The Charlie Kirk Show - 3 Scientific Discoveries that Prove God with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, it's hand to Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Do you believe in God?

00:00:03.000 What if I told you science points towards God?

00:00:07.000 Stephen Meyer from the Discovery Institute talks about why we should doubt Darwin and how science actually confirms the teachings of the Bible.

00:00:15.000 A phenomenal conversation.

00:00:16.000 For parents out there, if you have a young child, this is a great podcast to share with them.

00:00:21.000 Maybe even make it required listening.

00:00:24.000 Say, hey, we'll go out to your favorite restaurant if you guys listen to this.

00:00:27.000 They will learn a lot.

00:00:29.000 And I encourage you to check out his books, Darwin's Doubt and Return of the God Hypothesis.

00:00:34.000 Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com and consider supporting our show at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:40.000 Get involved with TurningPointUSA today at tpusa.com.

00:00:45.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:47.000 At turningpoint USA, you can start a high school chapter, start a college chapter today at tpusa.com.

00:00:55.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:58.000 Check it out today.

00:00:59.000 Start a high school chapter or a college chapter today at tpusa.com.

00:01:06.000 Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:01:09.000 That is freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:01:12.000 Get involved with Turning Point USA again.

00:01:14.000 Start our educational movement that is taking the country by storm, the largest movement for freedom in America, TurningPointUSA, tpusa.com.

00:01:23.000 Buckle up, everybody, here we go.

00:01:25.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:27.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:01:29.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:33.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:36.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:37.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:38.000 His 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.

00:01:46.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:55.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:58.000 Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.

00:02:07.000 You know, we do a lot of things on Rumble here.

00:02:10.000 It's becoming a very serious company, everybody.

00:02:13.000 They're going to be publicly traded soon.

00:02:15.000 I mean, their SPAC is their special purpose acquisition vehicle is already publicly traded.

00:02:20.000 Actually, it's up 2% here.

00:02:21.000 Full disclosure, I own shares and I am a partner in Rumble.

00:02:26.000 But you guys can too, by the way, if you want to.

00:02:28.000 You guys can own shares too.

00:02:30.000 It's not anything secret.

00:02:30.000 You guys could buy shares in the SPAC.

00:02:33.000 Rumble's really making some big moves, whether it be Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald.

00:02:39.000 Rumble 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.

00:02:53.000 You 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.

00:03:05.000 We have been so conditioned on our program to, we have to edit the YouTube feed or edit the Facebook feed immediately.

00:03:12.000 We kind of get into that default setting.

00:03:14.000 But on Rumble, we have no such concerns.

00:03:16.000 Now, I know some of you might say, well, Charlie, why are you still broadcasting on YouTube?

00:03:21.000 We reach a lot of people on YouTube.

00:03:24.000 A lot of people that are persuadable, a lot of people that are open-minded, a lot of people that don't have Rumble.

00:03:30.000 But Rumble has really become this free speech juggernaut, and they are just getting started.

00:03:37.000 And so Rumble just recently announced actually a major step towards a registration statement.

00:03:44.000 Effectively, they're going to be publicly traded under their own ticker symbol in the next couple of weeks.

00:03:49.000 It's a very big deal.

00:03:51.000 They have their own cloud computing services.

00:03:53.000 Rumble has also announced they have their own ad network.

00:03:56.000 And so all of the degenerates that run sleeping giants and all these other places won't be able to cancel them by pulling advertisements.

00:04:04.000 And so keep your eye on Rumble.

00:04:06.000 You guys can be partners with it as well.

00:04:09.000 Their stock has gone up.

00:04:10.000 Boy, it's a SPAC, so it's highly volatile, just kind of all things, all cards on the table.

00:04:16.000 It's gone up like 2.83% just today, and it's been up almost 11% in the last couple of days.

00:04:22.000 And so the free market of ideas allows the free market best at its best allows the free market of ideas.

00:04:28.000 And 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.

00:04:37.000 Parlor's back.

00:04:37.000 Finally, it's great.

00:04:39.000 But they took a huge hit because of that kind of big tech collusion.

00:04:43.000 Joining us now is one of my favorite authors and thinkers, someone who is just beyond brilliant.

