Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design and The Return of the God Hypothesis

Since then the god of enlightenment and science have been kept in separate compartments and many scientists will tell you that god does not even exist let alone matter, which is of course the way it should be or is today According to uncommon knowledge, dr. in his new book the

return

of god

hypothesis

welcome to uncommon knowledge i am peter robinson, a graduate of whitworth college the author

stephen

meyer

has a PhD in history and philosophy of science from cambridge in 2009 dr.

meyer

published his signature on cellular dna and evidence of the

intelligent

design

of the signature in the cell philosopher thomas nagle of nyu wrote that quote: anyone who believes that god never intervenes in the natural world will be instructed by the mayor of this devilishly difficult problem. close appointment in 2013 dr. maya published darwin's book doubting the explosive origin of animal life in the case of

intelligent

design

darwin's doubt david gallartner of yale one of the founders of the discipline of computer science wrote quote

stephen

myers a thoughtful and meticulous book that he convinced me that darwin had failed close quote now directed by dr. meyer the science and culture center at the discovery institute in seattle his most recent book the

hypothesis

of the

return

of god three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe stephen meyer thanks for joining us thanks for inviting me peter um steve a couple of preliminaries question which is the good god hypothesis, the god hypothesis is the idea that the postulation of the existence of god provides explanatory power with respect to the observations we can make about the natural world and in the book I argue that the god hypothesis provides an superior explanation power over and against other metaphysical hypotheses or competing worldviews, whether they be deism, materialism, pantheism or some other things that I consider in the book, as well as another kind of preliminary question here is the quote from the biologist Richard Dawkins, the The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind and ruthless indifference. the money quote i use in the book to frame the argument because what is implicit in darwin in dawkins quote is that a metaphysical hypothesis what he means by blind and ruthless differences after all, the philosophy of scientific materialism that Metaphysical hypotheses are equally testable in their own way.

As scientists, we can judge the merits of a metaphysical hypothesis of a worldview by looking at the world around us to see if it matches the expectations we believe should follow if that hypothesis were true. Dawkins says that the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if scientific materialism is true scientific materialism being that worldview that asserts that matter and energy are where everything else comes from and that matter and energy are eternal and self-existing and do not require any creator or prior creation. and in the book I appreciate Dawkins for framing the argument that way, but then I confront him and ask him whether that's true or not and argue that, in fact, the universe has precisely the properties that we should expect if it existed, if intelligence existed. . integrated design in the universe, a really intelligent design that has a theistic source, so the subtitle is three discoveries, three scientific discoveries that have effectively changed everything, but before we get to those three discoveries, spend some of your time on beginning of the book to be elucidated. the ancient or original relationship between science and theology theology here in the Judeo-Christian view of theology and I would like to take a moment or two to review these points because, frankly, because I found them so surprising, this is not what one hears in debates regulars you quote science historian ian barber quotes that science in any modern form emerged only in western civilization well that's politically incorrect that's a dangerous statement right there, science in its modern form emerged only in western civilization among all the cultures of the world. because only the Christian West possesses the necessary intellectual presuppositions.

Close quote, so let's take the first, scandalous suggestion that science arose in the West. What about the advanced aspects of Chinese civilization, mathematical architecture and so on? They had them for at least a few millennia, depending on how you count before the West did it or the Islamic civilization that reached a high point in reading and interpreting classical texts, solving mathematical algebra, all of that while we were in the West was In his dark ages, what happens to all that? It may be a controversial point in the current climate, but almost all historians of science have observed the same thing: that modern science, in the sense of a systematic method of interrogating and investigating nature, emerged only in a Judeo-Christian environment in Europe.

Western world approximately between 1300 and 1750 with a particular focus on the time period from 1500 to 1750 often called the Scientific Revolution, it is absolutely true that there have been many advanced civilizations, the Chinese invented gunpowder, they had advanced forms of military weaponry, they had organized cities and towns. claims that the Romans built roads and aqueducts, etc., but this actually highlights what was unique in the West: the material conditions for doing science were present in many cultures, but somehow this systematic way of investigating nature involved isolation of various variables. scientific methods and then the mathematization of descriptions of nature.

This didn't happen everywhere, it only happened in the Judeo-Christian West and it only happened during a particular time period, so this question was raised that the historian in the The way historians of science objected is why then? what was the difference what was the variable what was the difference that made the difference and they have found that difference in the field of ideas so let's go back to Barbara's phrase intellectual presuppositions presupposition one the contingency of the nature of her book the hypothesis of the return of god in 1277 this says something about the scope of his book right there in 1277 18 the bishop of paris writing with the support of pope john xx condemned what was necessary in theology and 219 separate theses influenced by greek philosophy about what god could or not to do.

