00:00:03.000What if I told you science points towards God?
00:00:07.000Stephen Meyer from the Discovery Institute talks about why we should doubt Darwin and how science actually confirms the teachings of the Bible.
00:01:12.000Get involved with Turning Point USA again.
00:01:14.000Start our educational movement that is taking the country by storm, the largest movement for freedom in America, TurningPointUSA, tpusa.com.
00:01:38.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:46.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:30.000You guys could buy shares in the SPAC.
00:02:33.000Rumble's really making some big moves, whether it be Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald.
00:02:39.000Rumble has really become kind of the epicenter of free speech in the entire kind of, I don't want to say conservative movement because there's a lot of liberals on Rumble, but it is, it's really interesting.
00:02:53.000You know, when we're hosting our program and sometimes we have a guest come on and they'll say something such as, oh, something about the 2020 election or something about transgenderism.
00:03:05.000We have been so conditioned on our program to, we have to edit the YouTube feed or edit the Facebook feed immediately.
00:03:12.000We kind of get into that default setting.
00:03:14.000But on Rumble, we have no such concerns.
00:03:16.000Now, I know some of you might say, well, Charlie, why are you still broadcasting on YouTube?
00:04:10.000Boy, it's a SPAC, so it's highly volatile, just kind of all things, all cards on the table.
00:04:16.000It's gone up like 2.83% just today, and it's been up almost 11% in the last couple of days.
00:04:22.000And so the free market of ideas allows the free market best at its best allows the free market of ideas.
00:04:28.000And look, Rumble learned from Parlor, it learned from all these other places that were obliterate, great companies that were obliterated and destroyed by the social media giants.
00:04:51.000He is the author of several books, including his latest book that I can't wait to unpack, The Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.
00:05:12.000We've never actually talked, so it's great to connect.
00:05:16.000Likewise, I first became aware of you when I kind of do my couple hours of learning every night where I was flipping through a Hoover Institution video.
00:05:25.000And I think you were in Italy somewhere, and you were with two other amazing thinkers talking about how Darwin was wrong.
00:05:34.000And I said, oh, wow, this is so interesting because as a Christian, I reject Darwin on just basic biblical and metaphysical terms.
00:05:41.000But to have someone actually make a scientific counter to Darwin was so interesting.
00:05:58.000Why should we doubt Darwin's theory of evolution?
00:06:03.000Well, I focused on two of many, but two big mysteries that have been unsolved by Darwinian evolution.
00:06:10.000The first has to do with the fossil record, that the pattern of appearance of new animal form in the fossil record is decidedly non-Darwinian, whereas Darwin predicted or expected to see evidence of a kind of gradual branching tree from the simplest organisms at the base of the tree to all the new forms of life we see today.
00:06:31.000And the new forms of life would emerge gradually as older forms morphed and changed.
00:06:39.000In the fossil record, we don't see a tree-like pattern, but instead we see something that looks more like a lawn or perhaps an orchard of separate trees where the major groups of organisms come into the fossil record abruptly or suddenly.
00:06:52.000And the most dramatic example of that occurs in an event known as the Cambrian explosion.
00:06:56.000And the book Darwin's Doubt was about that event in the history of life, something that even in Darwin's time, Darwin knew did not fit with his tree-like picture of the history of life.
00:07:08.000But the second mystery that I addressed is perhaps an even more profound one, and it's a kind of an engineering puzzle, which is how would the mutation and natural selection mechanism ever build complex new forms of animal life?
00:07:23.000We know now post-Watson and Crick and the molecular biological revolution and the Human Genome Project and many other things that at the foundation of life, we have not a simple cell as Darwin thought in his time, but instead the cell is understood to be chock full of complex information and a whole complex information storage, processing, transmission, and processing system.
00:07:50.000So, we've got high-tech digital computing technology inside even the simplest living organisms in their cells.
00:07:57.000And to build a new organism, you have to modify that genetic information, that code.
00:08:03.000And we know from our own experience in the computer world that if you start randomly changing sections of functional code, you're going to degrade that information long before you ever build a new functioning block of software or an operating system.
00:08:20.000Random changes to specified information invariably degrade that information long before you ever generate anything new or functional or useful.
00:08:30.000And that same thing appears to apply in the biological case.
00:08:33.000So, that the mechanism that Darwinism and neo-Darwinists have long relied on, namely natural selection acting on these random changes in the genetic text called mutations, is very unlikely to produce anything functional or new, even taking into account the billions of years of life's history on Earth.