00:04:50.000 It is Stephen C. Meyer.

00:04:51.000 He 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.

00:05:04.000 Stephen Meyer joins us right now.

00:05:05.000 Stephen, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:05:07.000 It's terrific to be with you, Charlie.

00:05:10.000 To put eyeballs on you.

00:05:12.000 We've never actually talked, so it's great to connect.

00:05:16.000 Likewise, 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.

00:05:25.000 And I think you were in Italy somewhere, and you were with two other amazing thinkers talking about how Darwin was wrong.

00:05:34.000 And I said, oh, wow, this is so interesting because as a Christian, I reject Darwin on just basic biblical and metaphysical terms.

00:05:41.000 But to have someone actually make a scientific counter to Darwin was so interesting.

00:05:46.000 Let's start there.

00:05:47.000 You wrote the whole book, Darwin's Doubt.

00:05:49.000 I encourage people to check it out.

00:05:50.000 I have not read it, but I have watched some of your lectures on it.

00:05:53.000 I do plan to read it.

00:05:54.000 Can you just give us a little bit of a taste and a teaser?

00:05:57.000 Why was Darwin wrong?

00:05:58.000 Why should we doubt Darwin's theory of evolution?

00:06:03.000 Well, I focused on two of many, but two big mysteries that have been unsolved by Darwinian evolution.

00:06:10.000 The 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.

00:06:31.000 And the new forms of life would emerge gradually as older forms morphed and changed.

00:06:39.000 In 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.

00:06:52.000 And the most dramatic example of that occurs in an event known as the Cambrian explosion.

00:06:56.000 And 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.

00:07:08.000 But 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?

00:07:23.000 We 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.

00:07:50.000 So, we've got high-tech digital computing technology inside even the simplest living organisms in their cells.

00:07:57.000 And to build a new organism, you have to modify that genetic information, that code.

00:08:03.000 And 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.

00:08:20.000 Random changes to specified information invariably degrade that information long before you ever generate anything new or functional or useful.

00:08:30.000 And that same thing appears to apply in the biological case.

00:08:33.000 So, 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.

00:08:56.000 So, 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.

00:09:11.000 And we were addressing these mathematical challenges to the neo-Darwinian view of the history of life.

00:09:18.000 It's just simply overwhelmingly improbable that random mutational changes would ever generate even a new gene or functional protein.

00:09:26.000 And that, again, taking into account the entire history of life on the planet.

00:09:30.000 So, that problem really hasn't been solved, the mathematical improbability associated with the Darwinian story.

00:09:38.000 Can you give us a number of how improbable it was?

00:09:40.000 If I remember in the video, one of your colleagues said something that was just so incredible.

00:09:47.000 It was something like 18 to a 25,000 exponent or something chance to even get a singular chance of it.

00:09:55.000 What is that?

00:09:56.000 Oh, 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.

00:10:13.000 And 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.

00:10:26.000 So it's beyond a needle in the haystack problem.

00:10:29.000 And 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.

00:10:50.000 The 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?

00:11:04.000 MyPillow is having their biggest sale of the year.

00:11:07.000 You have all helped build MyPillow into an amazing company that it is today.

00:11:11.000 Now, Mike Lindell, inventor and CEO, wants to give back exclusively to his listeners.

00:11:16.000 The Perkale and Giza dream bedsheets sets are available in a variety of colors and sizes, and they are now on sale for as low as $29.98 with our listener code, Kirk.

00:11:26.000 Order now, because when they're gone, they're gone.

00:11:29.000 The Perkale and Giesel dream sheets are breathable and have a cool, crisp feel.

00:11:33.000 They come with a 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

00:11:37.000 Don't miss out on this incredible offer.

00:11:39.000 There is a limited time supply, so make sure to order now.

00:11:42.000 Call 800-875-0425 right now and use promo code Kirk or go to mypillow.com and click on the radio listener square and use promo code Kirk.

00:11:52.000 This offer will not last long and they are known to sell quickly.

00:11:55.000 So order now with promo code Kirk at mypillow.com.

00:12:01.000 With the doubt that you kind of cast over Darwin, is intelligent design the rational explanation for our existence?

