Stephen M. Meyer is the author of the book Darwin's Doubt and Signature in the Cell, and an intelligent design advocate. In this Sunday Special, he joins the Ben Shapiro Show to talk about his new book, "Darwin s Doubt," and his views on evolution, evolution, and the theory of evolution. He also talks about why he thinks the earth is very old, and why intelligent design is not a scientific theory, but rather an idea that can be used to explain the origin of the universe and the existence of life on Earth. And he explains the difference between creationism and intelligent design, and how they are different from each other in the eyes of the scientific community. Go check out the Sunday Special with special guest Stephen Meyer! Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast The Weekly Standard, and is a regular contributor to the radio show "The Weekly Standard" and the Atlantic. He is also a regular contributing editor at The Daily Beast and contributor to The Huffington Post, and hosts the weekly podcast "The Dark Side Of" and "The Daily Beast." He can be found on social media by searching for "Ben Shapiro" on social medias like Apple and other major news outlets, and on the internet by searching "ben.shapiro.show". Thanks to Ben Shapiro for the linktr.ee/BenShapiro and the use of his name in the title "The Sunday Special." on the show is sponsored by PolicyGenius. and sponsored by the policy geniuses at Policy Genius. at policygenius, a great company that makes life insurance policies, insurance and financial planning firm that helps you save 40% more than $40,000 a month. You can get 40% off your first month with discount codes, and save up to $100,000 in lifetime insurance policies. If you like the deal, you can get 20% off for life insurance, free shipping, and free shipping on a maximum of $50,000, you'll get 10% off the first month, and you get an ad discount when you sign up for two months of free shipping starts starting at $99 a year, plus a maximum discount of $99, and they get $5,99 a month gets you get a discount on your first year, they'll get $25,99 gets you a maximum rate of $24,99 and they also get two months free, plus they get two years of VIP access to the deal gets you an ad-free offer.
00:01:39.000So you talk a lot about evolution and science.
00:01:43.000Obviously, your books, Darwin's Doubt and Signature in the Cell, are both heavily scientific.
00:01:47.000So what is your scientific background, so folks know?
00:01:49.000Well, I started and double majored in physics and geology, and then I worked as a geophysicist for five years in industry.
00:01:59.000And went from there to do the program in the philosophy of science, specifically philosophy of biology at Cambridge University, where my PhD dissertation was on the origin of life problem, which is a very interdisciplinary question.
00:02:13.000How did life first arise from presumably the non-living chemicals?
00:02:18.000So it's biochemistry, molecular biology, thermodynamics, information theory.
00:02:23.000It's a question that has lots of different subjects involved.
00:02:28.000Okay, so with all of that said, if you go to your Wikipedia page, the first thing that it says is that you are the advocate of a pseudo-scientific theory called intelligent design.
00:02:37.000So let's start with a couple of questions on that.
00:02:39.000First of all, people suggest that you are a creationist.
00:02:42.000What is the difference between intelligent design, the argument for intelligent design, and creationism?
00:02:47.000Well, creationism takes the Bible as the basis of the theory.
00:02:54.000So, creationism is an interpretation or a deduction from religious authority, whereas intelligent design is an inference from biological and physical cosmological evidence.
00:03:04.000So, the one starts from the data of the natural world, the other starts from Scripture.
00:03:09.000The other difference is that most creationists hold to a view that the earth is very young It was created maybe 10,000 years ago or something like that.
00:03:19.000ID itself is an age-neutral theory, but most of us hold the standard ancient dates for the universe and for life and planet Earth, so I'm an old Earth guy.
00:03:31.000So the case that is generally made against intelligent design is the idea that it's not a scientific theory.
00:03:36.000So is intelligent design the idea that there was somebody, you don't actually say God, but something, there was some intelligent force that moved the universe, that created life on Earth, that was responsible, in your book, for the Cambrian explosion?
00:03:49.000How is this a scientific theory as opposed to just, as maybe Richard Dawkins would say, a God-of-the-gaps argument?
00:03:55.000Well, one of the things I did when I first set off to grad school, my story is that I encountered this information argument.
00:04:02.000One of the most extraordinary discoveries of 20th century biology is that the foundation of life is information in a digital form.
00:04:09.000The DNA molecules stores information in a four-character digital code.
00:04:14.000And this discovery of Watson and Crick in the '50s has, over time, created an impasse in both chemical evolutionary theory, which are the theories about the origin of the first life, and theories of biological evolution as well, which are theories about how you get new forms of life from pre-existing forms.
00:04:31.000Because to build anything in biology, you've got to have code, you've got to have information.
00:04:35.000So I became fascinated with that question and the possibility that the information at the foundation of life was actually an indicator of the activity of mind, of an intelligence.
00:04:46.000But to determine whether or not that argument could be formulated scientifically, I had to dig in a little deeper into how scientists go about reasoning about these origins questions, about events in the remote past.
00:04:57.000And oddly, one of the people most helpful to me in that was Charles Darwin himself.
00:05:01.000Because in the 19th century, he and his mentor Charles Lyell, the great geologist, developed a method for investigating historical scientific questions.
00:05:10.000And they had a principle of reasoning they called the Vera Causa principle, or the idea that if you want to explain an event in the remote past, you should posit a cause which is known to have the powers to produce the effect in question.
00:05:22.000And as I began to think about that, I realized that it was possible to formulate a case for intelligent design in a strictly scientific manner using the method of Lyell and Darwin, because as we think about the origin of information, the one thing we know is that it always arises from an intelligent source, whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal.
00:05:44.000Whenever you find information, especially if it's in a digital or alphabetic form, you trace it back to its source, you always come to a mind, not a material process.
00:05:52.000So using the same scientific method of reasoning that Darwin used, I came to a different non-Darwinian conclusion, which was that there is evidence of intelligent design, not just what the Darwinians call apparent design in the history of life.
00:06:04.000So if our theory is unscientific, the Darwinian theory would be as well, but I think both are scientific.
00:06:08.000I just argue for one and critique the other.
00:06:11.000So the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, has suggested that science is basically that which can be falsified.
00:06:16.000So what evidence would have to arise for the theory of intelligent design to be falsified?
00:06:21.000You would have to find an undirected process that was capable of producing information beyond a threshold that we have defined mathematically.
00:06:31.000There's an amount of information that might arise by chance based on what are called the probabilistic resources of the universe.
00:06:37.000But if you get beyond that from an undirected process, that would falsify our claim that only mind can produce that amount of information.
