going to speak now.
How did that flip?
It's a great story, I think.
I have a colleague in the UK, Justin Briarly, who's written a book called The Surprising Rediscovery of.
Belief in God.
And he tells the story of the demise of the new atheist movement with people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss, and others.
And part of the story is that they overplayed their hand.
Part of it is that they linked their wagon to Darwinism.
And a famous quote from Richard Dawkins Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Well, what if leading evolutionary biologists are starting to say we need a new?
Theory, a new non Darwinian theory of evolution, what happens then to your atheism?
Is it properly grounded any longer?
I think a number of atheists themselves, leading atheist apologists, think that the arguments of the new atheists were really weak.
They typically avoided discussing the evidence from cosmology, suggesting that there was a creation event to the universe.
They typically avoided talking about the fine tuning problem, except for invoking the multiverse.
Which has been exposed to be an inadequate counter argument to the design argument.
And they certainly don't like to talk about the complexity and inner workings of the living cell and the problem of the origin of the first life, which has been a lot of the focus of my work.
And so I think the scientific case for intelligent design and indeed for God as the designer has grown ever more strong, even as they kind of overplayed their hand.
And I think also in Britain, in particular, where I spent a lot of time, There's a sense that there was something a little bit unsavory about these very overt attacks on religion, and the sense that maybe they very much overplayed their hand there.
And in virtue of that, you see that Dawkins himself is now describing himself as a cultural Christian, at least.
I'm not so bad.
I'm not a terrible guy.
I'm at least a cultural Christian.
I like hymns and cathedrals, you know?
Yes.
It starts somewhere.
I'll take it.
Radical Islam has impelled people to say, especially in Europe and the UK, to say, hey, we want to keep our cathedrals.
We don't want minarets going up.
And there are some big problems to abandoning our Christian identity.
The whole new atheist movement was just opportunistic, it seems to me.
9 11 occurred, Muslims attacked the United States, and these atheists took it as an opportunity to attack religion in general.
Religion in general.
And you say, well, hold on, wait, how is it that the Muslims attack us and then you lead a jihad against Christianity?
I think there's been a little sleight of hand here.
Right, right, right.
And out of that, and I think, I mean, there has been the accusation against the new atheists that they attacked religion in general because they were afraid to attack Islam specifically.
Of course.
I don't want to act like Salman Rushdie.
I don't know the motives.
But out of all of that came figures like Tom Holland, rediscovering the importance of Christianity for the cultural foundation of the West.
And that his argument that we all are swimming in Christian waters and don't know it, that our concepts of universal human rights, human dignity, the care, the concern for the disenfranchised, the poor, the widows, the orphans, All of this is something that comes into currency in the West after the Nazarene, after the Sermon on the Mount.
He said it doesn't exist in any of the ancient empires.
So there's been this kind of rediscovery.
I think there's a rediscovery of the cultural benefits and importance of Christianity to the West, but also I think the God question is percolating to the surface of the culture now among many unexpected figures.
You have Ayan Hirsi Ali, who has announced a Conversion away from the new atheism.
She was one of Dawkins' sidekicks.
She's a double convert.
She went from Islam to atheism and atheism to Christianity.
Yes.
But other figures, Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, Charles Murray, the social scientist, taking religion seriously, you have figures like Joe Rogan himself, who's now attending church and exploring some of these things.
So I think it's a very surprising.
Kind of turn where it seemed, you know, the days of the London buses with the billboards saying, you know, relax and enjoy your life.
God does not, God probably does not exist.
Relax and enjoy your life was the new atheist mantra.
I think that seems almost silly to people now.
It certainly does.
You know, back then, so this was 20 years ago basically.
It's not even 20 years ago, but this thing has spent force, and I would say in about 15 years.
Yeah, right, right.
I guess in those days, your comment or the criticism that people have made of you that it's creationism in a cheap tuxedo.
Oh, that tuxedo thing again.
Says, oh, just take a dagger out.
I came with a pocket square this time.
Just to prove them wrong.
Yeah, we can really dress.
But I think that impelled a lot of people to try to gussy up their arguments in secular sounding language, jargony kind of language, to say, no, no, no, I'm not grounding.
I might be theistic, I might be a Christian, but I'm not grounding my views on that at all.
I actually have these.
I've come to these conclusions through entirely secular and rationalist means.
I don't know.
To me now, it seems to flip.
It's kind of like the IQ bell curve meme.
The guy at the end of the IQ bell curve, the real dummy, he speaks.
That's the creationist in the cheap tuxedo.
He's the creationist in the cheap tuxedo.
He speaks in plain language.
He says, I think God made the world.
The world.
And then the guy in the middle says, No, actually, the multiverse has produced seven bazillion universes because of whatever.
And then you get up to the Jedi.
Who is at the high point of the end?
He says, Actually, you know, God made the world.
Then you get to a Berlinsky or a Dembski or some of the geniuses in our movement.
Yes.
Berlinsky wrote this incredible critique of the new atheist movement when it was still hot and the devil's delusion, atheism and its scientific pretensions.
And he saw a lot of the.
But I had a conversation with him.
I know you and I met him.
You met him at a conference in the fall.
Yes.
I'm quite taken with David Berlinsky.
But even before I met him, I. He's, by the way, featured in the film, and every time he comes on, people start laughing.
Yes, I mean, he's just this.
So before I had met him, all I knew of him was his writing.
But I really have enjoyed his writing for a long time.
As with yours.
His wit.
Yes, and then you meet this man, and you say, How is he even more?
He's 50 times more of a character than you expect, even from his writing, which is already called.
Even more fun, right?
Yes, yeah.
But he and I were talking the other day, and he said, No, actually, the New Atheist did us a favor.
Because what they did is they effectively challenged people of a theistic bent to up their game.
And to articulate and formulate the reasons they had for believing in God.
And as we were kind of doing that all along with our work on intelligent design, but they created an appetite for the kind of work that we were doing.