00:12:12.000 Well, it turns out that many of the criticisms of Darwinian evolution are the flip side of a positive case for intelligent design.

00:12:21.000 Just critiquing a theory doesn't allow you to justify formulating another theory.

00:12:29.000 The things that Darwinism can't explain are precisely the things that support the idea of intelligent design.

00:12:34.000 In particular, the discovery at the foundation of life.

00:12:38.000 We have digital code.

00:12:40.000 Now, 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.

00:12:50.000 If there is no God, this is the moral argument.

00:12:53.000 If there is no God, then how on earth are you able to determine morality?

00:12:59.000 It's nothing more than an opinion.

00:13:02.000 If there is no God, right and wrong is nothing more than an opinion.

00:13:05.000 And so we get a lot of questions from people.

00:13:07.000 We got one question actually.

00:13:08.000 I wanted to answer this in the Ask Me Anything, and I will do that later in the week.

00:13:11.000 I'll just give a little tease.

00:13:12.000 He said, Charlie, the Bible is an anti-scientific document.

00:13:17.000 And this is something that you'll hear a lot on college campuses.

00:13:19.000 And 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.

00:13:30.000 Well, the Bible is not just pro-science.

00:13:32.000 Science, 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.

00:13:42.000 What is man?

00:13:43.000 Is it man just a collection of cells, or is it a soul, a mind, and a body?

00:13:47.000 And this is apropos to your comment.

00:13:50.000 What we've discovered in the last hundred years in science is a series of discoveries that are faith-affirming, that point to theism.

00:13:58.000 There's been a common trope in Western intellectual circles that science, properly understood, undermines belief in God.

00:14:05.000 And 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.

00:14:15.000 But in fact, the major discoveries about biological and cosmological origins, where life came from, where the universe came from, have had decidedly theistic implications.

00:14:26.000 And 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.

00:14:39.000 There 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.

00:14:56.000 But we can see in that technology evidence of clear evidence of intelligent design.

00:15:00.000 So precisely what Darwinism can't explain is the presence of that information technology in cells.

00:15:08.000 We 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.

00:15:26.000 And 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.

00:15:38.000 And 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.

00:15:47.000 Yeah, I look forward to exploring that and also talking more about those three discoveries. 0.91

00:15:51.000 And 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.

00:16:16.000 So I just want anyone who's out there who's a Christian and know that these resources are available for you.

00:16:20.000 Stephen Meyer, Discovery Institute, it's so important.

00:16:23.000 And 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.

00:16:35.000 Those words are very carefully chosen.

00:16:40.000 Look, rents are going way too high.

00:16:42.000 The rent is too high.

00:16:43.000 If you're renting or a friend or family member, that is, right now is the time to make the move to homeownership.

00:16:48.000 My good buddies, Andrew Del Rey and Tadavakian at Sierra Pacific Mortgage have helped so many people to make that leap from renting to owning.

00:16:54.000 I know what you're saying, oh, Charlie, rates are too high.

00:16:56.000 Listen, you could always refinance.

00:16:59.000 The 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?

00:17:09.000 I encourage you to visit andrewandtodd.com right now.

00:17:12.000 They're beautiful people.

00:17:13.000 They're wonderful.

00:17:14.000 The thing I love about these guys is it's not about the transaction.

00:17:17.000 They're about helping you.

00:17:18.000 They just helped me through a whole problem right now.

00:17:20.000 They were amazing.

00:17:21.000 There's no one like it.

00:17:22.000 And by the way, I dealt with the banks before them.

00:17:24.000 I mean, never again.

00:17:27.000 The banks, the worst.

00:17:28.000 Andrew and Todd made the whole process seamless.

00:17:32.000 They're helping you create a plan to help you reach your goals, whether it's for today or a year from now.

00:17:36.000 With today's still historically low interest rates, it's easier than you think to become a homeowner.

00:17:40.000 I've relied on them and producer Andrew has as well.

00:17:43.000 I highly recommend you take action right now.

00:17:46.000 I use them and you should too.

00:17:47.000 I know them personally.

00:17:48.000 They're patriots.

00:17:49.000 They're Christians. 0.99

00:17:49.000 Unlike these big woke, godless banks. 0.99

00:17:52.000 Why would you do your loans with banks who hate you?