00:06:45.000There's also other ways of conceiving of what makes something a good scientific theory rather than Popper's idea.
00:06:50.000It's been critiqued by philosophers of science.
00:06:52.000Typically, a more popular view among philosophers of science is that what scientists are really doing is they're making inferences to the best explanation.
00:07:00.000And that's how I frame the argument in Darwin's Doubt and in Signature in the Cell for Intelligent Design.
00:07:06.000A best explanation would be one that posits a cause which is known to produce the effect in question, and in the best of cases, where there's only one known such cause, and that's the kind of argument I make for intelligent design, that only intelligence, only mind, is capable of generating the amount of information needed for these big jumps in biological complexity in the history of life.
00:07:26.000So in the history of science and the philosophy of science, there's been this interesting battle between sort of religious folks who believe that religion should stay separate from science and folks who believe that religion and science are intertwined.
00:07:37.000And that on the one side, you have sort of the Thomas Aquinas that God and nature speak in the same language.
00:07:43.000And on the other side, you have the William of Ockham argument that basically God can do whatever he wants.
00:07:48.000And so what we don't want is a theory of science that can disprove God.
00:07:52.000And the flip side of that is sort of Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria argument that science handles this stuff, and religion handles this stuff, and there's no crossover.
00:08:18.000Another view is the Stephen Jay Gould view, is that science and faith occupy non-overlapping realms of inquiry.
00:08:26.000The Galileo aphorism was science tells you how the planets go, not how to go to heaven.
00:08:35.000Or how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven.
00:08:38.000But the theory of intelligent design, I think, shows that that's also simplistic.
00:08:43.000There are many scientific questions and religious questions that are completely separate.
00:08:46.000But there are some questions that both science and religion speak to, and my view is that when they speak to the same questions in the same way, that there is actually far more agreement than people realize.
00:09:17.000Both science and religion are now telling us the same thing, that the universe had a beginning.
00:09:22.000Intelligent design is telling us that life and the universe were designed, and that's something that you would also find affirmed in the theistic religious traditions.
00:09:30.000So that's a point of agreement about a special question, in this case about the origins of life.
00:09:37.000I don't say that science and religion talk, they have many areas of specialized inquiry, there are different questions that each address, but there are overlapping areas of interest.
00:09:46.000And increasingly what we found is that there is increasing agreement as we understand the science better, and as we get better, more sophisticated biblical interpretations sometimes as well.
00:09:55.000One of the biggest, probably the biggest, argument against intelligent design, obviously, is made by the New Atheists.
00:10:01.000It's fascinating to watch the crossover between Neo-Darwinian thinkers and the New Atheists.
00:10:06.000They basically are the same group of people.
00:10:07.000They're the same group of people, absolutely.
00:10:09.000So it seems to me that... No surprise, because Dawkins said, you know, that Darwinism makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Atheism.
00:10:18.000And also the Darwinian view, the strictly Darwinian view, is not just the idea of evolution as change over time, but the idea of an undirected, unguided process that produced the appearance but not the reality of design.
00:10:30.000So they see nature essentially as being a self-creating entity that can produce all the wonders and intricacies of living organisms without any guiding hand whatsoever.
00:10:41.000And so that lends itself to a strictly materialistic or atheistic worldview.
00:10:45.000Well, people have suggested that intelligent design advocates are anti-evolution, that they don't believe in the theory of evolution.
00:10:51.000So, what does the theory of evolution say, to start, and then what in it is an argument too far?
00:11:10.000Obviously, and that can mean a couple different things itself.
00:11:13.000It can refer to the small scale variation that we see with things like the Galapagos finches where their beaks get a little bigger, a little smaller in response to varying weather conditions.
00:11:21.000It can also refer to the fact that life on the planet today is different than it was in the period of the Jurassic when you had the dinosaurs roaming the earth or in the Cambrian when you had trilobites.
00:11:31.000We've had change in the representation of life forms over time in the fossil record.
00:11:35.000Nobody doubts either of those meanings of evolution.
00:11:38.000Second big meaning of evolution is the idea that all forms of life are connected by common ancestry back to a single ancestral form, a single one-celled organism.
00:11:47.000So Darwin represented that idea with his concept of the tree of life.
00:11:51.000That's an idea of evolution that's consistent with the idea of intelligent design.
00:11:56.000Those many intelligent design proponents and others, other scientists, including evolutionary biologists, are getting increasingly skeptical about it because there's so much evidence of discontinuity in the fossil record and discontinuity in the study of genomics, where we have things like orphan genes, which are big classes of genes that are unique to certain taxa and don't show any similarity to other genes anywhere else in the genomic databases.
00:12:24.000So you have this sense of genetic information popping into existence in different classes of organisms, discontinuity.
00:12:32.000Third meaning of evolution is the one though that's really contentious.
00:12:36.000And that's the idea that natural selection and random mutation are sufficient to produce all the new forms of life and the appearance of design that living forms manifest.
00:12:45.000So, it's an unguided process that produces the appearance but not the reality of design.
00:12:50.000And that's the meaning of evolution that the theory of intelligent design is challenging.
00:12:55.000Some intelligent design proponents may be skeptical about common descent, others are not, but it's that third meaning that unites us, and it's what the theory of intelligent design is about.
00:13:04.000We're challenging the idea that purely undirected processes can produce the complexity or the information necessary to build the complexity of living organisms.
00:13:13.000So you make a couple of arguments in your two books, Darwin's Doubt, as well as Signature in the Cell.
00:13:17.000One is a DNA-related argument, one is a fossil record-related argument, but they go back, as you say, to that theory of evolution that suggests that natural selection and genetic mutation are enough alone to lead to the way that life has developed over time.
00:13:31.000I'm wondering if you can start by spelling out, where is the discontinuity with regard to the establishment of life?
00:13:38.000Well, the first big discontinuity is the origin of life itself, which is what my first book, Signature in the Cell, addressed.
00:13:44.000And many people don't realize that Darwin himself never addressed the question of the origin of the first life.
00:13:49.000He speculated about it in a letter to a friend, but this was not something he addressed in The Origin of Species.
00:13:55.000He presupposed the existence of the first living cell.
00:13:58.000And there's a major discontinuity between chemical processes that we observe and what we see in actual living organisms.
00:14:05.000And it's a complexity gap that's absolutely extraordinary.
00:14:08.000We've got tiny miniature machines, we have not only the DNA with the digital code in it, but a complex information processing system, and even the simplest living cells on Earth.