And lo and behold, people have found that our arguments are actually better.
And some of the new atheist arguments are incredibly weak, such that many atheist philosophers, for example, Dawkins' argument from.
Complexity.
If you invoke God, then you've invoked something more complex than the thing you're trying to explain, and that violates Occam's razor.
No, no, no, no, it doesn't.
That's not what Occam's razor says.
It isn't that the entity can't be more complex than the thing being explained.
If that were the case, then we couldn't explain the origin of the television set by reference to the engineers who designed it, because clearly the engineers, or you couldn't explain Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, by reference to Dawkins, because clearly he would have to acknowledge that his own mind and brain.
Are more complex than the words on the page that he wrote.
The Occam's razor says you shouldn't multiply theoretical entities.
Your explanation shouldn't be complex in the sense of being baroque and convoluted with just adding new explanatory just so stories to make your explanation still fit.
God is actually a very simple explanation because the postulation of one God is much simpler than the postulation of a multiverse and all the theoretical entities that go with it from string theory and inflationary cosmology.
Some would say he's so simple, he's described by divine simplicity.
Well, there's that very ancient argument from classical philosophy, absolutely.
So, this is one of the go to arguments of the scientific atheists, and even many atheistic philosophers say, no, this is a complete misapplication of Occam's razor.
I remember reading Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great, when I was a teenager or something.
And I read it, and I said, well, and I was quite taken with him.
Testing Metaphysical Systems00:15:29
But it did occur to me later.
I said, he doesn't even make that argument.
The book doesn't even give you what it sells you on the cover.
He just whines about religion for 250 pages or so.
And then I was taken with the analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga's description of the new atheism.
They said, What do you think of the new atheists?
He said, I think they're greatly inferior to the old atheists.
I think Bertrand Russell probably is.
A lot better.
Yes, yeah, that's exactly right.
Well, and that's the.
Yeah, a couple of things there.
First of all, let's stipulate that Christopher Hitchens was himself great.
Yes, yeah, a delightful figure.
Delightful figure.
Tremendous orator, great, oozed British erudition.
And let's give Dawkins his due as well.
He has a tremendous talent for framing issues.
And I think in so doing, he did us all a favor because Darwinism wasn't just about change over time.
It became very easy to accommodate Darwinian evolution if you thought all it was was change over time.
You could incorporate that into what was God's way of creating because God just caused the change over time.
No, Darwinism.
Was as Dawkins very succinctly put it in The Blind Watchmaker biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
Darwinism was about the denial of actual design and the affirmation of the illusion of design.
I mean, a lot of Christians who are interested in the doctrine of creation were getting all hung up on is the earth old or is it young?
Do organisms have a common ancestor or not?
Is there some change or no change?
No, the issue was always design or no design.
And that's the reason that our team framed the issue that way and said, no, our theory is the theory of intelligent design.
We think that there are certain features of the living world and of the universe that are best explained by the action of an intelligent agent rather than an undirected, unguided process like natural selection.
So we posed ourselves in opposition to the neo Darwinists.
And Dawkins made very clear what was at stake that helped us to clarify the issue.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
By going so far, by being so brazen, some would say reckless in their claims.
But logically consistent.
Yes, yes.
He is a logically consistent materialist.
The other great Dawkins quote, which I absolutely love and repaired to several times in my book, Return to the God Hypothesis, and in the new film, Story of Everything, another number of people cite it, is his claim that the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design.
Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
That's a beautiful statement, not only of materialism as a philosophy, but it also implies that metaphysical hypotheses like materialism or its opposite, theism, are testable against observations of the world around us.
They're every bit as testable as scientific theories.
And so that's a wonderful thing because there's people who want to separate metaphysics from the observations of the world.
No, our metaphysical theories can be tested by the test of experience, by looking and seeing.
And what I show in Return to the God Hypothesis, and what we show, I think, even more vividly in the film, is that the great.
The story of everything.
I don't know that we've actually said the title of the film yet.
The story of everything, thank you.
Is that the great discoveries of the last 100 years in science have been shocking to the materialist.
They're not what you would expect from blind, pitiless indifference.
That's shorthand for scientific materialism.
No materialist expected that the universe would have a beginning.
It was axiomatic for the materialistic philosophy or scientific atheism.
That the universe was eternal and self existent and self creating and therefore did not need an external creator.
It had always been here, so you didn't have to think about, well, what started it?
Yeah.
Or who started it?
But the shocking discovery of modern astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy is that the universe, as best we can tell for multiple reasons, had a beginning.
No materialist expected the fine tuning.
When Fred Hoyle discovered the first suite of fine tuning parameters, he changed his worldview.
He was a staunch scientific atheist.
He hated the Big Bang, as we were saying, and stigmatized it with his term, the Big Bang, the pejorative term.
But when he discovered the fine tuning that was necessary to account for the abundance of carbon in the universe, he realized that there must be an intellect, a mind behind the universe.
And his famous quote was that the best data we have suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible.
And I do love the way the monkeys always make it into the origins.
They do.
There is a role for the monkey, there's a role for every particle in the cosmos.
That was unexpected.
And of course, the biggest unexpected thing is the interior of the cell.
And Dawkins, two summers ago now, was himself quoted as saying that he was knocked sideways with wonder at the intricate data processing system at work inside the cell.
That's not what you would expect from blind, pitiless indifference.
Intricate data processing systems, digital code, and nanomachines.
And we're talking nanomachines, we're talking turbines, sliding clamps, little walking robotic motor proteins, little rotary engines, inside cells on a miniaturized scale.
This is what we're finding inside life.
No materialist expected to find that kind of thing.
So it's good that he's knocked on his side.
When's he going to be knocked on his knees?
How do you look at that with just the jaw dropping complexity, intricacy, and not just say, you know, just not start reciting Psalm 8, you know, oh Lord, your works are manifest in the creation.