00:17:55.000 And if you know someone who's still paying rent, tell them about Andrew and Todd.

00:17:58.000 Again, you might say, Charlie, now's the worst time to buy.

00:18:00.000 That's not true.

00:18:01.000 Okay, property values are going to go up.

00:18:03.000 And if you're renting, you're getting poorer.

00:18:06.000 So stop paying rent.

00:18:07.000 Start putting your hard-earned money into a home.

00:18:09.000 Again, there are some packages you might be available that might be available for you or no down payment.

00:18:13.000 Go to AndrewandTodd.com.

00:18:15.000 That is AndrewandTodd.com.

00:18:16.000 Tell them Charlie Kirk sent you.

00:18:18.000 They're wonderful people, enthusiastic.

00:18:20.000 They send me scripture.

00:18:22.000 They love the Lord.

00:18:23.000 They love the country.

00:18:24.000 Stop renting.

00:18:25.000 Start buying.

00:18:26.000 They're wonderful people.

00:18:28.000 AndrewandTodd.com.

00:18:32.000 Can you just repeat, what are the three scientific discoveries recently that reveal the mind behind the universe?

00:18:38.000 Right, exactly.

00:18:40.000 You 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.

00:18:49.000 But in fact, it's exactly the opposite.

00:18:52.000 In the early part of the 20th century, the first huge, unexpected discovery was that the universe had a beginning.

00:18:58.000 And this was a discovery of astronomy and astrophysics.

00:19:03.000 The discovery was that the light coming from very distant galaxies was being stretched out.

00:19:07.000 It looked redder than it should otherwise look.

00:19:09.000 It indicated that the galaxies in all directions were moving away from us, as if the universe were expanding outward from a definite beginning point.

00:19:17.000 And there have been many subsequent discoveries that have confirmed that basic idea.

00:19:21.000 It's now called the Big Bang theory.

00:19:23.000 But 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.

00:19:31.000 And that is a beginning to all of matter, space, time, and energy.

00:19:35.000 So 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.

00:19:42.000 So we're looking at the need for a cause which transcends the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy.

00:19:49.000 And if you think about possible explanations for that, an immaterial creative mind provides the best such explanation, aka God.

00:19:58.000 We'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.

00:20:11.000 Physicists now talk about the universe as being a fortunate universe or a Goldilocks universe where everything is just right.

00:20:18.000 The forces of physics, not too strong, not too weak, the masses of the elementary particles, not too heavy, not too light.

00:20:24.000 Everything falls within that sweet spot.

00:20:26.000 And many physicists have tumbled to the idea that the explanation for that fine-tuning is a transcendent fine-tuner.

00:20:33.000 And 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.

00:20:53.000 And that the digital code in the DNA, it's a four-character code, is very similar to software.

00:20:59.000 Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever written.

00:21:04.000 We 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.

00:21:23.000 Information is the product of intelligence.

00:21:25.000 And 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.

00:21:32.000 So the universe had a beginning.

00:21:35.000 From the beginning, it's been finely tuned.

00:21:37.000 And since the beginning, there have been big infusions of information into our biosphere that have made life and new forms of life possible.

00:21:45.000 In 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.

00:22:00.000 So 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.

00:22:13.000 And Aquinas was on this stuff before even some of the modern scientific, you know, let's say, discoveries have happened.

00:22:21.000 And you could read that in the Selma.

00:22:22.000 It's pretty incredible.

00:22:24.000 What do you find, though, is the most challenging atheist argument to overcome?

00:22:28.000 What's the one where when you hear it, you say, oh boy, this is going to be tough to navigate?

00:22:32.000 What is the hardest and most compelling atheist argument?

00:22:37.000 Well, the most common argument we hear is that, well, that may be so, but it's not science.

00:22:44.000 And that's a way of dodging the argument by trying to classify a conclusion out of significance.

00:22:52.000 So people will say, well, that's religion or that's philosophy.

00:22:55.000 But it really doesn't matter what you call the inference to an intelligent designer or to a transcendent designer.

00:23:03.000 The point is that the evidence supports that inference.

00:23:07.000 The 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.