00:14:21.000Then there is a series of discontinuities in the fossil record as we find greater and greater complexity arising over time.
00:14:27.000One of the big ones that I talked about in Darwin's Doubt was one that bothered Darwin a great deal, which was what we now call the Cambrian Explosion.
00:14:34.000Which is the origin of the first major groups of animals in the fossil record.
00:14:40.000They're attested in the Middle Cambrian in particular, and many groups of animals exemplifying completely new body plans arise in a very narrow window of geologic time, very abruptly, without discernible connection to ancestral precursors in the lower Precambrian strata.
00:15:00.000And that's one of the big discontinuities in the history of life.
00:15:22.000The even bigger question, though, that I address in the book is Apart from that discontinuity, which is a puzzle for Darwinism, how would you build those organisms?
00:15:31.000What process could account for the origin of all that new form, especially now that we know you need information, the information in DNA and from other sources, to build complex new forms of life?
00:15:43.000So, for folks who haven't read your books, don't know anything about information theory, why does information theory suggest that there must be some sort of designer?
00:15:51.000Obviously, people like Dawkins who suggest that evolution is the universal acid.
00:15:55.000They say that these things can arise by themselves.
00:15:58.000They would also make the suggestion that the information in DNA is not necessarily directed, that it only seems directed to us because we're here to actually look at the direction in which it moves.
00:16:09.000What does information theory have to say about that?
00:16:11.000Well, it's actually helpful first to go back to the molecular biological revolution of the 1950s.
00:16:15.000Watson and Crick discover in 1953, they elucidate rather, the structure of the DNA molecule.
00:16:21.000They discover it's got this beautiful helix structure, there's these four chemical subunits that run along the interior of the helix called bases or nucleotide bases.
00:16:31.000In 1957-1958, Crick, who was interestingly a codebreaker in World War II, ...posits what's known as the sequence hypothesis, which is just a breakthrough moment in the history of biology, where he realizes that the nucleotide bases on the inside of the double helix are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language, or what we now think of as like the zeros and ones in a section of software code, which is to say it's not the physical or chemical properties of those bases that
00:16:58.000is important to their function, but rather it's their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent code which was later elucidated and we now call the genetic code.
00:17:08.000So what we have is a true information bearing system that is expressing information as it happens for building the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive.
00:17:20.000So in Seattle where I live, we've got great information companies.
00:17:24.000We've got Microsoft, which writes code.
00:17:26.000We've got Boeing and other manufacturing companies that use code.
00:17:31.000And there's a process called Computer Assisted Design and Manufacturing, CAD-CAM, where an engineer might write some code, code would go down a wire, be converted into another machine language that could be read by a manufacturing apparatus, and that information will then direct the construction of a mechanical system.
00:17:49.000If you're at Boeing, it might put rivets exactly in the right place on the airplane wing.
00:17:53.000And the same thing that's going on inside the cell, that you've got information directing the construction of proteins and protein machines that are absolutely necessary for survivability.
00:18:04.000So the big question is, where does that information come from?
00:18:07.000And also, what kind of information is it?
00:18:09.000And that's where the information theory comes in.
00:18:11.000In the late 40s, there was a scientist named Claude Shannon who developed a mathematical theory of information.
00:18:17.000But his theory of information had to do with the reduction of uncertainty, which he showed was inversely related to probability.
00:18:27.000The more improbable an arrangement of characters, the more Shannon information that was carried.
00:18:32.000But his notion of information didn't capture The notion of meaning or communication function.
00:18:38.000So you could have a series of characters that were basically gibberish, but because they were aperiodic and random, you couldn't really tell whether they were meaningful or not.
00:18:48.000But they had a big information measure.
00:18:50.000So Shannon didn't capture the difference between functional or meaningful information and just an improbable arrangement of characters.
00:18:57.000So, it's actually not information theory, but it's information theory plus a qualitative judgment about what the sequence is doing that allows us to recognize the kind of information that we're familiar with in our own parlance.
00:19:10.000The dictionary talks about variable sequences of characters for conveying a meaning or a function.
00:19:18.000Francis Crick was very clear on that from the beginning.
00:19:20.000He said, it's not mere Shannon information, it's information that's functional.
00:19:24.000And that's the kind of information that, in our experience, always indicates the prior activity of an intelligence.
00:19:29.000If it's just a random arrangement, it might be undirected processes.
00:19:34.000But if it's very specific and complex, and it's operating in accord with a symbol convention, then you've got information that is the product of mind.
00:19:45.000So this is where we get into the theories of probability, because the question becomes, could there have been such a strand of DNA that comes about by chance?
00:19:55.000Because the theory obviously, as you mentioned, of evolution suggests that it's mutations now in the DNA that create all of the change in human life over time.
00:20:03.000origin of life problem for just a second.
00:20:06.000And then we'll, but when it comes to the information string in the DNA, the contention is basically that given enough time, you run the experiment enough times, and eventually you will end up with an evolution that combined with natural selection, it preserves the mutations that are good, and you will end up with something that looks designed even though it is not designed, and you will end up with something that looks designed even though it is not designed, that mutation over time being Why doesn't that work?
00:20:29.000It's, there's a mathematical problem, and it's a profound one.
00:20:32.000My colleague David Berlinski calls it the combinatorial problem, or the problem of combinatorial inflation.
00:20:40.000Maybe a simple analogy, a way to get into it.
00:20:42.000We know from our experience with software code, writing and using it, that the last thing you want in a section of functional software code is a series of random changes to those zeros and ones.
00:20:55.000If that happens, you're going to degrade the information that's in that code long before you'll ever generate a new software program or operating system.
00:21:03.000And Richard Dawkins and many, many other biologists have acknowledged that what we have in DNA is akin to machine code, or as Leroy Hood puts it, digital code.
00:21:14.000It's functioning in exactly the same way.
00:21:16.000So what we've learned from software writing and using is highly relevant to understanding whether or not the mutation selection mechanism would actually generate, could generate, conceivably or realistically, new information.
00:21:30.000And there's a reason that changing software at random invariably degrades the information before you get anything useful and new.
00:21:38.000And that is because there's so many more ways to go wrong.
00:21:41.000In any system of digital or typographic or alphabetic communication, there are vastly more ways of arranging the characters in question that will generate gibberish.
00:21:52.000Then there are ways of arranging those same characters that will generate something functional.
00:21:57.000So if you start randomly changing things, you're overwhelmingly more likely to find a gibberish sequence than a functional one.