Or fearfully and wonderfully made when you think about our own bodies.
And I say this with no glee, I actually have a great admiration for him.
He's a tremendous communicator, he's a very good scientist.
And as a He has a real talent for framing issues in a way that is clarifying.
He's just ended up on the wrong side of the most fundamental questions, but maybe he's softening in his interest in cultural Christianity.
Cultural Christianity, I'll tell you.
And one of his, I don't know if people have seen, but the interview or the conversation between Ayan, Hersi Ali, and Dawkins is fascinating.
The body language there, she seems so comfortable in her own skin.
And Dawkins is almost in a manner, leaning over, almost pleading, saying, How could you, of all people, have come to this conclusion?
Yes, yeah.
I would say to Professor Dawkins, I would say the water is warm.
It's like a nice primordial soup over here.
Come join us.
Come join us on the theistic side of things.
Can I tell you one other thing about the primordial soup that just is it triggers those of us who know something about chemical evolutionary theory and the origin of life?
The large biomolecules, the proteins in particular, will not polymerize, the amino acids will not link together in water.
But we've been telling students for years that life arose in a warm little pond, in a primordial soup.
I had never heard that.
Just repair to some of Jim Tour's videos online.
Jim is the most mild mannered, gentle, humble man.
But if you start spewing chemical nonsense, he'll get triggered.
And this is one of the things that triggers him.
Of all the nonsense I've ever heard about the primordial soup, I've never heard that water is a no problem.
That's great.
Just something's a no problem.
That's great.
Energetically unfavorable.
I love that.
Polymerization.
You know, on the point of the plain language versus jargon and these kinds of. abstract and needlessly convoluted theories like the multiverse.
Another shift, it seems to me, is that people now seem to want to back away from the jargon a little bit, which is good.
that's a return to normal.
Common sense.
Common sense.
And anyone who is worth their while who's ever written about writing points out that short, precise Saxon words are preferable to polysyllabic, Latinate words that are less evocative.
That a dummy or a midwit at best Will try to impress you with all sorts of polysyllabic words, unless he's Bill Buckley and he's just having fun.
Yes, right.
Running circles around you.
Yes.
Or our friend Berlinski can do the same.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
But people, some people have fun with it.
But the ones who write is basically all academic papers are written today.
Right.
With this weak, you know, passive voice.
Passive voice, all Latin at words, jargon.
As if no one is there making an argument, and maybe no argument is being made.
Yeah, precisely.
But the great works of science, we get.
Attacked for being polemical because we're making an argument.
We're making an argument for intelligent design.
But the great works of science, and I would include in that the origin of species.
It's time it was a great work of science.
Galileo?
Darwin said, yeah, exactly.
Darwin said, described his own work as one long argument for the idea of common descent by natural selection.
Yes.
Newton started the Principia with the theory of vortices is pressed with many difficulties.
And he's about to strip the bark off of the previous theory of gravity, and he executes a beautiful, mathematically rich argument.
But science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret evidence.
There's an Italian philosopher of science I like, Marcello Para.
He's not Irish, it's Marcello Para.
And he says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence.
Dispute in science, we're actually doing something profoundly unscientific.
We need to make sure that we're always allowing scientists the freedom to contest and to dispute and get back to that medieval disputational method where you make your case and then you address the counter arguments.
That's a very good way of getting to the truth.
It's not even something that is in theory unscientific.
It is demonstrably, observably unscientific.
The Galileo example came to mind because in his discourse on the world systems, he calls his opponent.
Simplicio.
He calls him an idiot.
That's his big mistake.
Well, that's why he got arrested.
He knew that pope.
Yeah, exactly.
But he does, you know, and even there it was clever because he's referring to this commentator on Aristotle, Simplicius.
But it was thinly veiled.
Right.
You know, it was quite polemical, let's put it.
And so, yes, it just seems to me that, you know, 20 years ago when people would say, 15 years ago when people would say, well, you know, you have religious priors and so that's why you're making the scientific argument.
And then he would say, no, no, it's not because of it.
Now I would say, Yes, I have an integral view of the world.
I, being an integral whole of matter and soul, yes, I have a view of the cosmos that includes this.
I think of St. John Henry Newman in his great work, The Idea of a University.
He points out that a university purports to universal knowledge.
Universitas, yes.
Yes, correct.
And so you say now they no longer teach theology at universities.
How could a university even pretend to universal knowledge if you're taking out a pretty integral part of that?
And what has happened since we've done that?
The universities now have splintered into specialization and more often nonsense.
Right.
Well, this is actually back to that Dawkins quote.
One of the things I love about the idea, he's tacitly affirming that metaphysical systems of thought, worldviews, can be tested.
So we have a worldview.
I'm a theist, a Christian like you are.
I hold that worldview because it does such a good job of explaining so many things around me.
You know, the old Chesterton quote I don't believe in God because I see him, but because by him I see all other things.
But that doesn't mean that even if you have a worldview that's very integrated, that it's still not subject to critical test.
That there might not be data that might come along that might either challenge you or provide further confirmation.
And the idea that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there's no purpose, no design.
No.
I think the universe has exactly the properties.
This is what we show in the film vividly.
We show because we do it with cinematography and animations.
You can see the things that you would expect to be the case if there was a designing mind behind everything.
And so it's the having prior commitments epistemologically, things that you assume, it's not a bad thing to have intellectually because it doesn't mean you're not open to adapting or refining or modifying your worldview.
But it's necessary to have such a system to make sense of the world.
It's the Augustinian belief in order to know, you know.
Yes.
But also to posit that one does not have any prior, that one is purely neutral, is just a lie.
I mean, it's not possible to do that.
Exactly.
That's the positivistic pretension on the other side the idea that, well, you theists have your prior assumptions, your faith commitments.
We're just all about the evidence.
But as many of the people we've been talking about on the side opposite demonstrate, they have their own set of assumptions.