00:08:56.000So, in the video you saw, I was discussing this problem with the chairman of the Yale Computer Science Department, David Galarenter, and David Berlinski, a mathematician and philosopher and author who's written a fantastic essay called The Deniable Darwin.
00:09:11.000And we were addressing these mathematical challenges to the neo-Darwinian view of the history of life.
00:09:18.000It's just simply overwhelmingly improbable that random mutational changes would ever generate even a new gene or functional protein.
00:09:26.000And that, again, taking into account the entire history of life on the planet.
00:09:30.000So, that problem really hasn't been solved, the mathematical improbability associated with the Darwinian story.
00:09:38.000Can you give us a number of how improbable it was?
00:09:40.000If I remember in the video, one of your colleagues said something that was just so incredible.
00:09:47.000It was something like 18 to a 25,000 exponent or something chance to even get a singular chance of it.
00:09:56.000Oh, yeah, well, a very important number comes from the work of Douglas Axe, a molecular biologist who spent 14 years at the University of Cambridge investigating the rarity of functional genes and proteins among all the other ways you could arrange the parts of those molecules.
00:10:13.000And the number he came up with is that for every functional gene, there's about 10 to the 77th power non-functional ways of arranging the letters in the genetic text that correspond to that functional gene.
00:10:26.000So it's beyond a needle in the haystack problem.
00:10:29.000And in fact, even given the amount of time that we've had and the number of trials that could have taken place since the beginning of life on Earth, you're overwhelmingly more likely, or that mechanism is overwhelmingly more likely to fail in finding even one new gene or protein in the known time of life on Earth than it is to find a functional gene or protein.
00:10:50.000The gaps in Darwin's theory or the theory of evolution over time, would it then confirm that there was a designer and that we are designed?
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00:12:01.000With the doubt that you kind of cast over Darwin, is intelligent design the rational explanation for our existence?
00:12:12.000Well, it turns out that many of the criticisms of Darwinian evolution are the flip side of a positive case for intelligent design.
00:12:21.000Just critiquing a theory doesn't allow you to justify formulating another theory.
00:12:29.000The things that Darwinism can't explain are precisely the things that support the idea of intelligent design.
00:12:34.000In particular, the discovery at the foundation of life.
00:12:40.000Now, the significance of this question of whether or not there is a God has implications throughout every single fashion, every single kind of vector you could say of what we talked about here on the Charlie Kirk show.
00:12:50.000If there is no God, this is the moral argument.
00:12:53.000If there is no God, then how on earth are you able to determine morality?
00:13:12.000He said, Charlie, the Bible is an anti-scientific document.
00:13:17.000And this is something that you'll hear a lot on college campuses.
00:13:19.000And parents, beware, especially Christian parents listening right now, when you send your kids to college, that this is a theme that is repeated, that the Bible is anti-science, the Bible is anti-modernity.
00:13:30.000Well, the Bible is not just pro-science.
00:13:32.000Science, and as we know it, the scientific method is actually derived from biblical principles, the exploration into the world, into nature as being subservient to man.
00:13:50.000What we've discovered in the last hundred years in science is a series of discoveries that are faith-affirming, that point to theism.
00:13:58.000There's been a common trope in Western intellectual circles that science, properly understood, undermines belief in God.
00:14:05.000And we've seen that message amplified through the works of the so-called new atheists, people like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, and many others.
00:14:15.000But in fact, the major discoveries about biological and cosmological origins, where life came from, where the universe came from, have had decidedly theistic implications.
00:14:26.000And one of those discoveries, which is the one I was talking about when we had the echo, is that at the foundation of life, in even the simplest living cells, we've discovered a complex form of digital nanotechnology.
00:14:39.000There is information, an information storage, transmission, and processing system in the DNA molecule and in the collection of complex molecular machines that process that information that not only rivals but exceeds the high-tech digital computing technology that we've developed.
00:14:56.000But we can see in that technology evidence of clear evidence of intelligent design.
00:15:00.000So precisely what Darwinism can't explain is the presence of that information technology in cells.
00:15:08.000We know from experience that whenever we see a section of information, whether we're looking at a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or a section of computer code, and we trace that information back to its source, we always find a mind, not a material process.
00:15:26.000And so the discovery of information at the foundation of life in the DNA molecule, in every single living cell, is powerful evidence of a designing mind in the origin and history of life on this planet.