Close appointment. That's a mouthful and seems incredibly abstruse. What does it have to do with the scientific method? Let's unravel it because it's actually pretty clear that the Greeks are always the greats. stories of the Western intellectual tradition and so they should be, they gave us the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, but Greek science was hampered by assumptions that the Greeks made about the nature of nature, they assumed that embedded in nature was a kind of intrinsic logic that they characterized as the logos and that is why they also assumed that the order they had in nature was governed by this logic, so that what seemed most logical to us was also what was integrated in nature, it was logic, it was the logical form of order in nature, so what is the The most logical and perfect form of movement is a circle, so how do the planets go?

What are the planetary orbits? What kind of shape do they have? It must be circular and there were numerous logically deduced conclusions about nature that were not empirically based. the Greeks worked things out in theory and assumed they worked that way in practice exactly exactly so they philosophized a lot about nature, not that they weren't interested in nature or didn't assume there was an order there, but they assumed that It was an order that had to be a certain way, the way that seemed most logical to them, okay and now again since the return of the god hypothesis because God himself, because God himself present possesses a certain free will, a certain freedom. quote quoting you order in nature could have been otherwise the job of the natural philosopher the old term for scientists the job of the natural philosopher was not to ask what god should have done but what god actually did close quote and that is and that intellectual presupposition is exclusive to the West, yes, because the idea is that yes, there is an order in nature, but it is an order that is imprinted in nature or engraved in nature from the outside because there was a creator who chose the form of order that would manifest. in creation we have to go and look and see what shape it is when I was teaching I used to use the example of brushes with my students I would show them all the different types of brushes that a painter could use, they all manifest a form function relationship a kind of order, but the painter could choose which one he wants to use for the particular application in mind in the same way that God in providing, for example, the law of gravity could have chosen to have a much stronger gravitational pull. weaker has an inverse square law in Newton's formulation, but it could have been an inverse cube law it could not have had an exponent in the denominator at all it could have been completely different there is an order, but which order is up to us to discover and that quote you just attributed to me is almost a direct paraphrase of robert boyle, who said that the work of the natural campus is not to look at what god must have done, not to not decide what god must have done, but to go and see and see what he really did so that was the change yeah the next question would only happen in the west and that question is hmm this is interesting let's see what the big guy really did here this gives rise to the western emphasis. in actual observation see, look, look and see, see, look and see, it becomes an empirical science rather than a deductive or philosophical approach to studying nature, the presupposition to the intelligibility of nature again, I am quoting the hypothesis of the return of God that was modern science.

Inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind that designed it to be understood and that designed the human mind to understand it, he goes on to quote 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler saying that God created us in his own image so that we could share your own thoughts with a close quote that seems to me to almost emerge as a step or two in the direction of a kind of feel-good, but but but it's not and yet and yet, kind of psychobabble vision of 21st century Western theology. It was still a crucial idea because in reality it is very difficult to discover the order of nature, it is not easy to conduct experiments, there has to be an instinctive trust that there is a secret in nature that must be revealed to motivate people to do the hard work. of investigating or interrogating nature and this conviction that nature had an intelligible order that was a product of the rational mind of the creator, the same creator who made our minds and had endowed our minds with a rationality that allowed us to understand rationality and the design and order built into nature, that's what gave us confidence or that's what the theology that human beings are distinctive of that we just this notion of being made in the image of God in some way or form. another, not dogs, cats, fish or anything else. but human beings can understand, congratulations, that is vital here, they did this to us, yes, it was the Judeo-Christian idea that they made us administrators.

This is also politically incorrect, of course, yes, of course, a long continuum from the bachelor, the amoeba to the human being. Human beings are different, well, I appreciate you pointing that out to me, yes, yes, not exactly, it is an absolutely human exceptionalism, so to speak, that there is something unique about the intellectual and cognitive abilities of human beings that allow them uniquely understanding the design and the order and rationality embedded in the natural world, okay, so intellectual presupposition number three and this is three out of three, so it's the last one. Human fallibility, on the one hand, human beings are created in the image of God so that they can understand, on the other hand, I quote you know that the Christian doctrine of original sin humans are vulnerable to self-deception, fantasies and jumping to conclusions, the Scientists must, therefore, employ systematic experimental methods. close quotes, explain that this is an idea that has been emphasized by the historian and philosopher of science steve fuller uh in britain and peter harrison in uh in australia that the doctrine of original sin that was recovered in the same period that uh In late medieval Catholic theology and during the Protestant Reformation the doctrine of creation was being re-emphasized with which also came the doctrine of the fall of human beings and therefore the idea that we were that fall affected our cognitive abilities. we were able to understand the rationality and design of nature but we were also capable of flights of fancy to deceive ourselves of self-deception and therefore EraIt was necessary to test our theories against nature and this again gave a boost to observation.