And what actually has caused people to not see the evidence of design in nature is a deep prior presupposition known as not just materialism in the sense of metaphysical materialism, but a commitment to methodological materialism that says that if you're going to be a scientist, we have to explain everything by reference to purely material processes or entities.
Irrespective of what the evidence is.
So, if you see evidence for a dualist understanding of the mind, the mind is not just the chemistry at work in the brain.
And there's a wonderful book out that provides a very strong evidential case for a kind of dualist understanding.
That's the work of Michael Egner in his book.
The immortal mind.
Dualist meaning that the mind is distinct from the brain.
From the brain.
They interact, but the physical brain is not the whole of our existence.
We are a composite entity that involves more than just the chemistry at work or the cells in the brain.
Neurophysiology has been constrained in its understanding of human nature and reality because of this principle of materialism.
Materialism Constrained by Faith00:14:25
When we think about the origin of life, What I've seen in researching this now for nearly 40 years is that you have these cycles where you'll have the chance hypothesis arise, and then that obviously doesn't work.
And then we'll get theories that invoke natural laws, and those don't explain the origin of information either.
Then we'll have theories that combine the two, and they have deep problems.
And so then we go back to the chance hypothesis.
But there's another possibility.
Maybe the information necessary to produce life is, in fact, the product of an intelligent agent.
But if you preclude that from the outset of your investigation, you'll never get there.
You'll never see that.
It'd be like going into the British Museum looking at the Rosetta Stone and saying, Well, I'd like to say it was the product of a scribe, but because I'm committed to methodological materialism, I'm going to have to invoke wind and erosion.
So you miss something, right?
And so it's not just theists that have prior commitments.
And I think being aware of those prior commitments allows you to.
To subject them to critical test when the need arises.
If you're not aware of them, you get blinders on and you just work within one framework and you keep trying to jam materialistic square pegs into theistic or round holes.
But you know, the theists are not blameless here in as much as there have been plenty of people under the banner of Christianity or really any other religion, I guess, who.
But Christianity is the one that matters here because it's.
It's what's of interest to us.
It's what's of interest to us.
who have posited a problem, a conflict between reason and faith.
Absolutely.
And there are well-established flavors of Christianity that adopt this.
Whereas you bring up the example of this shocking new discovery that the mind and the brain might be distinct.
think, well, all human beings in our civilization, at least for the last, I don't know, 2,000 years or so, maybe a little longer.
Back in the period of the Greeks?
Yeah, yeah, approaching 2,500 years, 3,000 years, have recognized this for pretty simple reasons.
St. Thomas Aquinas, who on basically every show I can't help but talk about my Mayflower cigars, and St. Thomas Aquinas those are the two.
You've worked it in, well, at least one.
We haven't got time.
There's one, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I wouldn't want to let it go.
But Aquinas makes a pretty clear argument for it, which is the mind can't be physical, the intellect can't be physical because it deals in immaterial substances.
So the eyes, what is, the eyes receive color, and that's how we see the physical world.
The ear receives sound, and the mind receives universals, so justice.
Thinks about mathematics.
Mathematics, yes.
And so, a purely physical object could not deal in any material substance.
And so there has to be a distinction between the mind and the brain.
Good enough for me.
An argument from the First Vatican Council says that God can be known, the existence of God can be known with certainty.
human reason in the created world.
It's simple as that.
Two things to say about that one.
One, just a quick experiment that Michael Egner cites in his new book.
When brain physiologists have, for various reasons therapeutic, needed on occasion to sever the two hemispheres electrically, and they find that a person who is still consciously aware can relate sense data that's presented to one hemisphere only to sense data that's been presented to the other hemisphere only,
The two and make intellectual connections and draw analogies between the two, even though there is no physiological center of the brain that's processing that information.
You want to hear something really weird?
That implies an immaterial entity that is doing the processing, which you can call the mind or the soul.
Your description of that just gave me chills.
Even though you just described evidence for the thing that I just said I believe.
I just, not 20 seconds ago, said I believe it.
And yet, your description of the physical evidence for that just gave me a chance.
Well, I would recommend Egner's work on this.
I had the same experience when he explained it to me over the phone one time.
But which is to say that neuroscience is catching up with or providing additional evidential support for the dualist philosophy of the classical philosophers.
So that's pretty exciting.
And the other thing is on the faith reason divide.
There has been this anti intellectual strain in recent, last hundred years, Christianity, in particular in our country.
And I think, in fact, just the other day, I was on an interview this morning on a television interview, and the host said, Well, why is it that in your film you talked about science and its relation to God, not scripture?
Why didn't you talk about scripture?
And I think there's the sense that.
That science has been opposed to a biblical or Christian worldview rather than seeing it as the friend.
I just made the point that, well, there's been this dichotomy the sense that religious people have the faith, and the scientists and the philosophers and the scholars have facts, and the facts oppose the faith.
And so many religious people, many Christian people, have withdrawn from the realm of intellectual discourse, It's opposed to what they value most rather than seeing that the facts support the faith.
And you go back to just something very simple in the scripture, Romans chapter 1.
From the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, sometimes in older translations rendered wisdom, have been clearly seen from what has been made.
The facts of the world point to not only God's existence, but they even tell us something about his attributes.
And so there's no necessary separation.
We don't have to keep the The world of the intellect, the world of facts, the world of reason down here, and the realm of morality and religious belief appear ever separated in the manner that Stephen Jay Gould commended to us with his idea of Noma, non overlapping magisteria.
No, the realms overlap because it's God's world.
Yes, yes.
I don't know.
To me, I would jump headlong into that because I said, well, look, either it's true or it's not.
Right.
And if it's true, then it must obtain.
In the world, not just in this one classroom or in this one.
It seems to me there's something very attractive now.
Maybe it's because it's so subversive.
You have seen a spike in conversions in Europe and in the United States.
Specifically to Catholicism, I've noticed.