00:22:04.000And as we've actually tried to quantify that, how much more likely, the quantitative odds are prohibitive.
00:22:11.000There's a scientist who worked for 14 years at Cambridge University, Douglas Axe.
00:22:17.000went on to do a long-term molecular biology research postdoc at Cambridge to try to quantify this question.
00:22:24.000How rare or common are the functional sequences that would make a new protein or a new gene capable of making a new protein?
00:22:32.000How rare are the functional ones in comparison to the non-functional ones?
00:22:36.000And for a relatively short protein, about 150 amino acids long, he determined that the ratio of functional to non-functional sequences was about 1 over 10 to the 77th power.
00:22:48.000Now to put that in context, there are only 10 to the 65th atoms in the Milky Way galaxy.
00:22:54.000So what that means is that a random search for a new functional sequence is Going to be like looking for one marked atom among 1 trillion galaxies of the size of the Milky Way.
00:23:11.000And it turns out that even 4 billion years of life's history is not enough time to solve a search problem of that magnitude.
00:23:20.000And I go into all the math of this in the book and it's pretty straightforward.
00:23:23.000There's only 10 to the 40th organisms in the history of the planet.
00:23:25.000Not enough replication events to search a space 10 to the 77 big.
00:23:31.000So you're looking at, even if you take the whole history of life on the planet into account, you're only going to be able to search a tiny, tiny fraction of the total relevant sequences.
00:23:41.000So you've got a really big haystack, really small number of needles, and very little time to look for them.
00:23:47.000The bottom line is it's overwhelmingly more probable that such a search will fail than succeed in the known time of life on planet Earth, which means that the mechanism is more likely, the hypothesis that the mechanism produced new information is more likely to be false than true.
00:24:02.000And so the result of this is, as you say, that it's more likely that it's designed than that it was randomly done in terms of DNA, and that's reflected in the fossil record, to the extent that there's sort of these jumps in the fossil record, and this is what you talk about in Darwin's Doubt, is that it's not a continuous process of mutation upon mutation building one on the other just randomly.
00:24:25.000It becomes a big engineering problem, because it's not just that there's gaps in the fossil record.
00:24:29.000You have to ask, well, how would the evolutionary process produce All the new information necessary to build these completely new body plans, new cell types, new anatomical structures.
00:24:38.000And we know it would take a lot of new information.
00:24:41.000And so then you've got to look, well, is there enough time to do that?
00:24:45.000Do you have enough trials through this mechanism?
00:24:47.000And the answer is just overwhelmingly no.
00:24:49.000It's not plausible at all mathematically.
00:24:52.000And on the flip side, We do know, however, of a cause that is sufficient to produce new information.
00:24:58.000This is why it's not a god of the gaps or an argument from ignorance.
00:25:02.000We're drawing, and this is Darwin's historical scientific method, when you're trying to explain an event in the remote past, you want to draw on your knowledge of cause and effect.
00:25:09.000What kind of cause is out there that we've observed that is capable of producing the effect in question?
00:25:13.000And if the effect is a lot of new digital information, we know of a cause that can do that, and it's a mind or an intelligence.
00:25:19.000And it happens that that's the only known cause that can produce lots of new information, and it's certainly much more plausible than the Darwinian idea of a random search.
00:25:28.000And we show why, mathematically, it's much more plausible.
00:25:31.000Now, one of the theories about the idea that randomness is still in the system is Stephen Jay Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium, that essentially small groups of animals kind of went away from the big group, they did all their changes and then they reintegrated.
00:25:46.000Why doesn't that work, the idea that the jumps in the fossil record are a result of small groups breaking away in a certain level of group selection?
00:25:51.000Yeah, Gould's model was a terrific advance as far as its accuracy in describing the fossil record because he described these big punctuations or big jumps and then the long-term stasis that would occur, lack of directional evolutionary change.
00:26:07.000That's what we see in the fossil record, very non-Darwinian.
00:26:10.000The problem was he didn't really have a mechanism That could produce the amount of change that we're seeing.
00:26:19.000I do a whole chapter on this in Darwin's Doubt, but the mechanism he proposed was called species selection.
00:26:25.000A lot of other evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins, were very critical of the mechanism, and in a way rightly so, because what it came down to in the end was that species selection itself depended on the natural selection random mutation mechanism.
00:26:37.000And that mechanism requires lots of time to get the job done.
00:26:41.000And it turns out four billion years isn't enough.
00:26:44.000But certainly the abrupt jumps that Gould was talking about were not allowing the mechanism enough time to work.
00:26:51.000So he had this kind of irony in evolutionary biology in the 80s and 90s in particular.
00:26:56.000Gould's model pretty much was dismissed by the early 2000s.
00:27:00.000But Gould's model was viewed as a good one for describing the fossil record accurately, but it didn't have a mechanism.
00:27:09.000The Darwinians had a mechanism, but it was inconsistent with the fossil record.
00:27:12.000And also, as we've later critiqued, the mechanism lacked the creative power to generate the information necessary to build major innovations in the history of life.
00:27:22.000So from a design perspective, what exactly is the theory of how one species would become another suddenly?
00:27:27.000Is it that there is a bunch of dead DNA that is suddenly activated?
00:27:31.000Or is it that something injects new information into the system?
00:28:00.000We think there's clearly evolution that takes place.
00:28:03.000The question is how much information was present and how how wide the envelopes of variability are that are generated by that information.
00:28:13.000So there's a terrific evolutionary biologist and cell biologist at the University of Chicago, also named Shapiro, James Shapiro, who's got a new theory of evolution he calls natural genetic engineering.
00:28:25.000And he notices that and has documented that many of the mutations that we actually see at work are not random at all.
00:28:32.000They're an expression of what he calls pre-programmed adaptive capacity where there's an external trigger or stressor put on an organism and that triggers the production of certain proteins for which the organism had the capability of building all along because it had the genetic information there.
00:28:51.000And so a lot of the evolution we see is actually pre-programmed adaptive capacity, which is really an exciting biological phenomenon that the Darwinians haven't really taken full account of, but it does raise the question of the origin of that adaptive capacity.
00:29:06.000Where did the pre-programming come from?
00:29:08.000So, intelligent design says the inputs of information from outside the system, from an intelligence, are located in that pre-programmed adaptive capacity, but the theory also acknowledges that there is evolution possible going downstream as a result of that pre-existing information.
00:29:24.000All right, so let's talk about the origin of life problem.
00:29:26.000The question being, how did organic life arise from non-organic material?