00:23:16.000 There's good evidence of good design, but also evidence of things like viruses and bacteria that are harmful to humans.

00:23:26.000 And so that's sometimes called the argument from natural evil.

00:23:31.000 As 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.

00:23:41.000 But I happen to be not only a proponent of intelligent design, but also a proponent of the biblical view of things.

00:23:47.000 I'm a Christian.

00:23:49.000 And in the Bible, you have the sense, the clear teaching that you should expect two things in nature.

00:23:55.000 You should see evidence of a good original design.

00:23:58.000 And 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.

00:24:05.000 After all, the first words of the Bible are actually in the beginning.

00:24:09.000 But the biblical view is also that something has gone wrong and that nature also has been affected by decay. 0.70

00:24:18.000 And 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.

00:24:25.000 And we see both in nature. 0.97

00:24:27.000 And for me, that confirms the biblical worldview that I hold.

00:24:31.000 Yeah.

00:24:31.000 So 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?

00:24:42.000 And you just kind of touched on it.

00:24:43.000 It's an atheist, it's a favorite atheist play, right?

00:24:46.000 Which 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.

00:25:02.000 And 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.

00:25:11.000 You know, what is the most effective way, then, in your personal opinion, to counter, you know, very militant atheism?

00:25:20.000 Because they try to hold science over us.

00:25:22.000 Sam Harris does this and many others.

00:25:25.000 As far as kind of persuasion, what is the most effective way to win the argument and win people over that might be on the fence?

00:25:32.000 Well, I think it's always really good to find out what a person's actual objection is.

00:25:36.000 Sometimes when I was younger, I would make the mistake of answering every objection except the one that the person actually had.

00:25:42.000 So it's good to listen and to find out where people are coming from.

00:25:46.000 But let me tell you a story.

00:25:47.000 I was doing a Socrates in the City event with our mutual friend, Eric Metaxas, several years ago.

00:25:55.000 And 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.

00:26:09.000 And we ended up getting a letter from her afterwards.

00:26:12.000 She was embarrassed that she'd gotten so emotional.

00:26:15.000 But 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.

00:26:27.000 And she had basically never heard that there was any, there were any counter arguments to that.

00:26:31.000 And 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.

00:26:48.000 And she didn't have any good counter arguments.

00:26:50.000 She didn't know about the evidence of the DNA or the fine-tuning or the evidence that the universe has a beginning.

00:27:00.000 And 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.

00:27:18.000 When I was in Cambridge in grad school, my supervisor tutor used to say, beware the sound of one hand clapping.

00:27:26.000 He said, where there's an argument on one side, there's bound to be an argument on the other.

00:27:30.000 And I think crucially for young people, the main thing is to put in their hands the resources to weigh both sides of the argument.

00:27:41.000 I think the argument for theism, for belief in God, is incredibly strong, and it is scientifically based as well as philosophically based.

00:27:49.000 And I think the main thing is just get these resources out to people.

00:27:54.000 We 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.

00:28:15.000 Rather, 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.

00:28:33.000 These are very powerful arguments, and I think students just need to know about them.

00:28:37.000 Well, 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.

00:28:46.000 The fact that we're able to discover or understand anything, that it's not just mountains of chaos in an unintelligible way.

00:28:52.000 The fact that we have reason, I mean, no other species has reason.

00:28:56.000 And that's something that the Darwinists are just not able to explain.

00:28:59.000 Is there something attractive about atheism that is deeper than just what you just articulated?

00:29:03.000 Is there almost a desire for people to be atheists because they might fear what theism might mean for their life?

00:29:09.000 Well, I think atheism has the attraction of moral autonomy.

00:29:13.000 I think theism has the attraction of personal significance.

00:29:18.000 And I think we have motivations in both those directions.

00:29:21.000 And 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.

00:29:38.000 And 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.

00:29:52.000 I think the evidence for that kind of God is everywhere around us.

00:29:55.000 And so I think the evidence should carry the day.

00:29:58.000 And I think there's a powerful case.

00:30:02.000 We have some questions from our audience.

00:30:04.000 This one from Lou in Louisiana.

00:30:07.000 It's kind of fun.

00:30:07.000 Lou in Louisiana might be a disguised name.