We could think of all kinds of different ways nature could be. It was important to discover what nature was really like in its reality and do it with those methods. Types of tests were developed and so when we think of testability as a crucial aspect of scientific research, this is part of its origin, so we have this notion that since nature is contingent, it could having been different and the only one. The way to find out what it is is to observe that humans being humans can actually get somewhere they can't understand, but humans being humans better double check. observations, that's why we have peer-reviewed journals. peer-to-peer, that's right, exactly, accountability systems that are built in to check our own ability to self-deceive or just overlook things.

Well, what I find so surprising here is that I mean. I'm used to the idea that I'm used to books and arguments where science has its scope, religion has its scope, but you make a much stronger argument that science, as we understand it, emerged from a distinctively Judeo-Christian worldview. and so is the next question. This is what happened, we have already cited Kepler, God created us in his own image, Newton is explicit and unashamed, in fact, unconsciously, a believer, he writes effectively, how did God do this? What was happening here, how We try this, but he is the one who assumes. some of us might argue exactly what the characteristics of her god are, but there is an omniscient one who assumes I am just she makes all of those same presuppositions that we just discussed, but then also sees in the scientific realm that he is By researching in the realm of nature, is investigating evidence for design, so in the general scholium of principles, the theological epilogue he writes for his great masterpiece on gravitation, he presents a design argument about the initial condition, refining the work of configuration which was He is required to create stable planetary orbits and in this memorable passage he says that this beautiful system of solar planets and comets could only come from the advice and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.

Now this is written in one of the greatest works of physics. never written and yet there is a deep theological reflection, a design argument in this, which is a form of natural theology, but it also applies a theology of nature, that is, it applies theological presuppositions throughout the framework of the investigation . it's fine and then everything falls apart the return of the god hypothesis the success of new scientific theories in the 18th century it begins there on the astronomical, geological and biological origins contributed to the rejection of theism as an explanatory framework they explain that they feel that they no longer They need a god to explain the phenomena they observe in nature, they are no longer useful or they must reject that God explains well, it becomes a bit of both and the change begins with the philosophy of the Enlightenment in the 18th century and then many of the theories, especially theories about scientific origins. theories of the 19th century I tell the story of pierre laplace in the book who is summoned to receive praise before the french emperor napoleon for his great work celestial mechanics tries to do precisely what newton said could not be done newton thought that the laws of nature were a mode of divine action, but he also thought that the laws, because they produced very predictable regularities, could not explain the origin of the very precise and specified initial conditions that made the solar system stable in the first place and that required a initial act. of design or creation that could not be explained as a result of a regularity or a law, Laplace appeared and tried to explain the origin of the solar system without such initial acts of design and then there were other types, there were other theories in geology and of course, in biology with the origin of species and charles darwin and the way his ideas were expanded to explain both the origin of humans and his book The Descent of Man and even to explain first life by other early to late evolutionary biologists of the 19th century. so at the end of the 19th century we had this kind of perfect materialist narrative about how everything had come from the origin of the solar system to the great geological features of the Earth and the origin of the first life and later forms of life without any reference to a designer or creator intelligence of any kind and that combination of theories gave rise to a broader type of world view known to academics as scientific materialism and there were other thinkers at that time, freud marx huxley, who contributed to this great synthesis materialist in the late 19th century you write darwin marks freud huxley quote science seemed to answer many of the deepest questions about worldview that until then the judeo-christian religion had answered science no longer needed to invoke a pre-existing mind to explain evidence of nature quote close okay so this is just I want to tell our viewers that there is a lot in your book, it's over 400 pages of locked plots and we're just getting started, we can't, I can't begin to do the book justice. in a video I just can't do it, so one of the many pleasures of this book is this historical tour de force, before we get to the three scientific discoveries that we'll get to in a moment, you tell us about five centuries. of history of science, well, which brings us to the present, we have already quoted the biologist richard dawkins, here is david barash, if I pronounce his name correctly at the university of washington, he wrote an article in the new york times about the talk is left over. to his students each year quote as evolutionary science has progressed the space available for religious beliefs has shrunk close quote now that's a little different from saying that science no longer needs to resort to an omnipresent omniscient prime mover now it is To say that as science advances eliminates any legitimate possibility of correct religious belief, that is not just the opinion of Barash and many of the so-called new atheist writers, but public opinion polls, the data show that it is increasingly the opinion of many young people, we have this phenomenon that the pollsters are collecting, they call it the rise of the nuns, the atheist and agnostic young people without religious affiliation between 18 and 33 years old in that type of age cohort and when you investigate deeply with that group of young people It is found that science has played an important role.