You've seen a little bit of a spike, a return to the mainline Protestantism, which had been basically eradicated over the last 60 years.
A return to liturgy, to smells and bells and complexity and all.
And it's really weird because in this country, Catholicism used to be a low class thing.
It was for your Irish maid, it was not for the intellectual Christians.
Yes, right.
But now it's weird.
Catholicism and to some degree the high church Protestant traditions, and Eastern Orthodoxy even, have this kind of intellectual cachet to them.
They're catching on.
The Catholic Church is still bleeding members because cradle Catholics are falling away.
But the number of adult conversions is skyrocketing in the West.
I wonder if there's this flip of ethos in that now the atheists have lost their mojo.
They've lost their cred.
And the intellectual mojo is.
This is a point I wanted to come back to before with your quote of Plantinga.
One of the funniest things, or the most ironic things about the new atheism, is that it wasn't new at all.
It was reprising the village atheism of the late 19th century, the scientific atheism of the late 19th century.
And I think when you ask, well, why did it lose its mojo?
I think it was partly because it wasn't really offering anything new.
It was offering something that had either been refuted or for which the evidence was right there to do the refuting.
Yes.
And so, yeah, there's a study in Britain, again, I cite my friend Justin Briarly, and there's a study in Britain on the quiet revival.
And this is happening very rapidly.
In 2018, the number of Of young people, I forget the cohort, maybe 18 to 30, who were attending church was in the low single digits, about 4%, very low among young men, only slightly lower among young women.
It's jumped among young men to 21 or 22%, from like 2%, almost a tenfold increase, and among young women from 4 to 16, a fourfold increase, something like that.
So there's something going on.
And this is one of the things that excites us in coming out.
With this film into the culture right now, we feel like we're hitting a cultural scene where there's receptivity to the message of this, that people are looking not only for evidence that supports belief in God, but I think people are also, young people in particular, are looking for something that would ground a yearning for meaning.
There's a Harvard study in which it was documented that something like 56% of young people in the 18 to 30 range.
Acknowledged having persistent doubts about whether their own lives had any enduring or lasting meaning.
And this makes perfect sense in light of the new atheism and the dominance of materialism, naturalism as a worldview.
It's not just been the new atheism, this has been the dominant, the default way of thinking in the West for quite some time in the elite intellectual culture, in the universities, the law schools, the courts, the media.
And young people pick up on that, of course.
And it makes sense.
If your worldview is materialistic, nothing can mean anything to a rock or a planet or a galaxy or even a DNA molecule.
Things only mean things to persons.
Things are meaningful to people.
And yet, we all die.
And so If there is no ultimate person whose existence precedes ours and can continue beyond ours, outlast ours.
Outlast ours.
That's the verb I was looking for.
Thank you.
There can be no possibility of ultimate meaning.
This is axiomatic.
And there was a great Bertrand Russell quote about the heat death of the universe and the sense that this is everything's pointless.
And because of the heat death of the universe, this is beyond certain.
This is absolutely certain.
And I think young people.
Perceive that.
And so I think there's a craving for a basis for meaning again.
And if there is a personal God, a personal creator who wants to know us, and if there is evidence of that, moreover, then the question of meaning is back on the table.
Yeah, and I guess I even come at it from the opposite direction, which is the materialist would say, yes, isn't it a pity?
But I guess my reaction to that is there is meaning.
There is meaning.
There manifestly is meaning.
Right.
We all behave as if.
As if.
Right.
For all of history, everywhere in the world.
Yeah.
And we can even investigate meaning.
Right.
We can know things about it.
Yeah.
One discovery of semiotics, of the study of symbols, is that meaning participates both in The real world with real things that I can touch, you know, and with rational creatures, objects of my mind.
And that, you know, a yellow light, for instance, means something.
It's a convention, it's just a symbol, but it means something.
And what's so curious about the yellow light is its meaning is not totally fixed.
I participate in its meaning because if I were a granny and I saw the yellow light, the meaning that I would pull out of it is to slow down, but the meaning that I pull out of it is, of course, to speed up.
Because I want to get past the light.
I know what it's trying to tell me.
I know what it says about the law.
I know what it says.
And yet, there's this dynamic meaning that is pulled out of the universe, both from tangible things.
I love that move, Michael, because you can make an evidential case for theism, which grounds a belief in a transcendent or ultimate, persistent meaning.
Or you can presuppose the reality of meaning and point out that we all live as if there was such a thing.
And then challenge people to fess up and acknowledge what is implied by the existence of such a thing.
Surely it's a curious fact.
Which is namely some ultimate person who is the ground of it all.
I think there's a moral argument that can be unpacked in the exact same way, or an epistemological argument.
We all live as though we have objective knowledge of the world, which implies that we believe that our minds are reliable.
There are all kinds of post enlightenment.
Epistemologies, philosophies that deny the reliability of the mind, but we live as though our minds are reliable.
The Grounding of Existence00:02:02
And perhaps the best, I think, the best grounding of that belief is actually theism, the idea that our minds were made by a benevolent God to know the world that he made.
And so you can start with a presumption of knowledge and work backwards to its necessary condition, which is theism, or you can make a case for God and then say, hey, good news, we have good reason to believe our minds are reliable and therefore science is possible.
Yeah, you know, the people who would say that.
Well, we have no reason even to believe that the product of our mind is accurate.
Have the courage of your convictions.
Go run into the wall.
Exactly.
Go jump into the fire.
You never seem to do that, do you?
Right.
And so I remember.
Part of my reversion, I was an atheist for 10 years.
I reverted a year after college.
But part of it, it was an agony.
It sounds like we settled about the same time.
That's really interesting.
I had about a 10 year protracted, agonizing conversion.
It wasn't really an experience.
That's interesting.
That's precisely the same.
It was 10 years.
Especially at the end Overthinking everything.
Overthinking everything.
I took the long way.
I took the stubborn.
Yes.
The last thing in the world to a Damascus Road experience.
Yes, yes.
I remember when I was finally.
The scales were beginning very slowly falling from my eyes.
I was sitting in my little ugly house that my mother had bought, and I had this little ugly house in New York, and I was sitting in front of my little ugly dying rose bush, smoking a cigar on my little ugly house.
Even then, huh?
Even then.
The cigars have been persistent.
That's the real grounding of your existence.
Truly, yeah, truly.
And I was sitting there smoking it, looking at this little ugly house.
It's important that it wasn't beautiful, it was kind of ugly.
Yeah.
I couldn't help but notice the particularity of it, the complexity of it, the fact that the leaf looked one way and not another way, the fact that the vine turned one way and not another way.
I thought, well, isn't that funny?
Minds Are Not Simple00:06:01
Isn't that weird that I thought the universe would be so neat and pat and simple and generalizable?
But it's so why does the concrete look the way that it does?
And why does it evoke something?
Why am I drawing some meaning out of that?
That in itself seems beautiful.
This is ugly, but there's a meaning that is drawing my mind to something beautiful.
How the hell does it mean anything at all?
And I was reminded of this line from the South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who, in their own charming way, had said, You know, we make fun of all these religions.
They had the musical about Mormons, and so we make fun of all these religions.
Said, But you know, of all the crazy religions of the world, the craziest one we ever heard about was this idea that everything that we know, that we experience, that is Beautiful, our loves, our joys, our desires, and all.
It's all here just because.
Just because.
That's the start of the Bertrand Russell quote.
Our greatest desires and hopes and loves and the highest accomplishments, the noonday brightness of human achievement, it's all destined for destruction in the heat death of the universe.
Yes.
Yeah.
And that's the fact.
Your description of that reminds me of the account of the conversion of Whittaker Chambers, who was looking at his daughter's ear.
Yeah.
And it also reminds me of a kind of conceit that exists within science that we will be able to explain everything by these pure, a set of pure, simple regularities.
And time and time again, we've not been able to come up with a theory of everything in physics.
But in biology in particular, there was the assumption that when we got, when we figured out the secret of life, it would be a real simple, repetitive molecule.
And then the shocking thing was, The immense three dimensional complexity of the proteins, the amazing linear complexity of the sequence of the characters in the DNA, and the sequence of the amino acids that turned into the three dimensional.
Everything in biology was complex.
It was highly specified, but it was very complex.
And a lot of times, physicists hope that we'll be able to explain everything in the universe by reference to one simple theory of everything.
But I don't think it's going to work because we live in a world, a universe, a world.
And especially the living world, of beautiful specificity and complexity combined.
And that's something that is derivative of information.
You need instructions to build that kind of thing.
I thought the secret of life was 42 or 50.
Yeah, exactly.
Or this thing that my grandson says about 6'7.
He says, I don't know what it means either.
But everyone at school is saying it 6'7, 6'7.
Yeah, maybe that's it.
Like cigars, the secret of the universe.
Yes, it is.
But of course, that is what everyone wants the secret of life.
Theory of the universe is this simple equation or something.
But I fear that you have had some deceit in the marketing here because you told me you have this movie based on this book about telling the story of everything.
Right.
Now you tell me there's no simple theory.
Well, there's no simple theory, but there is a simple explanation that involves the importance of a mind behind the universe.
Minds are not simple, and minds do things that are complex.
Yeah.
There's a Biblical connection here, too.
That what we've realized in the 19th century, when people did think things would end up being simple, everything by natural laws, and there were two fundamental entities, matter and energy.
And the big story, the story of everything, is that there's a third fundamental element, and that is information.
And this is something that was anticipated biblically, beginning of the Hebrew Bible.
In the beginning, God said, and in the Beginning of the John 9 prologue in the New Testament.
In the beginning was the Word.
And so, in fact, one of the scientists in the film, who was a leading chemical evolutionary theorist, first had a scientific conversion to skepticism about his own theory, then had a deeper scientific conversion to the idea or theory of intelligent design, and then finally had a religious conversion to Christianity.
And one of the things that elicited his sort of aha moment was coming across a passage in the New Testament describing Jesus Christ as the word of life and realizing that this.
This connection between creativity and information was anticipated in the Bible itself.
Even in the, as you mentioned, those first verses of Genesis, you do see Trinitarian imagery, the idea that the Father speaks, you know, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.
And even the air, like the aspiration of the Word, is an image of the bond of love between the Father and the Son, as I see it, of the Holy Ghost.
And so you see that all right there.
And the notion that from the very beginning there is personhood.
Personhood.
Relationship.
In relationship.
Yes.
And interesting, too, we were just discussing the triadic nature of meaning, signs and symbols.
Yeah.
And you see the basically just see God as Trinity embedded in the entire creation.
And some people will look at that and say, nah, just a coincidence.
Just a coincidence.
Everything's just a coincidence.
Yeah.
It's a lot of coincidences.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The movie is the story of everything.
The book, people should read all of your books, of course.
Well, thank you.
But the movie is based on the book.
Mrs. Meyer, thanks.
Yes, yes, certainly.
Personhood from the Beginning00:02:26
You can get more cheap tuxedos.
Yes, right, exactly.
Before I let you go, on that point, actually, which we haven't totally hammered, what is the difference?
They say you're just a creationist and a deist.
Oh, right, right, right.
What is the difference between this unthinking, God of the gaps, knuckle dragging, dumb creationism and intelligent design?
Well, the term creationist has been deployed as a pejorative term against those of us in our research community, our network, who are advancing the theory of intelligent design.
And that's because there is a form of creationism which is committed to the Proposition that the earth is very, very young on the order of, say, six or 10,000 years, or maybe a bit older, and that the days of Genesis are meant to be understood as six 24 hour periods.
Our theory of intelligent design is different from that form of creationism in two ways.
One is that it's not a deduction from scriptural authority, first of all, it's an inference from biological, physical, and cosmological data.
We're seeing evidence of the activity of a mind, an intelligent mind, and in the cosmological realm, even a transcendent intelligent mind.
And secondly, the theory of intelligent design is an age neutral proposition.
It's not committed to a young Earth or an old Earth.
It's simply saying that there are certain means by which you can detect the activity of a mind or an intelligence.
And we see evidence of those distinctive hallmarks of intelligent activity.
In the living forms that came on the planet before us, and even in, for example, the fine tuning of the physical constants and parameters of the universe.
So it's an inference of biological data, and it takes no position per se on the age of the Earth.
I myself hold to the great antiquity of the universe and life, but there are scientists who affirm intelligent design who might beg to differ with me, and maybe because they read the Genesis account differently than I do, hold to a young Earth.
But intelligent design is not affirming a young earth.
Hallmarks of Intelligent Activity00:06:23
Bound by that, yes.
But even today, we have a new study center that we've started in Cambridge, England, and one of the libels against us is that we're young earth creationists.
And well, that's not what the theory affirms.
On the point of a distinction between the mind and the brain, what does this mean for AI, artificial intelligence?
Because one thing I noticed that the head of NVIDIA claimed that they stumbled on artificial general intelligence.
They had reached it.
But then no one can define what that is.
Does it mean the AI can run a billion dollar business?
Does it mean that the AI is indiscernible from a human being in the way that he reasons at general tasks?
It occurred to me, I think they can't define artificial general intelligence because they don't know what real intelligence is.
They literally no longer know what the intellect is.
What does that distinction mean for AI?
Let's set the definitional question aside for a minute.
There's a very significant result that's emerged out of the most cutting edge versions of AI, the large language models.
And it's something called the model collapse.
And I think it's the tell, it's the philosophical tell.
The extraordinary thing about the AI technology, especially these large language models, is what they can do.
It's amazing.
And if you feed in lots of text written by actual human agents, you can then query that body of information and you will get coherent answers spit back at you in response to your queries.
But if you take the output of those answers, if you take those answers as output and treat that as more data to feed into the AI system or make that the basis of a new iteration.
Of large language modeling, if you will.
And now you query that data set, your next set of answers are not nearly as coherent.
And if you keep doing that iteration after iteration after iteration without correcting things, without an input of a conscious intelligence correcting things, you'll get to pure gibberish within a couple of generations.
So you have a kind of devolution of.
Of informational coherence with each iteration.
And what this shows is there's a fundamental asymmetry between the information that comes from the conscious intelligence, which is the source of the original data set, and then the artificial data that's output by the AI in response to your query of that first real data set that's come from agents, from conscious agents.
So the AI is dependent on either both the initial input and subsequent.
Inputs by way of correction in a way that the agent is not dependent on the AI for the production of genuine meaning.
So, this shows that the mind will not be replaced by the artificial intelligence.
There's a great book coming out called Augmented Human Intelligence by Eric Larson and co author with MIT Press.
And his previous book was The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, which was a critique of claims for artificial general intelligence.
And I would recommend these two books for readers that are interested.
And he shows for a bunch of reasons, the technical reasons and other more than I've just stated, that there's a lot of reasons to doubt the almost utopian program of artificial general intelligence.
And nothing in the LLMs, the large language models, the ChatGPTs, that sort of technology undermines that conclusion.
Listen, I'm going to preface this and say some of my best friends work in AI.
I don't, but I mean, some of them will say we're building God.
So they're describing the opposite process that this thing is going to achieve liftoff and become much, much more intelligent.
You're saying, no, no, no, if it's just feeding on itself, it degrades pretty quickly.
My only challenge to that is I seem to observe the same phenomenon among actual human intelligence in society.
I don't, you know, yeah, writing has declined low these last hundred years.
Well, you know what turned me onto this, Michael, was an analogous problem in origin of life research, which has been my main field.
And that is, there's a model called hypercycles that was meant to simulate how you could get in, produce something analogous to cellular metabolism.
But with each cycle, there was a loss of information and what was called an error catastrophe, an accumulation of essentially genetic gibberish in the modeling of the origin of life.
And that's what you have in the AI with the model collapse.
It's an error catastrophe.
Where you gradually lose meaning and coherence with each iteration, unless you have a conscious agent inputting information.
And so, this also underscores one of our key principles in intelligent design research, which is the conservation of information that the information, the specified or functional information of a system, will either remain the same or degrade over time unless there is an input of information from a conscious agent.
The initial input will exceed the output.
Right.
Or sometimes, If you have an error correction, you can maintain the fidelity of information across a channel, but that error correction has to have an input from an intelligence.
So it's this fundamental connection between conscious intelligence and the creation and even the maintenance of information.
That's not something that nature does on its own.
Nor something that the computers do on their own.
Even the computers are dependent upon us and not the other way around.
We use them, fantastic technology.
There's all kinds of ways they are.
Improving life.
We need them in the medical industry.
We need them in defense technology.
AI has got a lot of great potential, but it also, like any technology, can be used for ill as well.
Science Reveals Ultimate Meaning00:10:10
And we have to watch that side of things.
Right.
On points that are called dumb and uneducated, we were talking about Galileo earlier, who got exactly what he deserved, as far as I'm concerned, but not for scientific reasons because of impudence.
His imprudence.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Yes.
But what Galileo upended was this idea that the Earth is the center of everything, the cosmos, these spheres on which the celestial body is moved.
And now we find ourselves in Carl Sagan world where we say we're just some little rock far-flung in the middle of nowhere.
But I've heard that from cosmic background radiation, we have determined that actually maybe we are back at the center of things.
And anyway, I really want that because one, I want to beat up.
For new and different reasons.
Yes, is it?
In thought in the Middle Ages.
Is it possible?
There's a fantastic opening of the film, if I can just tout it one more time, I'm sorry.
I don't mean to be here selling.
Please.
I mean, I've been selling Mayflower cigars now twice on this show.