00:15:38.000And that's a big part of the argument I developed, both in my first book, Signature in the Cell, but also in this more recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis.
00:15:47.000Yeah, I look forward to exploring that and also talking more about those three discoveries.
00:15:51.000And it's just so important because religious people kind of get talked down to rather smugly and arrogantly by atheists or college professors or even parents have to kind of endure this when their kind of smart alec 19-year-old returns from college as an atheist because they watched a Sam Harris podcast and they have a couple atheist friends in college and a professor who's super miserable who says, oh, yes, only dumb people believe in religion.
00:16:16.000So I just want anyone who's out there who's a Christian and know that these resources are available for you.
00:16:20.000Stephen Meyer, Discovery Institute, it's so important.
00:16:23.000And his book, I want you to check it out, not just Darwin's Doubt, but The Return of the God Hypothesis, Return of the God Hypothesis, three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe.
00:16:35.000Those words are very carefully chosen.
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00:16:59.000The problem is, though, why are you giving all of your money to rent when you could be building equity with lots of programs that offer first-time buyers assistance with little to no down payment needed?
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00:18:40.000You mentioned this problem with young people losing their faith and going off to college and they get this message that science is undermining belief in God.
00:18:49.000But in fact, it's exactly the opposite.
00:18:52.000In the early part of the 20th century, the first huge, unexpected discovery was that the universe had a beginning.
00:18:58.000And this was a discovery of astronomy and astrophysics.
00:19:03.000The discovery was that the light coming from very distant galaxies was being stretched out.
00:19:07.000It looked redder than it should otherwise look.
00:19:09.000It indicated that the galaxies in all directions were moving away from us, as if the universe were expanding outward from a definite beginning point.
00:19:17.000And there have been many subsequent discoveries that have confirmed that basic idea.
00:19:23.000But there have been discoveries in theoretical physics that have also confirmed that the universe must have had a beginning, what the physicists call a singularity.
00:19:31.000And that is a beginning to all of matter, space, time, and energy.
00:19:35.000So we can't invoke a materialistic explanation for the origin of matter because before there was matter, there was no matter to do the causing.
00:19:42.000So we're looking at the need for a cause which transcends the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy.
00:19:49.000And if you think about possible explanations for that, an immaterial creative mind provides the best such explanation, aka God.
00:19:58.000We've also discovered in physics that from the very beginning of the universe, the universe has been fine-tuned, that the basic parameters of physics fall within very narrow ranges that allow for life to exist on Earth.
00:20:11.000Physicists now talk about the universe as being a fortunate universe or a Goldilocks universe where everything is just right.
00:20:18.000The forces of physics, not too strong, not too weak, the masses of the elementary particles, not too heavy, not too light.
00:20:24.000Everything falls within that sweet spot.
00:20:26.000And many physicists have tumbled to the idea that the explanation for that fine-tuning is a transcendent fine-tuner.
00:20:33.000And then thirdly, in the realm of biology, since Watson and Crick and right into the 20th century, we've discovered that, or 21st century, we've discovered that at the foundation of life, we don't have a simple cell, but inside the cell, we have a complex information storage, transmission, and processing system.
00:20:53.000And that the digital code in the DNA, it's a four-character code, is very similar to software.
00:20:59.000Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever written.
00:21:04.000We know from experience that software comes from programmers, and we know generally that information, especially when we find it in a digital or alphabetic form, always comes from a mind, whether we're talking about software or hieroglyphic inscription or paragraph in a book or even information embedded in a radio signal.
00:21:23.000Information is the product of intelligence.
00:21:25.000And at the foundation of life, the thing that really makes life go is the information embedded in that DNA molecule and other places in the cell.
00:21:35.000From the beginning, it's been finely tuned.
00:21:37.000And since the beginning, there have been big infusions of information into our biosphere that have made life and new forms of life possible.
00:21:45.000In the book, Return of the God hypothesis, I look at different competing worldviews and show that really only classical theism explains all three of those key facts about the origin of life in the universe adequately.
00:22:00.000So let me ask you, you do a lot of debates and you do a lot of conversations with atheists and people that disagree with these findings, albeit I find it to be overwhelmingly convincing.
00:22:13.000And Aquinas was on this stuff before even some of the modern scientific, you know, let's say, discoveries have happened.