In fact, two-thirds of young atheists surveyed in a survey said they cite the following statement: Uh, the discoveries of science make belief in God less likely, and that's right, this is the kind of direction we're going in. been going in popular culture and the argument of the book is that this move towards agnosticism and atheism is unnecessary, especially if it claims to be based on science because the scientific evidence actually points in the opposite direction, okay? which brings us to the first of these three great scientific discoveries the origin of the universe the big bang, quote, advances in astronomy and cosmology have established that the material universe had a definite beginning in time and space, suggesting a cause beyond the physical or material. universe now it's possible to stop there and just spend an afternoon thinking about it, but the universe began, this is, of course, what it reminds me of from a theological point of view, is genesis, but it had a specific beginning, I think it I understand. you might have a sentence or two about that, it's a developmental scientist from the mid-20th century, early to mid-20th century, it's now widely accepted, I think it's correct, although there are attempts to get around the conclusion and one of the things I do in the book. is to show that even those attempts within theoretical physics to circumvent the beginning end up having implicit theological implications or have theological implications so the universe started out fine, just a thought that's hard to understand in the first place, my little mind of all modes.

Why does that suggest a cause beyond the physical or material universe? I mean, Steve. Things just happen sometimes. Well, one of the basic principles of rationality is the principle of causality. Everything that begins to exist must have a cause. This is assumed in each attempt. We do to make sense of the world scientifically or otherwise, and the great discovery of both observational astronomy and astrophysics, on the one hand, and theoretical physics, on the other, is that the universe is expanding outwards. an approximately spherically symmetrical manner in the forward direction of time. We first got a sense of this from light coming from distant galaxies and found that it was stretched and appeared redder than it should otherwise, where redder light indicates longer wavelengths, as if objects in the night sky where the light comes from.

The emissions are going backwards, so if the universe is expanding outward in the direction of time, as we go backwards the time scale will increase in our minds. If we extrapolate backwards, matter will get closer and closer and space will get closer and closer. strongly curved because this is the contribution of theoretical physics Einstein's theory of general relativity published in 1915 stated that the gravitational force is a consequence of massive bodies curving space around the mass of those massive bodies, so Theoretical physicists thought about this in particular Stephen Selling in the 1960s, you realize that as you go back in that time sequence, the matter in the energy becomes more and more densely concentrated, causing space to become more dense. curve more and more until at some point in the finite past and this was called the singularity theorem.

There is a point at which a limiting case is reached at which matter becomes so densely compact that space becomes infinitely curved and at that point all physical reasoning becomes impossible, said physicist Paul Davey, beyond that point you reach an extreme where it is impossible to do anything. physical reasoning at all and before which there would be neither matter nor space nor time nor energy, come into existence at that point, so the origin of the universe cannot be explained as a result of a material cause because matter and energy are same as those that came into existence at that point before which there was no matter to cause it, so this suggests an event that took place and came into existence, therefore it must have a cause and yet the cause does not It can be material, it must transcend the domains of matter, space and time. and energy, okay, I say okay, like I followed absolutely every word, oh yes, of course, in investigating the big bang, scientists have made a corollary finding.

You've already alluded to it several times, but I'm going to quote the book. Return of the God Hypothesis We apparently live in a kind of goldilocks universe where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right intensity, the contingent properties of the universe have just the right characteristics, and the initial distribution of matter and energy at the beginning exhibited exactly the same correct configuration to make life possible these facts are so puzzling that physicists have given them a name the fine-tuning problem explains explains that well, maybe a useful illustration of that is well, let's talk about the expansion of the universe yeah, the Expansion is driven by uh a number of factors, one of which is the outward antigravity pushing force that Einstein called the cosmological constant.

If gravity pulls everything in, then there must be something that has pushed everything out because we don't live in a world where all matter has collapsed into one place and Einstein called that the cosmological constant which causes it to be just one. of many finely tuned parameters. It turns out that in order for the cosmological constant of the universe to expand in a way that is conducive to life, the cosmological constant has to be finely tuned to one part in 10 to the power of 90. This is an accepted degree of fine tuning accepted by many physicists, there are variable estimates, but to put that number in context and you would like to get it.

A degree of fine tuning by chance would be like searching for an elementary particle blindfolded not only in our universe but in 10 billion universes our size. It is an exquisite degree of fine tuning, meaning that things have to be well within very fine tolerances or limits. get a universe that's going to turn out fine but there are dozens if that's that constant if that constant is too small the universe collapses it collapses on itself you get that crunch if it's a little too big what happens we have a heat death of the universe where everything dissipates and we do not get stable galaxies or even basic chemistry, in fact there are dozens of such parameters, some initial conditions of matter and energy mustfinely tuned, that's an even more exquisitely fine-tuned parameter, uh, but then the fundamental forces of physics, uh, gravitation, the electromagnet, magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the masses of elementary particles have to exist within very particular values, neither too heavy nor too light, so this is where the goldilocks concept comes from each of these things together being within very specific tolerances to allow the universe to be conducive to life. .