Well, there's a wonderful opening where we set up this contrast between the two great stories of reality the materialistic story and the story that affirms a creator or a mind behind the universe.
And there's a wonderful clip that we found of Sagan where he's talking about.
Dawkins has just said, just affirmed how that when we die, he's asked by Piers Morgan in the film, What happens to you when you die?
He says, Well, of course, I'm either buried or I'm cremated.
There's just nothing.
There's just nothing.
How could there be?
You have a brain that decays.
And then Carl Sagan comes on and says, Here we are, like mites on a plum, on this little planet of this obscure, tiny solar system, and the edge of an insignificant galaxy among Something like 400 billion other galaxies.
And then there's this beautiful flyby of when we start on planet Earth and you go out into deep space and then you end up with all the galaxies.
And it gives you this great sense of this insignificance.
And I think so, as far as being at the center of the solar system or the center of the universe, now we can't derive significance from that.
But being the outcome of a plan, of a finely tuned universe, of a genetic.
And other levels of informational programming that make us possible, that reveal a master programming behind everything, well, maybe we are special after all.
Maybe we were intended.
And I think when we talk about evidence of intelligent design in life and the universe, we're talking about a mind that intended what is here, what has been created, the things that are made, as the book of Romans puts it.
And so maybe that whole question of human significance also needs to be revisited.
Yes.
Because we are the.
Outcome, I think, the highest form of life that has been created on the only planet in which we have any inkling that life exists.
Yes, you don't just think that.
It is a demonstrable and inescapable fact.
And so then they say, Are you so special?
You're so.
They'll say, You think this is all for us?
This whole cosmos is for us?
I say, Well, yeah, you're talking about the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, for instance?
You think all the creeping things that creep across the land?
Yeah, I actually do.
The earth was progressively prepared for humans to inhabit it.
There's nothing, there is absolutely nothing irrational or anti scientific about affirming that.
But then, of course, there's the next question, which is well, is that it?
You know, that we are the gods that we previously had expelled?
Or do we have to take it one step further and say maybe we are made for something or someone?
Maybe we are made with a purpose too.
And maybe.
To your point earlier, on when you have faith, it all kind of makes sense.
And that's one good argument for Christianity, it's explanatory power.
When I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, imperfectly but nevertheless doing my best, when I am in a state of grace, to use the Christian language, when I am cooperating with God's will as best I can, when I am not disobeying God to the best of my ability, things do seem to make more sense.
I get along in the world a lot better.
There's even a joy in that, right?
One would say there's even a joy in that.
That sparked my enchantment with Oxford and Cambridge.
I ended up going to Cambridge.
Was the Chariots of Fire in the 1980s?
And there's that memorable line where the Scottish runner is, he says, and when I run, I feel his pleasure.
And so when you're doing the thing you were designed to do, this idea of design and purpose and teleology, it isn't just a matter of something we see in the cosmos or something we see at the foundations of physics or that we see in the interior of the cell.
Once you are able to affirm that as a metaphysical reality, as an ontological reality, it begins to have implications for the rest of life.
You can begin to now think about, well, what is my purpose?
Where do I fit in all of this?
Might there be a calling that I have?
What was I made to do?
Those sorts of questions come back on the table as well.
Indeed, it has implications not just for when you're engaged deeply in your vocation, but it has implications for when you're chopping carrots.
It has implications for when you get cut off in traffic.
Yeah, exactly.
Ordinary work is good work.
It's part of what God made us to do.
So, yeah, all those things start to make sense.
And when you are in that zone, there is a kind of joy that comes from feeling His pleasure.
You're doing what you were made to do.
This idea, it's an ancient idea.
It goes back to Aristotle, the idea of a teleos or an entelechy, the purpose for which something was made.
And I was a college professor for 15 years, and I used to talk with students a lot about this.
This is part of what you're here to do.
In your educational experience, is to discern what your entelechy is.
What is the thing that you were uniquely designed to do?
Find that, run with it, and you will find a kind of joy, and you will be useful to other people.
You will serve and bless other people.
Yeah, I love that one can go from these mathematical calculations about the probabilities of all the aspects of the cosmos and figure out your purpose and do it in one conversation.
And in fact, Any story of everything that does not include both of those things is, uh, it probably does not comprise everything.
That's fantastic, but we still haven't talked about cigars.
Well, that's my purpose.
That's my, obviously, you need to go watch the story of everything right now.
And as a little amuse-bouche to that banquet, we have a trailer.
Today, I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange: Galileo, Kepler.
It's Newton.
Each tried to explain events in the history of the universe.
Has the universe always been here?
Or is it finite?
Is there something else that would lay these questions to rest?
It reopens that question of ultimate meaning.
How in the world did this start?
The simulation theory?
The multiverse.
You can't trust what's in front of your eyes.
Come on, that's ridiculous.
That belongs in the movies.
We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to.
And I can remember him saying, Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event.
He himself made a discovery that shook his personal philosophy.
The fact the universe sprang into being at a definite moment seems to me theological.
And it is science that has revealed this.
We're dealing with a system of man.
Complex design.
Force compared with the weak nuclear force.
One part in 10 to the 10,000.
One part in 10 to the 10,000.
Turned out to be the tip of the iceberg.
We associate information with a rational intelligence behind it.
It had an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string, very much like an information carrier.
You can read the same segment forward to get one protein and backwards to get another.
It struck us with a tremendous impact.
Without guidance, we would.
Yet a life unfriendly universe.
Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that's relevant for their survival value.
The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences.
The question then was what does one do about it?
The movie comes out April 30th.
It's in theaters across the country, possibly as many as 1,000.
We're adding them, I think we're over 500 now.
It has a guaranteed seven night opening, and we're hoping that it maybe lights a little bit of a spark in the culture.
The interest in the God question is coming back and percolating to the surface.
I think this film will foment further such interest, but on grounds that people may find surprising, namely scientific discovery.