00:29:31.000There are some experiments that were done in the early 20th century in which, under certain conditions, it looked as though maybe organic material could be created from non-organic material, but there really, as you point out, has not been a great explanation of how non-organic material could create an information system like DNA.
00:29:45.000I was wondering if you could elucidate that.
00:29:46.000So, yeah, the famous experiment still in a lot of the biology textbooks is the Miller-Urey experiment of 1952-1953.
00:29:54.000They sparked a chamber that had gases known as reducing gases that then spontaneously produced a few of the 20 protein-forming amino acids, two or three.
00:30:07.000The problem is that amino acids do not a protein make, and proteins by themselves do not make life.
00:30:14.000So they were really quite a long ways away from demonstrating anything like a spontaneous chemical origin of life.
00:30:21.000It's ironic that that experiment was performed in the same year as Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule and the subsequent elucidation of the information-bearing properties Because in what's called chemical evolutionary theory, by the 1960s and certainly by the early 1980s, the field reached a state of impasse precisely because the biologists and the biochemists realized that to build an actual living cell, you've got to have information-rich molecules.
00:30:49.000You can't just have the components, you can't just have the letters, you've got to have the sentences.
00:30:53.000And so there were a number of problems with the Miller-Urey experiment.
00:30:58.000One was they presupposed conditions on the early Earth and in the early Earth's atmosphere that didn't actually match the conditions on the early Earth.
00:31:07.000We had a slightly oxidizing or neutral atmosphere.
00:31:10.000You rerun those experiments, you don't get amino acids forming spontaneously.
00:31:13.000But the bigger problem was how do you arrange the amino acids in the very specific ways that are required to form a three-dimensional structure called a a protein fold.
00:31:23.000And that problem hasn't been solved apart from watching DNA do it inside living cells.
00:31:29.000So to build proteins, what we know is you need information stored in the DNA molecule.
00:31:33.000And so as the molecular biological revolution unfolded in the 50s, 60s, 70s, the scientists working on the origin of life realized the problem was much harder than they realized because they didn't just need to account for certain kinds of building blocks of life.
00:31:49.000They needed to account for the information that would organize the building blocks into DNA molecules, into protein molecules, and into the complex information processing systems that characterize even the simplest living cells.
00:32:00.000So one of the theories that has been posited to sort of solve this problem is the so-called RNA world thesis.
00:32:05.000Can you talk about what exactly that is?
00:32:07.000So one of the reasons the origin of life problem is so hard for evolutionary biologists is you can't invoke natural selection reasonably.
00:32:16.000Because natural selection depends on self-replication, differential survival of lots of offspring.
00:32:30.000Organisms only divide and reproduce on the basis of things that are happening at a molecular level that involve information-rich DNA and proteins.
00:32:39.000So if you're trying to explain the origin of information-rich DNA and proteins, you can't invoke prebiotic natural selection.
00:32:45.000It's a contradiction in terms, as one of the great evolutionary biologists Dobzhansky said.
00:32:49.000So, that made the origin of life problem even harder than the problems we've been talking about previously, as far as explaining the origin of the information for new forms of life.
00:32:58.000But one theory that attempted to get around that is called the RNA world, and it was based on the observation that some RNA molecules can perform two functions at once.
00:33:09.000They can perform the function of information storage, like DNA, but they can also catalyze certain reactions.
00:33:17.000Proteins catalyze at much faster rates than would otherwise occur.
00:33:20.000Really crucial biochemical reactions that are crucial to metabolism.
00:33:24.000So if RNA could do both, the thought was, then maybe life started with an RNA molecule that could copy itself, that could get natural selection going at a molecular level before you had life.
00:33:35.000The problem has turned out again to be an information problem.
00:33:51.000But people have tried to engineer RNA molecules by arranging the sequence of bases.
00:33:56.000RNA, like DNA, has these bases that carry information.
00:34:00.000And they've arranged the bases very specifically to try to build RNA molecules that would copy themselves to get a self-replicating system going, which would get natural selection going.
00:34:09.000Problem is, number one, we have been able to design some RNA molecules that will copy about 10% of themselves, but only if the bases are very specifically arranged.
00:34:19.000Which means that to get a self-replicating system going, you've got to have information.
00:34:23.000And where is the information coming from?
00:34:25.000It's coming from the intelligent biochemist who's doing the ribozyme engineering.
00:34:30.000So what's actually being simulated in these simulations is the need, we argue, for intelligent design.
00:34:36.000The RNA world doesn't refute the intelligent design argument based on information.
00:34:43.000It actually demonstrates or illustrates the need for intelligent design.
00:34:46.000And so, I don't think it really solves the problem, unless RNA world people are saying, well, that's where the intelligent designer input the information in the first place.
00:34:55.000Okay, so it seems like the biggest blowback that you've gotten, obviously, in terms of intelligent design, is the term intelligent design, because it seems like most of the critiques that you've made of neo-Darwinism are fairly well accepted.
00:35:07.000In 2016, a number of us attended a conference at the Royal Society of London in, obviously, London, and it was a group of leading evolutionary biologists called The Meeting to address new trends in evolutionary biology, they called it.
00:35:22.000It was innocuous way of saying neo-Darwinism is dead.
00:35:25.000The first talk of the conference was by a leading Austrian evolutionary biologist named Gerd Müller, who enumerated five, what he called, explanatory deficits of Neo-Darwinism.
00:35:36.000Elsewhere he's written that Neo-Darwinism has no theory of the generative, by which he means it explains the small-scale variations very well, Like the Galapagos finches, but it doesn't explain the origin of major innovations in the history of life.
00:35:50.000And so many evolutionary biologists are now, there's an aphorism that's afoot, it's mutation and selection explain the survival but not the arrival of the fittest.
00:35:59.000The problem is the main mechanism of evolutionary change doesn't seem to have significant creative power.
00:36:05.000And that's the problem, I think, increasingly being recognized.
00:36:09.000And as a result of that, many people within evolutionary biology are looking for new mechanisms, calling for the formulation of a new theory.
00:36:19.000When you think about how the theory is presented through the textbooks, with science popularizers, the new atheists, the public spokesmen for science, the National Center for Science Education, The National Academy of Sciences.
00:36:34.000When they talk about evolution, it's a fact.
00:36:36.000Richard Dawkins has said that if you find someone who questions it, they're either stupid, wicked, or insane.
00:36:43.000But the reality on the ground, or rather in the peer-reviewed literature within evolutionary biology, is very different.
00:36:49.000There's a recognition that the fundamental problems haven't been solved.
00:36:53.000And one of which is, Mueller acknowledged, the problem of the origin of biological form.
00:36:58.000When I saw that, it's in a table in a book that he's written with another evolutionary biologist.
00:37:03.000It's a list of unsolved problems, one of which they list, the origin of biological form.
00:37:10.000That was the very problem that Darwin was supposed to have solved in 1859, and it's now an open question.
00:37:15.000Well, with that said, it seems like, for a lot of folks like Dawkins, it's not about the God of the Gaps, it's about the Darwinism of the Gaps.
00:37:21.000The idea that eventually we're going to figure out that Darwinism still holds in these circumstances where it appears not to hold.
00:37:27.000Is that accurate, or does he have a theory for how to fix it?
00:37:29.000Well, yeah, there's a very good explanation for that in the sociology and philosophy of science.
00:37:35.000The assumption is we have to have a materialistic explanation.
00:37:38.000We can't allow creative intelligence or agency or mind to... We can't posit that as part of the explanation for how life got here.
00:37:46.000And there's a rule that many scientists take as normative.
00:37:49.000It's called methodological naturalism.
00:37:51.000And it says if you're going to be a scientist, you have to explain everything by reference to purely undirected material processes.
00:37:57.000And if you deviate from that in any way, you're not being scientific.
00:37:59.000That's why I got called a pseudoscientist on the Wikipedia webpage.
00:38:03.000It was a little bit of an upgrade because previously they had me down as a theologian.
00:38:09.000But in any case, this methodological rule is actually only as recent as the late 19th century in science.
00:38:15.000The founders of modern science, Newton, Boyle, Kepler, they didn't adhere to this at all.
00:38:19.000They saw design in science, well, in the natural world, and they wrote about it in their science treaties.
00:38:27.000For example, in the General Scolium to the Principia, Newton's great work on gravitation.
00:38:32.000He's got a terrific argument for design based on the fine-tuning of the planetary orbits.
00:38:38.000So design arguments were part of science from its foundation, but they became verboten in the late 19th century after the origin of species.
00:38:48.000And there's a very curious thing about this rule of methodological naturalism.
00:38:52.000If you're investigating an origin question or a causal origins question, It's a rule that actually limits the intellectual freedom of the scientist.
00:39:01.000There's a lot of areas of science where methodological naturalism is innocuous, but if you're asking the question, what caused life or the information necessary to produce life to arise, and you recognize that it could be an undirected material process, or it might have been a mind, but then you decide in advance that you're not going to consider any evidence of mind, of course you're only going to get materialistic explanations, but the explanations may not be adequate.
00:39:24.000I mean, imagine you go into the The British Museum, you look at the Rosetta Stone, you see all those inscriptions in three different languages, and you say, well, I'd like to say it was ascribed, but since I adhere to methodological naturalism, I've got to say it was wind and erosion or something like that.
00:39:41.000The rule actually limits scientists from following the evidence where it most naturally leads.
00:39:45.000Information based on our knowledge of cause and effect is a strong indicator of the activity of intelligence, and yet we can't say that or consider that if we accept methodological naturalism.
00:39:56.000That's why the dialectic kind of goes in circles where you get a new evolutionary model every few years, and then they circle back to the one that was rejected, you know, 20 years ago and start the cycle all over again, because we're really looking in the wrong place.
00:40:08.000I mean, it does raise the question, if you're a methodological naturalist and all you believe is that undirected processes are responsible for everything, why you believe in such a thing as objective truth, for example.
00:40:17.000Or the reliability of the human mind, as we were discussing before the interview.
00:40:21.000I mean, if the idea is that the human mind is capable of grasping the world around it, and there is such a thing as objective truth that we can grasp, then that would suggest that our mind reflects the universe in some deep, profound way, as opposed to the sort of evolutionary biology belief, which is that we are just adaptable balls of meat.
00:40:37.000And so whatever we think about the universe, maybe it's helpful in terms of our adaptation, but it's not necessarily true.
00:41:01.000But Nagel accepted the critical arguments in Signature in the Cell and began to get more critical of Darwinism as well, not just chemical evolutionary theory, but biological evolutionary theory.
00:41:13.000And in 2012, he doubled down by publishing his own book with Oxford Press called Mind and Cosmos, How the Neo-Darwinian Materialist View of Reality is Almost Certainly False, was the subtitle.
00:41:24.000And his problem was the one that you just articulated, that clearly we live in a universe in which mind is a reality.
00:41:30.000And if neo-Darwinism can't account for that, then it's missing something really big.
00:41:35.000It's an inadequate explanation for something we observe all the time, which is the activity of minds.
00:41:44.000I know I have a mind by my own introspective experience.
00:41:47.000This is a part of reality too, and if evolution can't account for that, and if we exclude mind as an explanatory principle, we're going to have an impoverished understanding of the world around us.
00:41:58.000And so, I think this is a very important aspect of the debate, is recognizing that mind is a reality.
00:42:08.000Fascinating sort of theories that Dawkins puts forth is essentially that mind is a spandrel, that mind is just something that we feel like we have but it actually does not exist in the first place, which does raise the question as to why he does what he does for a living.
00:42:20.000I mean if you're in the business of explanation, why bother operating along the spandrels?
00:42:51.000Well, and it does raise questions, I mean, far beyond that for civilization as well, since we all have to live together and reason together.
00:42:57.000I've had this exact argument with Sam Harris, who says he believes in objective truth and reason, and I keep saying to him, well, we're wandering balls of meat with no purpose in the universe, so what is this reason you're talking about?
00:43:07.000We're a bunch of firing neurons over which we have no control.
00:43:09.000Yeah, two points on that, and I think you've addressed them both.
00:43:12.000I think you're addressing the point you just made in your new book, but our whole legal system is based on notions of moral responsibility, culpability before the law.
00:43:22.000That presupposes our ability to choose as free agents, that we're not completely determined by undirected, you know, firings in our synapse.
00:43:32.000You know, it was not just nature or nurture.
00:43:33.000There's human free will and moral responsibility.
00:43:37.000Our whole legal system is based on that idea.
00:43:39.000And secondly, we have this epidemic of teen suicide in our country.
00:43:45.000And I heard something you did on your show a little while ago, and I had a very similar experience of kind of existential anxiety as a young person.
00:43:53.000I was a middle-class upbringing, had no great deprivation, but I had this recurring question, what's it going to matter in a hundred years?
00:44:02.000Will any human achievement ever matter?
00:44:04.000And this question of the purpose of human existence, I think, is gnawing at a lot of people in our culture, especially young people.
00:44:11.000Because only agents, only personal agents, can confer meaning on something.
00:44:15.000Nothing can mean something to a rock or to an atom.
00:44:18.000And we find meaning in relationship to other persons.
00:44:21.000And if at the end of the day we're just going to have this heat death of the universe, and there's no mind behind the universe, no personal agency behind the universe, there's no possibility of ultimate meaning.
00:44:30.000And a lot of people sense that, and it's very deeply troubling.
00:44:32.000And we're really not answering that question for a lot of young people.
00:44:35.000I think one of the philosophical implications of intelligent design, which doesn't attempt to prove the existence of God, but it does imply that personal agency is fundamental to the cosmos, and it opens up the possibility that there could be a good answer to that question of meaning and purpose that I think is gnawing at a lot of people.
00:44:52.000So let's talk about how intelligent design should be taught in schools.
00:44:54.000As we've mentioned, a lot of scientists basically accept the generalized critiques of neo-Darwinism that you've expressed in your books.
00:45:01.000Is there a reason why we don't just say, we don't know?
00:45:05.000In other words, why don't we try and just teach it this way?
00:45:16.000And you're not mentioning any intelligent designer at all.
00:45:18.000Why not teach it that way and then you're firmly within even the skeptic's view of what science ought to be?
00:45:23.000That happens to be our science education policy at the Discovery Institute.
00:45:26.000We propose that students are allowed to teach, to learn about the strengths and the weaknesses of Different scientific theories, including Darwinian evolution, but there are many... A lot of people have a stereotyped view of science, which is really inaccurate.
00:45:42.000It's the men in white coats, and it's just about the facts, and there's no role for interpretation or debate or argument.
00:45:50.000There's a wonderful Italian philosopher of science named Marcello Pera who says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence.
00:46:00.000And what we've done is present a stereotype view of science to students where we just tell them the answer.
00:46:05.000Well, here are the facts and the theory that explains it, and it's all a fait accompli.
00:46:10.000A much better way to learn science is to learn about the arguments that are ongoing.
00:46:14.000Now, we have this complication in the United States with our church-state jurisprudence, and we at Discovery think that at this point, at least, it's just borrowing trouble to try to buck that.
00:46:26.000But what we certainly can do without any problem with the constitutional A constitutional precedent is to allow students to learn the strengths of Darwinian theory and also the scientific weaknesses as we find them increasingly in the peer-reviewed literature in biology and evolutionary biology.
00:46:46.000I testified before the Texas State Board of Education several years ago in favor of a proposal to do exactly what I'm describing.
00:46:54.000to teach the strengths and weaknesses.
00:46:55.000And I submitted into evidence about 100 peer-reviewed papers of leading people in evolutionary biology pointing out serious weaknesses in the theory, especially around this problem of the lack of creative power of the mutation selection mechanism.
00:47:08.000At that same hearing, well, prior to, my opposite number at the National Center for Science Education, a Darwin-only science education lobby, said to the press, the Dallas Morning News, you can't apply the strengths and weaknesses standard to evolutionary theory because the theory of evolution has no weaknesses.
00:47:26.000Well, that's actually laughable when you get into the scientific literature.
00:47:29.000And students ought, just as a matter of scientific literacy, to know about the problems with the theory that the scientists themselves are talking about.
00:47:56.000And the first thing is to understand why, from the biological evidence, we make an inference to a mind of some kind.
00:48:03.000When we're reasoning about the history of life, we're using this Darwinian principle, the Veracasa principle, or using our knowledge of cause and effect.
00:48:11.000What do we know from cause and effect?
00:48:12.000Well, we know from cause and effect that it takes a mind with self-conscious awareness to create or generate information in a digital form.
00:48:22.000And so we can infer that there was a mind that at least had the kind of capabilities of which we are familiar because of our own introspective experience of having minds.
00:48:32.000Now, when we're talking about the biological evidence, the designing intelligence responsible might be an imminent intelligence within the cosmos, or it could be a transcendent intelligence that has the attributes that Jews and Christians ascribe to the deity.
00:48:46.000So, I've always said, in my books on the evidence of design in biology, that the theory of intelligent design isn't an argument for God's existence, but it may have theistic implications.
00:48:57.000Now, I happen to be writing another book that is extending the design argument into the realm of cosmology and the foundations of physics where we find, at the foundation of physical law, these incredibly finely tuned parameters.
00:49:11.000It's called the anthropic fine-tuning.
00:49:14.000And the physicists since the 50s and 60s have been discovering dozens of these fine-tuning parameters both in the way the universe was set up in the beginning and the configuration of mass-energy and in the relative strengths of the different forces of physics and a number of other parameters like The expansion rate of the universe and the speed of light and things like this.
00:49:33.000And it turns out we live in what they call a Goldilocks universe.
00:49:36.000The forces are not too strong, not too weak.
00:49:38.000The expansion rate not too fast, not too slow.
00:49:40.000The arrangement of the mass-energy just right at the beginning.
00:49:44.000We live in a just right universe that has made life possible.
00:49:47.000Now that, I argue, and many physicists have argued, is also evidence of design.
00:49:52.000But that evidence of design is located at the very beginning of the universe.
00:49:56.000And neither the beginning of the universe, which we now know of as a result of our Big Bang theory, nor the fine-tuning can be accounted for by an agent within the cosmos.
00:50:06.000Clearly no space alien or imminent intelligence could be responsible for the laws of physics and the fine-tuning of all those laws that make its very life possible.
00:50:16.000Nor could such an agent be responsible for the origin of the universe itself.
00:50:19.000So I think when you bring that other evidence into the picture, That I think you can make a very strong theistic design argument.
00:50:26.000And in my next book, which is going to be called The Return of the God Hypothesis, I look at how a theism as opposed to other competing metaphysical hypotheses, such as pantheism or materialism or deism, best explains that ensemble of evidence from biology, physics, and cosmology.
00:50:43.000So I do think you can make a theistic argument, not a proof for God's existence, but again an inference to the best explanation Of this ensemble of evidence we have about biological and cosmological origins.
00:50:53.000Now, is there an easy way out for folks when it comes to the fine-tuning argument or to the information argument by simply saying that there is no such actual distinction between meaningful information and Shannon information, there's no such distinction between fine-tuning and non-fine-tuning, except that we're here to see it.
00:51:07.000In other words, the only thing that distinguishes an information-rich segment of text from a non-information-rich segment of text is the fact that we speak English.
00:51:16.000If there's a bunch of letters and we can read them, then we think that they're meaningful.
00:51:20.000If there's a bunch of letters and we can't read them, we think that they're not meaningful.
00:51:23.000So in other words, are we reverse projecting mind onto a universe simply because we're here to perceive it?
00:51:27.000Well, no, because we do objectively recognize meaning and function.
00:51:30.000There is a possibility of false negative judgments.
00:51:34.000We might see a string of characters and not know the symbol convention, and therefore conclude that that string is just random or complex without being specified.
00:51:43.000But when we make a qualitative judgment of specificity of arrangement, when we see that the arrangement of characters is necessary to perform an independently observable function, that's a kind of information that is real and is something that we know is only associated with the causal activity of intelligent agents.
00:52:01.000So, no biologist really, when you get down to it, wants to say, well, the sequence of characters in the DNA, you know, the A's, C's, and G's in the DNA molecule, The arrangement doesn't matter for building proteins, because all we have to do is change the arrangement and see that the protein unfolds and doesn't catalyze a reaction.
00:52:18.000There's a real objective way of recognizing function in biology, just as there is in human language.
00:52:24.000So, I think in the information sciences, there's a distinction between specified or functional information on the one hand, and mere complexity or randomness or Shannon information on the other.
00:52:38.000And that's a real distinction, and it underwrites the whole case for intelligent design.
00:52:43.000Okay, so the countervailing case for a lot of this stuff is the theory of multiple universes.
00:52:48.000I was hoping you would ask about that.
00:52:50.000People essentially saying that we are a bubble universe that is on a bunch of other bubbles.
00:52:55.000They're an infinite number of universes, so all the probabilistic arguments that you make in favor of the chain of life and the creation of life, none of this matters in the end because there are a bajillion universes.
00:53:07.000And they call it the observer selection effect.
00:53:10.000We think we're special because all the conditions that are necessary for our existence are so incredibly improbable, but in fact Some universe somewhere had to arise that produced organisms such as ourselves, conscious and intelligent agents indeed.
00:53:26.000But there's a problem with this whole approach.
00:53:45.000If you have all these different universes out there, a gabillion of them, if the universes aren't in some way connected, then what happens in one universe has no material effect on events in another universe.
00:53:59.000So the fact that there may be a gabillion other universes out there if they're disconnected, doesn't change anything in our universe, including the probabilities of our being here.
00:54:09.000So to solve that problem, and in recognition of that problem, proponents of the multiverse have proposed a common cause for all the universes, so that they can portray the multiverse, all these different universes, as the result of something like a big cosmic lottery, where there's some mechanism as the result of something like a big cosmic lottery, where there's some mechanism that's churning out universes, where eventually one of them would have to have the right combination of factors
00:54:33.000Now, the problem, though, is that in all the universe-generating mechanisms that have been proposed, there are There is prior fine-tuning.
00:54:42.000There's something called inflationary cosmology and there's something called the string theoretic landscape.
00:54:48.000So there's a string theory version of the multiverse and there's an inflationary cosmology version.
00:54:53.000And in both cases there has to be exquisite fine-tuning for the universe generating mechanism to actually produce multiple universes.
00:55:01.000So the problem of the origin of the fine-tuning has just been pushed back one generation One of my philosopher physics colleagues, Robin Collins, uses an illustration like this.
00:55:11.000He says, so imagine you have some chef presents a beautiful loaf of bread to you, and you say, oh, chef, I'd like to compliment your skill as a chef, but I know you didn't actually design the recipe.
00:55:46.000There was a prior universe that sucked in on itself and then blew out again.
00:55:51.000Basically, time is eternal and there was no beginning to time, necessarily.
00:55:54.000Well, there really aren't good cosmological models that eliminate what's called the singularity at the beginning temporally.
00:56:01.000The standard Big Bang or the inflationary cosmology model both terminate in a definite beginning.
00:56:07.000There have been a number of developments in theoretical physics that have reinforced that, the singularity theorem of Hawking, Penrose, and Ellis in 1968, and also a theorem independently in physics, the Bord-Guth-Valindkin theorem that established the beginning. the Bord-Guth-Valindkin theorem that established the beginning.
00:56:25.000But what people have tried to do, theoretical physicists have tried to do, to get around the theistic implications of there being a beginning, is formulating a very abstract model of physics called quantum cosmology.
00:56:35.000That's where the action is, if you want to get around the theistic argument for the existence of God based on the beginning of the universe.
00:56:41.000And I'm writing about this too, it's really heady stuff, but it's based on an analogy to quantum physics.
00:56:47.000And some of your listeners and viewers are very smart, so they might know about the weirdness of quantum physics, where particles act like waves and waves act like particles.
00:56:57.000So there's this thing called a wave function that describes all the different places that a particle might be, and then how it might collapse and manifest one particular set of attributes upon an observation.
00:57:11.000And by analogy, some of the physicists have said, well, maybe the universe came out of a bigger wave function, what they call a universal wave function, where there were all these different possible universes that were existing in what quantum physicists call superposition, sort of existing simultaneously in an abstract mathematical space of possibilities, not as physical reality.
00:57:33.000And then somehow, some way, all those different possibilities collapsed, and we got a universe like ours.
00:57:40.000Now, this is a very bizarre thing for a number of reasons.
00:57:43.000One, they've got a mathematical equation generating a material universe, which is a very not materialistic explanation of things.
00:57:51.000It's almost as one of the proponents of this, Alexander Vilenkin noted, he said, math is an idea that exists in mind, so when we say that the universe came out of a big universal wave function equation, are we really saying that the universe came out of a pre-existing mind?
00:58:09.000He raises that as a rhetorical question near the end of one of his books, and then simply changes the subject to finish the book.
00:58:14.000The other crazy thing is that to get that mathematical equation that might explain our universe, you have to solve a prior mathematical equation, and you can't do that without an input of information which comes from the theoretical physicist.
00:58:27.000So like in those origin of life experiments, they're actually modeling the need for a mind to generate information.
00:58:33.000And you get this weird conclusion, in the beginning was the word.
00:58:38.000The attempt to get around the theistic implications of the Big Bang have generated other models which themselves have implications that are very theistic.
00:58:47.000Okay, so in just one second I'm going to ask you a final question.
00:58:50.000I'm going to ask about your own religious background, where you come from.