00:22:24.000What do you find, though, is the most challenging atheist argument to overcome?
00:22:28.000What's the one where when you hear it, you say, oh boy, this is going to be tough to navigate?
00:22:32.000What is the hardest and most compelling atheist argument?
00:22:37.000Well, the most common argument we hear is that, well, that may be so, but it's not science.
00:22:44.000And that's a way of dodging the argument by trying to classify a conclusion out of significance.
00:22:52.000So people will say, well, that's religion or that's philosophy.
00:22:55.000But it really doesn't matter what you call the inference to an intelligent designer or to a transcendent designer.
00:23:03.000The point is that the evidence supports that inference.
00:23:07.000The hardest argument, I think, for a lot of theists to answer is the idea is the recognition that there are things in nature that are also broken.
00:23:16.000There's good evidence of good design, but also evidence of things like viruses and bacteria that are harmful to humans.
00:23:26.000And so that's sometimes called the argument from natural evil.
00:23:31.000As it just a straight, if all you hold to is the idea that there was an intelligent designer of some kind, I think that is a hard argument to argue or a hard argument to answer.
00:23:41.000But I happen to be not only a proponent of intelligent design, but also a proponent of the biblical view of things.
00:23:49.000And in the Bible, you have the sense, the clear teaching that you should expect two things in nature.
00:23:55.000You should see evidence of a good original design.
00:23:58.000And we definitely see that in all the beauty around us, but also the inner workings of cells and the discovery that the universe had a beginning.
00:24:05.000After all, the first words of the Bible are actually in the beginning.
00:24:09.000But the biblical view is also that something has gone wrong and that nature also has been affected by decay.
00:24:18.000And so, in the biblical view, I think you would expect to see two things: evidence of an aboriginal good design, but evidence of subsequent decay.
00:24:31.000So the other most, I think the most difficult argument for most people is, and again, it's nothing new for people that have argued in the theist world is why is there evil in the world?
00:24:43.000It's an atheist, it's a favorite atheist play, right?
00:24:46.000Which is, if you believe in God and you believe in that God has some characteristics of goodness, how on earth could you explain child cancer or tsunamis or earthquakes or all these terrible and difficult things, as you mentioned, there.
00:25:02.000And so, you know, as we're having this, you know, broader conversation, and you know, a lot of young people listen to this program and they're going off to college and parents.
00:25:11.000You know, what is the most effective way, then, in your personal opinion, to counter, you know, very militant atheism?
00:25:20.000Because they try to hold science over us.
00:25:47.000I was doing a Socrates in the City event with our mutual friend, Eric Metaxas, several years ago.
00:25:55.000And as we were talking about the evidence for God that is contained in my book, Return of the God Hypothesis, the camera woman who was stage left began to weep visibly.
00:26:09.000And we ended up getting a letter from her afterwards.
00:26:12.000She was embarrassed that she'd gotten so emotional.
00:26:15.000But her story was that she'd been a science major, a biology major, in fact, and she had an aggressive atheistic professor who was sort of proselytizing people to read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.
00:26:27.000And she had basically never heard that there was any, there were any counter arguments to that.
00:26:31.000And so when she read the book, she was not entirely persuaded by Dawkins' atheism, but she was sort of it put her in a state of cognitive dissonance where the atheists and the atheistic professor and the new atheist writers were claiming that science supports their worldview.
00:26:48.000And she didn't have any good counter arguments.
00:26:50.000She didn't know about the evidence of the DNA or the fine-tuning or the evidence that the universe has a beginning.
00:27:00.000And so these kind of arguments that are somewhat facile and sophomoric that you get from the new atheists, they tend to carry the day simply because students are not being exposed to an alternative view and being given a chance to weigh the competing sides of the argument.
00:27:18.000When I was in Cambridge in grad school, my supervisor tutor used to say, beware the sound of one hand clapping.
00:27:26.000He said, where there's an argument on one side, there's bound to be an argument on the other.
00:27:30.000And I think crucially for young people, the main thing is to put in their hands the resources to weigh both sides of the argument.
00:27:41.000I think the argument for theism, for belief in God, is incredibly strong, and it is scientifically based as well as philosophically based.
00:27:49.000And I think the main thing is just get these resources out to people.
00:27:54.000We have a whole video series called Science Uprising that challenges this worldview of scientific materialism/slash atheism that's so prevalent among the professors, the professor at class, with really contemporary scientific arguments and evidences that I think are not being adequately answered by those scientific atheists.
00:28:15.000Rather, they avoid those arguments and resort to a lot of ad hominem rather than actually engaging the new, the reformulated cosmological argument from the discovery of the universe's beginning or the fine-tuning design argument or the biological design argument.
00:28:33.000These are very powerful arguments, and I think students just need to know about them.
00:28:37.000Well, just the fact that our earth is intelligible at all, I mean, our planet is something that very well could lend credence to the argument that this was designed.
00:28:46.000The fact that we're able to discover or understand anything, that it's not just mountains of chaos in an unintelligible way.
00:28:52.000The fact that we have reason, I mean, no other species has reason.
00:28:56.000And that's something that the Darwinists are just not able to explain.
00:28:59.000Is there something attractive about atheism that is deeper than just what you just articulated?
00:29:03.000Is there almost a desire for people to be atheists because they might fear what theism might mean for their life?
00:29:09.000Well, I think atheism has the attraction of moral autonomy.
00:29:13.000I think theism has the attraction of personal significance.
00:29:18.000And I think we have motivations in both those directions.
00:29:21.000And what we've tried to do in formulating the argument for intelligent design, and indeed what I've tried to do in formulating the argument for God as the designer in this most recent book, is to take the argument out, extract the argument from competing motivations and look at what the evidence has to say.
00:29:38.000And I think the evidence for intelligent design and indeed for a designer with the attributes that Jews and Christians, for example, have long ascribed to God, transcendence, intelligence, and a willingness to be active in the creation.
00:29:52.000I think the evidence for that kind of God is everywhere around us.
00:29:55.000And so I think the evidence should carry the day.
00:30:25.000I talk to bereaved parents all over the country when we go out and do conferences or university talks, kids that lost their faith in college.
00:30:34.000But the go-to atheistic argument or sentiment is that because I don't see God, it's rational not to believe in him.
00:30:42.000But science itself is based on indirect inference.
00:30:47.000We infer the structure of the DNA molecule, not because we can see the DNA molecule, but because of other evidence that we can only explain in light of positing a double helix.
00:30:58.000We don't see the Big Bang, but we have other evidence that suggests that there was a beginning to the universe.
00:31:28.000We don't see God, but we see the evidence of the activity of a divine mind, and therefore we have a good reason to believe in him.
00:31:37.000Yeah, so it's just, it's a, I also ask people when they say that, I say, well, do you believe in love, justice, mercy, grace?
00:31:44.000There's a lot of things you can't see that you believe in.
00:31:48.000That's not an argument not to say that it's real.
00:31:52.000Well, just even to amplify that point a little bit, imagine you were to, well, you walk into the British Museum, you see the Rosetta Stone.
00:32:01.000On the stone, there are inscriptions in three different languages.
00:32:05.000When the archaeologists were able to translate and crack those codes, they realized they were dealing with informational sequences.
00:32:13.000And they inferred then something they couldn't see, which was an unseen designing scribe.
00:32:19.000A mind was behind that information inscribed on the stone.
00:32:24.000They didn't see the person who wrote it, but they were able to infer the existence of such a person or a mind because of the informational sequences that were inscribed in the stone.
00:32:35.000We found informational sequences inside the DNA molecule.
00:32:39.000And by the same logic, it makes sense to infer that there was a mind responsible for the generation of that information that in turn makes life possible.
00:32:48.000So that's an indirect inference, but that's just the way science works.
00:32:51.000In other words, the logic behind scientific inferences is no different than the logic behind the case for the existence of God.
00:33:50.000And the evidence I present in Return of the God hypothesis ends up favoring that notion of God over and against a merely deistic creator or a pantheistic creator who doesn't actually have a mind, or a pantheistic God, rather, that doesn't have a mind.
00:34:04.000So I think there are scientific arguments and evidences that get you as far as classical Judeo-Christian theism.
00:34:11.000Then to decide between the different theistic religions, I think you need what's called special revelation.
00:34:16.000And that involves examining, for example, the historical reliability of the Bible to decide whether or not it is in fact a communication of the God that we can infer by examining nature.
00:34:28.000So I think you can get to theism, the idea of a transcendent, intelligent, and active creator by examining the evidence from nature.
00:34:36.000C.S. Lewis said it best, I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because I see it, because by it I see everything else.
00:34:44.000So basically, it's the explanation of it exactly.