Now there is an obvious objection. I say it's obvious because you say in your book that it's obvious. I can think of no independent objections here and To quote physicist Brandon Carter, what we can expect to observe must be constrained by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers. If you're a fish in the ocean, you might be surprised to learn that four-fifths of the planet is covered in water, that the water has just the right salinity, etc., because you're a fish and because we're human, we look at all this and say, wow, It's not that extraordinary, to which the answer is how good it is, of course.

We live in a universe that has conditions that are consistent with our own existence, but that is not an explanation of how the conditions were established or why the conditions are so exquisitely improbable, overwhelmingly improbable, which is why this is called the principle. weak anthropic which says essentially We don't need to explain the adjustment because of course we live in a universe that produces that is consistent with our existence but um it's that's of course uh uh obvious that that would be the case it's necessary it's necessary but it's not necessary that those conditions would have been so overwhelmingly improbable and therefore doesn't really provide an explanation of what needs to be explained, which is the exquisite fine-tuning of fine-tuning.

Why are fine-tuning parameters so unlikely? There is a great philosopher of physics called John Leslie who came up with an illustration to illustrate the fallacy here he says imagine that you are part of the resistance you have been captured by the Nazis you have been imprisoned in a camp you were put against the fire against the wall now you face a firing squad of a hundred Nazi shooters and the order is given, aim ready, fire, there is a hail of bullets and you look down, there is a pattern of bullets perfectly inscribed around your body, but none of them have hit you. reached, what do you conclude?

He says, well, no. Say, well, of course, I live in a universe that is consistent with my own existence. You say: Wow, something must have happened here that the shooter didn't give me a choice between the design and well, it had to be that way when things. when the conditions are so improbable the design hypothesis is the best explanation okay, we go from the inconceivably vast to the unimaginably small the enigma of dna in 1953 watson and crick discover the basic structure of the dna molecule the hypothesis of the return of god cites heavily the discovery of the information-carrying properties of dna fascinating information to me, I think of it as little twisted molecules or and okay, we'll get to this in a moment the discovery of the information-carrying properties of dna the materialist The understanding of life has begun to fall apart.

Scientists have become increasingly aware that there is at least one semblance of design and biology that has not been explained by natural selection. Information present even in the simplest living cells. the materialist view well a little more about the discovery and then I will explain the problem Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. In 1957 1958 Crick on his own proposes something called the sequence hypothesis in which he proposes that the subunits chemicals called bases or nucleotide bases that run along the inside of the rotating helix are four different amino amino proteins. The correct amino acids are in proteins.

Nucleotide bases are the constituent parts of DNA and these nucleotide bases function alphabetically. characters, they are literally providing instructions to organize the amino acids that build proteins, so what they end up discovering and Crick's hypothesis is a confusing code, it is a code, what we have now is not that the nucleotide base, its function does not is determined by its physical properties. Their shapes, their masses are determined by their arrangement according to an independent symbol convention later discovered and now known as the genetic code, so what we have is a sophisticated information storage processing and transmission system at the heart of every cell and bill gates in our local hero here in Redmond has said that DNA, uh, uh, that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than anything we've ever devised.

Richard Dawkins himself has recognized that DNA contains a machine code. Leroy Hood, the pioneer of biotechnology simply called DNA wedge. full of digital code we have information, a molecule that contains information, which we know from our uniform and repeated experience, the basis of all scientific reasoning is that whenever we find information, whether in a section of software, in a paragraph of a book or in a hieroglyph inscription or even information embedded in a radio signal and we trace that information to its ultimate source, it always comes to mind, it is not a material process, the professional, the software program requires a programmer, the information and DNA, I maintain, now require a master programmer to I justify that conclusion.

I have to examine the various materialistic attempts that have been made to explain the origin of information. I did it first at the book signing in the cell, but I repeat some of those problems with materialistic attempts to explain the origin of the information. information whether based on chance or on principles of law or necessity or some combination of both, but it is universally recognized within original life research that the problem of information has not been solved even as a defender prominent of scientific atheism and neo-Darwinism. As Richard Dawkins has recognized, no one knows how life emerged from a strictly materialistic chemical evolutionary process, okay, we start out vast, we get very small and now we get very, very old, the Cambrian Cambrian or Cambrian the Cambrian explosion of Either way it's potatoes, but listen, I'm going to take it as you pronounce it, I always say Cambrian, but there, there, we're done, the return of the god, hypothesis quote, darwin presented the story of life as it gradually unfolds in this vision, new animal and plant species arose from a series of simpler precursors and intermediate forms over vast periods of geological time, but during the Cambrian explosion that began about 530 million years ago, most major animals appear by first time in the fossil record in a geologically abrupt manner, although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the same. just the explosion of new life forms the first winged insects birds flowering plants mammals and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record quote close so explain that in my previous book Darwin's Doubt I addressed this question in a comprehensive treatment of the book but two separate mysteries arising from it were addressed: the obvious one of missing ancestral precursors in the fossil record that should be there but are not there.