00:30:12.000 He said, basically, my daughter went off to college.

00:30:15.000 She's come back an atheist.

00:30:17.000 She keeps on saying, I can't see God, therefore I don't believe in him.

00:30:20.000 Stephen, what is the best argument against that?

00:30:22.000 Obviously, you've heard it before.

00:30:24.000 This is a common story.

00:30:25.000 I 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.

00:30:34.000 But the go-to atheistic argument or sentiment is that because I don't see God, it's rational not to believe in him.

00:30:42.000 But science itself is based on indirect inference.

00:30:47.000 We 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.

00:30:58.000 We don't see the Big Bang, but we have other evidence that suggests that there was a beginning to the universe.

00:31:04.000 We don't see elementary particles.

00:31:06.000 We infer their existence on the basis of other things we can see.

00:31:10.000 So the whole nature of the scientific endeavor is that we infer from what we can see to postulate things we can't see.

00:31:18.000 And having then discovered those unobservable things, we use them to guide our research and our understanding of the world.

00:31:26.000 So belief in God is no different.

00:31:28.000 We 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.

00:31:37.000 Yeah, 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?

00:31:44.000 There's a lot of things you can't see that you believe in.

00:31:48.000 That's not an argument not to say that it's real.

00:31:52.000 Well, 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.

00:32:01.000 On the stone, there are inscriptions in three different languages.

00:32:05.000 When the archaeologists were able to translate and crack those codes, they realized they were dealing with informational sequences.

00:32:13.000 And they inferred then something they couldn't see, which was an unseen designing scribe.

00:32:19.000 A mind was behind that information inscribed on the stone.

00:32:23.000 They didn't see the mind.

00:32:24.000 They 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.

00:32:35.000 We found informational sequences inside the DNA molecule.

00:32:39.000 And 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.

00:32:48.000 So that's an indirect inference, but that's just the way science works.

00:32:51.000 In other words, the logic behind scientific inferences is no different than the logic behind the case for the existence of God.

00:32:59.000 There's another question here.

00:33:00.000 This is Paul from Massachusetts.

00:33:03.000 He said, I am not an atheist.

00:33:05.000 I am an agnostic, but I'm just waiting for enough evidence to make me believe in God.

00:33:11.000 My challenge is this, is whose God is it exactly?

00:33:14.000 Is it the Buddhist God?

00:33:15.000 Is it the Hindu God? 0.78

00:33:16.000 Is it the Jewish God? 0.67

00:33:17.000 Is it the Christian God? 0.99

00:33:17.000 Is it the Muslim God? 0.99

00:33:18.000 And so when you say God, what exactly does that mean?

00:33:21.000 You're talking about a God that is omniscient, omnipotent, but has a mind of creation of which we are made in that image.

00:33:28.000 Is that correct?

00:33:29.000 Right.

00:33:29.000 In the book, I actually look at competing worldviews, some of which would infer the existence of some kind of a God.

00:33:36.000 There's a pantheistic notion of God.

00:33:38.000 There's a deistic notion of God.

00:33:40.000 There's a theistic notion of God.

00:33:41.000 The theistic notion of God is the notion that Jews and Christians hold, that God is transcendent.

00:33:46.000 He's intelligent.

00:33:47.000 He's personal and active.

00:33:50.000 And 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.

00:34:04.000 So I think there are scientific arguments and evidences that get you as far as classical Judeo-Christian theism.

00:34:11.000 Then to decide between the different theistic religions, I think you need what's called special revelation.

00:34:16.000 And 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.

00:34:28.000 So I think you can get to theism, the idea of a transcendent, intelligent, and active creator by examining the evidence from nature.

00:34:36.000 C.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.

00:34:44.000 So basically, it's the explanation of it exactly.

00:34:48.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:34:50.000 That's right.

00:34:51.000 God bless you, Stephen.

00:34:52.000 Thank you for your great work.

00:34:53.000 We appreciate it.

00:34:56.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:57.000 Email me your thoughts as always.

00:34:58.000 Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.

00:35:00.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:35:02.000 God bless.

00:35:06.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - September 01, 2022

3 Scientific Discoveries that Prove God with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript