In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with author and philosopher David Ray Griffin to talk about the idea of intelligent design, and why he thinks it's a good idea. We talk about how he came to believe in it, how he first encountered it, and what it means to be an intelligent designer, and how he became a believer in it. It's a fascinating conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it. Joe's a great guy and I really enjoyed having him on the show, so thank you to him for coming on and talking about it! The show is brought to you by Train By Day, a podcast by day, and by Night, a Podcast by night, all day. Thanks for listening, Joe! Check it out! -Jon Sorrentino Check out his excellent book, "Intelligent Design: The Biggest Little Idea in the World" which is out now: Click here to buy a copy of the book for $99.99. If you haven't already, you can get your own copy of The Big Little Idea: A Guide to the Big Idea by Jon Rogan's book on Amazon Prime Day, wherever you get your copy of his book, or you can check it out on amazon. It's free to buy it out for 99 cents, and you'll get 20% off for a year! I'm giving away a copy for free. $99, plus shipping, shipping included in the first month, shipping free, shipping, and shipping free to you get a limited edition paperback edition, plus I'll send you two copies of the paperback edition for free, plus an additional $1699 shipping address, plus a $50,99, shipping discount, and an additional six months, plus you get an additional year of the second year, shipping a third of your choice, and two months of shipping starts, plus all other places you decide you get the book and shipping a maximum of $10,99 a place get a maximum chance to ship it all will get a chance to redeem your choice of a carteloadship, and all of that gets a discount, you get all of this will get it all you get it starts, and they'll get $5,000, and a lifetime of the service, plus they'll receive all of your choices, plus the shipping and shipping starts will get an ad-free shipping service, shipping starts start-up pricing starts, no shipping starts are also receive $35,99 and shipping an extra $49,99 will get you a personalized experience.
00:01:07.000It was a process of philosophical deliberation.
00:01:11.000It was not really based on science initially.
00:01:13.000I started having weird existential questions when I was 14 years old after I'd broken my leg in a skiing accident.
00:01:20.000Questions like, well, what's it going to matter in 100 years?
00:01:24.000There's this great quote from Bertrand Russell where he says that all the noonday genius of human achievement is destined for extinction in the vast The heat death of the solar system.
00:01:37.000I had never encountered Bertrand Russell as a 14-year-old, but I later encountered that quote and I thought, that was what was bothering me, you know?
00:02:24.000And then I got to thinking, well, but then what for any of us, you know?
00:02:27.000And so this question of meaning kind of haunted me.
00:02:33.000What could I possibly do that would have any lasting or enduring meaning?
00:02:42.000I did a physics major and a geology major in college, but I took as many philosophy classes as I could along the way, and I encountered these existentialist writers who were asking these same types of questions and realized, As a 14-year-old, I thought I must be insane to be having these questions,
00:03:01.000It was a real funk I was in for six or eight months.
00:03:06.000And then later I realized, no, these were philosophical questions.
00:03:08.000And for me, the religious conversion I had started to address and answer those questions.
00:03:14.000So by the time I got out of college, I was a convinced theist for philosophical reasons.
00:03:20.000But at that point, I was completely comfortable with the evolutionary explanation of everything.
00:03:27.000And then at a conference that I attended while I was working as a geophysicist, it was a conference about the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness.
00:03:39.000And it was divided on each panel between theists and philosophical materialists who were debating these big questions at the intersection of science and philosophy.
00:03:50.000And I was kind of stunned to learn or to perceive at least That the theists seem to have the intellectual initiative in each of these big discussions, that materialism was a philosophy that was a spent force.
00:04:03.000It was not explaining where life first came from or the universe came from, let alone consciousness.
00:04:08.000And so I began, in a sense, on a kind of intellectual journey to see where these new evidences, the evidence for the beginning of the universe or the fine-tuning of the universe, or the thing that really intrigued me was the discovery That at the foundation of life,
00:04:23.000and even the very simplest cells, we have this amazingly complex code.
00:04:28.000The DNA we all learned about in high school.
00:04:31.000We all learned about the double helix structure of the DNA molecule.
00:04:35.000But that's not the most important thing about it.
00:04:36.000It's that within that double helix, There is literally a code, digital information, that is directing the construction of the important proteins and protein machines that every cell needs to stay alive.
00:04:50.000Bill Gates has said it's like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.
00:04:54.000And I was doing, at the time, for the work as a geophysicist for an oil company, I was doing seismic digital signal processing, which was an early form of information technology.
00:05:06.000And I got fascinated with the idea that there was this, first of all, an impasse in evolutionary explanations of the origin of life.
00:05:13.000Nobody knew how we got from the chemistry in the prebiotic soup to the code in a natural living cell.
00:05:21.000But I was fascinated that the impasse was created by the mystery surrounding the origin of information.
00:06:29.000Well, okay, for example, I was in this big leg cast and I would crutch my way up our driveway, get the newspaper, bring back the box scores to read about the baseball games the night before.
00:07:04.000There was this flow of sensory experience.
00:07:08.000But there didn't seem to be anything rooting it that gave it an enduring reality.
00:07:16.000And I had this sense there must be something that doesn't change or else everything else that does change is passing, ephemeral, and ultimately of no account.
00:07:29.000And so, you know, I ended up reading the big fat family Bible that I'd never cracked.
00:07:38.000And found that when God revealed his name to Moses, it was the I am that I am, this timeless, eternal person.
00:07:46.000And you found the same thing in the New Testament, the way Jesus Christ was referred to.
00:08:20.000It was the experience of having the constant flux of changing sense perceptions left me with a sense that there was nothing solid to hold onto in reality.
00:08:38.000And so this is not the argument for the existence of God in which I would repose great trust.
00:08:49.000I'm not trying to persuade anyone by this.
00:08:51.000I'm just telling what my experience was at this point.
00:08:53.000I later found what I think are very, very persuasive arguments, both philosophically and scientifically.
00:09:00.000The thing that really convinced me as a university student studying philosophy was an argument known as...
00:09:06.000The argument from epistemological necessity.
00:09:09.000The fundamental question in modern philosophy that has really just been a stumper and has led to this whole postmodern turn where people don't think there's no objective basis for any reality is the question of the reliability of the human mind.
00:09:22.000On what basis can we trust the way our minds process all that sensory information?
00:09:28.000This goes back to Hume and Kant and some of the philosophers and the Enlightenment period.
00:09:34.000And from that point forward, there was a great doubt.
00:09:48.000We have to use those assumptions in order to know anything at all.
00:09:52.000And I encountered this argument that suggested, well, if we try to justify our ability to know the world around us by empirical data, by things we observe,
00:10:10.000He was a radical empiricist and found that In order to make any sense of the sense and presence he had, he had to presuppose the uniformity of nature.
00:10:20.000But to prove the uniformity of nature, he had to make reference to sensory observations.
00:10:26.000And so you couldn't justify the reliability of assumptions we make in our minds by observing the world.
00:10:33.000You had to use those assumptions to make sense of the observations.
00:10:37.000But if you presupposed that our minds were made by a benevolent creator who gave us those assumptions in order to make sense of the world that he also made, then there was a principle of correspondence between the way the mind worked and the way the world worked,
00:10:54.000in which case we could trust the basic reliability of the mind.
00:10:58.000And this turns out to be one of the key foundational assumptions that gave rise to modern science.
00:11:03.000It was called the idea of intelligibility.
00:11:05.000Newton, Boyle, Kepler, the great founders of modern science, thought that nature had secrets to reveal.
00:11:11.000There were patterns there to be revealed that we could understand because our minds had been made in the image of the same rational creator who had built rationality and design and pattern and lawful order into the world.
00:11:31.000I believe that there are real evolutionary processes.
00:11:34.000I'm skeptical about what's called universal common descent, the idea that all living forms have evolved from one single common ancestor.
00:11:42.000I'm profoundly skeptical about chemical evolution, the idea that the nonliving chemicals in a prebiotic ocean or prebiotic soup arrange themselves to form the first living cell.
00:11:55.000And I'm also skeptical about the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism, which as it happens, so are many leading evolutionary biologists today.
00:12:06.000I attended a conference in 2016 convened by the Royal Society in London, Royal Society being the oldest and most august scientific body in the world.
00:12:17.000And it was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists Who were essentially dissatisfied with neo-Darwinism, the standard textbook theory that we learn in high school and college textbooks.
00:12:29.000And many of them were saying, we need a new theory of evolution.
00:12:32.000The first talk at that conference was given by Gerd Müller, a prominent Austrian evolutionary biologist.
00:12:38.000And he simply enumerated the five major what he called explanatory deficits of neo-Darwinism.
00:12:45.000And his basic perspective was the mutation selection mechanism Does a good job of optimizing or modifying pre-existing forms.
00:12:57.000It can generate small-scale variation, but it does a very poor job of explaining the origin of those forms.
00:13:04.000Think about, for example, Darwin's Finch Beaks.
00:13:07.000Great job of explaining how variations in weather patterns result in changes in the shape and structure of the finch beaks.
00:13:16.000But that mechanism turns out not to do a good job of explaining the origin of birds or other major animal groups in the first place.
00:13:28.000But modification over massive amounts of time, don't you think that would eventually lead to new groups?
00:13:34.000Because a lot of new groups have – they have similar origins or at least origins from one ancestor.
00:13:40.000Well, time was always the hero of the plot.
00:13:43.000But let me just run a couple of arguments by it and let's see what you think.
00:13:49.000And I developed these in a lot of detail in my book, Darwin's Doubt.
00:13:55.000We now know, thanks to the genetic revolution, the molecular biological revolution, that if you want to build a new form of life, you have to have new code.
00:14:09.000Because all new forms of life depend upon a fundamentally new type of animal, for example.
00:14:17.000So you need new anatomical structures, but the new anatomical structures require new cell types.
00:14:25.000So if you've got animals that first come on the line and they have a digestive system, they have a gut.
00:14:30.000Well, you've got to have enzymes that can service a gut, that can process food.
00:15:05.000But if you want to build a fundamentally new form of life, you've got to have new proteins to service the new cell types to build the new anatomical structures.
00:15:14.000In our computer world, we know that if you start randomly changing the zeros and ones in a section of digital code, You're going to degrade the function of that code long before you come up with a new string for making a new program or operating system.
00:15:33.000The functional sequences are highly isolated in what's called sequence space.
00:15:40.000You can change a few things and still retain function, but after a very few number of changes you're going to degrade the function and long before you come up with a new function.
00:15:50.000Now the Darwinian mechanism It starts with the idea that there are random changes in those digital bit strings, those sequences of A's, C's, G's and T's.
00:16:03.000And based on our experience in the computer world, we would expect That random changes are going to, again, degrade those strings long before they're capable of building a new protein.
00:16:14.000And there's now very compelling experimental evidence that that's true.
00:16:19.000There's an Israeli molecular biologist, Dan Tofik.
00:16:22.000Unfortunately, he died fairly recently in a tragic accident.
00:16:26.000But he was doing mutagenesis experiments on sequences of code for building specific proteins that fold it into stable structures.
00:16:38.000They're actually called protein folds.
00:16:40.000And he found that between 3 and 15 mutations was enough to degrade the thermodynamic stability of the protein structure that the gene was making.
00:16:52.000And once you lose that thermodynamic stability, you have no functional possibilities.
00:17:00.000Is there possibly an undiscovered mechanism for protecting against that that we're not aware of yet?
00:17:04.000Possibly, but there's numerous lines of evidence suggesting that mutations are within limits.
00:17:31.000I want to run one other argument by you that I think is very intuitive.
00:17:38.000It turns out that there are structures or systems for building that are Very important for building new animal body plants.
00:17:49.000And they're called developmental gene regulatory networks.
00:17:53.000They were discovered at Caltech by Eric Davidson and colleagues.
00:17:59.000Eric Davidson has also unfortunately recently passed away in the last few years.
00:18:04.000But what they discovered is that you not only have genes for building proteins, you have genes for constructing molecules that send signals that tell the genome when to express other parts of itself.
00:18:24.000So you've got signaling molecules that are telling the genome When to turn this part or that part on in order to build the right proteins at the right time as new cells are going through cell division in the process of animal development.
00:18:40.000So if you go from one cell to two to four to eight to 16, etc.
00:18:48.000There are points in that trajectory where it's important to differentiate one type of cell from another and for certain types of cells, muscle cells as opposed to nerve cells or bone cells, to start to be constructed.
00:19:04.000And all of this is closely choreographed by these signaling molecules.
00:19:09.000So you get a DNA that builds regulatory RNA that turns on another part of the DNA that builds a protein for servicing a particular type of cell at the right time and not at another time.
00:19:22.000And as Davidson and his colleagues mapped this out, They discovered that the functional relationships that were involved looked like an integrated circuit.
00:19:33.000And they call them developmental gene regulatory networks.
00:19:37.000And the point is you can't build a completely developed animal form unless you have this choreography taking place that is expressed through these developmental gene regulatory networks.
00:19:48.000But they discovered something else about them, and that is that they cannot be altered significantly.
00:19:55.000If you alter any of the core elements of these developmental gene regulatory networks, animal development shuts down.
00:20:01.000And this makes perfect sense to anyone with a background in, say, electrical engineering, because there's a principle of engineering that says the more tightly integrated a functional system and the more difficult it is to perturb any part of the system without defect or the whole.
00:20:29.000You need a developmental gene regulatory network to make an animal body plan.
00:20:34.000But if you want to turn one animal body plan into another animal body plan, you're going to have to change developmental gene regulatory network A into a completely novel developmental gene regulatory network to build that novel animal form.
00:20:49.000But the one thing we know experimentally is these things cannot be altered without the destruction of the initial form.
00:20:57.000And once that form is destroyed, there's no more evolutionary development possible.
00:21:03.000Now, it turns out that not only neo-Darwinism, the kind of standard textbook form of evolutionary theory, has no answer for this.
00:21:09.000And Davidson was quite explicit about this.
00:21:10.000He was, by the way, no friend of creationism or intelligent design, but he said very explicitly that neo-Darwinism commits a catastrophic error in thinking because it is not addressing this fundamental problem.
00:21:26.000There's also newer models of evolutionary theory, and they don't address this either.
00:21:32.000So there are these sort of fundamental challenges to the creative power of mutation and selection and other similarly undirected materialistic processes that have not been answered.
00:21:49.000What it looks like when you look at it, I've got a picture in two of my books, these networks, they look like circuits.
00:21:56.000And circuits, in our experience, are the product of engineers, of intelligence.
00:22:01.000I mean, we're looking at distinctive hallmarks of intelligent agency when we look at circuitry and code and information processing systems.
00:22:08.000I mean, this is what we're finding inside life.
00:22:10.000It's not What Darwin thought in the 19th century or his colleagues, Huxley, who said the cell was a simple homogenous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
00:22:31.000But when you're talking about First of all, I want to go back one step further.
00:22:41.000You were saying something about, and I'm paraphrasing, but whatever this intelligent thing is, creating us somehow or another in its image or somehow or another thinking the way it thinks?
00:24:27.000But for some reason, in Western Europe, in the 16th and 17th centuries, and I think the antecedents for that go back a little further, you get these very systematic methods for studying nature arising.
00:24:42.000And you get this concern to use mathematics to describe the order in nature.
00:24:49.000And you get this incredibly productive – historians of science call it – they call it the scientific revolution.
00:24:58.000And it's different than other civilizations.
00:25:01.000And as they examined what happened, they – well, the material substrate or the things you would need to do science were in all the other cultures and there were many great cultures.
00:25:14.000But this systematic method of studying nature uniquely arose in Western Europe in a particular time, in a particular context.
00:25:23.000And many, many historians of science have come to the conclusion that the difference that made the difference was the worldview, was the philosophical assumptions of those Western European scientists who were Almost entirely coming out of a Judeo-Christian worldview.
00:25:42.000And one of the key assumptions that they had was that systematic study of nature was actually possible.
00:25:48.000It's actually very hard to do science.
00:25:50.000It's very hard to see a pattern in what can initially seem to be a chaotic jumble of sense data.
00:25:57.000And these thinkers had the conviction that there were such patterns, there was rationality, there was order behind things, because there was a God who had made the universe to be orderly and to be understood.
00:26:11.000So that was just one of those thought differences or differences in thinking that historians have identified as a key feature that explains why the scientific revolution happened where it did.
00:26:23.000And that's not to say that the only people that can do science once it gets going are people of religious faith.
00:26:30.000But it is to say that the people with a particular religious faith had a reason to pursue science that apparently other cultures did not have to the same degree.
00:27:00.000We know there had to be some very complex geometry in order for them to figure out how to do it correctly.
00:27:05.000Well, certainly, there may have been other things that have gone on that we didn't know about and that were lost.
00:27:11.000The only point I was making was that The people who got science going in the 16th and 17th century did so for a discernible religious reason, if you will.
00:27:34.000And it probably motivated them in a lot of ways and guided them in a lot of ways.
00:27:38.000But it doesn't necessarily mean that they're correct in that assumption.
00:27:41.000No, and I wouldn't argue for the correctness of a theistic worldview simply on the basis of the fruitfulness of science.
00:27:50.000But it is a fact of history, I think, that a theistic worldview was a very important motivator for those early scientists who did get science going, and that science did turn out to be very fruitful.
00:28:16.000But it's literally probably the birth of science as far as we know in the Western world.
00:28:19.000Yeah, I know you've had, you know, Neil Tyson on your show, you know, and he makes this claim that Newton's science was a dead end, or Newton's religious beliefs led to, didn't lead to any good questions, they were a dead end.
00:28:33.000He had great scientific insights, but his religion was bad news for science.
00:28:37.000But it turns out Newton didn't make the God of the Gaps argument that Tyson accused him of making and many other people have accused.
00:28:47.000And his greatest work, the Principia, his work on gravitation, was meant to display.
00:28:59.000He was trying to demonstrate the principles, the mathematical harmony that had been built into creation by the Creator.
00:29:07.000And he later writes a theological epilogue to the book called The General Scolium, where he makes the religious motivation for his scientific work completely explicit and ends up making design arguments right in the context of that work.
00:29:22.000So I just think it's something that persuaded me that I think?
00:29:58.000Why does God create all the horrific things we see in the news, school shootings?
00:30:02.000Why would God create a mind that acts in that way?
00:30:06.000Well, I think the traditional theistic answer to that is the free will defense.
00:30:12.000It's not that God created those things.
00:30:13.000He created free agents knowing that it was better to create free agents who had the ability to choose and therefore to choose to love him or not or love each other or not than it was to create puppets.
00:30:59.000Yeah, their life, the childhood, the horrific traumas, all the abuse they've suffered in and out of the justice system at a very young age, surrounded by crime.
00:31:17.000The philosophical way of thinking about that is to make a distinction between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions.
00:31:27.000Many of those Well, actually, let me go a different direction.
00:31:34.000There's two different views of human nature.
00:31:36.000One is that we are moral agents, free moral agents.
00:31:38.000And one is that we're completely determined by genes, environment, or evolutionary past.
00:31:43.000And I'm convinced that even in the face of terrible environmental conditions in our background, we are still free to choose.
00:31:56.000I think there are certain types of backgrounds that incline people towards a tendency to harm others and to do things that we would regard as crimes.
00:32:09.000I think that's a fundamental … Trevor Burrus There's some real clear research into trauma and the developmental cycle of children, how it leads to psychopathy and all sorts of other real serious problems.
00:32:30.000I would say that those are predisposing inclinations that are probably necessary to explain the behavior but not sufficient.
00:32:40.000That I think even in the face of things that incline us towards certain courses of action, we still have choice.
00:32:50.000And I think there's a lot of brain physiological research that supports the idea that the mind is not completely determined by the neurophysiological correlates or the underlying brain chemistry.
00:33:45.000Let's bracket and I'll get to the main point.
00:33:47.000The main thing is – and he showed that with all the research we've had in brain science and neuroscience, We've shown that there are lots of things that are necessary conditions of certain brain states and necessary conditions physiological.
00:34:09.000So to have a certain brain state, there are underlying physiological correlates that must be in place.
00:34:17.000To use that brain state to make a certain course of action, to accomplish a certain course of action.
00:34:22.000Also, there are necessary conditions, necessary correlates.
00:34:29.000But we've never in the research showed that we've closed the gap between necessary and sufficient.
00:34:36.000That just because those states are there doesn't mean that someone is forced to make that choice or to undertake that course of action.
00:34:49.000You're aware of that as a person, though, right?
00:34:51.000I'm aware of that as a person all the time.
00:34:53.000I wake up grumpy in the morning because I didn't get enough sleep.
00:34:56.000It doesn't mean I have to slap one of my kids.
00:35:31.000You know, there's a real issue with that as well.
00:35:34.000There's a lot of people that are on medications, and medications have horrible side effects and unintended effects, and there's a lot of that as well.
00:35:44.000I'm a big fan of the work of Jeffrey Schwartz.
00:35:47.000The UCLA psychiatrist has written the book, You Are Not Your Brain.
00:35:54.000And he shows that those Psychotherapeutic drugs can be helpful in stabilizing people, but that for many anxiety disorders, it's also really important to retrain the thinking patterns that lead to anxiety,
00:36:11.000that there's a mind over matter aspect as well as the material substrate aspect.
00:36:17.000And I think you and I are saying the same thing effectively, that if you say there's a combination of factors involved and one of them is our own human agency, Then we're saying that we retain free will even in the face of predisposing materialistic factors.
00:36:36.000We're getting pretty heady and philosophical.
00:36:42.0001925 is the famous Scopes trial with Clarence Darrow.
00:36:46.000The year or two before that, I can't remember the exact year, there's a famous Leopold and Loeb case in Chicago.
00:36:52.000Two young college students commit a horrific murder.
00:36:57.000They're taking philosophy courses from a professor who is an advocate or a proponent of Nietzschean, the Nietzschean ubermitsch, you know, the idea of the overman and that saying that, you know, that the really enlightened person extricates themselves from bourgeois morality and chooses their own morality.
00:37:19.000And so these two young college students end up killing a 12-year-old boy for the thrill of it, was the justification.
00:37:33.000And the ACLU sends out Clarence Darrow To argue for leniency in the case.
00:37:43.000And he makes the first diminished responsibility plea in American jurisprudence history.
00:37:48.000He says, was Dickey Loeb to blame because of the infinite forces that were at work in him Through the evolutionary process, millions of years before.
00:37:59.000And so he appeals to evolutionary determinism to say that these two young guys were not responsible for what they had done.
00:38:07.000And that basically our genes, our environment, and the evolutionary process that programmed these inclinations into these young men is the real culprit, is what was responsible.
00:38:19.000And so this is the first time we get the diminished responsibility plea in our legal system.
00:38:26.000There was a little cartoon in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago where there was this hapless guy standing before the judge.
00:38:31.000And he says, not guilty by reason of millions of years of evolutionary selection for aggressive behavior, Your Honor.
00:39:16.000This is the idea that what we all gravitate towards, what we all inherently recognize as being good, regardless of culture, regardless of geopolitical boundaries and all the various different things that make us unique all across the globe.
00:39:39.000Family, love, community, that all these things are somehow or another Exactly.
00:39:46.000The great Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, argued that there was a universally understood morality that he called the Tao.
00:39:55.000We all know it's wrong to kick old ladies in the shins for pleasure.
00:39:59.000You can do these, you know, kind of case studies in ethical philosophy, but there might be a case where you need to kill someone in order for a higher good, but you can easily construct things that reveal these deep moral intuitions we have.
00:40:14.000It's not okay to kick old ladies in the shins for pleasure.
00:40:25.000We all have that awareness of sort of objective moral principles.
00:40:31.000And I think the way you put it was beautiful.
00:40:33.000I think the Creator wants us to live in accord with those things we know to be the good.
00:40:38.000But these objective moral principles, they do vary with the environment and the amount of resources and stress and the dangers.
00:40:51.000Like, for instance, I think it's Pinker's work where he talks about hunter-gatherer tribes that Relatively frequently kill the older women because they just can't keep up anymore and they're nomadic and they get in the way and so they try to catch them when they're not looking.
00:41:09.000It's a great example because it actually illustrates the deeper universality of the moral – the deeper moral principles.
00:41:16.000Even cultures that were involved in child sacrifice.
00:41:20.000They had belief systems that suggested that if they sacrificed the children, then the crops would come in and it would benefit the tribe as a whole.
00:41:30.000So the underlying value was the preservation of life, even though there's a difference between a moral judgment and a moral principle.
00:41:40.000They made a moral judgment that this is what was necessary to affirm the underlying moral principle.
00:41:46.000Now, I would argue they had a false worldview that suggested that this was necessary, but because they believed that idea about the need to sacrifice children to the gods, they made a moral judgment that differed from one that I would make or you would make,
00:42:01.000but they did, in the process, actually affirm a deeper moral principle that is the value of human life.
00:42:07.000Right, but the question is, where did that idea even come from, to sacrifice a child?
00:42:13.000Well, that came from their mythological religious belief.
00:42:29.000As a universal ought rather than just a statement of fact.
00:42:34.000But does it exist in a person who's sacrificing a child?
00:42:37.000The universal moral principle seems to have been completely abandoned.
00:42:40.000If you're sacrificing a child for some reason that you cannot prove, that it's somehow or another going to influence something according to whatever your beliefs are that's going to make the crops come back.
00:42:52.000I think something very deep and profound has to be overwritten, but I think that is the role that, I say, a religious belief system can play.
00:43:09.000That religious belief system overrode the intuition that they would normally have based on the underlying moral principle.
00:43:15.000Why do they have that religious belief system?
00:43:17.000If God is going to present religious beliefs, if God is going to somehow or another come down and give wisdom to men, Why do some have this very fucked up version of it?
00:43:31.000There's a multiplicity of systems of belief.
00:43:34.000What I have tried to do is argue for a theistic belief system that I think makes sense.
00:43:41.000I think it gives a good account of this objective morality, but also I think there's scientific evidence for it, and that's what my work has been about.
00:43:48.000I mean, I'm not a sociologist of religion, so I don't know exactly how all these different Sure,
00:45:15.000For 2,000, 4,000 years, however long humans have thought about these things, at least back to the time of Aristotle, we've had this mystery, why does like beget like?
00:45:24.000Why are children discernibly like their parents?
00:45:27.000And in 1953 through 65, we have this amazing flurry of scientific activity that elucidates the source of the signal that ensures that transmission of hereditary information.
00:45:47.000And we discover there actually is a code that is responsible for that phenomenon.
00:45:52.000We now talk about DNA replication and gene expression, two different things a DNA molecule does.
00:45:59.000So to me that's a stop-press moment in the history of science and the history of biology, but in the history of humankind.
00:46:07.000Suddenly we have an inkling of how this happens.
00:46:12.000What I was going to say is that a human being, we think of them as an individual, but really they're a host for a lot of organisms.
00:46:20.000The human being does not exist without the bacteria in its gut.
00:46:24.000The human being does not exist without the floor on its skin.
00:46:27.000The human being is filled with billions of other living things, right?
00:47:18.000Well, that's an absolutely great question.
00:47:21.000There are three basic views about this.
00:47:24.000One is that the universe itself, the physical universe, is eternal and self-existent.
00:47:31.000And some people think of it as a kind of organism.
00:47:33.000There was this Gaia hypothesis, Lynn Margulis.
00:47:37.000Most standard materialists just think of it as the product of matter and eternally existent or self-existent matter and energy or the physical fields that are expressed in material particles.
00:47:51.000They think of those as eternal and self-existent.
00:47:56.000The other view is a more pantheistic view that there's a kind of There is a kind of God, but it's not an agent or a conscious mind to whom you could pray or with whom you could communicate or who has communicated or created, but rather it sort of pervades the physical universe and it is also eternal and self-existent.
00:48:17.000And then the third view is that there is a transcendent creator beyond the universe who brought the physical universe into existence.
00:48:25.000And who brought him into existence or her or it or they?
00:48:29.000Just to finish the other thought and then I'll come back to that.
00:48:32.000The third view is the view that I hold.
00:48:37.000The scientific evidence is pointing in that direction fairly strongly, in part because we now have evidence from multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the universe did in fact have a beginning.
00:48:49.000The material universe does not look to have been eternal and self-existent.
00:48:54.000And so then to answer your second question, I would say that every philosophical system – sometimes philosophers talk about worldviews, whether they're formal philosophical systems or just sort of the informal set of assumptions that we all need to make about reality – But every worldview needs to answer the question,
00:49:16.000what is the thing or the process or the entity from which everything else came?
00:49:21.000What's the ground of being, the starting point?
00:49:24.000And up until the 20th century, I think the materialist-naturalist view was very credible because it affirmed that matter and energy were eternal and self-existent in the same way that theists thought God was eternal and self-existent.
00:49:43.000But in both systems, or in all systems, something is what philosophers call the primitive, the thing from which everything else comes.
00:49:50.000I think as a consequence or in the wake of our modern cosmological, astrophysical discoveries that the material universe itself had a beginning, That matter and energy is now a poor candidate to be that eternal self-existent thing.
00:50:07.000And therefore, I think that the theistic view that a transcendent creator is the thing from which everything else came without itself being created is the best place to start our philosophical thinking.
00:50:22.000It provides the best explanation for what we see.
00:50:24.000When you say that there's direct evidence that the universe has a beginning, what do you mean by that?
00:50:32.000Well, it's a fascinating story and one I tell in the new book, Return of the God Hypothesis.
00:50:39.000It starts – there are basically three different lines of evidence.
00:50:45.000Well, there's three different classes of evidence, if you will.
00:50:49.000Evidence from observational astronomy.
00:50:52.000Maybe we should just start there, and then I'll tell you about the stuff from theoretical physics.
00:51:09.000I think maybe part of my story is that I was always fascinated with these Issues at the intersection of science and philosophy, where the scientific evidence leads you to a big philosophical question or possibly conclusion.
00:51:26.000So back to the ancient Greeks, we've had this debate.
00:51:31.000Is the universe eternal and self-existent?
00:52:08.000In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble is looking at Mount Wilson in Southern California, the big observatory there.
00:52:16.000He's a lawyer who's come into astronomy at a very propitious time because astronomers have just started building these great dome telescopes.
00:52:46.000Or whether these little smudges that they were detecting on the photographic plates, a little dot of light with smudges, whether those were other galaxies or just a star with gas around it.
00:52:57.000And Hubble was able to use some new techniques for measuring distances to distant astronomical objects, in particular to these nebulae.
00:53:07.000And he found that the distance to the Andromeda Nebula was measured at 900,000 light years, but the accepted measurement for the distance across the Milky Way was only 300,000 light years.
00:53:20.000So clearly the Milky Way could not contain the Andromeda Nebula, so therefore the Andromeda Nebula wasn't just a nebula, it was another galaxy.
00:53:28.000And in the ensuing years, then, as he uses the big telescopes and these new techniques, he establishes that there are galaxies galore, spiral galaxies, spindle nebula galaxies.
00:53:39.000So we now know, I think I put in the book, I used the number 200 billion galaxies.
00:53:45.000I think I've since corrected that it's another order of magnitude, that astronomers now think there's We're good to go.
00:54:14.000And the red light corresponds to light with longer wavelengths.
00:54:18.000And what he's detecting is light that has shifted in these spectral analyses that they do in the red direction, suggesting that its wavelengths are longer, as you would expect if those galactic objects are receding away from us,
00:54:36.000So it's like the Doppler effect with the train whistle.
00:54:39.000You know, if the train's moving away, the pitch of the sound goes down.
00:54:42.000And that's because the sound waves are being stretched out.
00:54:44.000Well, the same thing happens with light.
00:54:45.000And so very early on, as he's studying the galaxies, he's realizing that there's not just a lot of them, and they're not just separate from our galaxy, but they're moving away from us.
00:54:57.000And in fact, the further out they are, the faster they're moving away.
00:55:02.000And so that gives rise to the idea of an expanding universe, because to explain that observation, you have to posit something like a roughly spherical expansion of the whole to account for what's called the Hubble relationship, that the further out, the faster they're going.
00:55:18.000And so that's big discovery number two for Hubble.
00:55:22.000Secondly, they're moving away from us, and that is suggesting that the universe as a whole is expanding.
00:55:29.000Now as you wind that picture of the universe backwards in time, if in your mind's eye you think of, they call it back extrapolating, what the universe would have been like a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago or a million or a billion, however old the universe ends up being,
00:55:45.000eventually all that galactic material would have converged to a common point past which you cannot back extrapolate.
00:55:54.000So that point then marks the beginning of the expansion of the universe, but arguably the beginning of the universe itself.
00:56:17.000The detection ability that we might have 500 years from now.
00:56:22.000Maybe this information is not the big picture.
00:56:26.000Maybe there's a lot more to be discovered with advancement of science and astronomy as they can develop methods to look deeper and deeper into the galaxy.
00:56:35.000I mean, aren't we finding some things with the James Webb telescope that are leading some scientists to question the actual age of the universe itself?
00:56:46.000I was going to talk about James Webb after you started the question, but it's – the James Webb I think has provided – first of all – There is some debate though now about the timeline.
00:56:56.000Well, the debate as I understand it – let me answer the first part of your question and that is, of course, all the arguments that I make in the book.
00:57:05.000are provisional based on the best science that we have.
00:57:07.000And that's all we can do as scientists and philosophers of science, okay?
00:57:13.000But we're looking at a very limited amount of data that we can acquire from things that are 13.9 billion light years away, right?
00:57:22.000Sure, but it is striking how decisive the indicators are of a beginning based on what we're discovering.
00:57:31.000And James Webb has only reinforced that.
00:57:33.000And there's kind of a long story there.
00:57:50.000Yeah, there's been a lot of media reports suggesting that the findings of the James Webb telescope have undermined the case for the Big Bang or the Big Bang theory.
00:58:03.000But there's an interesting backstory on this.
00:58:05.000Most of these media reports were based on the writings of a single physics researcher named Eric Lerner, who's been since 1990 kind of carrying a torch to refute the Big Bang.
00:58:19.000And Lerner, in one of his articles, quoted a University of Kansas astrophysicist saying that she stays up late at night wondering if based on the James Webb that everything that we know is turning out to be false.
00:58:41.000Turns out that that researcher, that astrophysicist, disclaimed his use of the quote, explaining that he took it completely out of context.
00:58:48.000She was talking about theories of galaxy formation, not about whether or not there had been a Big Bang, and not about whether or not the universe is expanding as we would expect.
00:59:10.000So here's – and there have been a number of leading astrophysicists.
00:59:15.000In fact, people who would like to know more about this, I'd recommend what Brian Keating from University of California, San Diego, great astrophysicist, has been writing about this.
00:59:26.000I wrote a – An op-ed in the Daily Wired, distilling some of this stuff.
00:59:31.000What the James Webb Telescope is able to do is to, in fact, what it was constructed to do was to detect extremely long wavelength radiation, stuff that's outside the visible range.
00:59:45.000It's actually in the infrared range is the more accurate physics term.
00:59:51.000So it's looking for very long wavelength.
00:59:54.000radiation coming from galaxies that are very, very far out there.
00:59:59.000Now, why would it be looking for that?
01:00:01.000Well, because if the universe is expanding as we would expect based on the Big Bang Theory, then the radiation coming from things very, very far out in space and therefore very far back in time should be very stretched out, more stretched out than stuff that's closer at hand.
01:00:17.000So the James Webb was constructed in hopes of detecting that type of radiation if it existed.
01:00:23.000It's not assuming that it necessarily would, but it would be a way of confirming the expansion of the universe has been going on for a very long time.
01:00:31.000And in order to do that, the NASA people created some amazing technology.
01:00:37.000They super cooled the detection apparatus to, I think, Five, six, seven degrees above absolute zero so that the heat coming off of the instrument itself was not creating infrared that would interfere.
01:00:52.000And what they were in fact able to detect from these very ancient, very distant galaxies was super Redshifted radiation, uber-redshifted stuff out in the infrared, and were able, on the basis of that, to synthesize images of these very,
01:01:12.000Now, the very fact that they were able to do that confirms that you have what you would expect on the basis of the Big Bang Theory, that the amount of redshift that you would expect to be Present, if in fact the galaxies had been expanding throughout that vast stretch of time,
01:01:35.000The whole focus was on the fact that there were galaxies that were more mature, there were more of them early on than we would have expected.
01:01:42.000It's based on our theories of galaxy formation.
01:01:44.000And so those are anomalies that need to be addressed and have not yet been explained, as I understand it.
01:01:50.000Maybe the astrophysicists have made more progress on that in even recent days.
01:01:55.000But the basic picture of an expanding universe outward from the beginning has not been undermined, but rather confirmed in a very dramatic way at very Great distance and for galaxies that are a very far look-back time, way, way back in time.
01:02:10.000So I think it's a rather dramatic confirmation.
01:02:14.000The cosmic background radiation that was discovered in 1965. The Kobe radiation that George Smoot discovered in the 90s.
01:02:21.000So there's been this pattern of confirming evidence of this basic picture of an expanding universe out from the beginning in observational astronomy from the 20s right up till now.
01:02:31.000And so that, I think, gives us good reason to think best we can tell the universe at a beginning.
01:02:36.000When she was discussing the formation of galaxies, what had thrown that into question?
01:02:43.000Like, what was about the formation of galaxies that undermined previous ideas?
01:02:49.000I'm going to answer tentatively because I don't know this as well as the other that I just described.
01:02:54.000But as I understand it, it's that there are more galaxies that formed earlier and are more mature than we would have expected because they were able to look back to 13.5, 13.6 billion years ago.
01:03:07.000They think the origin of the universe is about 13.8 billion years ago.
01:03:10.000So apparently galaxies were forming faster Then we would have expected.
01:03:15.000And I think that's the anomaly that is on the table.
01:03:18.000Does that just push the timeline further back but still come up with the data that points to the idea of a beginning?
01:03:27.000That seems to me a logical possibility.
01:03:29.000Maybe the origin of the universe was further back, but you're still getting this picture of a collapsing sphere in the reverse direction of time back to a point.
01:03:39.000But is it possible that with further detection, we can, with new data, have a better understanding of what is actually going on rather than just saying it all points to this thing?
01:04:14.000Theories that have persisted because of a preponderance of evidence that points to and continues to point to the same conclusion.
01:04:21.000And I think we've had a hundred years now where we've had repeated new types of observations that point towards the beginning.
01:04:29.000And there are two other classes of Two other developments in theoretical physics that also, I think, reinforce this that I also wrote about in the book.
01:04:39.000One is the singularity theorems that Hawking and Penrose and George Ellis proved in the 1960s and 70s.
01:04:53.000And then there's something called the Bord-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which I think is even a tighter physics proof of a beginning.
01:05:02.000I think there is a loophole with the Hawking-Penrose-Ellis singularity theorem, although it's, I think, very suggestive and highly indicative of a beginning.
01:05:14.000Let me run it just briefly because it's a fun thing to think about.
01:05:17.000So Hawking is doing black hole physics for his Ph.D. in the 1960s.
01:05:23.000And he's at Cambridge, and he's having these neurological symptoms, and he's diagnosed with ALS. He gets very, very discouraged.
01:05:33.000And he's encouraged to press on by close friends, and he does.
01:05:38.000And he ends up writing this brilliant thesis where he has one chapter where he's thinking about what the cosmologists are talking about, is that we've got this expanding universe, and if universes...
01:05:52.000Expanding in the forward direction of time, then matter is getting more and more diffuse over time.
01:05:56.000Now, part of his thesis involves general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity.
01:06:03.000And according to Einstein, a massive body actually curves the fabric of space or space-time.
01:06:10.000So if you're going in the forward direction of time, space is getting less and less curved.
01:06:18.000But if you're going in the reverse direction of time, the matter is getting more and more densely concentrated at every successive point in the finite past until, again, you reach a limiting case where the matter gets so densely concentrated that space gets so tightly curved that it can't get any more tightly curved.
01:06:33.000It can't get any more densely concentrated.
01:06:35.000And you move towards a point of infinite density and infinite curvature.
01:06:40.000Now, infinite curvature corresponds to zero spatial volume.
01:06:44.000And so the picture of the origin of the universe that sort of intuitively flows from this is one where you get not just matter and energy arising, but space and time come into existence at that zero point.
01:06:57.000And he presents this in his PhD thesis.
01:07:02.000The story of this is told really nicely in the little film, The Theory of Everything.
01:07:10.000And he's fear and trepidation getting examined.
01:07:14.000But one of his examiners, they're nitpicking all these different things.
01:07:17.000But then they say, hey, the idea of a black hole at the beginning of the universe, a space-time singularity, this is brilliant.
01:07:24.000And they shove the thesis book back over to him and he's passed.
01:07:29.000But one of them says, now go work out the maths.
01:07:32.000And he ends up working out the math of this intuitive proof that he develops with Sir Roger Penrose, with whom you have done a wonderful interview, and George Ellis, whom I've had the occasion to meet.
01:07:44.000And so they end up producing several of these singularity theorems, suggesting that if general relativity is true, then there must have been a beginning.
01:07:53.000This is on grounds independent of all the things from observational astronomy.
01:07:57.000Now there's a loophole with that, and that is that in the very tiniest smidgens of spacetime, inside 10 to the minus 43rd of a second, or what they call Planck time, quantum effects might have been such that we would have to alter our ideas of how gravity worked.
01:08:15.000And so out of that has come something called an impulse or different theories of what are called quantum gravity or quantum cosmology.
01:08:23.000And I think you've had some conversations on this show about that as well.
01:08:29.000In my book, I show that that is another possible cosmological model.
01:08:35.000But like the conclusion that the universe had a definite beginning, I think those models also have theistic implications, and I can explain why.
01:08:46.000Then there's yet a third proof, though, of a beginning by three physicists, Bord, Guth, and Alexander Valenkin.
01:08:54.000And it's not based on general relativity.
01:08:56.000It's not based on ideas of what gravity was like in the early universe, but based on ideas of special relativity.
01:09:03.000It's a little tricky to explain easily, but basically they show that there is, again, a limiting case, and therefore a definite beginning to time, and that it does not have the same loophole, the singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose.
01:09:21.000So what I argue in the book is that a body of evidence from observational astronomy A strong indicator from theoretical physics, namely the singularity theorems of Hawking et al., and then a very compelling proof from Bord,
01:09:38.000Guth, and Valenkin all point to the same conclusion, that is best we can tell the universe had a beginning.
01:09:42.000And I think that's the best we can do in science, but that is a pretty weighty range of testimony supporting the same conclusion.
01:09:51.000Did you ever read any Terrence McKenna?
01:13:04.000He's thinking about carbon and he realizes that carbon has this unique property of being able to make long chain-like molecules and long chain-like molecules therefore are capable of storing information and we need information to build specified structures in particular living systems.
01:13:21.000So he's trying to explain the abundance of carbon in the universe.
01:13:25.000And he thinks of four or five different ways that won't work.
01:13:29.000And finally, he comes up with a way that would work.
01:13:31.000And long story short, it turns out for that way of building carbon chemically to work, it has to do with combining simpler, what are called nucleons, smaller atoms to get the carbon molecule.
01:13:51.000There has to be a special resonance level for the carbon molecule, a special way it sings.
01:13:56.000It has a certain energy level that causes it to sing at a certain frequency.
01:14:03.000Turns out the frequency he predicts, which would be necessary to explain the origin of carbon in the universe, Exists within a particular form of carbon.
01:14:15.000But then that turns out to be the tip of a deeper iceberg, of a whole series of other things in the universe that would have to be just right to make this formation of carbon possible.
01:14:29.000The gravitational force would have to, inside stars, gravity couldn't be too strong, too weak.
01:14:36.000Electromagnetic force couldn't be too strong or too weak.
01:14:38.000The ratio between them couldn't be too strong Everything fell in this sweet spot, this kind of Goldilocks zone, and we now call this the phenomenon of fine-tuning, that there are multiple parameters in the universe that fall within these very narrow tolerances,
01:14:55.000outside of which not only life would be impossible, but stable galaxies and even basic chemistry would be impossible.
01:15:03.000And so that is to say, even to get the evolutionary process going, you would have to have all these beautifully finely tuned parameters in place.
01:15:11.000And so Hoyle starts having a rethink about this, and he's a staunch atheist, scientific atheist materialist, but he ends up Concluding that fine-tuning points to some kind of a fine-tuner.
01:15:26.000And he's quoted as saying that the best data we have suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry in order to make life possible.
01:15:35.000And so he moves to this sort of rudimentary theistic position in his philosophy or his worldview.
01:15:42.000Now a lot of other physicists have come to the same conclusion.
01:15:46.000Sir John Polkinghorne, great Cambridge physicist, had a late in life conversion, religious conversion, It was partially predicated on his awareness as a physicist of the evidence for the universe as a setup job, the Goldilocks universe, as some physicists have called it.
01:16:02.000So that's kind of, as Hoyle said, a kind of common sense interpretation.
01:16:05.000When we see other systems that are finely tuned, like a French recipe or an internal combustion engine, what we mean by fine-tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that work together to accomplish some remarkable outcome or functional or remarkable outcome.
01:16:22.000If you see an internal combustion engine, you think it was engineered because it's finely tuned.
01:16:28.000The contrary argument to that, the main one, there have been others, but not even most secular physicists regard them as compelling anymore.
01:16:35.000The main contrary argument has been the idea of the multiverse.
01:16:38.000That, yes, our universe has this array of jointly improbable parameters that are in that sweet spot.
01:16:48.000But we just happen to be the lucky one because there's a billion other universes out there and with different combinations of the laws and constants of physics and different initial conditions at the beginning of those universes.
01:17:03.000So all those things that were just right in our universe are, yes, extremely improbable, but there's so many other universes that the probability of a universe with that set of life-friendly conditions arising somewhere Had to arise somewhere,
01:17:20.000inevitably, and we just happened to be in that lucky universe.
01:17:24.000And then we are stunned by that, and they call that this observer selection effect.
01:17:28.000So that's superficially an equally plausible explanation to the fine-tuner argument.
01:17:35.000And a lot of physicists have told me that they regard the two as a wash.
01:17:39.000You can believe in a fine-tuner, or you could believe in a multiverse.
01:17:44.000I think the fine tuner, we'll call it theistic design argument, provides a better overall explanation, and here's why.
01:17:52.000For the fine tuning argument to actually work, there has to be some sort of causal connection between the universes.
01:18:00.000If all those other universes are just causally disconnected from our own, Then nothing that happens in those other universes affects anything that happens in this universe, including whatever events were responsible for setting up the fine tuning in the first place.
01:18:16.000And in virtue of that, proponents of the multiverse hypothesis have proposed what they call universe-generating mechanisms.
01:18:24.000And some are based on something called inflationary cosmology, and others are based on something called string theory.
01:18:32.000But the idea is that there are mechanisms that would According to the physics of those two cosmological models, spit out new universes such that we could portray our universe as the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery that was produced by an underlying common cause.
01:18:52.000But it turns out that the cosmological models that give us these universe-generating mechanisms imply that the universe generating mechanisms themselves must be finely tuned in order to generate new universes.
01:19:11.000And that fine-tuning is ultimately unexplained.
01:19:14.000There's no underlying physics that explains why that fine-tuning.
01:19:17.000So in order to explain the fine-tuning, you invoke the multiverse.
01:19:22.000In order to make the multiverse credible, you invoke universe generating mechanisms.
01:19:26.000In order to make the universe generating mechanisms Credible or plausible, you have to presuppose prior unexplained fine-tuning and you're right back to where you started.
01:19:37.000And given that fine-tuning in our experience, our uniform and repeated experience, when we find it with a French recipe or an internal combustion engine or a hardware-software combination that works, When we find fine-tuning, it always results from a mind,
01:19:52.000and since the multiverse hasn't provided a better explanation for that, I think the conclusion of design or an ultimate fine-tuner stands.
01:20:17.000Then, and given that the multiverse has not provided an explanation for ultimate fine-tuning, the best explanation remains intelligent design.
01:20:29.000And if you want to say yet, that's fine, because again, all scientific arguments, whether they have theistic implications or not, are provisional.
01:20:38.000Is it fine-tuning based on our interpretations of what's happening?
01:21:16.000There are processes that are at work that I wouldn't want to make a design argument about.
01:21:23.000But I think there are deep and fundamental parameters of the universe and I think of our planetary system that have these joint properties of I think it's life.
01:21:51.000I think we play the role of perceiving life as having a significance that non-life does not have.
01:21:59.000You could then argue, well, that's very subjective.
01:22:02.000Maybe life doesn't have that significance.
01:22:05.000But I think we come again and again to affirm that life has significance.
01:22:12.000The contrary view would be to say life has no significance.
01:22:16.000There's nothing significant in that outcome.
01:22:18.000And I don't think we actually believe that.
01:22:20.000Why does it have to be no significance?
01:23:25.000Some robber got in and there are two possibilities.
01:23:29.000Either it was an inside job and the robber had the code to open the vault, or it was just lucky random fiddling.
01:23:41.000Now, if you freeze the footage right before the robber puts his hand on the dial, If you're expecting, what would you expect if it was an inside job?
01:23:59.000Well, you would expect that the robber would go directly to the combination that would pop open the vault, okay?
01:24:07.000Now, it might be that he got incredibly lucky, but your overwhelming expectation based on your knowledge of the improbability of finding that combination is that the robber will crack the code and open the vault.
01:24:24.000On the random fiddling hypothesis, you'd expect that there would be a lot of tries.
01:24:33.000And, actually, you'd expect that the vault would never get opened.
01:24:45.000Now, that combination of an incredibly improbable event that results in a remarkable or functional or significant outcome triggers an awareness that there was design.
01:24:59.000And that is, probabilistically, a calculably more probable I think?
01:25:18.000It's also incredibly unlikely that that's how it happened.
01:25:35.000We know that there's something very different about life than a lifeless universe.
01:25:38.000And we know that finding our overwhelming expectation based on the improbability of getting all those parameters right is that if only natural processes had been at work, We would find one of those other combinations that would not open the lock or aka not result in life.
01:25:54.000So our expectation based on naturalism is a lifeless universe in light of what we know about the fine-tuning parameters.
01:26:02.000Our expectation based on theism, the inside job hypothesis, is that we would get something.
01:26:11.000It's certainly more probable on theism that we'd get life given the fine-tuning than it would be given naturalism, where our overwhelming expectation is we'd find one of those life-unfriendly combinations.
01:26:21.000So there's some kind of second-order probabilistic reasoning involved in But I think it's very commonsensical, but it can be unpacked with these sort of deeper...
01:26:31.000Is this an egocentric perspective because we are alive?
01:26:35.000Is it our perspective of life being far more significant than other things in the universe, like the creation of suns?
01:26:43.000Is this this thing that we have where we're attaching intelligent design to something that may just be a property of the universe itself?
01:26:52.000We could say that, except that we know that fine-tuning in our experience does result from mind.
01:26:59.000It's not just that we're interested in...
01:27:36.000It's awesome the amount of good philosophy you do on this show because of the way you ask questions.
01:27:43.000And the questions you just asked lead to an answer that is right at the heart of Deep philosophical discussions have been going on for about 500 years.
01:27:53.000And in the Middle Ages, there were these attempts to prove God's existence with absolute certainty.
01:28:32.000And you've got figures like Kierkegaard who believed that you could know God, but you knew God entirely subjectively, and you just had to take a leap of faith.
01:29:31.000So the two extremes are fideism, where we have no rational basis for faith, or rationalism with the claim that we can have absolute certainty about belief in God.
01:29:42.000And the middle way, I think, is this idea of what I call we can make an inference to the best explanation.
01:29:48.000We have strong provisional evidence and arguments in support of belief in God.
01:29:54.000And so I think from a rational standpoint, as an intellectual, when I am asked, does belief in God make sense?
01:30:00.000I would say, yes, it makes sense in that sense.
01:30:03.000You know, I think we have strong reasons for faith, but not absolute proof.
01:30:18.000I don't think this is unique to people who have religious belief, but one of the things that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament talk about is the role of the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit,
01:30:34.000that what is objectively real in history is made subjectively real or confirmed subjectively by the testimony of the Holy Spirit.
01:30:49.000That's something I have experienced in different ways, and so I have an inner confidence about my faith in God.
01:31:03.000I have heard non-audible voices, the things I don't hear audibly, but words that come into my head that I am immediately aware are not generated by my own thought processes.
01:32:16.000But I think there is an experience that many people have over time walking in faith where they begin to recognize the voice of God in their own life in a more personal way.
01:32:29.000And for me, sometimes it's been with a sort of double entendre, where there's a passage The Bible to which I've been drawn for some, you know, maybe something of completely random reason, but at a particular time where I realized, oh, that's kind of funny.
01:32:46.000That has a direct application to this situation that I'm in.
01:32:50.000And then I find that, sure enough, that was actually...
01:32:54.000Insight or guidance into what I was about to experience.
01:32:57.000But people have gotten that from philosophy as well.
01:33:12.000Relating to revelations and things that other human beings have discovered.
01:33:17.000And as a human, we are constantly absorbing the ideas and the revelations and just the observations of all of us, of what we've learned about the human experience, what we've learned about how our own unique biology interacts with the world around us,
01:33:40.000And because this is what I'm relating are subjective experiences, I would not place any weight on them in trying to persuade anyone else of the existence or reality of God.
01:33:52.000That's why I wrote the book I did in a completely different vein on the basis of objective evidence.
01:34:00.000What religion do you study, if you don't mind me asking?
01:34:06.000I'll give you the thing that I first experienced upon my Christian conversion was an experience of peace that I'd never had before and an experience of outward-focused love and concern for other people that was completely and is completely contrary to all my natural inclinations.
01:34:28.000Why I would suddenly feel love for a stranger on the street or be concerned about a friend in a way that I had never experienced before.
01:34:37.000I could not explain that on the basis of my own selfish inclinations.
01:34:43.000Isn't that a part of the philosophy of Christianity?
01:34:47.000And when people go into an ideology, would they adopt a predetermined pattern of thinking and behavior?
01:34:56.000That's very common to do, and that is one of the beautiful aspects of Christianity.
01:35:01.000Those thoughts, that philosophy, that this would be something that you would adopt, because now you have meaning, you have guidance, you have purpose.
01:35:10.000You are now a part of a group, and being a part of this group, this group has a very beautiful philosophy on other human beings.
01:35:19.000And you would adopt that, and that would give you great pleasure from that, but that's not necessarily an experience with God.
01:35:26.000But there is a difference between knowing what you should do based on Christian moral teaching And actually having, for the first time ever in your life, having an inclination to do it.
01:35:39.000Yes, but you're a young, I understand, but you're a young, impressionable person looking for guidance, and your life is not so good before this.
01:35:52.000And gives you focus and gives you this beautiful philosophy to change the way you think and you adopt it wholeheartedly like young people are inclined to do or like anybody that's looking for change in their life.
01:36:05.000Anybody that's looking for something better is inclined to do.
01:36:17.000I mean, that would be an alternative explanation.
01:36:19.000I experienced it in a way that convinced me that something more than myself and my thinking was responsible.
01:36:26.000Isn't it beneficial to think that way, though?
01:36:29.000It's beneficial in adopting that philosophy to think that way.
01:36:32.000And if you think that way, you're rewarded and you are inside of this philosophy that does have these beautiful tenets to it, that does have these beautiful ideas.
01:36:46.000I mean, again, I would not place any weight on my experience in trying to persuade someone else of the truth of theism or Christianity.
01:36:54.000I have a lot of other arguments that I would place weight on because I think we all have internal experiences.
01:37:01.000But this was such a dramatic thing and, you know, persistent concern for a given friend that I am aware is hurting.
01:37:17.000My natural inclinations towards selfishness are still very much in evidence every day, right?
01:37:23.000But isn't that part of the human survival mechanism?
01:37:26.000I mean, there's a lot of natural inclinations that people have towards selfishness if they're not treated correctly when they're young or if they encounter bad experiences.
01:37:34.000And then when you encounter good experiences and now you can relax and you can be a part of something that's bigger and better.
01:37:52.000I care about them, but I didn't know that they were...
01:37:54.000In any case, I think this could be somewhat unproductive because I'm completely willing to concede your point that It's definitely not unproductive.
01:38:05.000I just mean in the sense that I don't think that I could persuade you to be a theist or a Christian on the basis of my personal experience.
01:38:13.000I would concede that, you know, because there's always— Well, I'm not asking you to do that, though.
01:38:50.000And the cult was called the Buddha Field.
01:38:53.000They existed in West Hollywood and they made their way out to Austin.
01:38:56.000And the guy who ran it was a very charismatic guy who was also a hypnotherapist and a gay porn star.
01:39:03.000And this guy had these people convinced that they had extreme meaning being with him and it meant so much to them that they were willing to sacrifice the rest of their lives and they were going to travel with him no matter where he went.
01:39:20.000And he would do these things to them where we'd have them and he would impart upon him what he called the knowing.
01:39:26.000And it was a very difficult thing to get.
01:39:29.000He had to choose you for it and people waited years.
01:39:32.000But when they did have that experience, it was one of the most overwhelming things they'd ever experienced in their life.
01:39:37.000It was like a days-long psychedelic experience where there was no drugs involved.
01:39:42.000It was merely him With this ritual, this thing that he would do, he's put his hands on their head, and there's videos of these people, like, in orgasmic ecstasy, experiencing love and God in a way that they had never before.
01:39:59.000This was real to them, but it was a cult.
01:40:02.000It was a guy who was a scam artist, who was a con man, who was a hypnotist, and knew how to manipulate people, and ultimately, the result was terrible.
01:40:11.000These people lost 20-plus years of their lives, and Probably a lot of money in the process.
01:40:45.000It was him figuring out a way to hijack the human brain and that there's things in the human brain where you can convince the human brain that it's having an experience whether it has it or not.
01:40:59.000If you're a young person and you're looking for some meaning to life, you can work yourself into a frenzy where you believe you have this experience with God.
01:41:13.000Yeah, well, a couple things to say about that.
01:41:16.000One is that I think it's one of the beautiful things about Christianity is that there is an interplay between the subjective experience of the individual believer and the objective witness of God's actions in time, space, and history.
01:41:30.000And that there is a – that people are enjoined to check their experience against objective criteria so that – and I think Jesus famously said, you will know the tree by its fruit.
01:41:44.000In the case of the cult, it had a horrible outcome over time.
01:41:51.000So I think these things do have to be tested over time.
01:41:53.000In my own experience, because I tended to overthink things, Because I was annoyed at Christians who talked about their personal experience without being able to explain to me on any kind of objective basis why I should consider their faith, I tended to be very either distrustful or skeptical about subjective experience or...
01:42:17.000Or overthinking in a way that would almost crowd the possibility of such experiences out.
01:42:23.000As a young convert, I didn't have a lot of that.
01:42:28.000These things sort of crept up on me over the years.
01:42:30.000And I have become more confident that in some cases, in addition to the sort of general guidance of Christianity as a religious philosophy, There have been occasions in my life where I've experienced what I thought were pretty clear instances of specific guidance towards specific courses of action or choices I needed to make.
01:42:57.000And again, I wouldn't put any weight on that for anyone else, but it has been part of my experience in that sense.
01:43:04.000Well, I could say the same about my own life.
01:43:14.000I mean, that's why I didn't mean it as a critique of our conversation to say I don't think it's productive.
01:43:22.000I just say, I mean, I mean that in a philosophical sense that if you want to talk across a worldview divide and say, hey, Here's my philosophy.
01:43:36.000If we want to have that great conversation, either one of us just appealing to our personal experience is not going to move the discussion towards greater understanding.
01:43:47.000But you're assuming I have a different worldview.
01:44:07.000Yeah, but also you want a very particular truth that you seem to have experienced to be true.
01:44:15.000Like this experience with God, this experience with this sort of frequency that you feel that if you achieve and you are on, the world works in a more harmonious way.
01:44:29.000Yeah, I would say I'm not trying to conjure up something.
01:44:40.000It's taken me by surprise sometimes that there's a subjective aspect of my faith that has seemed as real as the objective things that the scientist-philosopher in me also regards as very weighty.
01:44:53.000Well, I'm very glad that you have the courage to talk about that because I think sometimes when people do deal in science, these things that you can't weigh and measure, they seem like a sort of complicated thing to discuss.
01:45:13.000And it's part of what I think is so unsatisfying about materialism as a philosophy is that people do not actually in their own personal experience Of consciousness, if nothing else, believe that we're nothing but matter in motion.
01:45:47.000Whether or not they're religions or not, even some social philosophies, some social trends, they mimic cult-like behavior.
01:45:56.000And I think these are patterns that human beings are inclined to take.
01:45:59.000And I think there's very productive patterns that human beings are inclined to take.
01:46:04.000I think those are the ones that have succeeded over time, either because they are the most ruthless and the most controlling and the people can't escape them, or because they're the most productive and people find that those things benefit them greatly.
01:46:17.000Yeah, and I think one of the things, there is groupthink in all groups, right?
01:46:42.000He and I, over the years, done a number of debates.
01:46:45.000He's written a very important book in which he says that evolutionary biology has functioned as a kind of secular religion for many of his colleagues.
01:46:56.000In that, it answers a very important deep worldview question.
01:47:00.000What is the process through which everything else came?
01:47:05.000It answers a worldview question that religions also answer.
01:47:09.000And so we have in our network of scientists who have been challenging the comprehensive neo-Darwinian account of things.
01:47:18.000I already alluded to, I think, that the Darwinian process is a real process.
01:47:21.000They just don't explain everything, right?
01:47:23.000But in challenging neo-Darwinism, we have found that oftentimes the discussions get very, very hot.
01:47:31.000And many of our top scientists have been canceled or censored at prestigious places like the Smithsonian or Cambridge University or the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History.
01:47:46.000People outside the sciences often say, I can't make sense of that.
01:47:51.000I mean, isn't science the place where people are supposed to discuss competing ideas and theories openly?
01:47:57.000How do you explain this impulse to cancel somebody with an alternative view who's at that rank of science?
01:48:04.000And I think Ruse's book helps to explain that a bit, you know, that it's not just religious people who have religious beliefs.
01:48:33.000Having a closed system of thought and not being aware of the kinds of challenges that could be brought or alternative points of view.
01:48:41.000I think one of the things that I advocate in all my work is a method of reasoning that is used in the sciences but also in philosophy, also in detective work.
01:48:52.000It's called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inference to the best explanation.
01:48:58.000And it functions, it only functions well if you're open to considering the competing hypotheses.
01:49:05.000And so I just think that there's a philosopher of science that I really like from Italy named Marcello Perra says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence.
01:49:18.000And so I think that openness to competing ideas is crucial to coming to conclusions that you can put some weight down on.
01:49:25.000Have you ever had someone debate you that you feel like had a very good argument against the things that you believe?
01:49:37.000I have been in debates with more and less skilled people on the other side.
01:49:43.000I have had a common experience that has been somewhat surprising.
01:49:54.000Many of the people who have debated me about, for example, the theory of intelligent design, have come somewhat unprepared to debate the merits of what I actually have proposed or affirm or argue for.
01:50:39.000But almost everyone that has told me they've listened to it said he was debating a cartoon caricature of you and was not at all prepared to debate your actual arguments.
01:50:56.000There's good people on the other side.
01:50:58.000I recently had a good conversation with Michael Shermer, who's the well-known editor of Skeptic Magazine, on your friend Brian Callen's show.
01:51:28.000And I feel a kind of kinship with anybody who loves those kinds of questions, even if they've come to a different conclusion about the answer to those questions than I have.
01:51:38.000So I tend not to view people willing to have those discussions, call them debates, as adversaries, but rather as sort of co-belligerents in an exploration.
01:52:39.000And at that point, we usually get crickets because this type of argument is used mainly to shut people up rather than to engage the merits of the argument on the basis of the evidence and the structure of the argument presented.
01:52:51.000They're called in the field, they're called demarcation arguments.
01:52:56.000And this one is based on the assumption that if you're invoking a cause which is not materialistic, then it's by definition not science.
01:53:08.000Okay, well then let's call it something different.
01:53:11.000What I found in my PhD research was that when people investigate questions of origins, They're investigating questions that have both a scientific and a philosophical dimension.
01:53:23.000There's evidence that bears on the question, but whatever conclusion they draw is going to have larger implications for philosophy and worldview.
01:53:33.000If you can show that life arose by a completely undirected chemical evolutionary process, You're going to be more inclined toward a more materialistic worldview.
01:53:44.000You're going to say matter and energy are sufficient to explain how everything got here.
01:53:48.000If, as I think, the evidence of digital code in the DNA molecule and a complex information storage and processing system and those nifty developmental gene regulatory circuits I was telling you about, if those kinds of phenomena in life point as I think they do to a mind,
01:54:06.000a pre-existing mind, after all, it takes a program to make a It takes a programmer to make a program, and if we've got something like software programming in DNA, we're looking at a strong indicator of our mind.
01:54:19.000If that's a good argument, then that has different metaphysical implications.
01:54:24.000That's going to point more in a theistic direction.
01:54:26.000So these origins questions have an incorrigibly philosophical dimension.
01:54:34.000And that's what makes them interesting and exciting.
01:54:36.000That's not something that makes them inherently off limits to discussion.
01:54:40.000But too many scientists on the materialist side of the ledger have wanted to say, unless it's a materialistic answer, I'm not going to consider it.
01:54:49.000And I'm going to use a pejorative term to stigmatize your point of view.
01:54:53.000And in the end, I don't think it works because what we care about is not how you classify the idea.
01:54:59.000We don't care whether intelligent design is science or philosophy or metaphysics or what I think it is, which is a form of historical science.
01:55:08.000It's a conclusion that comes from historical scientific reasoning that has metaphysical implications.
01:55:14.000But that's not what's important, how we classify it.
01:55:16.000What's important is whether or not it's true and whether the evidence supports it.
01:55:20.000When we're talking about metaphysical, we're just talking about things we can't measure.
01:55:27.000But it might be because we don't have the capacity to measure them.
01:55:31.000It might not be because they don't exist.
01:56:33.000If I go into the British Museum and I look at the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone, And I study them for a bit and realize, oh, OK. Three different languages with the same message.
01:56:44.000When the archaeologists figured out what was going on, they realized, oh, these are inscriptions.
01:56:48.000These were produced by a scribe, by an intelligence.
01:56:51.000They did not arise by wind and erosion or some materialistic forces.
01:56:56.000In other words, they were looking at evidence that compelled the conclusion of an intelligent designer.
01:57:03.000Now, if I hold strictly to the rule, I'm only going to look at what I regard as science and what I regard as science limits itself to strictly materialistic explanations, I may encounter evidence that's pointing towards the reality of a mind and I'm not going to be able to see it because I've put philosophical blinders on my inquiry.
01:57:25.000I've limited the range of hypotheses that I'm willing to consider before I even looked at the evidence.
01:57:30.000And I think that's what's been going on.
01:57:32.000The main objection we get to intelligent design is this claim.
01:57:35.000It's not science because it's not materialistic.
01:57:38.000And sometimes people will justify that by saying, well, it's not science because the thing you postulate is unobservable.
01:57:45.000And that's the connection to the comment you made a minute ago.
01:57:52.000Science works by inferring, it has an indirect method of inference.
01:57:56.000We often infer unobservable things, quarks, physical fields, subterranean geological structures, states of mind, We infer from evidence that we can observe or see.
01:58:12.000We infer from the unobservable to the observable.
01:58:15.000Well, if you can do that in other branches of science.
01:58:18.000In evolutionary biology, we infer past transitional intermediate forms and past mutational events based on things we can see.
01:58:26.000So the fact that we're positing an unobservable designing intelligence having acted in the past Should not disqualify that as being a scientific theory or a legitimate theory of a metaphysical kind because science and metaphysics often does that very thing.
01:58:45.000Well, I think human beings get very arrogant when they're the disseminators of information and people listen to them on a regular basis and there's this appeal to authority.
01:58:56.000I'm the person who explains science and anything that confuses that or questions that or is an alternative theory gets dismissed.
01:59:06.000Because if you're right and then I'm wrong and I'm not willing to, then I can just shut you up.
01:59:10.000Man, we've experienced that in spades, and some very top people are...
01:59:18.000It's just a human inclination, I think, especially when you're encountering a very difficult thing like this.
01:59:25.000Like, instead of having a long-form discussion or, you know, years of debate and years of examination, it's easier to dismiss and to not have a conversation with that person.
01:59:39.000I really do, because I think that it's an opportunity.
01:59:42.000First of all, if you really truly believe what you're saying, it's an opportunity for you to state your point more clearly than the other person.
02:00:29.000Do you think that human beings are the ultimate expression of this intelligent design?
02:00:39.000In this cosmos, I think there is a sense that humans are qualitatively unique in the creation, that we were made as sort of a crowning of the process of creation.
02:00:55.000When you say cosmos, what do you define it?
02:00:58.000Well, I'll speak as a Christian who also believes that there may be other beings besides human beings that have consciousness.
02:01:07.000The Bible speaks of angelic beings, for example.
02:01:10.000I have no direct experience of those, but I have other reasons to believe that the Bible is true, so I take things like that on the authority of the Bible.
02:01:19.000But of the creatures we know, I think there are qualitative Differences between humans and all other forms of animals that make us special.
02:01:31.000Our ability to use language, for example.
02:02:00.000We know that they have sounds for different animals and sounds for predators.
02:02:03.000I think that the studies of human language show that you just – a three-year-old human can do things that the best chimp just – There's a qualitative difference in the way we use language,
02:02:22.000in the complexity of the language forms, and Chomsky's universal grammar idea.
02:02:30.000But you know that chimpanzees are, in fact, even better at solving some puzzles with rewards for food than humans, than young humans.
02:02:39.000I think there's a Skinnerian account of animal behavior that's pretty good.
02:02:44.000I think the Skinnerian account of human language was pretty much refuted by Chomsky in the 60s, and I think there's something much deeper going on with human language.
02:02:54.000It's not an area of particular expertise, but my colleague David Berlinski is very interested in this and has corresponded with Chomsky over the years.
02:03:10.000A story about Chomsky at a conference that I attended where he said that Chomsky was at one point very openly skeptical about Darwinian accounts of the origin of language and then was later sort of pressured to walk some of that skepticism back.
02:03:31.000But he said, okay, language could have evolved, but there would have had to have been sort of a A pre-existing universal grammar that allowed people to make sense of all the To develop a symbol convention that would allow communication.
02:03:53.000And this would have had to have arisen very, very abruptly.
02:05:15.000And it's very hard to imagine how you could express that subtlety Conveyed by those tenses without already having the universal grammar or those language structures built into the brain.
02:05:32.000If you're learning how to describe things around you with sound, And if you have a sound that you associate for different objects, a sound that you associate for different feelings, a sound that you associate with love and it's universally agreed upon,
02:05:47.000and we know that that varies so widely along the world.
02:05:52.000If you go to some cultures Like a good example is Australia.
02:06:00.000What they call mobs of these indigenous people.
02:06:07.000They could travel just a few hundred kilometers and they experience a language they have no understanding of at all.
02:06:15.000Another 50 kilometers that way, same thing.
02:06:18.000They don't know how many languages they have.
02:06:21.000They don't know how many of them are lost.
02:06:22.000These people develop these languages like in isolation in these small groups and Within the people that were indigenous to Australia.
02:06:33.000There's like I God my friend Adam Greentree explained this to me.
02:06:37.000I don't want to say I don't I don't want to misstate how many different languages there are but I would believe it's hundreds of different languages and they don't understand each other but they develop these in isolation and Yeah, well, I mean, we're both talking somewhat derivatively based on – this isn't my area of expertise.
02:06:57.000But could you imagine a world, couldn't you imagine, where over time, cultures who existed in the same sort of harmonious groups and learned to till the soil together and hunt and gather and do things together and raise their children together,
02:07:15.000they would develop sounds that they all agreed upon.
02:07:21.000But I think Chomsky's argument was that is only possible because there are innate language structures where people already intuitively understand these differences in tense.
02:07:33.000Could you get from—I mean, in a way, the thing is to turn it back on the— The person who thinks the pointing and grunting is going to be enough.
02:09:58.000Well, I think there is in the human experience, there's both evidence of our great capacity for creativity and nobility, but also the idea that something's not as it was initially intended in our nature as well.
02:10:13.000And so the Judeo-Christian story is one of a long arc of redemption.
02:10:20.000And so I think that we will be improved, but not by an evolutionary means, but by God's own action.
02:10:26.000So you believe that there will be some sort of a miracle that improves human beings?
02:10:33.000But let me say a few words about miracle.
02:10:37.000A miracle is, strictly speaking, an act of God.
02:10:40.000And so, just as I see evidence of divine action or intelligent agency in the past, Or because I see evidence of such things in the past, I don't find the idea of miraculous acts of God in the future as something that are inherently implausible.
02:11:00.000But as a person who believes in science, and your degree is in philosophy of science?
02:11:07.000Yeah, I did a PhD in philosophy of science, right?
02:11:19.000This is, I think, one of the things that you've objected to, the idea that there are people on various issues that speak for the science and shut down the rhetorical dimension of science.
02:11:29.000That's why this Italian philosopher of science I mentioned, Marcello Perra, says that Science advances as scientists argue, with emphasis on the word argue, about how to interpret the evidence.
02:11:41.000Darwin's Origin of Species he presented as one long argument.
02:11:45.000Newton started the Principia with the theory of vortices is beset by difficulties on many sides, and then he argued against the standard theory of gravity.
02:11:56.000In presenting a case for a better view of how gravitation works.
02:12:00.000So science has this rhetorical dimension that has been written out of science as we've advanced more of a authoritarian view of science that portrays to the public the idea of an Right.
02:13:22.000I mean, if God can bring the universe into existence from...
02:13:26.000A spatial, temporal, material singularity, then perhaps he can raise someone from the dead or give us life after this life is over.
02:13:37.000The power is certainly—there's nothing implausible about believing that.
02:13:43.000My belief in a new creation, as it were, is based on the biblical witness that such a thing will happen and my independent reasons for believing the Bible.
02:13:52.000So I wouldn't make a scientific case for that.
02:14:09.000How do you reconcile with the reality that the Bible is written down, at least, by human beings, and that human beings are generally unreliable?
02:14:23.000At least in terms of 100% accuracy and also inclined to manipulate each other especially when they're in control of large groups of people and also inclined to appease the instincts and the desires and needs of their followers.
02:14:40.000So they create texts that resonate with the people and develop a philosophy that resonates with the people And if they say that it comes from God itself, especially if it resonates, especially if it makes sense, and maybe perhaps it is in some way from God because it is coming from this divine inspiration.
02:15:01.000When something's written down and also We're translating it, right?
02:15:06.000We're translating it from, you know, Aramaic, from ancient Hebrew, and it goes into Latin and Greek, and there's a lot going on there, and then eventually to English, and there's a lot of room for interpretation.
02:15:20.000Let me give a general answer and then come back to the specific challenge, okay?
02:15:27.000The books that I've written have been advancing the theory of intelligent design The first was signatures in the cell about the origin of life.
02:15:34.000The second was about the question of the origin of the first animals called Darwin's Doubt.
02:15:39.000The third was about the worldview implications of the theory of intelligent design.
02:15:46.000I happen to be a believing, biblical Christian.
02:15:53.000I just need to say that not all proponents of intelligent design hold my viewpoint about religious matters, and it would be unfair to them for me to answer the question without making that proviso because I'm also here representing those books and those arguments.
02:16:07.000We actually have some agnostic proponents of intelligent design, and even an atheistic philosopher who's inclined towards Thinking there must be some intelligent design.
02:16:17.000So, and then secondly, your question about motivation, your question embedded an interesting insight about motivation, that we have confirmation bias, we have all these things.
02:16:31.000And in this basic discussion about God between, say, the new atheists who aren't so new anymore and people who are on our side of the worldview divide, There's a tendency to point fingers about motivations.
02:16:46.000Oh, you religious people believe this stuff because it gives you comfort.
02:16:50.000And the religious argument to the atheists is, oh, you atheist materialists, you disbelieve because it gives you moral freedom and you don't have to be accountable to a moral judge.
02:17:04.000And I think in each person there's that push-pull.
02:17:12.000And one of the benefits of philosophical training is the attempt, at least, to extricate debates from those motivations.
02:17:25.000You know, that's essentially ad hominem arguments and try to avoid those as much as possible on both sides.
02:17:34.000So that's why I've developed the case for God in the last book based on key evidences that are public and commonly accepted across the worldview division.
02:17:44.000You know, the universe had a beginning, it was finely tuned from the beginning, and there is information and an information processing system in even the simplest living cells.
02:17:52.000Those three key pieces of evidence, I think, support a robust case for God as an inference to the best explanation.
02:18:02.000So I tend to take an evidentialist and philosophical approach to the kinds of questions you're asking, including the question about why I believe the other parts of the Bible, not just about the creation of the universe, but about the historical witness about Jesus Christ or the Exodus or things like that.
02:18:24.000And there I would say my general answer is that I have A strong avocational interest in the historicity of the Bible as one can test it based on external sources of historical evidence from documentary historical sources and archaeological sources.
02:18:49.000In a way, I'd prefer not to go too deeply into this because, again, I'd rather talk about the ID and the God stuff.
02:18:56.000And I have Jewish colleagues, Muslim colleagues, agnostic, non-religious theists who all agree with me about the scientific evidence and what it points to.
02:19:05.000And then we have different discussions about the religious things.
02:19:10.000So, crucial event in, for example, the New Testament...
02:19:14.000Is the trial and death of Jesus of Nazareth and subsequent resurrection.
02:19:22.000One key really striking thing that I've discovered in my avocational interest in archaeology is that the five or six leading figures, most important figures in that trial narrative, which take up about a quarter to a third of the four Gospels,
02:19:40.000Have all been independently attested by archaeological inscriptions in the last 50 or 60 years.
02:19:46.000There were some construction workers working in Caesarea Maritima in Israel in 1960-ish.
02:19:57.000Turned over a big slab of rock and on the back was an inscription from Pontius Pilate listing himself as the governor of Judea with a tribute to Tiberius Caesar.
02:20:09.000Significant because in the Gospels the ministry of Jesus is reported to have occurred And what year was this attributed to?
02:20:32.000Well, it's attributed to the period of time in which Tiberius was emperor.
02:20:58.000In Jerusalem, under the traditional site of the high priest, was discovered a stone ossuary bearing the name of Caiaphas, and Caiaphas Ben Joseph on two sides of an ornately decorated oswer containing the bones of someone who was reburied by this practice that the Jews undertook during that unique period of time from about 20 BC to the destruction of the temple.
02:21:21.000So you have multiple figures from that key event who have been independently attested and established in that time period.
02:21:32.000Herod Antipas, we know from his coins and his building projects, Jesus himself, Peter, Annas, the other high priest.
02:21:42.000So you have these multiple lines of external corroboration for This really important account.
02:21:48.000And then you have external sources like Josephus and Tacitus.
02:21:52.000So there's a weight of external corroborating evidence supporting the historicity of these narratives.
02:21:58.000And that gives you, I think, a good reason to take the narrative seriously and evaluate their other claims.
02:22:05.000It's in fact a level of corroboration that I think is almost unprecedented for any document that old.
02:22:28.000There's two different texts of Josephus, one that was likely doctored by medieval Christians that historians rightly regard as too affirmative in his expression of belief in Jesus of Nazareth.
02:22:43.000And one that came to us through the Arabic world where the Josephus text is much more credible where he records the basic facts of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth including being crucified under Pontius Pilate.
02:22:59.000And then that there were reports that he had been, that he had appeared to many after being resurrected.
02:23:42.000So I think there are three great scholars who have addressed the question of whether or not the – actually four – One is Wolfhard Pannenberg, the great German theologian historian.
02:24:40.000And I would tell you I have reasons to believe that that are well considered.
02:24:43.000And they are reasons not of subjective experience or subjective experience alone, but the reasons that are derived from Having examined very detailed historical analyses of the relevant data.
02:24:57.000And that's probably as far as we could take something in a discussion like this.
02:25:00.000But I do affirm that belief in such an extraordinary event should be well grounded in historical evidence and not something that we just believe because we want it to be true.
02:25:13.000Well, is it historical evidence or is it historical statements of people who were discussing a thing that may or may not have happened that might have been legend?
02:25:25.000Well, much historical evidence is also historical statement.
02:25:30.000It's testimony, eyewitness or otherwise.
02:25:32.000Right, but this is an extraordinary event, right?
02:25:34.000You're talking about a resurrection of a person who died and came back and was the son of God.
02:25:42.000What historians must do is evaluate the reliability of historical testimony if what's coming is historical testimony.
02:25:50.000One piece of historical testimony that's always been extremely compelling to me is the testimony of James, who is mentioned in the New Testament as one of the The witnesses to whom Jesus appeared after the alleged resurrection event.
02:26:11.000He was also mentioned earlier in the New Testament as one of his brothers or half-brothers, depending on whether you're a Protestant or a Catholic Christian, how you view that.
02:26:22.000But he was mentioned as one of his own family members who did not accept his crazy messianic claims, and he did not believe in them.
02:29:03.000I actually have taught college classes that included An evaluation of the historical reliability of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.
02:29:14.000And in many, many periods of biblical history, there is just extensive, same kind of extensive extra-biblical corroboration of the history that is provided in the Old Testament.
02:29:28.000So I think the same types of evidences can be brought to bear to provide external support.
02:29:34.000One example of a favorite lecture of mine was the story of the Assyrian invasion of Judah in 701 BC. It's recorded in Kings and Chronicles.
02:29:50.000And there are Multiple points of agreement between the biblical record and the account of that same event in the Assyrian records, many of which are now stored in the British Museum.
02:30:02.000There's a fantastic tour you can take of the Assyrian room there, where absolutely the same basic story is told.
02:30:10.000Where the Assyrians come, they lay siege to ancient Judah.
02:30:15.000The 46 strong-walled cities of Judah are put under siege.
02:30:23.000The city is put under siege, which is a death sentence in the ancient world when a dominant world empire like Assyria comes.
02:30:33.000And for some reason, the reason recorded in the Bible and Implied in the Assyrian records, the siege was broken, the Assyrians returned to Assyria, and Sennacherib was killed by his own sons.
02:30:50.000When I do a lecture like this, I list the biblical claims and then I list the claims from the secular archaeological records and I point out the multiple points of convergence and agreement.
02:31:03.000That is a way of providing warrant or support or justification for the historical reliability of the Bible, and I think you can do that with the Old Testament as well.
02:31:11.000But these are historical representations of things that are plausible, like sieges, things that happened all the time.
02:31:24.000There's something kind of mysterious about this siege and why it was broken because the Assyrian power was overwhelming in comparison to what was left.
02:31:33.000The biblical account is that God himself created confusion in the ranks of The Assyrian soldiers.
02:31:42.000Is that really how God would handle it?
02:33:24.000I know the laws of physics cause me to expect this given outcome.
02:33:29.000And I can do that a hundred times and it's all going to be the same, especially if I hit the ball in the exact same place with the exact same force.
02:33:36.000But what if, well, right as I make the shot, someone comes along, shakes the table?
02:33:42.000The ball will not end up where I expected it to end.
02:33:45.000Because all the laws of physics have a ceteris paribus clause, all other things being equal, which includes no interfering conditions from an outside agent.
02:33:54.000But if an outside agent disrupts the system, I'm going to get a completely unexpected event.
02:33:58.000But the law of momentum exchange was not violated.
02:34:02.000A new set of events was fed into the matrix of natural law, into the regular system of cause and effect.
02:34:12.000And that could be considered a miracle.
02:34:14.000That's what a miracle is in the Bible.
02:34:17.000In the Exodus miracle, it says, and the Lord caused an east wind to blow.
02:34:21.000It represents God as an actor, Within the matrix of natural law which he otherwise sustains and upholds.
02:34:28.000So I think for that and other reasons, I think Hume's argument against miracles, his in principle argument fails, which means that we have to be open to evaluating claims of the miraculous On the basis of the evidence that pertains to them.
02:34:43.000Most of them may be bunk, but there is a consistent pattern of corroboration of biblical witness where we can check the biblical witness, the historical reliability that I think means that we ought to be open to evaluating those more extraordinary events as possibly true as well.
02:35:03.000And that was my reference to the scholars who have done the deep dive on the case of pro and con about the resurrection.
02:35:11.000So as a Christian and as a person who believes in God, you believe that currently human beings are the greatest expression of life.
02:35:30.000Certainly we have qualitative capabilities that other animals don't have.
02:35:35.000I think the biblical way of phrasing that was talking about being made in the image of God, having this conscious awareness and creative capabilities that reflected the capabilities of our Creator.
02:35:47.000And so I believe that for biblical reasons, I think.
02:35:53.000But I also see the evidence of the qualitative differences as well.
02:35:59.000What do you make of all this UAP, UFO stuff, all these whistleblowers that are coming out and saying there's advanced crafts that can move in ways that defy physics?
02:36:14.000That they seem to be off-world origin, that the United States has been studying them, that there's a project that retrieves crashed vehicles, and that these things are far more advanced than us.
02:36:27.000Some of this stuff has been suppressed and not coming out.
02:36:37.000The government oftentimes will lie or create a narrative to obscure reality or to give people some sort of confusion while something else is going on to distract you.
02:36:48.000There's always the possibility of that.
02:36:50.000I mean, that would be what I would do if I wanted to freak people out or if I was trying to obscure some sort of a very advanced Project that we have where we have capabilities far beyond what's conventionally thought of as our,
02:37:07.000you know, our supreme method of propulsion or travel or drones or or even Our understanding of gravity and space-time like if there is some sort of monumental breakthrough that was made and made in secrecy and made through some sort of Project that involved the US government and top physicists and they kept this all under wraps What better way to keep it under wraps than to say that it's something from another planet?
02:37:44.000I wrote an op-ed for the New York Post two summers ago when a lot of this stuff first broke, you know, with the Navy stuff.
02:37:51.000And it happens that there are a number of scientists who, upon being confronted with the difficulty of explaining the origin of the first life from simple chemistry, and upon being confronted with The digital code that's stored in the DNA molecule.
02:38:48.000So Dawkins himself, seeing an animation of what's called gene expression, said he was knocked sideways with wonder at the complexity of the digital information processing in cells.
02:39:01.000There have been leading scientists who have actually proposed, well, maybe that is evidence of intelligent design, but it's intelligent design that is coming from an extraterrestrial source.
02:39:12.000So this actually has a name in science.
02:39:31.000But I don't think it helps us with the problem of explaining the origin of life for reasons that are similar to the critique of the multiverse I offered.
02:39:40.000Even if you posit that a superintelligence evolved on some other planet and then designed life or designed the genetic code and imparted it in cells and sent it to our planet, you've still got to explain the origin of that evolutionary process on some other planet and it takes you right back to the problem of the origin of information.
02:40:01.000If you want to build any kind of system that has a high degree of specificity, you need information to say, I want this structure, not that.
02:40:08.000I want this way of configuring matter, not that.
02:40:11.000Information is crucial to specificity of form.
02:40:16.000Just to complete the thought, I'm very interested in what you have to say about this other thing because I don't know much about it.
02:40:22.000The other thing is that the panspermia hypothesis doesn't do a good job of explaining the ultimate fine-tuning of the universe or the universe itself, upon which any future intelligent alien's evolution would depend.
02:40:36.000You have to have the universe fine-tuned in the first place to get any kind of evolutionary process going.
02:40:41.000And therefore, if you want to explain the big three things that I've Put out as a challenge to scientific materialism.
02:40:49.000Panspermia doesn't cut it because it might explain the origin of the first life, but only by kicking the problem into outer space without answering the question of the ultimate origin of information.
02:41:00.000It definitely doesn't explain the origin of the fine-tuning of the universe because that precedes any possible subsequent evolution of any alien being.
02:41:09.000That would be getting the cause-and-effect relationship reversed.
02:41:12.000But if there are alien beings on another planet, what does that do with your biblical interpretation of life?
02:41:19.000If there are far superior beings that in fact did come here and did manipulate human DNA and did create what we now think of as modern humans, if that becomes fact, And you still have to account for how were they created.
02:41:35.000You still have to account for the code.
02:41:37.000You still have to account for all these things you're saying about intelligent design.
02:41:41.000But what does that do for your interpretation of the biblical version of history if, in fact, there are some untold numbers of advanced civilizations?
02:41:53.000Yeah, again, I'm completely agnostic because the Bible tells us that we were made in the image of God with Capacities that reflect those of our Creator.
02:42:00.000It doesn't tell us that he didn't make other such beings on other planets.
02:42:04.000C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, wrote that wonderful space trilogy in which he speculates about other planets with other forms of life, with other forms of higher conscious life.
02:42:16.000So I don't think there is a biblical doctrine on that.
02:42:20.000So I'm completely agnostic and open on biblical grounds.
02:42:23.000And as a scientist, of course I'm interested.
02:42:28.000There's been two different lines of thinking about that.
02:42:30.000One, that there's so many universes and therefore likely solar systems that it's inevitable that we would have life someplace else.
02:42:40.000The other strain of thought that's a bit more recent is the idea that, yes, there's lots and lots of places where it could happen, but the number of parameters that would have to be The number of things that would have to be just right and the probability of getting each of those parameters is so small that even that two trillion galaxy universe is not enough to render the probability of getting life somewhere else.
02:43:52.000And that it is so big that not only does this Earth exist, but a version of this Earth where all the events exactly as they've taken place on Earth have taken place in space.
02:44:05.000On other planets an infinite number of times because you were talking about something that's so large.
02:44:21.000Of yous are out there in the world, and infinite numbers of yous presenting this exact same discussion.
02:44:28.000Or maybe there's a me arguing for panspermia.
02:44:31.000But what I'm saying is, it's even more complex than just simple intelligent design, but intelligent design on a scale that's so large that is happening simultaneously in so many places, so ubiquitous in the universe.
02:44:51.000That it's impossible for us to even quantify.
02:44:55.000Well, let me come back at you on this just a little bit.
02:44:59.000This is where the idea of the multiverse comes in because it happens that our universe actually has a quantifiable number of elementary particles and a limited number of interactions that could take place between the elementary particles and therefore an upper bound number of events that might have taken place from the Big Bang till now.
02:45:20.000And that's why the multiverse gets proposed because the multiverse proponents realize that what are called the probabilistic resources of this universe are not actually sufficient to render even the origin of life, and I have argued in Signature in the Cell,
02:45:47.000And if the theory that each galaxy, which contains a supermassive black hole, that inside that supermassive black hole, if you could somehow get through the event horizon, you would go to another universe that has hundreds of billions, if not trillions of galaxies as well.
02:46:02.000And that this is the portal, and this is the process that they all have.
02:46:07.000That there is just an infinite number of universes.
02:49:27.000John Marco Allegro, who was a scholar, a biblical scholar, and he was also an ordained minister who became agnostic when he started studying theology.
02:49:36.000He was one of the people that deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he worked with it over a period of 14 years deciphering it.
02:49:44.000And it's very controversial, but his interpretation of Christianity after reading these scrolls was that it was initially about psychedelic mushroom rituals and fertility rituals.
02:49:56.000And that this was what they were documenting in these ancient scrolls.
02:50:00.000And that what he believed is that these psychedelic mushrooms were what we thought of as mana or the host, the body of Christ, that these experiences were directly attributed to people taking these psychedelic mushrooms in these rituals.
02:50:19.000And many people have had psychedelic experiences, especially on psilocybin and on other very potent psychedelic drugs.
02:50:27.000Is that the acting agent within mushrooms that creates the psychedelic?
02:51:21.000These ancient rituals were how they connected to God and that they hid these from the conquering Romans and from all these different religions that wanted to impose their philosophies on them when the people were conquered.
02:51:36.000But they kept these parables and they kept these stories and they kept these legends of these experiences.
02:51:43.000And John Marco Allegro wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
02:52:02.000Joe, what was your experience of God as you were using those substances?
02:52:11.000I mean, I'm kind of joking around when I say it's God.
02:52:14.000What it seems like Is the root of everything.
02:52:19.000Like, when you have these experiences, they're so profound and so transformatory, so transformational.
02:52:30.000They have this impact on you where you enter into a realm of the impossible, and it's so easy to get to.
02:52:39.000It just doesn't take that long, and then all of a sudden you're there, especially through things like dimethyltryptamine, which is also endogenous in the human brain.
02:52:47.000If you can take that, you will be transported into a realm of impossible beauty, of geometric patterns that move and dance in front of you and you're confronted with some sort of intelligence.
02:53:04.000Some sort of intelligence that's beyond anything you could possibly comprehend in our material realm.
02:53:23.000There's a university in, I believe it's in London, that Graham Hancock was talking about, where they're putting these people on an IV drip of dimethyltryptamine.
02:53:38.000It's a very, very potent psychedelic, but the body brings it back to baseline very quickly because it's endogenous in the human body.
02:53:46.000It's one of the quickest drugs from the initial breakthrough experiences, which is insanely profound, to 15 minutes later you're completely sober.
02:54:01.000These people that are having these experiences, they're mapping out these experiences in this very new and profound way, where they're saying there might be some sort of chemical portal in the mind that can be activated through these psychedelic chemicals.
02:54:17.000And then you experience or perceive sort of transcendent beauty or...
02:54:24.000Overwhelming in a way that it's not...
02:54:27.000This is not like, you know, sitting in a field and feeling love.
02:54:31.000This is just an overwhelming thing that feels more real than reality itself.
02:54:37.000And it seems like you're kind of dipping your toe also into this infinite realm.
02:54:43.000You almost feel like you're in the waiting room.
02:54:46.000Like you can't really handle the whole thing.
02:54:49.000So having had an experience like that, you're not inclined to...
02:54:57.000You were saying there's something more.
02:55:00.000Well, anybody who hasn't had that experience that wants to diminish it or wants to somehow or another have a reductionist take of what it means to be a human being, I think you've had a limited amount of experiences, if you want to say that.
02:55:49.000Ben Stein got him to admit that no one had any idea how the first life had evolved from the chemical prebiotic soup.
02:55:58.000And then Stein asked him, Think about the possibility that intelligent design could be part of the answer.
02:56:05.000And then Dawkins speculated, maybe somewhat imprudently from his point of view, about, well, it might be, but it would have had to have been another alien being who evolved by a purely explicable process on some other planet.
02:56:21.000And then later, I think he came to wish he had not said that.
02:56:42.000And I think some of that bad trip is trying to control the trip because your ego sort of takes over and you try to like stop it because it's so overwhelming and scary.
02:56:52.000It's terrifying because it's a complete loss of control and reality melts down in front of you.
02:56:57.000Reminds me a little bit of the British philosopher A.J. Ayer, one of the great scientific, more of an atheistic philosopher, the founder of something called logical positivism.
02:57:11.000In 1986, 87, something like that, he had a near-death experience.
02:57:17.000And felt himself being drawn inexorably towards this malevolent red light and then kind of a sense of being drawn down into a maelstrom or a vortex.
02:57:29.000And then he was revived and wrote the whole thing up for, I think it was the National Review of all places.
02:57:36.000And at first he was sort of really affected by it, but then later he gave a reductionist account of it and said it was, you know...
02:57:48.000Loss of oxygen to the brain or something like that.
02:57:53.000I know a very dear friend in England who's had an experience while under the knife of not a near-death experience, but one where he felt an encounter with a deity in a probably drug-altered state of consciousness because he was being deeply anesthetized.
02:58:16.000I think these experiences are rather pervasive in human experience.
02:58:20.000Are you aware of these Brazilian churches that they practice Christianity, but they practice Christianity while consuming this psychedelic brew?
02:58:50.000Santo Daime is a Brazilian religion that makes elaborate use of ordering principles, techniques, and symbology to shape and direct the effects of the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca.
02:59:00.000So ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT. DMT is broken down in the gut by monoamine oxidase.
02:59:10.000And ayahuasca combines the leaves of one plant, which they do it in different ways in different parts of the world.
02:59:21.000One part of the brew contains dimethyltryptamine, and the other part of the brew contains a natural MAO inhibitor called harmine.
02:59:31.000And the two of them combine to this very elaborate brewing process, converts it to an orally active version of DMT. So with the MAO inhibitor and with the DMT, you take it, now it's orally active, and it's a slow-release trip of dimethyltryptamine.
02:59:47.000That instead of lasting for 15 minutes, it lasts for hours.
02:59:51.000And so this church combines Christianity with this psychedelic ritual.
02:59:58.000And I know people that have done it there.
03:00:27.000But I don't necessarily think you can put them into like this dangerous cult thing like the Buddhafield people that I was talking about earlier.
03:00:49.000I think they're really trying to connect with God and they believe they're doing that through this.
03:00:53.000And I'm just speaking for them and I probably shouldn't be.
03:00:55.000But I believe from my friends who have done it and have these experiences with this church.
03:01:01.000I think there's two churches in the United States that are allowed to do this.
03:01:04.000And I think they – again, they originated from Brazil where in the Amazon, this is where they first discovered this ayahuasca.
03:01:13.000You are definitely broadening my horizons because I had not heard of that.
03:01:18.000But I think anybody who's really truly religious and if you do go into the ancient history of – Mushroom symbolism and religious texts and how much connection there is to psychedelic rituals and ancient religious art.
03:01:36.000You know, Brian Murarescu, who wrote this fantastic book called The Immortality Key on the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece.
03:01:44.000Because of his work, because of this amazing book and because of more than a decade of research, they've now determined that there's actual physical proof that during the Eleusinian Mysteries, when they were involved in these rituals and they were drinking wine,
03:02:01.000that the wine they were drinking was laced with ergot, which is a very potent psychedelic drug.
03:02:06.000And they think it was laced with other psychedelics as well.
03:02:53.000There are more things under heaven and earth, Horatio, than are acknowledged in your philosophy, I think.
03:03:03.000I don't know anything about this, but the one thing I do know is that The default philosophy or worldview that we inherited from the late 19th century called scientific materialism is failing on multiple fronts.
03:03:18.000And stuff I've written is arguing that it can't explain the science.
03:03:22.000It was supposedly based on science, but it's not explaining the cutting-edge scientific discoveries.
03:03:29.000Dawkins has this wonderful way of framing the issue.
03:03:33.000He says that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect.
03:03:38.000If at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
03:03:45.000And blind, pitiless indifference is shorthand or his way of talking about purely undirected material processes, matter in motion, the molecules and the energy, and that's it.
03:03:54.000And the evolutionary process that ensues from it.
03:03:58.000But what is striking to me is that the big discoveries that we've made about where the universe came from, about the structure of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, the fact that the universe had a beginning, the complexity of life, the information stored in life,
03:04:15.000the information processing system in life, all of these things...
03:04:18.000Have turned out to be deeply surprising and unexpected from that perspective of the 19th century scientific materialism that we inherited and which has been popularized by people like Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss and even Stephen Hawking got into it in the end.
03:04:36.000This sort of so-called new atheism that was so popular around 07 through 2015 But I think is now waning.
03:04:45.000No materialist expected the universe to have a beginning.
03:04:50.000Einstein initially, before he adopted a less materialistic worldview, bent over backwards to try to circumvent the conclusion that there had been a Big Bang.
03:05:03.000The people confronted with the fine-tuning have invented the multiverse concept, but that hasn't actually solved the problem.
03:05:11.000And in the origin of life problem, they've punted the problem to outer space.
03:05:15.000So it's actually now the scientific atheism that's getting exotic and invoking extra ad hoc or auxiliary hypotheses to try to save the evidence where the theistic design view It has a sort of parsimony and elegance and simplicity to it as an explanation.
03:05:49.000My worldview is open to things beyond just the molecules and the atoms in front of me.
03:05:57.000And I think there have been big shifts in science and philosophy that are Putting materialism on the defensive and are opening people to spiritual realities that were not even considered in the late 19th century among elite intellectuals or among most elite intellectuals through the last hundred years.
03:06:18.000I think there's a real danger of being an elite intellectual and all agreeing upon a very specific thing that gives you social credit to sort of espouse.
03:06:32.000We've seen that in a lot of things, haven't we?
03:06:56.000And some infinite being that is also a part of a universe that's an atom and another infinite being?
03:07:04.000This is why I wrote Return of a God Hypothesis.
03:07:08.000In the first two books, the first book was Signature in the Cell about the origin of the first life.
03:07:13.000And I argued that the information-bearing properties of DNA and the information processing system that's present in even the very simplest cell It presents a profound challenge to the idea of undirected evolutionary processes.
03:07:28.000A mind had to be involved because what we know from our uniform and repeated experience is that whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we're talking about computer code or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal,
03:07:44.000we always come to a mind, not an undirected material process.
03:07:48.000The people looking for extraterrestrial intelligence with SETI, We're looking for information-rich sequences embedded, modulated, in a radio signal.
03:07:58.000And had they found them, they would have concluded, yes, there is definitely an extraterrestrial intelligence.
03:08:05.000But the presumption that information is a decisive indicator of prior intelligence is shared not just by theists or Christians.
03:08:14.000It was shared by the SETI people, you know, or ID people.
03:08:19.000But having made that argument, my readers then wanted to know, well, who do you think the designing intelligence is and what can science tell us about that?
03:08:27.000And what I do in the new book is look at competing metaphysical hypotheses.
03:08:34.000Theism, deism, pantheism, panentheism, space alienism, and good old-fashioned materialism, and then compare their explanatory power with respect to these big three things that science has discovered,
03:08:50.000that the universe had a beginning, that it's been finely tuned from the beginning, and that since the beginning, we've had these big infusions of new code into our biosphere that make new forms of life possible.
03:09:02.000I think theism provides the best overall explanation of that.
03:09:06.000But I do think it is a completely new day.
03:09:10.000It's the scientific materialism of the 19th century that's getting weird and exotic.
03:09:15.000And I think that's a way of saying that there must be something more than just these simplistic materialistic explanations that we have defined as coextensive with science such that we will not consider anything outside that box.
03:09:55.000The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, subtitle, and the first book was Signature in the Cell, DNA, and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.