It should be there if there was a gradual development of life in the manner of a Darwinian tree, but the deeper mystery that I talk about a lot more is the mystery that it is essentially an engineering problem, how would the evolutionary process construct these animal forms new and different, given what we now know about the primacy of information in living systems, if you like? To give your computer a new feature, we know you have to provide new code. The same turns out to be true now in the biological realm if you want to build a new form of life from a pre-existing form or if you want to build the first living cell from non-living chemicals in both cases there needs to be an infusion of information. where that information comes from that question has not been adequately answered by either chemical evolutionary theories about the origin of life or biological evolutionary theories about the origin of later life forms and important innovations in the history of life, such as these new animal forms arising in the Cambrian and, as I mentioned in the book, in other places up and down the rock column, okay, this brings us back.

This is something you've already touched on in a couple of places, but let's be explicit about it. The question of design itself, which you discuss about the work of mathematician and philosopher William Dempsky, to quote you according to Demski, extremely unlikely events. characteristic one that also exhibits an independently recognizable pattern characteristic two are invariably the result of intelligent causes, not by chance, close quote, so what has happened in the last 20 years or so is that there has been a development within demski that has been at the forefront of this, but other In addition to advances in design detection methods and we all make design inferences all the time, it's very common if you look at the faces on Mount Rushmore or you look at a stop sign or we recognize intelligent causes in the echo of the effects they leave behind. and what demski began to think very deeply about was what are the characteristics of all those objects that are obviously designed and the answer to that that had been given for a long time is that they are very improbable, but he showed that there are many improbable things that happen all the time and are not designed, you can flip a series of coins or you can flip a coin a hundred times and you'll get an improbable outcome, but if you get one, you flip a coin 100 times and it comes up seven. each time it can be inferred that the dice were loaded and then it is the combination of an improbable event with a pattern that we recognize or with a set of discernible functional requirements that trigger this design awareness and then I give a number The series of examples in the book Mount Rushmore is great because you have improbable shapes, but that's not the only thing that triggers design awareness, there's a pattern that we recognize that matches something we know from independent experience, namely the shape of the human face, in fact, the specific face shapes of presidents, okay, to paraphrase the great cosmologist Bill Clinton, if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know it didn't get there on its own, pretty much okay, the universe it had a beginning and was finely tuned to allow the emergence of life in a way that allowed the emergence of life one two dna demonstrates that even the smallest and most rudimentary structures possess astonishing complexity three the cambrian explosion shows that at intervals new forms of life they just burst into existence and this suggests or requires that you adjust this some kind of what we are I'm trying to avoid using the word god but this suggests certain properties omniscience omnipotence what how do you interact with god yeah, let's start with the design of intelligence because in both The first books we wrote were arguing for intelligent design without attempting to identify the nature of the designer, we know from our uniform and repeated experience that it requires the mind to be the only known cause of the generation of large amounts of specific information, especially when we find it in a digital or alphabetical form as we do in the molecules that make life possible, so from the discovery of functional digital information in living systems I deduced that a design intelligence must have played a role in the origin and subsequent development . of life, but I did not try to identify the design of an agent involved, many of my readers wanted to know well who they think design intelligence is and what science can tell us about that question, so to address that question I expanded the range . of the phenomena under consideration instead of looking only at the evidence of design in biology, I also looked at developments in physics and cosmology about the origin and fine-tuning of the universe and because one of the proposed identities of the designer intelligence responsible for life is which was an imminent intelligence within the cosmos, even Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins have put forward the idea that perhaps life was settled here on Earth because it was very difficult to make life work here, perhaps it started somewhere else. and that life form evolved and eventually became very intelligent and seeded some simple cells on planet Earth.

In the new book I argue that that is an unsatisfactory explanation for several reasons, but one of the reasons is that that hypothesis clearly cannot explain. It is the origin of the adjustment of the laws and concepts of physics and the initial conditions of the universe that precede the origin of any possible imminent intelligence within the cosmos. When Dawkins proposed this, he suggested that such a being would have evolved by processes.purely natural, but no being within the cosmos can be responsible for the adjustment of the laws and concepts of physics on which its origin and evolution depend, so the adjustment does not point to an imminent intelligence, but requires as a condition for Its explanation is an intelligent cause but one that also lies beyond the limits of matter, space and matter, space, time and energy, one that is transcendent and therefore, when the evidence is presented of the beginning of the universe and fine tuning. of the universe from the beginning, I think this excludes the idea of ​​an imminent intelligence within the cosmos and points rather to a designer agent that transcends the universe, but then, due to biological evidence, is also active in creation, so that we do not have a deistic creator.

Not an alien but rather a theistic designer who has the attributes that Jews and Christians have always described as God. well, the biologist richard dawkins, the quote we started with quote, the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if it existed at least no, deep down, there is no design, quote steve meyer, if a purposeful intelligence had acted periodically during the history of life on Earth, we might well expect to find evidence of episodic bursts of new information in the biosphere, quote, how strong is your argument, steve? I just want to say: look, let's face it guys, the big bang, the 20th century has brought important basic radical discoveries that are in line with the judeo-christian understanding of god, which is a milestone in these times that would be a very statement striking on the part of or means that these discoveries require a mind and I'm sorry, doctor dawkins, but you simply haven't been paying attention, you haven't been keeping up with the developments in the 20th century, the great physicist arno penzias, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering cosmic background radiation in 1965, which was one of the key pieces of evidence that really provided great support for the big bang model and, uh, sounded the death knell for this, the steady state model. competitor said this, he said that the evidence that we have and he was talking about the cosmological evidence in this case is precisely what he would have predicted if he had nothing to go on except the five books of Moses, the psalms and the Bible as a whole.

We now contrast that statement with Dawkins' statement. Now I'm not necessarily arguing for a specifically biblical god, but yes. I am arguing for what might be called basic or classical theism, which would be consistent with the biblical understanding of God, but when so, I am not simply saying that the evidence is consistent with theism. I'm saying that and I'm not saying it either. I say that theism is proven by evidence in a mathematical sense from which certainty would be derived, but instead I am arguing that such theism provides a better explanation for these three great tests that we have about biology, biological, physical and cosmological origins, and happens. that this kind of standard of evidentiary support is precisely what scientific theories can provide and scientists are very philosophically astute and most of them know that scientific work does not prove conclusions with absolute certainty that we obtain, provide evidence or reasons to believe in conclusions, but we don't provide absolute evidence because we always have to be open to new evidence that emerges, so we've had this kind of false dichotomy in the discussion of the relationship between science and faith since the mid-Middle Ages there were a lot of people trying to prove the existence of God with deductive certainty, when the Enlightenment philosophers came and drilled holes in those proofs and said no, they don't really work, then people went to the other side of the world. to the extreme and embrace something called fidaism, faith and only faith, arguing that there is no evidence for faith or there are no reasons for faith, we just leap blindly and what I am arguing is that there is something in the middle that is still very strong and it is We can have good reasons to believe in God without being able to reach that unattainable standard of absolutely certain proof and the part of this method of reasoning that I use is to show that it is to evaluate competing hypotheses with reference to their explanatory power and when.

If we look at these three great discoveries, the universe had a beginning, it has been finely tuned from the beginning, and there have been bursts of information in the biosphere from the beginning. Theism provides a better explanation of that set of key facts about our biological and cosmological origins than do the other major worldviews or competing systems of thought, whether deism, pantheism or materialism or even this more fanciful idea of ​​pan panspermia, the concept of the extraterrestrial designer, so I examine theism and its explanatory power and compare it to that of competing systems and argument. which provides the best explanation, not the proof, but the best explanation, the same kind of standard of evidence that we would like to achieve for a very good scientific theory.

I've been quoting Dawkins. I've been on this this entire discussion. I've been treading water because I'm in the deep end, but now let me swim to the shallow end and stand on my own two feet and just tell you a story. I am an English student but I am a product. of the American education system, public schools in upstate new york and this is the story I can tell you: it starts with some kind of primordial chemical soup, how it got there, we don't know, but it's there and this arises in a corner from some vast universe again how it got there we don't know but we don't care and then there is some kind of natural event I think I remember being told it was lightning miller yuri's experiment yeah so and for some reason there is a There's a lot of ammonia in the atmosphere, but there is lightning and in this primordial chemical soup a life begins and takes the form of a very simple life form.

I seem to remember a teacher saying, "imagine a drop of gelatin and that's it." all you need because the drop of jelly subdivides now you have two drops of jelly and there are random mutations and natural selection acts on those random mutations and billions of years later, here we are now, you can believe in God if you want, but It just doesn't fit into the story, it's just that I have the feeling that that's the story that I have in the back of my mind, that a lot of people must have more or less that story in the back of their minds, what's wrong with that professor Philip Johnson? ?

From across Berkeley Bay, the law professor who wrote the highly influential book Darwin on Trial in the 1990s used to tell that story as almost a paraphrase of the biblical text only it was inverted rather than at the beginning. It was the word, era of eternity past where particles and energy and particles are organized into more complex chemicals and chemicals are organized into the first cell and the first cell evolved through Darwinian processes to produce life forms each time. more complex and then one of those forms of life, namely, human beings conceived the idea of ​​god, so in this materialistic narrative you have god, but god only has one concept in the mind of man, remember you are freud , God did not create man, man created the idea. of god, then you have this direct inversion of the theistic worldview, the theistic worldview holds that that mind was primary, that god is a conscious agent who created the universe, shaped it and designed everything we see and materialism has the opposite type of uh narrative, the question is which of the two narratives best fits the scientific evidence we have and that is why I appreciate the framing that Dawkins brings to the topic, the new atheists are brilliant at framing the key issues, but I think that if You look at these three great discoveries, they definitely support theism and underline that let me tell you just a short story.

I did a debate with one of my friendly debate partners on the opposite side of this issue. I say his name in the book, but I won't, I don't want to say it here, it's not really important, we had our debate, we went, we went, he tested me, I tested him, we were in a in a car on the way back to the St. Louis airport. and this particular debate partner always starts by telling his deconversion experience what it was like, what it was like, he was raised in a religious home, how he rejected his belief in God as a result of science and in the car I asked him, well, what about? was it specifically about? the science that made you reject your belief in god and he said well, you know, it's just the overall success of science, its ability to unzip the DNA molecule and discover the big bang and I said, well, wait a minute, friend, uh in our debate.

You admitted to me that you didn't really have an explanation for the origin of the information and the DNA. We theists also love the discovery of DNA, but you have not explained to me what is crucial: the origin of the information. He says, well, yeah, that's it. true, but and and what about fine tuning, I said and he said well, you know the multiverse exists and I said, but do you really believe in all those multiple universes that can't be detected? and he said no and I said well what about the problem of consciousness and then he says: okay, okay, stop accumulating things, you know, there are these big questions that scientific materialism doesn't answer origin and adjustment end of the universe the origin of life the origin and nature of consciousness and I would add things like in philosophy the reliability of the mind or the origin of objective morality, why do we all act as if there were an objective standard of morality, even if we deny that there can be a standard that does so?

Such a belief is plausible or meaningful, so there are many fundamental questions that the materialist worldview has not really been able to answer, although despite the great success of science, science does not actually support materialism and that is the argument of the Steve's book quoting the astrophysicist. quote by robert jastrow science has been extraordinarily successful in tracing the chain of cause and effect back in time for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason the story ends as a bad dream has climbed the mountains of ignorance trying to conquer the highest peak while rising over the final rock, is greeted by a group of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries, quote, but what surprises me in that, very clever, sums up a lot, but he says it ends up like a bad dream why if he offers a better explanation should theism seem like a bad dream to scientists or, let me put it another way, why steve myer, who has now written three carefully reasoned and footnotes, why steve meyer is dismissed as some kind of snake-wielding redneck, and why there's something going on here that isn't just honestly and good-faith searching for the best arguments, isn't there?

This is the change that we were describing at the beginning of the interview, that this I have not seen, they have seen it as a bad dream for Newton Kepler and Boyle, that science was revealing the reality of God or was confirming an expectation of a worldview theistic, which is, I think, the origin of Jastro's quote, but sometime in the late 19th century the idea. In science, reason and non-belief were equated in such a way that it was assumed that if progress was to be made in science, it would be outside or independent of any kind of theological framework and that we could explain everything with reference to purely materialist causes. and when we talk about the origin of matter itself, clearly materialism breaks down at that point as an explanation, so I think reason has been equated with a materialist way of thinking and that's when materialism is called into question for scientists who think in both things. as coextensive or equivalent, a sense of cognitive dissonance arises and I think what I'm essentially arguing in the book is that it's perfectly legitimate to reframe our understanding of reason and science within a theistic approach. framework because it was very fruitful at the beginning and can be fruitful again not only in our personal lives and in thinking about ultimate meaning and purpose, but also for science itself.

It was after belief in God was no longer an obstacle to science for Sir Isaac Newton. was the originator of science last question steve genesis 1 1 in the beginning god created the sky and the earth close quote if you had to reduce everything we know to one sentence, that sentence would be scientifically adequate it is surprisingly convergent with what we have discovered Astrophysics and cosmology, the first three words of the Bible are after all at the beginning and even some physicists have told me that you know that the idea that there was light first and then matter, which is implicitly stated in that passage, is what we understand from our standard models of particle physics and our most cutting edge, to think about the early evolution of the universe from the beginning onwards, so, it's okay for me, you know, it's okay for a lot of scientists, yes, yes, I wantsay that there is and this was the point of arno penzias' statement that the discovery of a beginning was what would be expected from that theistic view that has god creating the universe in the beginning, steve meyer, most recent author of the return of the god hypothesis thank you, thank you for inviting me to speak with peter and for the excellent discussion on rare knowledge, the hoover institution and the fox nation, I'm peter robinson