The Michael Knowles Show - ＂Evolution Fails To Explain This＂ Michael & Intelligent Design ｜ Dr. Stephen C. Meyer

00:00:00.000 The shocking discovery of modern astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy, is that the universe,

00:00:05.860 as best we can tell for multiple reasons, had a beginning.

00:00:09.000 Everyone, if you pushed them far enough and you made them think, they would have to admit that.

00:00:12.660 There are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages.

00:00:16.740 How you get from what the primates do to what we do is a complete mystery.

00:00:21.200 It's a hugely unsolved mystery in evolutionary theory.

00:00:23.940 It's that information always arises from an intelligent source,

00:00:27.280 whether we're talking about computer code or a paragraph in a book or hieroglyphic inscription,

00:00:32.420 information is, in our experience, a product of intelligence.

00:00:35.700 Your description of that just gave me chills.

00:00:37.820 Let me unpack it a little bit. 0.99

00:00:49.960 When I was in school, the surest way to be called an idiot was to question the theory of evolution, 0.97

00:00:55.200 which is precisely what my guest, Dr. Stephen Meyer, has done. And he's done a lot more than 0.97

00:01:02.500 that. In fact, he's questioned a lot of everything, and he has a new movie out called The Story

00:01:06.180 of Everything. Steve, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me, Michael. It's great to

00:01:11.420 be here. I want to get to evolution. I want to get to the origin of life. I want to get to the

00:01:15.680 existence of God. I want to get to how you have contradicted the entire scientific and

00:01:21.100 philosophical establishment of the 20th century, but I want to start with evolution because

00:01:27.780 truly it was the unthinkable heresy for the entire duration of my schooling. And you come

00:01:37.300 out with a couple other friends. This would have been, what, 10, 15 years ago?

00:01:41.960 It goes back to the mid-90s.

00:01:43.300 Okay, it goes all the way back to the...

00:01:44.500 This craziness started, right?

00:01:46.060 And you say, actually, Darwin's wrong.

00:01:51.100 How's that? Well, an interesting little factoid is that now leading evolutionary biologists are

00:01:59.180 calling for a new theory of evolution. And they are calling for a new theory of evolution because

00:02:04.660 they recognize in their technical papers, if not more publicly, that the fundamental driver of the

00:02:13.960 Darwinian, the modern version of Darwinism, the neo-Darwinian theory, the mechanism of mutation

00:02:19.900 acting on, or natural selection acting on random mutations, lacks the creative power to generate

00:02:26.580 truly novel forms of life. There was a 2004 book published with MIT Press. Two leading

00:02:34.500 evolutionary biologists said that neo-Darwinism lacks any theory of the generative. It does a nice

00:02:40.000 job of explaining small-scale variation. It does a very poor job of explaining large-scale

00:02:46.780 morphological innovation, the origin of fundamentally new forms. And in 2016,

00:02:52.940 there was a conference at the Royal Society in London, convened by leading evolutionary

00:02:58.820 biologists who are dissatisfied with the standard so-called neo-Darwinian synthesis.

00:03:06.100 Well, I've always considered myself a paleo-Darwinian.

00:03:08.980 You're a paleo-Darwinian. Go back further to 1859.

00:03:11.580 Because there are these different shades of evolutionary theories.

00:03:15.760 There's Darwin, there's Lamarck, there's what Darwin actually wrote, there's what modern

00:03:20.380 Darwinians actually think, and they all have problems.

00:03:25.740 Right.

00:03:26.660 They all have problems, but the fundamental problem is the origin of novel form.

00:03:32.120 The mechanism that we learn about in high school and college biology classes, natural

00:03:36.200 selection acting on random variations or mutations does a really nice job of explaining small-scale

00:03:42.260 variation, the finch beaks that get a little bigger or smaller among the Galapagos finches,

00:03:47.360 the variations in coloration of the famous peppered moths in England and with the so-called

00:03:52.560 industrial melanism.

00:03:54.040 It's the same set of examples.

00:03:55.740 You always get antibiotic resistance, but fundamental innovation where you get new body

00:04:01.560 plans, new organs, new anatomical structure. The mechanism does not do a good job of that.

00:04:07.900 And there's some very good reasons for that that are recognized in the literature in biology

00:04:13.520 broadly, but also even within the more specialized sub-discipline of evolutionary biology. And so

00:04:19.020 this 2016 conference convened at the Royal Society in London, arguably the most august

00:04:25.860 a scientific body in the world, was featured evolutionary biologists calling for a new theory

00:04:32.320 and exploring, looking for some other evolutionary mechanisms that would provide the creative power

00:04:41.420 that is not provided by mutation and selection. But oddly, at the end of the conference, one of

00:04:45.980 the conveners characterized the conference for its lack of momentousness. And essentially,

00:04:51.340 she said this was Susan Mazur. She was essentially, I think, alluding to the fact that the conferees

00:04:57.320 did a very good job of characterizing the problems with the standard theory, the receive theory,

00:05:01.860 but did not come up with any mechanisms that had the power to generate body plans and fundamental

00:05:09.260 changes in living systems. Because this is the evolution of someone learning about evolution,

00:05:18.840 but also taking the existence of God seriously

00:05:21.800 and taking deeper philosophical problems seriously as well.

00:05:25.600 Seems to be, you learn about Darwin in school

00:05:29.680 and you're told that everything has come about

00:05:32.300 because of natural selection working on randomization.

00:05:34.960 Undirected natural processes.

00:05:36.540 Yes, exactly.

00:05:37.500 The indifference of this cold material.

00:05:39.540 Right, right.

00:05:40.100 Blind, pitiless indifference is the famous Dawkins phrase.

00:05:42.600 Yes, yes.

00:05:43.760 And then you say, okay, well,

00:05:45.880 uh, look, maybe God exists and God is just using evolution. Evolution is an expression of how God

00:05:54.120 creates the world. And then you start to say, well, hold on, evolution seems to have trouble,

00:05:59.760 uh, creating new species, but it can change the length of your fingers or whatever. And

00:06:06.720 so you keep, you keep, on the one hand, the, the materialists and the Darwinists accuse us of being

00:06:14.880 god of the gaps kind of, or, you know, but then I think we could probably accuse them of being

00:06:20.260 science of the gaps. Well, or materialism of the gaps, right? There's got to be a materialistic

00:06:24.760 explanation for everything. That's a pre-commitment of many scientists. But what if you're looking at

00:06:29.940 features in the living world or in the universe that are characteristic of the activity of

00:06:35.960 intelligent agents? And then maybe we need to amend that rule a bit and follow the evidence

00:06:42.800 where it leads. But yeah, the evolution of study and thinking about evolution is exactly what you

00:06:48.500 described. I've been through it myself. But even the first step, the idea that God is using the

00:06:58.460 evolutionary process to create, is itself a bit problematic. For one, if you're affirming

00:07:06.040 Darwinian evolution, the idea of natural selection acting on random variations and mutations,

00:07:11.820 the Darwinian mechanism,

00:07:13.420 was designed as a designer substitute mechanism.

00:07:17.020 And there's a way to get your head around this.

00:07:19.720 If you think of,

00:07:21.460 this would be an archetypal Darwinian example.

00:07:24.260 Imagine that there are some,

00:07:26.740 you're a ranch,

00:07:27.940 or you're a shepherd in the far north of Scotland,

00:07:30.900 and you want to breed a woolier breed of sheep.

00:07:33.540 Well, what do you do?

00:07:34.440 Well, you choose the wooliest males 0.52

00:07:36.620 and the wooliest females and allow only them to breed.

00:07:39.480 And then you would do that through successive generations

00:07:42.460 and you get a very woolly breed of sheep.

00:07:44.600 This is a well-known phenomenon,

00:07:47.620 going back to biblical times, called artificial selection.

00:07:52.520 But at the end of the day,

00:07:54.960 if you're in a cold climate like the far north of Scotland

00:07:56.940 and you've got a very woolly sheep,

00:07:59.320 now you've got a sheep that's well adapted to its environment.

00:08:02.680 And in the 19th century, biologists thought

00:08:04.700 the strongest evidence of design in nature or in life

00:08:08.820 was the adaptation of organisms to their environment that they, you know, birds live in the air,

00:08:14.200 they have wings, allow them to fly, fish live underwater, they have gills and so forth.

00:08:20.140 So now Darwin comes along and he says, the sheep example is my own, but he had several like it.

00:08:26.360 And he says, well, let's imagine that instead of the artificial selection of the breeder,

00:08:31.940 we have a series of very cold winters so that only the wooliest sheep survive.

00:08:38.100 Now, at the end of, say, 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever winters,

00:08:42.100 we're going to get the same outcome.

00:08:43.100 We're going to get a very woolly breed of sheep,

00:08:45.100 and now that sheep is well adapted to the environment.

00:08:49.100 Right.

00:08:50.100 And so now we've got the same outcome.

00:08:52.100 We've got design, the appearance of design, adaptation,

00:08:56.100 but without a designer.

00:08:58.100 Instead of artificial selection, we have natural selection.

00:09:02.100 We have nature doing the work.

00:09:04.100 So now why is that important?

00:09:05.100 important well when we when we want to sort of baptize darwinism and say that this is god's way

00:09:09.900 of of um of creating that the the the the proper darwinists will bristle and say no no no as darwin

00:09:18.280 himself did and say no that's you're missing the whole point we're getting rid of any intelligent

00:09:22.440 activity in the creation of new biological form and so it's nature doing the selecting not not god

00:09:29.020 it's it's an attempt to explain the appearance of design without a designer and that's very

00:09:33.620 actually very hard to reconcile with any meaningful form of theism.

00:09:36.980 When I was learning about this in school, and the last time I studied this seriously

00:09:42.380 was probably the eighth grade, so it never got very advanced, though I never got better

00:09:48.160 answers even from my friends in college or elsewhere.

00:09:53.320 The argument was, look, we can see the evidence of natural selection in all of these species

00:09:57.500 and all these places of the earth, but we have no idea how life began in the first place.

00:10:03.620 I said, well, listen to me. What am I? I'm a layman. That seems like a big problem for your theory.

00:10:09.340 It seems like a big deal, right, yeah.

00:10:10.200 And the last I heard was that there was this, the leading theory is there's a primordial soup, and a bunch of molecules were batting into each other.

00:10:21.780 And then just one day, I don't know, enough molecules hit each other that you got a life form, a single cell or something.

00:10:28.360 And scientists had tried to recreate these conditions and various beakers and petri dishes, and they've been successful.

00:10:37.360 But there were problems with the methodology, and they were tainted with germs or whatever.

00:10:43.020 And so, but anyway, we're pretty sure.

00:10:45.860 Something like this is what explains it all.

00:10:48.920 That's how you go from inorganic to organic.

00:10:50.840 And then you get natural selection kicking in, and all the new forms arise, right?

00:10:55.120 Yes.

00:10:55.320 Yeah. So, right. This is what I did my PhD on. It was the origin of life biology. And I was working in the late 80s in Cambridge on this. At the time, it was pretty widely acknowledged, including by one of my PhD examiners that origin of life research had reached an impasse.

00:11:13.720 She came back from the 1989 ISOL conference saying to me, 0.99

00:11:20.520 Steve, our field has become populated with cranks and quacks. 1.00

00:11:24.660 And I hate to say this, but the problem is everyone knows that everyone else's theory doesn't work, 1.00

00:11:31.080 but they're unwilling to admit it about their own.

00:11:34.520 And things have gotten no better in the ensuing almost now 30 years.

00:11:40.340 And the problem is that, as Jim Tour, the organic chemist from Rice, has pointed out,

00:11:45.140 is that with each passing decade, we learn more and more about the complexity of life.

00:11:51.320 And if you want to explain the origin of life, you have to know what life is like,

00:11:55.200 you know, what it's made of.

00:11:56.720 And at the time of Darwin, when people first started thinking about the origin of the first life,

00:12:01.140 because Darwin didn't, he had one little passage in a letter to a friend

00:12:05.960 where he speculated about life beginning in a warm little pond.

00:12:08.900 But his famous bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, started to formulate ideas about the origin of the first life.

00:12:16.900 And he was famous for saying that the cell is a simple, homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.

00:12:27.360 That's my wife's nickname for me, by the way.

00:12:29.400 Homogeneous? 1.00

00:12:30.260 Homogeneous globule full of undifferentiated protoplasm.

00:12:33.260 So, when scientists thought that life was very simple, that it was just a chemical goo,

00:12:39.900 then it was easy to imagine that the essence of life might have arisen as a result of a

00:12:44.340 few simple chemical reactions.

00:12:46.760 But that view of life did not hold.

00:12:50.020 And by the time you get to the 1950s and 60s and 70s, in this period that historians of

00:12:55.260 science now call the molecular biological revolution, and scientists are learning that

00:12:59.360 Inside living cells, there are large, what are called macromolecules, biomacromolecules

00:13:06.180 that contain digital information, and that that information is part of a larger information

00:13:13.940 processing system that involves nanomachinery, and that the cell as a whole can be characterized

00:13:20.580 as something like an automated factory.

00:13:23.180 Explaining how that arose through a few simple chemical reactions becomes very, very much

00:13:28.180 more difficult.

00:13:28.700 And so that's the real problem today. It's the problem in both branches of evolutionary theory. Where does the information come from that's needed to build new forms? To build biological form, you need information. And the key question in The Origin of Life is, where did the information in the DNA come from?

00:13:48.980 Right. And, I mean, at a very basic level, how is it information?

00:13:54.520 Right.

00:13:54.740 You know, the very fact that it has meaning, that is intelligible, the very fact that the

00:14:01.060 world is intelligible, would seem to suggest to my totally scientifically illiterate, but

00:14:07.260 moderately philosophically interested mind, it would seem to suggest that there is an

00:14:13.040 intelligence that is outside of us.

00:14:14.800 Let me unpack it a little bit. 1953, Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule.

00:14:22.320 By this time, most scientists are suspecting that DNA has something to do with the transmission of

00:14:26.320 hereditary information. And they unpack the structure. Famous paper, you know, nature,

00:14:33.600 April 25, 1953, they announced they've unlocked the secret of life. Five years later, 57, 58,

00:14:41.360 Francis Crick, upon deeper reflection on all this, realizes that the DNA has this beautiful

00:14:49.180 double helix structure, and on the inside there are these chemical subunits called bases or

00:14:54.340 nucleotide bases. And Crick realizes that these bases are functioning like alphabetic characters

00:15:00.120 in a written language or like digital characters, like the zeros and ones in the section of machine

00:15:05.420 code or computer code. And they are collectively providing instructions for other machinery in the

00:15:13.060 cell to produce the proteins and protein machines that are needed to keep cells alive. So you've got

00:15:19.240 digital information producing three-dimensional, even mechanical structures inside life. And so

00:15:28.460 you've got an advanced form of digital nanotechnology. And initially, people think,

00:15:36.060 oh, this helps explain where the mutations occur. But then they start thinking, wait a minute,

00:15:41.160 we know where the information is, we know what it does, but we don't know where it came from.

00:15:48.260 And as you think just in a deeply philosophical way, just ask yourself the question or scientific

00:15:57.440 What do we know about the origin of information?

00:15:59.440 Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program,

00:16:01.440 but much more complex than any we've ever created.

00:16:04.440 Richard Dawkins himself has acknowledged

00:16:07.440 that DNA is like a machine code.

00:16:11.440 Again, computer code.

00:16:12.440 Well, where does computer code come from?

00:16:14.440 Where does software come from?

00:16:15.440 It comes from a programmer.

00:16:16.440 It's a product.

00:16:17.440 It's a mind product.

00:16:18.440 It's a product of intelligence.

00:16:19.440 And so what we know from our uniform and repeated experience,

00:16:24.440 which is the basis of all scientific reasoning,

00:16:26.440 is that information always arises from an intelligent source,

00:16:30.440 whether we're talking about computer code or a paragraph in a book or hieroglyphic inscription

00:16:35.440 or the information transmitted as we're talking or across a radio signal,

00:16:43.440 information is, in our experience, a product of intelligence.

00:16:47.440 And so there have been numerous attempts to explain the origin of the information

00:16:50.440 necessary to produce life apart from intelligence.

00:16:54.440 This is what my book, Signature in the Cell, was all about and documented.

00:16:58.360 But these different attempts have failed, and for very good reasons that we could talk about and explain.

00:17:04.360 But what is left standing is our knowledge based on our uniform experience, which is that information is a product of mind.

00:17:12.580 So this discovery of information at the foundation of life is a powerful indicator of the activity of a designing mind in the history and origin of life.

00:17:22.840 But if I give a monkey a typewriter and I leave him on a long enough time scale, he will compose.

00:17:29.580 He'll certainly compose my first book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.

00:17:32.180 He'll do that immediately.

00:17:33.120 But he'll compose the works of Shakespeare eventually.

00:17:36.100 And so wouldn't the materialist come back and say, well, yes, we're all astounded by the complexity of nature and all these data that we find in the nucleotides.

00:17:46.100 How cool is that?

00:17:47.120 But it's just because of natural processes.

00:17:49.820 I like how you've mastered the lingo already.

00:17:51.280 you see. Don't tell me you can't do science. You know, I'm very good at mimicking. I don't

00:17:58.180 know about storing the information, but they would tell you, okay, on a long enough time

00:18:04.220 scale, nature will achieve this. So I don't know how long it would take the monkey to

00:18:09.160 write Shakespeare. Maybe it would be 500,000 years or 500 million years. Could you calculate

00:18:15.320 how long it would take nature to- Well, it turns out to be a math problem, actually,

00:18:18.260 interestingly enough. And I did the math in my first book on the origin of life, Signature in

00:18:25.240 the Cell. In the early 50s, the chance hypothesis was still taken seriously among origin of life

00:18:32.940 researchers, people that were thinking seriously about this problem. There was a famous scientist,

00:18:38.260 George Wald, who said that time is the hero of the plot. And that if you have enough time,

00:18:42.980 enough chances, enough opportunities. Chance is a plausible explanation. But the molecular

00:18:49.460 biological revolution that I've been describing kind of changed all that because the amount of

00:18:54.280 information stored in even a modest length protein defies what are called the probabilistic

00:19:01.940 resources of the entire universe. The point past which appeals to chance become implausible. Let

00:19:09.920 Let me give a simple example.

00:19:12.700 Chance can be a reasonable explanation

00:19:14.620 under certain circumstances.

00:19:17.060 If there's, maybe there's a bike outside the building here

00:19:20.240 and it's locked with a standard four dial lock.

00:19:23.000 If a thief comes along and wants to open it by chance,

00:19:28.600 if he only has five minutes

00:19:30.300 before your excellent security people

00:19:32.020 come around the corner,

00:19:33.440 it's more likely than not that he will fail by chance.

00:19:37.580 So that means that the chance hypothesis

00:19:39.920 likely to be false than true, okay? Now if he's got more time, and I've actually

00:19:45.320 made this calculation for a four dial lock with 10 seconds per spin, if in

00:19:52.760 about 15 hours the thief could sample more than half those 10,000

00:19:57.560 combinations, in that case the chance hypothesis becomes more likely to

00:20:01.040 be true than false, okay? In the case of the specific arrangement of the

00:20:07.700 amino acids in a modest length functional protein, there are not enough events from

00:20:15.180 the beginning of the universe till now to have sampled more than half the possible combinations

00:20:20.320 because you've got 20 times 20 times 20 times 20 times 20 possibilities running out to 150 sites.

00:20:27.580 Right. So I won't go into all the math on the show, but I do it in the book. And here's the

00:20:32.080 thing. It's not controversial. There is no serious origin of life researcher today who thinks that

00:20:37.660 the chance hypothesis is plausible. They're looking for other types of materialistic explanations,

00:20:44.800 not relying on chance. As we're sitting here in outer space, well, it kind of looks like outer

00:20:49.180 space and it also looks like the double-edged set. There's even a DNA molecule there. Kudos to your

00:20:54.120 set designers. They're good. They are intelligent designers. Beautiful. But as we sit here and I'm

00:20:59.880 looking at outer space, there's an issue that has really divided the daily wire, specifically me

00:21:06.360 from my colleague, Matt Walsh.

00:21:07.840 Okay.

00:21:08.640 He believes in aliens.

00:21:10.920 I do not believe in aliens.

00:21:13.040 And regardless of what one thinks about E.T.

00:21:16.480 and Little Green Men,

00:21:18.120 the thing that drives me the craziest

00:21:19.800 whenever I mention anything

00:21:21.700 about the supposed aliens

00:21:23.140 is I say,

00:21:25.300 I don't see any evidence for them.

00:21:27.500 And people tell me,

00:21:28.760 Michael, the universe is just so big,

00:21:31.040 the odds that life

00:21:32.520 wouldn't spring up somewhere else,

00:21:34.660 I mean, it's zero.

00:21:35.360 There's so much to say about this, Michael.

00:21:37.220 Yes, and it drives me.

00:21:38.620 I want to put my head through a wall when I say this.

00:21:41.540 And what do I know?

00:21:42.860 I don't know anything about probability.

00:21:44.460 But I said, it seems to me if we are to ascertain the probability of something,

00:21:50.960 we need to know anything at all about how it comes about.

00:21:55.020 And if you can't do that, then you can't possibly ascertain whether or not something is likely.

00:21:59.800 Am I crazy?

00:22:01.380 You're not crazy.

00:22:02.060 Let me answer the question you didn't ask first, and then I'll segue to answer the other one, okay?

00:22:06.760 Because what is really fascinating in the origin of life discussion is that very serious scientists, biologists,

00:22:13.380 no less a figure than Francis Crick himself, have posited an alien origin of life that they then propose was transported here to planet Earth.

00:22:26.560 Why?

00:22:26.800 Because the conditions on the early Earth were not hospitable to the spontaneous chemical evolutionary origin of life, or even the slow and gradual chemical evolutionary origin of life.

00:22:37.040 And so instead, they've posited that life might have arisen on another planet designed by an alien intelligence.

00:22:47.100 Why designed?

00:22:47.940 Well, when Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins about whether there was a possibility that intelligent design could be part of the answer to the origin of life problem, which Dawkins acknowledged is a problem, he speculated that, well, maybe there, he said, there is a signature of intelligence, but it must have had, it must have arisen by an intelligence in outer space.

00:23:11.220 Well, that solves it.

00:23:11.980 Yeah, that's, well, it doesn't, of course, because there's no accounting for where the information ultimately came from.

00:23:17.940 In space, it just doesn't kick the can down the road.

00:23:20.300 It kicks it into outer space.

00:23:22.260 But this is the so-called panspermia theory.

00:23:25.500 But it shows you just how deep the impasse is in origin of life research as far as people

00:23:30.480 trying to explain the origin of life from undirected chemical evolutionary processes.

00:23:34.640 That one, though, I've had friends who have presented that idea to me.

00:23:37.700 They say, you know, I don't believe in God.

00:23:40.300 That's crazy.

00:23:41.020 I just believe in a big God-shaped alien.

00:23:43.920 You say, well, all right, that's a lot more credible.

00:23:45.900 Okay, sure.

00:23:46.460 Well, that's still an intelligent design hypothesis, right?

00:23:49.360 Yes.

00:23:49.940 The problem with that hypothesis is, well, first of all, there's never any specificity about how the information came from.

00:23:56.560 It's not clear whether they're saying the alien designed the genetic information or whether the alien simply transported what had evolved on some other planet.

00:24:05.040 And it's usually the latter, which means they haven't solved the information problem.

00:24:08.540 Of course.

00:24:09.000 But now back to your other question.

00:24:11.360 Yes.

00:24:12.360 Solving for the alien.

00:24:13.500 Where did the alien come from in the first place?

00:24:15.100 Exactly, because we also have this problem of fine-tuning. The universe is exquisitely fine-tuned in its basic physical parameters and properties. And that fine-tuning has been present from the very beginning of the universe. And it's an absolutely necessary condition of any future possible evolution of life. So no alien within the universe could be the explanation for the origin of the fine-tuning upon which its subsequent evolution would depend.

00:24:40.980 Right. Nor could the alien explain the origin of the universe itself. So it's a bad overall theory of biological and cosmological origins. But this whole question about, well, is life inevitable somewhere in the universe? And it's a numerator and denominator problem. If you can go back to just basic math, it is true that the universe is vast beyond anything we had any inkling of even 100 years ago.

00:25:07.740 In Return of the God Hypothesis, I used the figure 200 billion galaxies, and I was wrong.

00:25:16.200 It's actually, the more current estimate is closer to 2 trillion.

00:25:21.260 So you weren't only a little wrong.

00:25:23.360 Everyone wasn't only a little wrong.

00:25:24.660 Order of magnitude.

00:25:25.740 What's an order of magnitude among friends in physics, right?

00:25:29.000 But so, yeah, the universe is vast.

00:25:31.780 There's lots of places where life could have evolved.

00:25:33.820 But the problem is that people who just simply assert that are not reckoning on the number of parameters and the improbability associated with each to make a life-friendly universe to start with.

00:25:50.040 Just one of the fine-tuning parameters, the initial entropy of the universe, calculated by Sir Roger Penrose as one chance in 10 to the 10 to the 123.

00:26:02.400 it's a hyper-exponential number you can't there's not even enough elementary particles in the

00:26:08.180 universe to represent the zeros in that number it's it's just ridiculous you know so you have

00:26:13.300 you have this ensemble of cosmic fine-tuning parameters that have to be just right and then

00:26:19.100 you have to have the all the localized fine-tuning parameters to get a life-friendly solar system

00:26:26.060 and planetary system, and so when you do the math, the localized fine-tuning parameters are more

00:26:33.060 relevant to assessing whether there would be life somewhere else in the universe, but they end up

00:26:37.180 dwarfing. The improbability of that ends up dwarfing the probabilistic resources provided by

00:26:43.000 the two trillion galaxies, at least in the reckoning of an increasing number of physicists.

00:26:50.500 This is at least now a very active area of debate.

00:26:57.060 There was a book years ago in the mid-2000s by two astronomers at the University of Washington called Rare Earth.

00:27:04.420 Two colleagues of mine a few years later wrote a book called Privileged Planet.

00:27:09.040 And apparently a new book out by some Italian physicists making the same point that, yeah, big universe,

00:27:15.500 but the probabilities are so small that even this vast universe doesn't render life inevitable.

00:27:22.800 And again, even in a very favorable planetary environment like ours,

00:27:28.020 we have no explanation for where the origin of the first cell came from

00:27:32.880 and the origin of the information necessary to build it.

00:27:35.960 So the complexity of life dwarfs the vastness of the universe in that kind of a calculation.

00:27:43.620 But then when you tell people that, I don't say it verbatim as you did. It was a little more eloquent than my version of it. But when I tell people that, they say, so you just think we're special? That's what it comes down. What you think, this vast universe that we cannot possibly even begin to fathom, you just think that we're special? And my answer is...

00:28:05.880 Yes. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that? Yeah.

00:28:08.380 And what's your evidence to the contrary?

00:28:09.680 Right. Right.

00:28:10.360 Right. From everything that I know, we're the only meat creature that can reason and receive

00:28:18.460 universals in our intellect, which by all accounts appears to be a power, a spiritual power of a

00:28:24.960 rational soul. Right. That's pretty special to me. The qualitative differences between humans and

00:28:30.680 other, even the highest primates are staggering and they're obvious and we hardly ever talk about

00:28:38.440 them. Yeah. And the primates surely don't talk about it. They surely don't. And, you know,

00:28:44.360 this problem of the origin of language, which has been a persistent problem for evolutionary theory

00:28:49.640 and has been acknowledged by people who are otherwise disinclined toward theistic belief,

00:28:56.320 like Noam Chomsky. Yeah. You know, how do you get a language going without a language to

00:29:01.060 determine what the language will be? Or to put it more precisely, how do you get a symbol

00:29:06.540 convention established without an agreed symbol convention by which to establish the tokens of

00:29:13.540 the symbol convention. It's quite, you could conceivably get to simple sort of nouns by

00:29:21.440 pointing and grunting and stimulus response. This was the Skinnerian idea of the origin of language,

00:29:27.420 which was closely aligned with Darwinism before Chomsky came along. You know, if I point at this,

00:29:32.920 Now, am I saying, and I say table, does table mean gold?

00:29:37.540 Does it mean the object that's holding up the glasses?

00:29:42.600 Does it refer to the glitter?

00:29:44.360 I mean, there's any number of things that...

00:29:46.220 Does it refer to the act of tapping?

00:29:47.580 Does it refer to the act of tapping?

00:29:49.160 Maybe it's a verb, not a noun that I'm trying to get across.

00:29:51.940 That's a simple problem.

00:29:53.380 How do you get across with, in a stimulus response evolutionary system,

00:29:59.640 How do you get across the idea of something like what I would have done, the subjunctive tense, or what you should have done, Michael, the imperative?

00:30:11.240 These things are difficult to convey.

00:30:12.900 What I will have done tomorrow.

00:30:14.620 Exactly.

00:30:15.360 The future perfect.

00:30:17.420 See, I didn't take those courses.

00:30:19.860 You did.

00:30:20.820 You just wasted your time on science.

00:30:22.960 Yeah, linguistics and languages, Latin.

00:30:27.540 But every single human language has this complexity and suppleness of expression, all the tenses and the declensions and so forth.

00:30:42.820 So this was Chomsky's, his mantra, there are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages.

00:30:53.980 And how you get from what the primates do to what we do is a complete mystery.

00:31:01.880 It is not, it's a hugely unsolved mystery in evolutionary theory.

00:31:05.540 I do get a kick.

00:31:06.700 But it underscores our uniqueness as well.

00:31:08.840 And I like, though I know it's erroneous to appeal to authority, and in this way I'm kind of doing, in a way I'm appealing to the opposite of an authority because Chomsky's wrong about everything, but he's pretty good on language.

00:31:20.300 And I like that people who don't share my priors about a lot of things increasingly seem to be coming to the same dilemmas.

00:31:29.880 Making concessions about really fundamental issues.

00:31:32.080 Yes, that's right.

00:31:32.860 Go to goodranchers.com, use code Knowles. The weather is warming up. Grilling season is here.

00:31:38.840 and if you're like me,

00:31:40.780 you're planning out every one of your delicious steaks

00:31:43.380 that you're going to cook throughout the year.

00:31:44.620 Frankly, you don't need to wait until grilling time

00:31:47.520 because the only debate that sweet little Alisa and I have 0.90

00:31:51.060 over our meat is whether we're going to grill it

00:31:54.280 or cook it in the pan.

00:31:55.640 It's Good Ranchers. 0.99

00:31:56.740 That goes without saying.

00:31:58.040 The Good Ranchers,

00:31:58.900 I just had a delicious Good Ranchers New York strip

00:32:01.380 the other night.

00:32:02.560 Sweet Little Lisa, she said,

00:32:03.540 Mac, I'm a little worried I overcooked it a little bit.

00:32:06.000 It was great.

00:32:07.180 But the great thing about Good Ranchers,

00:32:08.460 Even if you do overcook it a little bit, it doesn't matter.

00:32:10.280 The meat is so, so good.

00:32:11.600 The cuts that I'm strongly recommending to you right now,

00:32:14.480 obviously the Wagyu burgers are the best you're ever going to have.

00:32:16.860 Also, the bone and ribeye out of this world.

00:32:19.620 The filet mignon out of this world.

00:32:21.600 Then add on all the other stuff too.

00:32:23.320 The chicken nuggets for the kids with that.

00:32:24.700 Seed oils and for you, by the way.

00:32:26.640 It's just amazing.

00:32:27.520 They have custom boxes now.

00:32:28.760 You don't need a preset box.

00:32:30.440 Make your own box.

00:32:31.500 Add what you want to it.

00:32:32.560 It's just magnificent.

00:32:33.700 Best prices, best meat.

00:32:35.420 All American ranchers.

00:32:36.560 No weird stuff shot into your food.

00:32:38.100 When you subscribe, you get to choose a free meat that will be included in every single box for the life of your subscription with code Knowles.

00:32:44.440 Get $25 off your first order.

00:32:45.960 Free meat for life, $25 off your first order.

00:32:48.260 Use code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, at GoodRanchers.com.

00:32:50.820 GoodRanchers.com.

00:32:51.760 American meat delivered.

00:32:54.100 So, okay, to take it all the way back to the beginning, which you touched on just a moment ago,

00:32:58.700 the fine-tuning of the universe all the way from the very beginning of the universe,

00:33:02.620 which itself cannot really be explained in some naturalistic way.

00:33:06.020 as a boy i was told that there was this thing called the big bang right and if you were one 0.96

00:33:12.540 of these religious kooks who didn't believe in the big bang uh you were just a big dummy and

00:33:17.100 there was no hope for you and so then i just did a little modicum of research into the big bang 0.94

00:33:22.980 and i discovered it was um posited by a catholic priest father george lemaitre lemaitre and i said

00:33:30.600 well that i'm pretty sure he believed in god yeah it depends on which order of the cow you know

00:33:34.700 the Jesuits are one. But anyway, I think Lemaitre believed in God, and indeed, it was called the

00:33:41.460 Big Bang as a kind of mockery, a term of derision to make way for God in this scientific theory.

00:33:48.700 We tell that story in the film because Fred Hoyle, who was early in his career a staunch

00:33:53.820 scientific atheist, despised the Big Bang. Actually, one of the astronomers, cosmologists

00:34:02.180 in the film, Brian Keating actually mentioned that Hoyle thought that the Big Bang had been

00:34:09.000 formulated because the cosmologists were relying too much on the Genesis 1-1 narrative, which he

00:34:14.900 then said was laughable because, of course, the bias in science was heading in the entirely

00:34:20.100 other direction at the time. But right. So, yeah, it's a fascinating story. Lemaître

00:34:25.980 synthesizes two lines of evidence. Einstein is thinking about his new theory of gravity

00:34:33.940 and realizes that it can't be the whole of the story, that there's got to be an outward pushing

00:34:38.020 force to counteract gravity, to account for the empty space in the universe. So the theoretical

00:34:44.300 physics of Einstein is suggesting an outward pushing, an expanding universe outward from a

00:34:51.560 beginning point. Einstein initially doesn't like it, but it has to come around. And then, um, and

00:34:58.200 then the, the, the astronomers are discovering that the light coming from the distant galaxies

00:35:03.200 is, is stretched out and which is indicated by a, a, a change in its, its wavelength. It, and it,

00:35:13.220 it looks redder than it should otherwise look if the galaxies are, um, a constant distance away from

00:35:20.580 us. So you've got this evidence from observational astronomy suggesting that the universe is

00:35:25.240 expanding, the galaxies are receding from us in every quadrant of the night sky, and Einstein's

00:35:30.880 theory implies the same thing. And Father Lemaitre pulls these two lines of evidence together and

00:35:37.040 formulates what's now known as the Big Bang Theory. Now, he doesn't do this on the basis of

00:35:42.400 the Genesis 1-1 account. In fact, he was a bit of a compartmentalist, a NOMA guy. He said,

00:35:49.820 keep the science and the religion separate.

00:35:52.180 Yeah, I recall that he quite resisted, actually. 0.71

00:35:54.520 He did.

00:35:55.040 He actually resisted this,

00:35:56.580 but the connections between the two are obvious.

00:35:59.980 First of all, there's an affirmation of a creation event.

00:36:04.400 Yeah.

00:36:04.860 And secondly, there's a kind of confirmation

00:36:07.940 of the first words of the book of Genesis,

00:36:10.120 which is that there was a beginning.

00:36:11.640 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

00:36:14.120 So this sets off a fascinating century-long dialectic in cosmology where many, many astronomers and physicists and cosmologists have resisted the Big Bang theory precisely because it challenges a materialistic understanding of the cosmos, which presupposes that the universe is made of material stuff, matter and energy that is eternal and self-existent and has always been here.

00:36:40.900 So there's also this kind of irony that a lot of religious people think that the Big Bang is contrary to a theistic worldview or to a concept of creation, but in a way it's the ultimate creationist theory.

00:36:54.440 Yes. I had a friend of mine, a very serious evangelical Protestant, and he was invading against me, this was many years ago, for believing in the Big Bang. I said, look, I'm not, it's not a matter of dogma for me. I don't totally scientifically illiterate. But I said, you know, it was formulated by a Catholic priest. And I don't know, it seems to jive pretty well with Genesis. So yes, people resist it because it's science-y.

00:37:21.740 Well, the confusion, Michael, comes in when people think that the scientists are saying

00:37:26.620 that the Big Bang is the cause of everything, that it is the creator, it's the first cause.

00:37:33.220 But the Big Bang is not a theory of the first cause, it's a theory of the first effect.

00:37:37.760 Of course.

00:37:39.300 There's a fancy word in philosophy of science, a retrodiction.

00:37:42.400 You're inferring backwards in time to the first effect, to the place where all the physical

00:37:47.620 stuff comes out of, well, we're not sure. Certainly not something physical. So it becomes

00:37:57.100 profoundly anti-materialistic because independent of the hot, dense starting point, independent

00:38:07.540 of all the matter and energy of the universe, there is no matter, there is no space, there

00:38:13.060 is no time. So something that transcends those dimensions is a better explanation of the origin

00:38:21.140 of matter than matter itself. Matter can't explain its own origin. That's the problem.

00:38:27.780 People have tried to, like the materialists and the libs have tried, and I've only seen

00:38:32.580 this in popular writing, but they say, well, no, you know what happens is you have the singularity

00:38:36.180 of this really hot, dense starting point, and it expands into the cosmos as we know it,

00:38:42.580 And then eventually it's going to contract again, collapse, and rinse and repeat.

00:38:46.480 It's going to come down.

00:38:47.120 Or they'll say, well, yeah.

00:38:48.840 It's known as the oscillating universe model.

00:38:50.780 And it, by the mid-80s, was dismissed on physical grounds.

00:38:55.960 Which is, of course, why?

00:38:56.840 Not enough matter in the universe, even counting the dark matter, to cause a re-collapse.

00:39:00.580 Even if you got a re-collapse, you would have no energy available left to do work.

00:39:05.720 The entropy buildup would mean that you wouldn't get a subsequent expansion.

00:39:10.320 So that was one of many cosmological models that attempted to retain the idea of an infinite universe, temporally infinite, and the one before it was known as the steady state, and I'll tell you there's a whole suite of new models being formulated because the mind of the mathematician and the physicist is infinitely creative, and there has been an impulse to try to retain the idea that the universe is infinite.

00:39:40.320 in duration. If the universe has always been here, we don't need to think about what created it.

00:39:45.380 Right. But the best evidence we have points to a beginning.

00:39:48.220 That, yeah, okay. So, because that model, that's interesting, that it doesn't give you infinite space,

00:39:53.920 but it does give you infinite time. Right, right.

00:39:55.920 You know, ad infinitum, you know, in and out, in and out, in and out.

00:40:00.180 Yes. But you're saying that one was debunked in the 80s, basically.

00:40:04.260 Right, exactly. Okay, well, that makes sense that it's still, to this day, appears in popular...

00:40:08.320 Exactly. Well, the chance hypothesis for the origin of life is, you know, it's in every sophomore dorm bowl session.

00:40:16.440 Right, right.

00:40:17.140 It's not credible.

00:40:18.280 So then the next one that they all offer, of course, is the multiverse.

00:40:21.980 Right.

00:40:22.540 That, well, yeah, it's amazing how finely tuned the cosmos is and the Big Bang is interesting.

00:40:28.000 But the reason that that occurred, it's not that it was designed.

00:40:31.880 it's that everything that could possibly occur in a certain sense occurs and we just live in the one

00:40:38.040 in which life could right we just happen to be the lucky one yeah right right notice what notice

00:40:43.040 the move though that's an attempt to in what we would say inflate the probabilistic resources to

00:40:48.560 give you more chances more opportunities right so there's a certain kind of logic to that right

00:40:52.760 it makes sense um but there's a problem with it uh and the postulation is that there's a billion

00:40:58.660 in other universes out there, so many, in fact, that one of them had to arise with the right

00:41:04.780 combination of fine-tuning parameters so that even though in our universe, the odds associated

00:41:11.420 with all those fine-tuning parameters arising is infinitesimally small. If you've got enough

00:41:17.160 universes, we can breathe a sigh of relief. Right. You get the works of Shakespeare. We can

00:41:21.980 posit our universe as kind of the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery. Yeah. But there's a

00:41:27.020 And the problem is, first, that if you have these other universes and they're causally

00:41:32.260 disconnected to our own, which is what we mean by a separate universe, then whatever

00:41:36.780 happens in those other universes does not affect what happens in our universe, including

00:41:41.900 whatever process was responsible for the fixing of the fine-tuning parameters.

00:41:48.200 Nothing in those other universes makes the fixing and the fine-tuning any more probable

00:41:52.140 in this universe because there's no causal connection.

00:41:55.140 So in virtue of that, multiverse proponents have proposed

00:41:59.680 a kind of underlying common cause of all the universes.

00:42:03.800 It's not just that those universes exist,

00:42:06.140 it's that there's some kind of universe-generating mechanism

00:42:08.460 that spits out universes like a lottery machine.

00:42:11.720 And then we can portray our universe as the lucky winner of this giant cosmic lottery.

00:42:16.900 But that's where the real rub comes in.

00:42:19.000 There's a catch.

00:42:19.560 And that is that every universe-generating mechanism that's been proposed,

00:42:24.960 whether it's based on something called string theory or based on something called inflationary

00:42:30.420 cosmology, itself, the universe-generating mechanisms themselves, have to be finely tuned

00:42:36.040 in order to produce new universes. And so then you're right back to where you started,

00:42:42.520 which is unexplained fine-tuning. And we know from our experience that fine-tuning,

00:42:47.740 what we mean by fine-tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that are just right to

00:42:56.080 accomplish some significant end or purpose. So what are examples of fine-tuning? An internal

00:43:03.420 combustion engine, a French recipe, a radio dial, the relationship between hardware and software

00:43:10.440 and a computer. So a clock. A clock. Yeah, exactly. So every system that we know of that

00:43:16.480 we would describe as being finely tuned is the product of intelligence. That's part of our

00:43:21.600 knowledge base, our uniform and repeated experience again. So since fine-tuning always

00:43:26.360 points to a fine-tuner, and since the multiverse, even the multiverse, doesn't get rid of fine-tuning

00:43:31.860 but only displaces it to an earlier... Because you can't just have a random universe generating...

00:43:37.460 No, no. Here'd be a good example. Go back to your monkeys at the typewriter.

00:43:42.380 If you have enough time, yeah, you could type Shakespeare,

00:43:46.000 provided the keyboard includes the H for Hamlet.

00:43:50.860 But if you don't have the H,

00:43:53.000 if the keyboard isn't fine-tuned in a particular way,

00:43:56.420 it doesn't matter how much time you have,

00:43:58.020 you're never going to get the outcome you want.

00:43:59.500 And so this is the problem,

00:44:01.620 that every universe-generating mechanism does require fine-tuning

00:44:04.840 to get to, even in theory, produce new universes.

00:44:09.300 So you're back to unexplained fine-tuning,

00:44:11.500 And since the only real explanation of fine-tuning that we have is intelligence, we're back to intelligent design.

00:44:17.860 In other words, even if the multiverse is true, intelligent design is still the best explanation.

00:44:22.240 Then how come when I go on Wikipedia, Steve, and I look up intelligent design,

00:44:27.220 it tells me that intelligent design is a pseudoscientific creationist nonsense

00:44:33.080 made by people who have insufficient brain cells and who are afraid of the dark. 0.79

00:44:38.960 and wear white shoes and are from Appalachia

00:44:44.100 and all the stereotypes, right?

00:44:46.240 Yes.

00:44:46.520 Yeah.

00:44:47.940 Well, in my own Wikipedia page,

00:44:50.520 it says that I am a pseudoscientist.

00:44:53.040 I regarded that as an upgrade

00:44:54.720 because the previous description of me on Wikipedia

00:44:58.720 had me as an American theologian

00:45:00.800 as a way of stigmatizing our work.

00:45:04.580 I have no degrees in theology.

00:45:07.020 And so, in a way, that was an upgrade, too, I suppose.

00:45:09.900 Well, this is an attempt to win the debate by pejorative, by ad hominem.

00:45:14.680 And so, it makes it more fun, I think, really.

00:45:18.040 The other epithet we get is creationists in cheap tuxedos.

00:45:22.480 And my wife took that one very much to heart because she said, we've paid a lot for that tuxedo.

00:45:27.720 It's outrageous.

00:45:28.620 That's outrageous.

00:45:29.580 I love my tailor.

00:45:30.700 Yeah, but no, if that's the best the other side can do, we smile and appreciate that.

00:45:36.660 When I'm in debates and my opposite number starts with a lot of ad hominem or trying to characterize me or the Discovery Institute or my colleagues in the intelligent design research community, rather than address the issues, I quietly smile inside because I know he or she is wasting time that could be better spent making arguments.

00:45:58.380 And I think invariably people see through that stuff.

00:46:01.640 And I think the growth in our movement over the last 20 years where around 2004 and 2005 there was a court trial that brought us a lot of bad media.

00:46:13.660 But I think we're in a very different day now.

00:46:15.580 I think that those kinds of arguments are not working.

00:46:17.940 Once we get past the multiverse, the next thing that the denizens of Reddit, they ask, well, don't you think we might just be living in a simulation?

00:46:28.380 Okay. Is that, are we? And how would I know?

00:46:32.780 Berlinski has an hysterical line about the simulation hypothesis in the film. So

00:46:38.860 if people are interested, they should check that out. Well, the first thing they say about the

00:46:44.560 simulation hypothesis is the idea that we have a kind of faux existence that's a consequence of

00:46:53.080 some master programmer programming us as kind of bots. But notice what's implied there is that

00:47:01.040 it is an intelligent design hypothesis. The implication is that there's a mind behind

00:47:06.820 everything. So I would say the simulation hypothesis is at least halfway there. Where

00:47:11.560 it falls down is that if the programmer has convinced us that we actually do exist, that

00:47:20.380 we're not just have a faux existence in a simulated computer domain, then the master

00:47:30.260 programmer has outsmarted himself and created real existence. It's a little bit like the old

00:47:35.780 Cartesian argument about the evil demon that's convinced us that we exist, but we really don't.

00:47:43.960 But realizing that if the evil demon has convinced us such that we think we exist, well, then we at

00:47:50.300 least do exist. We at least do that. The rest of Descartes' proofs may not be that effective, but

00:47:55.600 he, I think he refuted the idea that we can be, we can be talked out of an awareness of our own

00:48:02.820 existence. And I think the simulation hypothesis implies that as well. And I think it fails on

00:48:09.060 that grounds, but it does affirm the need for an intelligent agent to account for the things we see,

00:48:14.500 which I think is kind of curious and gets us halfway there.

00:48:18.380 Many, I would say actually maybe the most popular

00:48:23.460 pastime for conservatives is to figure out

00:48:25.980 when everything went wrong and whose fault it is.

00:48:28.400 And so sometimes we say, oh, it was William of Ockham.

00:48:31.360 Yeah.

00:48:31.680 So sometimes it was the liberals of the 60s.

00:48:34.020 I don't know.

00:48:35.360 But I might give it to Descartes.

00:48:38.300 You know, Descartes just convincing us

00:48:39.880 that everything that we can trust is in our own heads.

00:48:42.700 that a lot of confusion comes from that man. Well, it's an interesting thing to comment on

00:48:48.520 actually, because what Descartes tried to do was to establish the reliability of the mind and

00:48:54.540 therefore a basis for knowledge. And his first move in doing that was to try to prove the existence

00:48:59.320 of God. Well, he wanted to prove the existence of himself, then prove that he had thoughts that

00:49:05.360 implied the existence of God, his famous trademark argument, which not even theistic philosophers

00:49:11.280 think has any force is a really bad argument. And then from there, he wanted to, since there was a

00:49:17.500 God, then we could trust the reliability of the mind. There's an element of truth in all that.

00:49:23.240 The existence of God does provide a solid grounding for the belief in the reliability

00:49:29.240 of the mind. But because he tried to do all of that deductively and with absolute rational

00:49:35.760 certainty. He ended up setting philosophy back three or 400 years, but he also showed something,

00:49:43.260 which is that trying to prove things with absolute certainty is a fool's errand. On the other hand,

00:49:49.880 then Hume came along and tried to base everything on empirical data, and he ended up proving that

00:49:59.260 we couldn't know anything at all based on that premise. And so the rationalist premise and the

00:50:04.320 empiricist premise, the strict rationalist, strict empiricist premise, both failed to provide a

00:50:09.060 foundation for knowledge. And I think there's a kind of echo of that in theistic thought, where

00:50:15.100 on the one hand, we've had the strict rationalists who have tried to prove God's existence with

00:50:21.200 absolute certainty using deductively certain arguments. And that's turned out to be a very

00:50:26.280 high bar to meet. And on the other hand, we've had people who've said, well, since you can't do that,

00:50:30.100 We just punt, and we're going to have faith and faith alone and do the fideism thing,

00:50:35.420 or the Kierkegaardian take a leap of faith and deny that there's any rational basis for faith.

00:50:43.480 I, in my work, focused on a middle way where making the claim that you can have very strong

00:50:51.120 reasons for belief in God. You can have good reasons to believe in God, such that you can

00:50:55.620 even affirm that you know, you have knowledge of God, but without the kind of proof that's really

00:51:00.840 only possible in mathematics and geometry, and even then, only if you presuppose certain

00:51:07.440 self-evident axioms. So, I think we've had an epistemological crisis of belief in the West

00:51:14.680 because we've oscillated between a strict rationalism on the one hand and a fideism and skepticism on the other.

00:51:27.740 And the title of a course I taught for years was Reasons for Faith.

00:51:32.200 You can have strong reasons for faith.

00:51:33.720 You can infer to the theism as the best explanation for things without having to meet the bar of absolute certain proof.

00:51:41.220 Yes. Obviously, I don't go with Kierkegaard, and I'm certainly not a fideist, but there is

00:51:47.600 something I really took from him that I love. In that book, Fear and Trembling, when he's talking

00:51:52.660 about the sacrifice of Isaac, and he says, well, how can God command something that's so manifestly

00:51:57.900 immoral? And he uses a phrase that I like to use in my own personal life, which is the teleological

00:52:04.580 suspension of the ethical, which is a great justification for when you want to do something

00:52:09.500 wrong. You say, no, no, no. I'm sorry. You stole my donut. No, no, no. It was the teleological...

00:52:13.660 You must have that third cigar.

00:52:15.040 Yes.

00:52:16.420 No, there's much to appreciate in Kierkegaard, but not his epistemology. I think his religious

00:52:22.160 epistemology, I think, is one... In a sense, it conceded that there was no rational, evidential,

00:52:29.240 or other similar grounding, cognitive grounding for belief in God. And I think that's one

00:52:34.800 of the reasons that so many young people lose their faith when they get to places where

00:52:38.900 they're expected to think, namely the university.

00:52:41.240 I am noticing just anecdotally, but the plural of anecdote is data. I've just noticed that

00:52:47.960 back then people who, well, ultimately people who believe in God, but people who believe in

00:52:55.220 an intelligent designer or who don't believe in aliens or who believe in the rational soul

00:53:01.520 or any of these attendant issues.

00:53:05.440 Non-materialists.

00:53:06.960 Non-materialists.

00:53:07.460 People who think something other than matter and energy exists.

00:53:10.600 Yes.

00:53:10.980 Which is actually most of us, because that's the way we live.

00:53:13.960 We believe there are moral principles.

00:53:15.920 We believe the human mind is reliable.

00:53:18.260 We believe we have a conscious agency

00:53:21.720 that is not just a matter of chemistry in our brains,

00:53:25.460 the rational soul.

00:53:27.960 Like, basically everybody would seem to...

00:53:31.520 everyone does behave that way. And everyone, if you push them far enough and you made them think,

00:53:36.420 they would have to admit that. It does seem to me now that it's totally flipped, that really,

00:53:42.480 the materialists now, when they say some nonsense from a Christopher Hitchens interview or something,

00:53:48.760 I don't know, the reaction I see even just on the internet is, you'll say, hey, go over to

00:53:52.200 reddit.com, sir. This is for a serious discussion. Okay, enjoy tipping your fedora. We're going to,

00:53:58.180 the adults are going to speak now. How did that flip? It's a great story, I think. I have a

00:54:03.740 colleague in the UK, Justin Brierley, who's written a book called The Surprising Rediscovery

00:54:08.280 of Belief in God. And he tells the story of the demise of the new atheist movement with people

00:54:14.360 like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss and others.

00:54:21.880 and part of the story is that they overplayed their hand part of it is that they linked their

00:54:28.720 wagon to darwinism and a famous quote from from richard dawkins darwin made it possible to be

00:54:35.800 an intellectually fulfilled atheist well what if leading evolutionary biologists are starting to

00:54:40.360 say we need a new theory a new non-darwinian theory of evolution what happens then to your

00:54:45.100 atheism is it is it properly grounded any longer i think a number of atheists themselves leading

00:54:49.860 atheist apologists think that the arguments of the new atheists were really weak. They typically

00:54:57.780 avoided discussing the evidence from cosmology, suggesting that there was a creation event to

00:55:04.860 the universe. They typically avoided talking about the fine-tuning problem, except for invoking the

00:55:11.980 multiverse, which has been exposed to be an inadequate counter-argument to the design

00:55:16.760 argument. And they certainly don't like to talk about the complexity and inner workings of the

00:55:22.800 living cell and the problem of the origin of the first life, which has been a lot of the focus of

00:55:27.640 my work. And so I think the scientific case for intelligent design and indeed for God as the

00:55:34.140 designer has grown ever more strong, even as they kind of overplayed their hand. And I think also

00:55:40.140 in Britain in particular, where I spent a lot of time, there's a sense that there's something a

00:55:45.320 little bit unsavory about these very overt attacks on religion and the sense that maybe they very

00:55:51.860 much overplayed their hand there. And in virtue of that, you see that Dawkins himself is now

00:55:57.040 describing himself as a cultural Christian, at least. I'm not so bad. I'm not a terrible guy. 0.89

00:56:02.480 I'm at least a cultural Christian. I like hymns and cathedrals, you know?

00:56:05.320 Yes. It starts somewhere. I'll take it. But even on that point, because I think a lot of

00:56:12.580 radical Islam has impelled people, especially in Europe and the UK, to say, hey, we want to keep 0.78

00:56:18.200 our cathedrals. We don't want minarets going up. And, you know, there are some big problems to

00:56:22.380 abandoning our Christian identity. The whole new atheist movement was just opportunistic, 0.77

00:56:27.980 it seems to me. 9-11 occurred, Muslims attacked the United States, and these atheists took it as 0.70

00:56:35.320 an opportunity to attack... Religion in general. Religion in general. And you say, well, hold on, 0.98

00:56:39.700 Wait, how is it that the Muslims attack us and then you lead a jihad against Christianity?

00:56:46.000 I think there's been a little sleight of hand here. 0.59

00:56:48.180 Right, right, right.

00:56:49.220 And out of that, and I think, I mean, there has been the accusation against the new atheists

00:56:53.580 that they attacked religion in general because they were afraid to attack Islam specifically.

00:56:57.560 Of course.

00:56:58.080 They don't want to look like Salman Rushdie.

00:56:59.620 I don't know the motives.

00:57:01.140 But out of all of that came figures like Tom Holland, rediscovering the importance of Christianity for the cultural foundation of the West.

00:57:13.720 And that, you know, his argument that we all are swimming in Christian waters and don't know it.

00:57:18.980 That our concepts of universal human rights, human dignity, the care, the concern for the disenfranchised, the poor, the widows, the orphans.

00:57:28.440 all of this is something that come into a currency in the West after the Nazarene,

00:57:34.900 after the Sermon on the Mount. He said it doesn't exist in any of the ancient empires.

00:57:39.700 So there's been this kind of rediscovery. I think there's a rediscovery of the cultural benefits

00:57:46.340 and importance of Christianity to the West, but also I think the God question is percolating

00:57:52.800 to the surface of the culture now among many unexpected figures. You have Ayan Hirsi Ali,

00:57:58.120 who has announced a conversion away from the new atheism. She was one of Dawkins' sidekicks.

00:58:03.240 She's a double convert. She went from Islam to atheism, and atheism to Christianity. 0.93

00:58:08.840 But other figures, Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, Charles Murray, the social scientist,

00:58:18.440 taking religion seriously. You have figures like Joe Rogan himself, who's now

00:58:25.080 attending church and exploring some of these things. So I think it's a very surprising

00:58:32.060 kind of turn where it seemed, you know, the days of the London buses with the billboards saying,

00:58:38.520 you know, relax and enjoy your life. God probably does not exist. Relax and enjoy your life was the

00:58:45.900 new atheist mantra. I think that seems almost silly to people now. It certainly does. You know,

00:58:51.900 back then, so this was 20 years ago, basically. It's not even 20 years ago, but this thing is

00:58:58.000 a spent force, and I would say in about 15 years. Yeah, right, right. I guess in those days,

00:59:05.060 your comment or the criticism that people have made of you that it's creationism in a cheap

00:59:10.240 tuxedo. Oh, that tuxedo thing again. Says, oh, just dagger out. I came with a pocket square

00:59:15.720 this time. Just to prove them wrong. Yeah, we can really dress. But that, I think that impelled a

00:59:21.540 lot of people to try to gussy up their arguments in secular sounding language, jargony kind of

00:59:28.200 language to say, no, no, no, I'm not grounding. I might be theistic. I might be a Christian,

00:59:32.520 but I'm not grounding my views on that at all. I actually have these, I've come to these

00:59:36.920 conclusions through entirely secular and rationalism. I don't know, to me now, it seems

00:59:41.780 to flip. Like it's kind of like the IQ bell curve meme. The guy at the end of the IQ bell curve,

00:59:47.000 the real dummy, he speaks- That's the creationist in the cheap tuxedo.

00:59:50.680 He's the creationist in the cheap tuxedo.

00:59:52.560 He speaks in plain language.

00:59:54.180 He says, I think God made the world.

00:59:56.640 And then the guy in the middle, he says,

00:59:58.480 no, actually, you know, the multiverse has produced

01:00:01.180 seven bazillion universes because of whatever.

01:00:06.460 And then you get up to the Jedi,

01:00:09.000 who is at the high point of the end.

01:00:10.760 And he says, actually, you know, God made the world.

01:00:13.040 Then you get to a Berlinski or a Dembski

01:00:16.120 or some of the geniuses in our movement.

01:00:18.200 Yes, yes. Berlinski wrote this incredible critique of the new atheist movement when it was still hot. And the devil's delusion. Yeah. Atheism and its scientific pretensions. And he saw a lot of them. But I had a conversation with him. I know you and I met him. Yes. You met him at a conference in the fall. Yes. And I'm quite taken with David Berlinski. But even before I met him. Yeah. He's, by the way, featured in the film. And every time he comes on, people start laughing.

01:00:46.460 Yes, he, I mean, he's just this, so before I had met him, all I knew of him was his writing.

01:00:51.320 And so I, but I really have enjoyed his writing for a long time as, as with yours.

01:00:55.620 His wit.

01:00:56.180 And yes, and then you meet this man and you say, how is he even more, he's 50 times more of a character than you expect, even from his writing, which is already called.

01:01:04.440 Even more fun, right?

01:01:05.420 Yes.

01:01:05.660 Yeah.

01:01:06.200 But he and I were talking the other day and he said, no, actually the new atheists did us a favor because what they did is they, they effectively challenged people of a theistic bent.

01:01:15.460 to up their game and to articulate and formulate the reasons they had for believing in God.

01:01:25.820 And we were kind of doing that all along with our work on intelligent design,

01:01:30.600 but they created an appetite for the kind of work that we were doing.

01:01:35.380 And lo and behold, people have found that our arguments are actually better.

01:01:39.160 And some of the new atheist arguments are incredibly weak and such that many atheist

01:01:44.220 philosophers. For example, Dawkins' argument from complexity. If you invoke God, then you've

01:01:51.920 invoked something more complex than the thing you're trying to explain, and that violates

01:01:55.920 Occam's razor. No, no, no, no, it doesn't. That's not what Occam's razor says. It isn't that the

01:02:00.960 entity can't be more complex than the thing being explained. If that were the case, then we couldn't

01:02:06.600 explain the origin of the television set by reference to the engineers who designed it,

01:02:10.240 because clearly the engineer, or you couldn't explain Dawkins' book, The God Delusion,

01:02:14.320 by reference to Dawkins, because clearly he would have to acknowledge that his own mind and brain

01:02:20.540 are more complex than the words on the page that he wrote.

01:02:24.660 Occam's razor says you shouldn't multiply theoretical entities. Your explanation shouldn't

01:02:29.900 be complex in the sense of being Baroque and convoluted with just adding new explanatory

01:02:36.260 just-so stories to make your explanation still fit. God is actually a very simple explanation

01:02:43.140 because the postulation of one God is much simpler than the postulation of a multiverse

01:02:49.700 and all the theoretical entities that go with it from string theory and inflationary cosmology.

01:02:54.860 Some would say he's so simple, he's described by divine simplicity.

01:02:58.640 Well, there's that very ancient argument from classical philosophy, absolutely. So this is

01:03:04.700 one of the go-to arguments of the scientific atheists, and even many atheistic philosophers

01:03:09.160 say, no, this is a complete misapplication of Occam's razor.

01:03:13.080 I remember reading Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great, when I was a teenager or

01:03:19.660 something, and I read it, and I said, well, and I was quite taken with him, but it did

01:03:25.140 occur to me later, he doesn't even make that argument. The book doesn't even give you what

01:03:30.960 it sells you on the cover. He just whines about religion for 250 pages or so. And then I was

01:03:36.740 taken with the analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga's description of the new atheism.

01:03:41.660 They said, what do you think of the new atheists? He said, I think they're greatly inferior to the

01:03:46.400 old atheists. I think Bertrand Russell was a lot better. Yeah, that's exactly right. 1.00

01:03:53.400 Well, and that's a couple of things there. First of all, let's stipulate that Christopher Hitchens

01:03:58.320 was himself great. Yes. Yeah. Delightful figure. Delightful figure. Tremendous orator. Great,

01:04:05.040 oozed British erudition. And let's give Dawkins his due as well. He has a tremendous talent for

01:04:12.360 framing issues. And I think in so doing did us all a favor because the Darwinism wasn't just

01:04:21.520 about change over time. It became very easy to accommodate Darwinian evolution if you thought

01:04:27.860 all it was was change over time. You could incorporate that into what was God's way of

01:04:32.740 creating because God just caused the change over time. No, Darwinism was, as Dawkins very

01:04:38.820 succinctly put it in The Blind Watchmaker, biology is the study of complicated things that

01:04:46.260 give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Darwinism was about the denial of

01:04:52.060 actual design and the affirmation of the illusion of design. I mean, a lot of Christians 1.00

01:04:56.660 who are interested

01:04:58.680 in the doctrine of creation

01:05:00.120 we're getting all hung up on

01:05:01.820 is the earth old

01:05:02.660 or is it young

01:05:03.400 do organisms have

01:05:05.260 a common ancestor or not

01:05:06.640 is there some change

01:05:08.280 or no change

01:05:08.780 no the issue was always

01:05:10.140 design or no design

01:05:11.200 and that's the reason

01:05:13.840 that our team

01:05:15.140 framed the issue

01:05:16.240 that way

01:05:17.140 and said no our theory

01:05:18.080 is the theory of intelligent design

01:05:19.380 we think that

01:05:20.920 there are certain features

01:05:22.280 of the living world

01:05:23.360 and of the universe

01:05:24.680 that are best explained

01:05:26.320 by the action of an intelligent agent

01:05:28.860 rather than an undirected, unguided process

01:05:31.620 like natural selection.

01:05:32.900 So we posed ourselves in opposition

01:05:35.620 to the neo-Darwinists,

01:05:38.220 and Dawkins made very clear what was at stake

01:05:40.920 that helped us to clarify the issue.

01:05:43.200 That's a good point.

01:05:44.720 Yeah, by going so far,

01:05:47.460 by being so brazen,

01:05:49.700 some would say reckless in their claims.

01:05:52.160 But logically consistent.

01:05:53.500 Yes, yes.

01:05:53.960 He is a logically consistent,

01:05:55.500 is a logically consistent materialist. The other great Dawkins quote, which I absolutely love

01:05:59.900 and repaired to several times in my book, Return of the God Hypothesis, and in the new film,

01:06:05.520 Story of Everything, another number of people cite it. It's his claim that the universe we

01:06:10.560 observe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design,

01:06:17.200 nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. That's a beautiful statement, not only of materialism

01:06:22.680 as a philosophy, but it also implies that metaphysical hypotheses like materialism or

01:06:29.300 its opposite, theism, are testable against observations of the world around us. They're

01:06:36.160 every bit as testable as scientific theories. And so that's a wonderful thing because if people

01:06:41.160 want to separate metaphysics from the observations of the world, no. Our metaphysical theories can

01:06:46.960 be tested by the test of experience, by looking and seeing. And what I show in Return of the

01:06:53.940 God Hypothesis and what we show, I think, even more vividly in the film is that the

01:06:58.860 story of everything. I don't know that we've actually said the title of the film.

01:07:01.500 The story of everything. Thank you. Is that the great discoveries of the last 100 years

01:07:06.300 in science have been shocking to the materialist. They're not what you would expect from blind, 0.94

01:07:11.980 pitiless indifference. That's shorthand for scientific materialism. No materialist expected

01:07:18.020 that the universe would have a beginning. It was axiomatic for the materialistic philosophy

01:07:24.060 or scientific atheism that the universe was eternal and self-existent and self-creating

01:07:30.860 and therefore did not need an external creator. It had always been here, so you didn't have to

01:07:35.280 think about, well, what started it or who started it. But the shocking discovery of modern

01:07:41.680 astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy, is that the universe, as best we can tell, for multiple

01:07:47.540 reasons, had a beginning. No materialist expected the fine-tuning. When Fred Hoyle discovered the

01:07:53.760 first suite of fine-tuning parameters, he changed his worldview. He was a staunch scientific atheist.

01:07:59.580 He hated the Big Bang, as we were saying, and stigmatized it with his term, the Big Bang,

01:08:07.740 the pejorative term. But when he discovered the fine-tuning that was necessary to account for the

01:08:13.320 abundance of carbon in the universe, he realized that there must be an intellect, a mind behind

01:08:20.660 the universe. And his famous quote was that the best data we have suggests that a super intellect

01:08:26.820 has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible. And I do love the way the monkeys

01:08:33.080 always make it into the origins discussion.

01:08:34.860 They do.

01:08:35.640 There is a role for the monkey.

01:08:37.600 There's a role for every particle in the cosmos.

01:08:40.100 That was unexpected.

01:08:41.040 And of course, the biggest unexpected thing

01:08:42.700 is the interior of the cell.

01:08:44.500 And Dawkins, a summer, two summers ago now,

01:08:47.780 was himself quoted as saying that he was knocked sideways

01:08:51.660 with wonder at the intricate data processing system

01:08:55.200 at work inside the cell.

01:08:56.860 That's not what you would expect

01:08:58.520 from blind, pitiless indifference.

01:09:00.500 you don't expect intricate data processing systems, digital code, and nanomachines.

01:09:05.840 And we're talking nanomachines, we're talking turbines, sliding clamps, little walking robotic

01:09:11.380 motor proteins, little rotary engines, inside cells on a miniaturized scale.

01:09:17.860 This is what we're finding inside life.

01:09:19.420 No materialist expected to find that kind of thing.

01:09:21.340 So it's good that he's knocked on his side.

01:09:23.120 When's he going to be knocked on his knees?

01:09:24.340 How do you look at that with just the jaw-dropping complexity, intricacy, and not just say, you know, just not start reciting Psalm 8, you know, Lord, your works are manifest in the creation.

01:09:40.420 Or fearfully and wonderfully made

01:09:41.940 when you think about our own bodies and our own, yeah.

01:09:45.920 No, and I say this with no glee.

01:09:47.700 I actually have a great admiration for him.

01:09:50.080 He's a tremendous communicator.

01:09:51.880 He's a very good scientist.

01:09:54.300 And he has a real talent for framing issues

01:09:58.140 in a way that is clarifying.

01:09:59.700 He's just ended up on the wrong side

01:10:01.540 of the most fundamental questions.

01:10:03.580 But maybe he's softening in his interest

01:10:05.600 in cultural Christianity. 0.78

01:10:07.180 Cultural Christianity, I'll take it. 0.76

01:10:08.220 And one of his, I don't know,

01:10:09.640 people have seen, but the interview or the conversation between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Dawkins

01:10:16.320 is fascinating. The body language there, she seems so comfortable in her own skin. And Dawkins is

01:10:21.920 almost in a manner, you know, leaning over, almost pleading, saying, you know, how could you of all

01:10:27.840 people come to this conclusion? Yes. Yeah. I would say to Professor Dawkins, I would say the water

01:10:33.720 is warm. It's like a nice primordial soup over here. Come join us. Come join us on the theistic

01:10:38.140 side of things. Can I tell you one other thing about the primordial soup? It triggers those of

01:10:44.620 us who know something about chemical evolutionary theory and the origin of life. The large

01:10:49.260 biomolecules, the proteins in particular, will not polymerize. The amino acids will not link

01:10:55.980 together in water. But we've been telling students for years that life arose in a warm little pond

01:11:03.020 in a primordial soup.

01:11:04.700 I had never heard that.

01:11:06.000 Just repair to some of Jim Tours' videos online.

01:11:10.960 Jim is the most mild-mannered, gentle, humble man.

01:11:14.960 But if you start spewing chemical nonsense,

01:11:17.880 he'll get triggered.

01:11:19.240 And this is one of the things that triggers him.

01:11:20.980 Of all the nonsense I've ever heard

01:11:23.400 about the primordial soup,

01:11:24.440 I've never heard that water presents a problem.

01:11:28.040 That's great.

01:11:28.580 It's energetically unfavorable.

01:11:29.480 I love that.

01:11:29.900 You know, on the point of the plain language versus jargon and these kind of abstract and

01:11:37.580 needlessly convoluted theories like the multiverse, another shift, it seems to me, is that people

01:11:44.420 now seem to want to back away from the jargon a little bit, which is good.

01:11:50.020 That's a return to normal.

01:11:51.640 Common sense.

01:11:52.460 Common sense.

01:11:52.900 And anyone who is worth their while who's ever written about writing points out that short, precise, Saxon words are preferable to polysyllabic, Latinate, you know, words that are less evocative. 0.99

01:12:09.360 That a dummy or a midwit at best will try to impress you with all sorts of polysyllabic words. 0.88

01:12:17.640 Unless he's Bill Buckley and he's just having fun. 0.97

01:12:19.520 Yes, running circles around you.

01:12:21.240 Or our friend Berlinski can do the same.

01:12:23.600 Yes, yeah, yeah.

01:12:24.060 But some people have fun with it.

01:12:25.780 But the ones who write is basically all academic papers are written today.

01:12:30.280 Right.

01:12:30.500 With this weak, you know...

01:12:33.240 Passive voice.

01:12:34.200 Passive voice, all Latinate words, jargon.

01:12:38.620 As if no one is there making an argument and maybe no argument is being made.

01:12:43.580 Precisely, precisely.

01:12:44.760 But the great works of science, we get attacked for being polemical because we're making an argument.

01:12:50.200 We're making an argument for intelligent design.

01:12:52.900 But the great works of science, and I would include in that the origin of species.

01:12:57.820 It's time it was a great work of science.

01:12:59.180 Galileo?

01:13:00.260 Darwin said, yeah, exactly.

01:13:01.680 Darwin said, described his own work as one long argument for the idea of common descent by natural selection.

01:13:10.440 Yes.

01:13:10.980 Newton started the Principia with the theory of vortices is pressed with many difficulties.

01:13:16.460 and he's about to strip the bark off of the previous theory of gravity and he executes a

01:13:23.000 beautiful mathematically rich argument but but science advances as scientists argue about how

01:13:30.320 to interpret evidence there's a there's an italian philosopher of science i'd like marcello pera not

01:13:35.940 he's not irish it's marcello pera and he are he says that science advances as scientists argue

01:13:40.900 about how to interpret the evidence. And by referring to the science to shut down dispute

01:13:48.120 in science, we're actually doing something profoundly unscientific. We need to make sure

01:13:52.900 that we're always allowing scientists the freedom to contest and to dispute and get back to that

01:13:59.120 medieval disputational method where you make your case and then you address the counter arguments.

01:14:04.860 And that's a very good way of getting to the truth.

01:14:07.940 But it's not even something that is, in theory, unscientific.

01:14:11.640 Yeah.

01:14:12.000 It is demonstrably, observably unscientific.

01:14:14.720 The Galileo example came to mind because in his discourse on the world systems, he calls his opponent Simplicio. 1.00

01:14:21.120 He calls him an idiot. 0.99

01:14:22.440 That was his big mistake. 1.00

01:14:23.560 Well, that's why he got arrested.

01:14:24.900 Yeah, he knew that pope.

01:14:26.120 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:14:27.440 But he does, you know, and even there it was clever because he's referring to this commentator on Aristotle, Simplicius.

01:14:33.620 Yeah, right.

01:14:33.900 But it was thinly veiled.

01:14:36.160 Right.

01:14:36.320 You know, it was quite polemical, let's put it.

01:14:37.940 And so, yes, it just seems to me that, you know, 20 years ago when people would say, 15 years ago when people would say, well, you know, you have religious priors, and so that's why you're making the scientific argument.

01:14:50.060 Then you would say, no, no, it's not because of it.

01:14:52.060 Now I would say, yes, I have an integral view of the world.

01:14:56.140 I, being an integral whole of matter and soul, yes, I have a view of the cosmos that includes this.

01:15:02.160 I think of St. John Henry Newman and his great work, The Idea of a University.

01:15:06.720 He points out that a university purports to universal knowledge.

01:15:10.980 Univanitas.

01:15:11.740 Yes, correct.

01:15:12.360 And so you say, now they no longer teach theology at universities.

01:15:17.960 How could a university even pretend to universal knowledge if you're taking out a pretty integral part of that?

01:15:25.700 And what has happened since we've done that?

01:15:27.460 The universities now have splintered into specialization and more often nonsense.

01:15:31.280 Right.

01:15:31.780 Well, this is actually, back to that Dawkins quote.

01:15:34.300 one of the things I love about the idea, he's tacitly affirming that metaphysical systems of

01:15:40.060 thought, worldviews, can be tested. So we have a worldview. I'm a theist, a Christian, like you are,

01:15:48.020 and so I hold that worldview because it does such a good job of explaining so many things around me.

01:15:54.020 You know, the old Chesterton quote, I don't believe in God because I see him, but because by him,

01:15:58.560 I see all other things. But that doesn't mean that even if you have a worldview that's very

01:16:03.680 integrated that it's still not subject to to critical tests yeah that there might not be

01:16:09.760 my data might come along that might either challenge you or provide further confirmation

01:16:14.780 yep and the idea that uh you know the universe has exactly the properties we should expect

01:16:20.540 if at bottom there's no purpose no design no i think the universe has exactly the properties

01:16:25.920 this is what we show in the film vividly we show because we do it uh with with cinematography and

01:16:31.920 animations, you can see the things that you would expect to be the case if there was a designing

01:16:36.500 mind behind everything. And so it's having prior commitments epistemologically, things that you

01:16:47.520 assume, it's not a bad thing to have intellectually because it doesn't mean you're not open to

01:16:52.400 adapting or refining or modifying your worldview, but it's necessary to have such a system to make

01:17:00.400 sense of the world. It's the Augustinian believe in order to know, you know, the Tredo Udentelegom.

01:17:07.140 But also to posit that one does not have any prior, that one is purely neutral,

01:17:12.400 is just a lie. I mean, it's not possible to be that.

01:17:15.780 That's the positivistic pretension on the other side, the idea that, well, you theists have your

01:17:24.300 prior assumptions your faith commitments we just we're just all about the evidence but but as as

01:17:31.860 many of the people we've been talking about on the side opposite demonstrate they have their own

01:17:36.880 their own set of assumptions and what what actually has caused people to not see the

01:17:42.460 evidence of design in nature is a deep prior presupposition known as not just materialism in

01:17:49.500 the sense of metaphysical materialism, but a commitment to methodological materialism

01:17:54.820 that says that if you're going to be a scientist, we have to explain everything by reference

01:17:59.000 to purely material processes or entities, irrespective of what the evidence is.

01:18:04.620 So if you see evidence for a dualist understanding of the mind, the mind is not just the chemistry

01:18:12.420 at work in the brain.

01:18:13.660 And there's a wonderful book out that provides a very strong evidential case for a kind of

01:18:18.800 dualist understanding. That's the work of Michael Eggner in his book, The Immortal Mind.

01:18:26.240 Dualist meaning that the mind is distinct from the brain.

01:18:29.160 They interact, but the physical brain is not the whole of our existence. We are a composite

01:18:38.100 entity that involves more than just the chemistry at work or the cells in the brain.

01:18:44.280 neurophysiology has been constrained in its understanding of human nature and reality

01:18:51.660 because of this principle of materialism when we think about the origin of life we what i've seen

01:18:57.620 in you know researching this now for for nearly 40 years is that you have these cycles where

01:19:02.720 you'll have the chance hypothesis will arise and then that obviously doesn't work and then we'll

01:19:06.660 get theories that invoke natural laws and those don't explain the origin of information either

01:19:11.280 then we'll have theories that combine the two, and they have deep problems. And so then we go

01:19:17.960 back to the chance hypothesis. But there's another possibility. Maybe the information

01:19:22.420 necessary to produce life is, in fact, the product of an intelligent agent. But if you've precluded

01:19:27.380 that from the outset of your investigation, you'll never get there. You'll never see that. It'd be

01:19:32.060 like going into the British Museum, looking at the Rosetta Stone and saying, well, I'd like to

01:19:36.860 say it was the product of a scribe, but because I'm committed to methodological materialism,

01:19:41.440 I'm going to have to invoke wind and erosion. So you miss something, right? And so it's not

01:19:49.640 just theists that have prior commitments. And I think being aware of those prior commitments

01:19:55.140 allows you to subject them to critical tests when the need arises. If you're not aware of them,

01:20:02.360 you get blinders on and you just work within one framework and you keep trying to jam

01:20:08.180 materialistic square pegs into theistic or round holes.

01:20:15.680 But you know, the theists are not blameless here in as much as there have been plenty of people

01:20:20.680 under the banner of Christianity or really any other religion, I guess,

01:20:24.820 who, but Christianity is the one that matters here because it's...

01:20:27.920 It's what's of interest to us.

01:20:29.360 It's what's of interest to us.

01:20:30.400 who have posited a problem, a conflict between reason and faith.

01:20:36.140 Absolutely.

01:20:36.580 And there are well-established flavors of Christianity that adopt this.

01:20:42.560 Whereas you bring up the example of this shocking new discovery

01:20:46.120 that the mind and the brain might be distinct.

01:20:49.000 I think, well, all human beings in our civilization,

01:20:52.760 at least for the last, I don't know, 2,000 years or so,

01:20:56.140 maybe a little longer. 0.97

01:20:56.480 Back in the period of the Greeks? 0.97

01:20:58.400 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:58.860 approaching 2,500 years, 3,000 years, have recognized this for pretty simple reasons.

01:21:05.860 You know, St. Thomas Aquinas, who, you know, on basically every show,

01:21:10.280 I can't help but talk about my Mayflower cigars and St. Thomas Aquinas.

01:21:13.920 Those are the two.

01:21:14.740 You've worked it in at least one.

01:21:15.920 There's one, yes.

01:21:16.880 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:17.160 I wouldn't want to let it go.

01:21:17.900 But Aquinas makes a pretty clear argument for it, which is the mind can't be physical,

01:21:26.320 The intellect can't be physical because it deals in immaterial substances.

01:21:30.720 So the eyes receive color, and that's how we see the physical world.

01:21:36.360 The ear receives sound, and the mind receives universals, so justice.

01:21:43.460 It thinks about mathematics.

01:21:44.660 Mathematics, yes.

01:21:46.220 And so a purely physical object could not deal in an immaterial substance, and so there has to be a distinction between the mind and the brain.

01:21:55.180 good enough for me. An argument from the First Vatican Council says that the existence of God

01:22:03.980 can be known with certainty by human reason in the created world. Simple as that.

01:22:08.820 Two things to say about that. One, just a quick experiment that Michael Egnor cites in his new

01:22:12.380 book, when brain physiologists have, for various reasons therapeutic, needed on occasion to sever

01:22:20.180 the two hemispheres electrically, and they find that a person who is still consciously aware

01:22:27.560 can relate sense data that's presented to one hemisphere only to sense data that's been

01:22:38.480 presented to the other hemisphere only, and can relate the two and make intellectual connections

01:22:47.400 and draw analogies, and between the two,

01:22:51.720 even though there is no physiological center of the brain

01:22:55.540 that's processing that information.

01:22:57.260 You want to hear something really weird?

01:22:58.340 That implies an immaterial entity that is doing the processing,

01:23:04.360 which you can call the mind or the soul.

01:23:06.720 Your description of that just gave me chills.

01:23:08.980 Even though you just described evidence for the thing

01:23:12.040 that I just said I believe.

01:23:13.360 I just, not 20 seconds ago, I said I believe it.

01:23:16.400 And yet your description of the physical evidence for that just gave me a chance.

01:23:20.200 Yeah, well, I would recommend Egner's work on this.

01:23:22.580 I had the same experience when he explained it to me over the phone one time.

01:23:25.980 But what it would just say that neuroscience is catching up with or providing additional evidential support for the dualist philosophy of the classical philosophers.

01:23:39.180 So that's pretty exciting.

01:23:40.360 and um the other thing is on the the faith reason divide um there there has been this

01:23:47.440 anti-intellectual strain in recent last hundred years christianity in particular in our country

01:23:54.700 yeah and i think uh in fact just the other day i was on an interview this morning on a television

01:24:02.020 interview and the host said well why is it in your film you talked about science and its relation

01:24:08.780 to god not scripture why didn't you talk about scripture and and and i think there's the sense

01:24:14.660 that that that uh science has been opposed to a biblical or christian worldview right and rather

01:24:22.300 than seeing it as the friend i just made the point that well it's in the that's there's been

01:24:27.960 this dichotomy the sense that that that religious people have the faith and the scientists and the

01:24:33.320 philosophers and the scholars have facts and the facts oppose the faith. And so many religious

01:24:39.160 people, many Christian people have withdrawn from the realm of intellectual discourse, feeling that

01:24:44.940 it's opposed to what they value most rather than seeing that the facts support the faith. And you

01:24:50.460 go back to just something very simple in the scripture, Romans chapter one, from the creation

01:24:57.440 of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, sometimes in

01:25:02.620 older translations rendered wisdom, have been clearly seen from what has been made. The facts

01:25:08.840 of the world point to not only God's existence, but they even tell us something about his attributes.

01:25:13.180 Yes. And so there's no necessary separation. We don't have to keep the world of the intellect,

01:25:19.700 the world of facts, the world of reason down here, and the realm of morality and religious belief

01:25:27.060 appear ever separated in the manner that Stephen Jay Gould commended to us with his idea of Noma,

01:25:33.420 non-overlapping magisteria. No, the realms overlap because it's God's world.

01:25:38.440 Yes, yes. I don't know. To me, I would jump headlong into that because I said, well, look,

01:25:43.560 either it's true or it's not. And if it's true, then it must obtain in the world,

01:25:50.000 not just in this one classroom. So it seems to me there's something very attractive

01:25:56.900 now. And maybe it's because it's so subversive. You have seen a spike in conversions in Europe

01:26:06.840 and in the United States. And specifically to Catholicism, I've noticed. And you've seen a

01:26:13.180 little bit of a spike, a return to the mainline Protestantism, which had been basically eradicated

01:26:18.780 over the last 60 years. But a return to liturgy, to smells and bells and complexity and all. And

01:26:25.680 And it's really weird because in this country, Catholicism used to be a low-class thing. 1.00

01:26:30.560 It was for your Irish maid. 0.96

01:26:32.140 It was not for, you know, the... 1.00

01:26:33.640 The intellectual Christians. 0.99

01:26:34.640 Yes, right.

01:26:36.640 But now, it's weird, Catholicism and to some degree, the high church Protestant traditions

01:26:43.060 and Eastern Orthodoxy even, have this kind of intellectual cachet to them.

01:26:49.100 They're catching on.

01:26:50.100 The Catholic church is still bleeding members because cradle Catholics are falling away,

01:26:54.500 But the number of adult conversions is skyrocketing in the West. 0.90

01:26:58.920 And I wonder if there's this flip of ethos in that now the atheists have lost their mojo,

01:27:08.740 they've lost their cred, and the intellectual mojo is- 0.72

01:27:11.740 This is a point I wanted to come back to before with your quote of Plantinga, that one of

01:27:16.680 the funniest things or the most ironic things about the new atheism is that it wasn't new

01:27:20.880 at all.

01:27:21.880 was reprising the village atheism of the late 19th century, the scientific atheism of the late

01:27:27.000 19th century. And I think when you asked, well, why did it lose its mojo? I think it was partly

01:27:33.740 because it wasn't really offering anything new. It was offering something that had either been

01:27:40.820 refuted or for which the evidence was right there to do the refuting. And so, yeah, there's a study

01:27:50.000 in Britain, again, I cite my friend Justin Brierly, and there's a study in Britain on the

01:27:56.040 quiet revival. And this is happening very rapidly. In 2018, it was the number of young people,

01:28:09.060 I forget the cohort, maybe 18 to 30, who were attending church was in the low single digits,

01:28:15.500 about 4%, very low among young men, only slightly lower among young women. It's jumped among young

01:28:22.760 men to 21 or 22% from like 2%, almost a tenfold increase, and among young women from 4 to 16,

01:28:30.920 a fourfold increase, something like that. So there's something going on. And this is one

01:28:35.540 thing that excites us in coming out with this film into the culture right now. We feel like

01:28:41.260 we're hitting a cultural scene where there's receptivity to the message of this, that people

01:28:46.320 are looking not only for evidence that supports belief in God, but I think people are also,

01:28:52.400 young people in particular, are looking for something that would ground a yearning for

01:28:56.800 meaning. There's a Harvard study in which it was documented that something like 56% of young people

01:29:06.880 in the 18 to 30 range, acknowledged having persistent doubts about whether their own lives

01:29:12.740 had any enduring or lasting meaning. And this makes perfect sense in light of the new atheism

01:29:21.960 and the dominance of materialism, naturalism as a worldview that it's not just been the new

01:29:27.500 atheist, this has been the dominant, the default way of thinking in the West for quite some time

01:29:31.660 in the elite intellectual culture, in the universities, the law schools, the courts,

01:29:35.640 the media. And young people pick up on that, of course. And it makes sense. If your worldview

01:29:44.660 is materialistic, nothing can mean anything to a rock or a planet or a galaxy or even a DNA

01:29:53.420 molecule. Things only mean things to persons. Things are meaningful to people. And yet we all

01:29:59.800 die. And so if there is no ultimate person whose existence precedes ours and can continue

01:30:12.680 beyond ours. Outlast ours. Outlast ours. That's the verb I was looking for. Thank you. There can be no

01:30:18.160 possibility of ultimate meaning. This is axiomatic. And there was a great Bertrand Russell quote about

01:30:23.720 the heat death of the universe and the sense that this is, you know, completely, everything's

01:30:30.180 pointless. And because of the heat death of the universe, this is beyond certain. This is

01:30:35.120 absolutely certain. And I think young people perceive that. And so I think there's a craving

01:30:41.160 for a basis for meaning again. And if there is a personal God, a personal creator who wants to

01:30:50.260 know us. And if there is evidence of that, moreover, then the question of meaning is back

01:30:56.900 on the table. Yeah. And I guess I even come at it from the opposite direction, which is the

01:31:01.920 materialist would say, yes, isn't it a pity? You wish there were meaning. There isn't. That's why

01:31:06.800 you're depressed. That's why you're taking drugs. But, you know, cope with it. I love the condescending

01:31:12.080 affect. So sorry. But I guess my reaction to that is there is meaning. There manifestly

01:31:22.140 is meaning. We all behave as if for all of history, everywhere in the world. And we can

01:31:29.940 even investigate meaning. We can know things about it. One discovery of semiotics, of the

01:31:35.680 study of symbols, is that meaning participates both in the real world with real things and

01:31:41.620 touch, you know, and with rational creatures, you know, objects of my mind. And that, you

01:31:47.280 know, a yellow light, for instance, means something. It's a convention, just a symbol,

01:31:53.260 but it means something. And what's so curious about the yellow light is its meaning is not

01:31:58.360 totally fixed. I participate in its meaning because if I were a granny and I saw the yellow

01:32:03.960 light, the meaning that I would pull out of it is to slow down. But the meaning that I pull out of

01:32:09.360 is of course to speed up because I want to get past the light. I know what it's trying to tell

01:32:13.900 me. I know what it says about the law. I know what it says. And yet there's this dynamic meaning that

01:32:19.900 is pulled out of the universe, both from tangible things. I love that move, Michael, because you can

01:32:24.960 make an evidential case for theism, which grounds a belief in a transcendent or ultimate persistent

01:32:33.700 meaning. Or you can presuppose the reality of meaning and point out that we all live as if

01:32:41.060 there was such a thing and then challenge people to fess up and acknowledge what is implied by

01:32:48.680 the existence of such a thing. Surely it's a curious fact. Which is namely some ultimate

01:32:54.040 person who is the ground of it all. I think there's a moral argument that can be unpacked

01:32:59.740 the exact same way or an epistemological argument. We all live as though we have objective knowledge

01:33:05.020 of the world, which implies that we believe that our minds are reliable. There are all kinds of

01:33:11.580 post-enlightenment epistemologies, philosophies that deny the reliability of the mind, but we

01:33:17.260 live as though our minds are reliable. And perhaps the best, I think the best grounding of that belief

01:33:23.980 is actually theism, the idea that our minds were made by a benevolent God to know the world that

01:33:28.620 that he made. And so you can start with a presumption of knowledge and work backwards

01:33:33.800 to its necessary condition, which is theism. Or you can make a case for God and then say,

01:33:38.980 hey, good news. We have good reason to believe our minds are reliable and therefore science is

01:33:44.360 possible. Yeah. The people who would say that, well, we have no reason even to believe that

01:33:49.540 the product of our mind is accurate, have the courage of your convictions. Go run into the

01:33:55.260 wall. Exactly. Go jump into the fire. You never seem to do that, do you? And so I remember

01:34:01.000 part of my reversion, I was an atheist for 10 years, I converted a year after college,

01:34:06.400 and a part of it, it was an agonist. It sounds like we settled about the same time. That's

01:34:10.480 really interesting. I had about a 10-year protracted, agonizing conversion. It wasn't

01:34:17.840 really an experience, you know, but that's interesting. That's precisely the same. It was

01:34:21.700 10 years, and especially at the end.

01:34:24.120 Overthinking everything.

01:34:25.300 Overthinking everything.

01:34:26.140 I took the long way.

01:34:27.160 I took the stubborn.

01:34:28.080 Yes, yes. 0.78

01:34:28.560 The last thing in the world to a Damascus Road experience. 0.95

01:34:32.840 Yes, yes. 0.74

01:34:33.940 I remember when I was finally, the scales were very slowly falling from my eyes.

01:34:40.460 I was sitting in my little ugly house that my mother had bought, and I had this little ugly house in New York,

01:34:47.320 and I was sitting in front of my little, ugly, dying rose bush, 0.91

01:34:51.240 smoking a cigar on my little, ugly... 0.90

01:34:52.980 Even then, huh? Even then. 0.98

01:34:54.260 The cigars have been persistent.

01:34:57.100 That's the real grounding of your existence.

01:34:59.600 Truly, yeah, truly. 0.62

01:35:01.000 And I was sitting there smoking it, looking at this little ugly...

01:35:03.680 It's important that it wasn't beautiful.

01:35:06.020 It was kind of ugly.

01:35:07.420 And yet, I couldn't help but notice the particularity of it,

01:35:11.480 the complexity of it,

01:35:13.100 the fact that the leaf looked one way and not another way,

01:35:15.240 The fact that the vine turned one way and not another way.

01:35:19.520 And I thought, well, isn't that funny?

01:35:21.960 Isn't that weird?

01:35:23.540 That I thought the universe would be so neat and pat and simple and generalizable.

01:35:28.460 But it's so...

01:35:30.020 Why is it all...

01:35:30.700 Why is this...

01:35:31.900 Why does the concrete look the way that it does?

01:35:34.980 Why does it...

01:35:35.680 And why does it evoke something?

01:35:38.600 Why am I drawing some meaning out of that?

01:35:41.160 That in itself seems beautiful.

01:35:44.660 This is ugly, but there's a meaning that is drawing my mind to something beautiful.

01:35:49.440 How the hell does it mean anything at all?

01:35:52.080 And I was reminded of this line from the South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone,

01:35:56.900 who in their own charming way had said, you know, we make fun of all these religions.

01:36:01.560 They had the musical about Mormons.

01:36:03.780 So we make fun of all these religions. 0.95

01:36:05.060 He said, but you know, of all the crazy religions of the world, the craziest one we ever heard

01:36:10.440 about was this idea that everything that we know, that we experience, that is beautiful,

01:36:16.500 our loves, our joys, our desires, and all, it's all here just because. Just because.

01:36:23.300 That's the start of the Birch and Russell quote. You know, our greatest desires and hopes and loves

01:36:30.540 and the highest accomplishments, the noonday brightness of human achievement, it's all

01:36:37.740 destined for, for destruction in the heat death of the universe. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That, and that's

01:36:43.320 the, that, that's fat. Well, your, your, your description of that reminds me of the, the

01:36:48.440 account of the conversion of Whitaker Chambers, who was looking at his daughter's ear. Yeah. And

01:36:53.680 it also reminds me of a, of a kind of conceit that exists within science that we will be able

01:37:01.700 to explain everything by a set of pure, simple regularities. And time and time again, we've

01:37:09.960 not been able to come up with a theory of everything in physics, but in biology in particular,

01:37:14.580 there was the assumption that when we figured out the secret of life, it would be a real

01:37:20.720 simple, repetitive molecule. And then the shocking thing was the immense three-dimensional

01:37:29.140 complexity of the proteins, the amazing linear complexity of the sequence of the characters in

01:37:37.380 the DNA, and the sequence of the amino acids that turned into the three-dimensional. Everything in

01:37:42.160 biology was complex. It was highly specified, but it was very complex. And a lot of times,

01:37:49.100 physicists hope that we'll be able to explain everything in the universe by reference to one

01:37:53.300 simple theory of everything, but I don't think it's going to work because we live in a world of

01:37:57.340 a universe a world and especially the living world of beautiful specificity and complexity

01:38:04.260 combined and that that's something that that is derivative of information you need instructions

01:38:09.700 to build that kind of thing i thought the secret of life was 42 or 40 yeah exactly or this thing

01:38:14.900 that uh my grandson says about six seven he says yeah he says i don't i don't know what it means

01:38:21.040 either either but everyone at school is saying it six seven six seven yeah maybe that's it but

01:38:26.000 Like cigars, the secret of the universe.

01:38:28.820 Yes, it is.

01:38:29.400 But of course, that is what everyone wants, is the secret of life.

01:38:32.920 The theory of the universe is this simple equation or something.

01:38:36.600 But I fear that you have had some deceit in the marketing here.

01:38:40.040 Because you told me you have this movie, based on this book, about telling the story of everything.

01:38:45.460 Now you tell me there's no simple theory.

01:38:47.460 Well, there's no simple theory.

01:38:48.860 But there is a simple explanation that involves the importance of a mind behind the universe.

01:38:56.000 Minds are not simple, um, and minds do things that are complex. Um, yeah, there's a biblical

01:39:05.460 connection here too, that what we've realized in, in, in the 19th century, when people did think

01:39:10.760 things would end up being simple, everything by natural laws. And there were two fundamental

01:39:14.880 entities, matter and energy. And the big story, the story of everything is that there's a,

01:39:21.160 there's a third fundamental element, and that is information. And this is something that was

01:39:28.800 anticipated biblically, beginning of the Hebrew Bible. In the beginning, God said. And in the

01:39:36.520 beginning of the John 9 prologue in the New Testament, in the beginning was the Word.

01:39:41.600 And so, in fact, one of the scientists in the film who was a leading chemical evolutionary

01:39:47.900 theorist, first had a scientific conversion to skepticism about his own theory, then had a

01:39:53.620 deeper scientific conversion to the idea or theory of intelligent design, and then finally had a

01:40:00.160 religious conversion to Christianity. And one of the things that elicited his sort of aha moment

01:40:06.540 was coming across a passage in the New Testament describing Jesus Christ as the word of life

01:40:13.380 and realizing that this connection between creativity and information

01:40:17.960 was anticipated in the Bible itself.

01:40:22.220 Even in the, as you mentioned, those first verses of Genesis,

01:40:26.320 you do see Trinitarian imagery, the idea that the Father speaks,

01:40:31.620 you know, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.

01:40:34.160 And even the air, like the aspiration of the Word,

01:40:38.940 is an image of the bond of love between the Father and the Son, as I see it.

01:40:42.240 It's the Holy Ghost.

01:40:43.380 And so you see that all right there

01:40:45.320 in the notion that from the very beginning there is...

01:40:48.520 Personhood.

01:40:49.460 Personhood.

01:40:49.700 And relationship.

01:40:50.600 And relationship, yes.

01:40:51.520 And interesting, too,

01:40:54.600 we were just discussing the triadic nature of meaning,

01:40:56.840 signs and symbols.

01:40:57.720 Yeah, yeah.

01:40:58.460 And you see the...

01:40:59.520 You basically just see God as Trinity

01:41:02.780 embedded in the entire creation.

01:41:04.940 And some people will look at that and say,

01:41:06.840 nah, just a coincidence.

01:41:08.720 Just a coincidence.

01:41:09.740 Everything's just a coincidence.

01:41:11.020 Yeah.

01:41:11.400 It's a lot of coincidences.

01:41:12.320 Yeah, yeah.

01:41:14.240 The movie is the story of everything.

01:41:17.200 People should read all of your books, of course.

01:41:19.120 Well, thank you.

01:41:19.740 But the movie is based on the book.

01:41:21.360 Mrs. Meyer, thanks you.

01:41:22.520 Yes, certainly. 0.96

01:41:23.740 You can get more cheap tuxedos for creationism.

01:41:25.620 Yes, right, exactly.

01:41:27.940 Before I let you go, on that point, actually, which we haven't totally hammered, what is the difference?

01:41:34.600 They say you're just a creationist.

01:41:36.860 Oh, right, right, right. 0.97

01:41:37.800 What is the difference between this unthinking, god of the gaps, knuckle-dragging, dumb creationism and intelligent design?

01:41:48.740 Well, the term creationist has been deployed as a pejorative term against those of us in our research community, our network, who are advancing the theory of intelligent design.

01:42:02.120 And that's because there is a form of creationism which is committed to the proposition that the earth is very, very young on the order of, say, six or 10,000 years or maybe a bit older.

01:42:16.100 And the days of Genesis are meant to be understood as six 24-hour periods.

01:42:22.780 Our theory of intelligent design is different from that form of creationism in two ways.

01:42:28.940 one is that it's not a deduction from scriptural authority first of all it's an inference from

01:42:36.080 biological physical and cosmological data we're seeing evidence of the activity of a mind an

01:42:43.340 intelligent mind and in the cosmological realm even a transcendent intelligent mind and secondly

01:42:49.320 the theory of intelligent design is an age-neutral proposition it's not committed to a young earth

01:42:56.900 or an old Earth, it's simply saying that there are certain means by which you can detect the

01:43:02.520 activity of a mind or an intelligence, and we see evidence of those distinctive hallmarks of

01:43:09.280 intelligent activity in the living forms that came on the planet before us, and even in, for

01:43:15.840 example, the fine-tuning of the physical constants and parameters of the universe. So it's an inference

01:43:21.340 some biological data, and it takes no position per se on the age of the earth. I myself hold to

01:43:28.720 the great antiquity of the universe and life, but there are scientists who

01:43:34.280 affirm intelligent design who might beg to differ with me, and maybe because they read

01:43:42.460 the Genesis account differently than I do, hold to a young earth. But intelligent design is not

01:43:47.740 um, is not, not, not affirming a young earth. Bound by that. Yeah. But, but I, I, we, even today,

01:43:53.280 I mean, as we've, we have a new study center that we've started in Cambridge, England. And

01:43:56.740 one of the, one of the libels against us is that we're, we're young earth creationists. And well,

01:44:02.020 that's, that's, that's not what, that's not what the theory, uh, affirms.

01:44:07.060 On the point of a distinction between the mind and the brain, what does this mean for AI?

01:44:12.500 Right. Artificial intelligence. Because one thing I noticed that the head of

01:44:16.380 nvidia claimed that they stumbled on artificial general intelligence right right they had reached

01:44:21.480 it but then no one can define what that is everyone says does it mean uh the ai can run

01:44:27.840 a billion dollar business does it mean that the ai is indiscernible from a human being in the way

01:44:31.520 that he reasons a general task i don't know and it occurred to me i think they can't define

01:44:36.420 artificial general intelligence because they they don't know what real intelligence is like they

01:44:41.540 literally they no longer know what the intellect is. So is the, what does that distinction mean

01:44:46.800 for AI? Let's set the definitional question aside for a minute, but there's a very significant

01:44:53.840 result that's emerged out of the most cutting edge versions of AI, the large language models.

01:44:59.540 And it's something called the model collapse or mod, yeah, model collapse. And I think it's the

01:45:07.260 tell. It's the philosophical tell. The extraordinary thing about the AI technology,

01:45:14.700 especially these large language models, is what they can do. It's amazing. And if you feed in lots

01:45:20.580 of text written by actual human agents, you can then query that body of information and you will

01:45:29.420 get coherent answers spit back out at you in response to your queries but if

01:45:36.380 you take the output of those answers if you take those answers as output and

01:45:42.860 treat that as more data to feed into the AI system or make that the basis of a

01:45:49.040 new iteration of large language model modeling if you will and now you query

01:45:57.620 that data set your next set of answers are not nearly as coherent and if you keep doing that

01:46:07.000 iteration after iteration after iteration without correcting things without an input of a conscious

01:46:12.340 intelligence correcting things you'll you'll get to pure gibberish within a couple of generations

01:46:17.480 so you have a kind of devolution of informational coherence with each iteration that and what this

01:46:26.520 shows is there's a fundamental asymmetry between the information that comes from the conscious

01:46:31.100 intelligence, which is the source of the original data set, and then the artificial data that's

01:46:36.920 output by the AI in response to your query of that first real data set that's come from agents,

01:46:44.500 from conscious agents. So the AI is dependent on either both the initial input and subsequent

01:46:53.100 inputs by way of correction in a way that the agent is not dependent on the AI for the production

01:47:01.800 of genuine meaning. So this shows that the mind will not be replaced by the artificial intelligence.

01:47:09.200 There's a great book coming out called Augmented Human Intelligence by Eric Larson and co-author

01:47:15.980 with MIT Press. And his previous book was The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, which was a critique

01:47:21.700 of claims for artificial general intelligence. And I would recommend these two books for readers

01:47:27.020 that are interested. And he shows for a bunch of reasons, technical reasons and more than I've

01:47:33.500 just stated, that there's a lot of reasons to doubt the almost utopian program of artificial

01:47:43.140 general intelligence. And nothing in the LLMs, the large language models, the chat GPTs, that sort of

01:47:48.700 technology undermines that conclusion. Listen, I'm going to preface this and say some of my best

01:47:54.600 friends work in AI, but I mean, some of them will say we're building God. So they're describing

01:48:01.600 the opposite process, that this thing is going to achieve liftoff and become much, much more

01:48:05.960 intelligent. You're saying, no, no, no, if it's just feeding on itself, it degrades pretty quickly.

01:48:10.620 My only challenge to that is I seem to observe the same phenomenon among actual human intelligence

01:48:17.980 in society. I don't, you know. It can be degeneracy. Yeah, writing has declined low

01:48:22.660 these last hundred years. Well, you know what turned me on to this, Michael, was an analogous

01:48:27.020 problem in origin of life research, which has been my main field. And that is, there's a model

01:48:32.480 called hypercycles that was meant to simulate how you could get in, produce something analogous to

01:48:39.980 cellular metabolism. But with each cycle, there was a loss of information in what was called an

01:48:46.800 error catastrophe, an accumulation of essentially genetic gibberish in the modeling of the origin

01:48:52.660 of life. And that's what you have in the AI with the model collapse. It's an error catastrophe

01:48:57.620 where you gradually lose meaning and coherence with each iteration unless you have a conscious

01:49:05.780 agent inputting information. And so this also underscores one of our key principles in

01:49:11.560 intelligent design research, which is the conservation of information, that the information

01:49:15.860 the information, the specified or functional information of a system will either remain the

01:49:21.780 same or degrade over time unless there is an input of information from a conscious agent.

01:49:28.580 The initial input will exceed the output. Or sometimes if you have an error correction,

01:49:35.020 you can maintain the fidelity of information across a channel, but that error correction has

01:49:40.400 to have an input from an intelligence. So it's this fundamental connection between conscious

01:49:45.540 intelligence and the creation and even the maintenance of information, that's not something

01:49:51.000 that nature does on its own. Nor something that the computers do on the road. Even the computers

01:49:55.760 are dependent upon us and not the other way around. Yeah. We use them. They're fantastic

01:50:00.980 technology. There's all kinds of ways they are improving life. We need them in the medical

01:50:05.800 industry. We need them in defense technology. AI has got a lot of great potential, but it also,

01:50:11.300 like any technology, can be used for ill as well, and we have to watch that side of things.

01:50:16.860 Right. On points that are called dumb and uneducated and all, we were talking about 0.85

01:50:22.900 Galileo earlier, who got exactly what he deserved as far as I'm concerned, but not for scientific 0.81

01:50:27.280 reasons because of impudence. His imprudence. Yes, exactly. Yes. But

01:50:35.140 what Galileo upended was this idea that the earth is the center of everything,

01:50:40.740 of the cosmos, these spheres on which the celestial body is moved. And now we find ourselves

01:50:50.200 in Carl Sagan world where we say we're just some little rock far flung in the middle of

01:50:53.440 nowhere and all. But I've heard that from cosmic background radiation, we have determined

01:51:00.000 that actually maybe we are back at the center of things. And anyway, I really want that

01:51:04.520 because one, I want to meet up- We're special for new and different reasons

01:51:07.740 or thought in the Middle Ages.

01:51:09.600 Is it possible?

01:51:10.320 There's a fantastic,

01:51:11.340 in the opening of the film,

01:51:12.840 if I can just tout it one more time,

01:51:14.500 I'm sorry.

01:51:15.280 I don't mean to be here selling.

01:51:17.540 I mean, I've been selling Mayflower cigars

01:51:19.500 now twice on this show.

01:51:20.780 Well, there's a wonderful opening

01:51:22.280 where we set up this contrast

01:51:23.440 between the two great stories of reality.

01:51:25.520 Yeah.

01:51:25.860 The materialistic story

01:51:27.320 and the story that affirms

01:51:29.480 a creator or a mind behind the universe.

01:51:31.860 And there's a wonderful clip

01:51:34.540 that we found of Sagan

01:51:35.940 where he's talking about, Dawkins has just said, just affirmed how that when we die,

01:51:43.680 he's asked by Piers Morgan in the film, what happens to you when you die? He says, well,

01:51:49.280 of course, I'm either buried or I'm cremated. There's just nothing. There's just nothing.

01:51:55.660 How could there be? You have a brain that decays. And then Carl Sagan comes on and says, here we are 0.97

01:52:01.160 like mites on a plum on this little planet of this obscure, tiny solar system

01:52:07.740 and the edge of an insignificant galaxy among something like 400 billion other galaxies.

01:52:15.480 And then there's this beautiful flyby.

01:52:17.860 We start on planet Earth and you go out into deep space

01:52:22.020 and then you end up with all the galaxies

01:52:23.860 and it gives you this great sense of this insignificance.

01:52:26.620 and I think so as far as being at the center of the solar system or the center of the universe

01:52:33.720 now we can't we can't derive significance from that but being the outcome of a plan

01:52:39.400 of a finely tuned universe of a genetic and other levels of informational programming that make us

01:52:51.440 possible that reveal a master programming behind everything well maybe we are special after all

01:52:57.000 maybe we were intended and i think when we talk about evidence of intelligent design in life in

01:53:03.040 the universe we're talking about a mind that intended what is here what has been created

01:53:07.700 the things that are made as the book of romans puts it and so maybe that whole uh question of

01:53:14.440 human significance also needs to be revisited yes because we are the outcome i think the highest form

01:53:20.620 of life that has been created on the only planet in which we have any inkling that life exists.

01:53:26.440 Yes. You don't just think that. It is a demonstrable and inescapable fact. And so

01:53:33.800 then they say, are you so, you're so special, you're so, they'll say, you think this is all for

01:53:39.240 us? This whole cosmos is for us. I say, well, yeah, you're talking about the birds of the air

01:53:44.520 and the fish of the sea, for instance. You think all the creeping things that creep across the

01:53:49.020 Yeah, I actually do.

01:53:51.020 The earth was progressively prepared for humans to inhabit it.

01:53:55.020 There is absolutely nothing irrational or anti-scientific about affirming that.

01:54:00.020 But then, of course, there's the next question, which is, well, is that it?

01:54:04.020 You know, that we are the gods that we previously had expelled?

01:54:09.020 Or do we have to take it one step further and say maybe we are made for something or someone?

01:54:17.020 maybe we are made with a purpose too. And maybe, uh, to your point earlier on, you know, when you,

01:54:24.340 when you have faith, it all kind of makes sense. And that's one good argument for the, for

01:54:28.120 Christianity is it's explanatory power. Let's say when, when I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing,

01:54:36.600 uh, imperfectly, but nevertheless, uh, doing my best when I am in a state of grace to use the

01:54:43.220 Christian language, when I am cooperating with God's will as best I can, when I am not

01:54:47.720 disobeying God to the best of my ability, things do seem to make more sense. I get along

01:54:55.920 in the world a lot better.

01:54:56.940 There's even a joy in that, right?

01:54:59.040 One would say there's even a joy in that.

01:55:01.380 The film that sparked my enchantment with Oxford and Cambridge, I ended up going to

01:55:08.780 Cambridge was the Chariots of Fire in the 1980s. And there's that memorable line where the Scottish

01:55:15.620 runner is, and when I run, I feel his pleasure, you know. And so when you're doing the thing you

01:55:24.240 were designed to do, this idea of design and purpose and teleology, it isn't just a matter of

01:55:31.100 something we see in the cosmos or something we see at the foundations of physics or that we see in

01:55:36.460 the interior of the cell. Once you are able to affirm that as a metaphysical reality, as an

01:55:42.000 ontological reality, it begins to have implications for the rest of life. You can begin to now think

01:55:46.780 about, well, what is my purpose? Where do I fit in all of this? Might there be a calling that I have?

01:55:52.960 What was I made to do? Those sorts of questions come back on the table as well. Indeed, it has

01:55:59.140 implications not just for when you're engaged deeply in your vocation, but it has implications

01:56:05.260 for when you're chopping carrots.

01:56:06.620 It has implications for when you get cut off in traffic.

01:56:08.540 Yeah, exactly.

01:56:09.160 Ordinary work is good work.

01:56:10.740 It's part of what God made us to do.

01:56:12.680 So, yeah, all those things start to make sense.

01:56:14.660 And when you are in that zone,

01:56:18.880 there is a kind of joy that comes from feeling his pleasure.

01:56:21.900 You're doing what you were made to do.

01:56:24.540 This idea, it's an ancient idea.

01:56:25.880 It goes back to Aristotle, the idea of a teleos,

01:56:28.720 or an entelechy, the purpose for which something was made.

01:56:31.920 And as you, I was a college professor for 15 years, and I used to talk to students a lot about this.

01:56:38.620 This is part of what you're here to do in your educational experience, is to discern what your entelechy is.

01:56:45.160 What is the thing that you were uniquely designed to do?

01:56:48.460 Find that, run with it, and you will find a kind of joy, and you will be useful to other people.

01:56:54.360 You will serve and bless other people.

01:56:55.780 Yeah, I love that one can go from these mathematical calculations about the probabilities of all the aspects of the cosmos and figure out your purpose and do it in one conversation.

01:57:10.280 And in fact, any story of everything that does not include both of those things probably does not comprise everything.

01:57:18.620 That's fantastic, but we still haven't talked about cigars.

01:57:21.340 Well, that's my purpose.

01:57:23.120 That's your purpose.

01:57:24.120 Obviously, you need to go watch the story of everything right now.

01:57:29.340 And as a little amuse-bouche to that banquet, we have a trailer.

01:57:34.620 Today, I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange.

01:57:42.300 Galileo, Kepler, Newton.

01:57:46.460 Each tried to explain events in the history of the universe.

01:57:49.300 Has the universe always been here?

01:57:51.600 Or is it finite?

01:57:52.780 Is there something else that would lay these questions to rest?

01:57:56.240 It reopens that question of ultimate meaning.

01:57:59.640 How in the world did this start?

01:58:02.480 The simulation theory?

01:58:03.800 The multiverse.

01:58:04.640 You can't trust what's in front of your eyes. 0.98

01:58:06.340 Come on, that's ridiculous. 0.98

01:58:08.040 That belongs in the movies. 0.90

01:58:12.860 We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to.

01:58:18.580 And I can remember him saying...

01:58:20.040 Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event.

01:58:26.420 He himself made a discovery that shook his personal philosophy.

01:58:31.440 The fact the universe sprang into being at a definite moment seems to me theological.

01:58:36.580 And it is science that has revealed this.

01:58:39.480 We're dealing with a system of manifold complex design.

01:58:44.080 ... force compared with the weak nuclear force.

01:58:46.060 One part in 10 to the 10,000.

01:58:47.760 Not too fast, not too slow.

01:58:50.040 turned out to be the tip of the iceberg we associate information with a rational intelligence

01:58:58.200 behind it it had an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string very much like an information

01:59:04.920 carrier you can read the same segment forward to get one protein and backwards to get another

01:59:10.440 it struck us with a tremendous impact without guidance we would get a life unfriendly universe

01:59:15.960 Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that's relevant for their survival value.

01:59:20.960 The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences.

01:59:30.960 The question then was what does one do about it?

01:59:45.960 The movie comes out April 30th.

01:59:49.000 It's in theaters across the country, possibly as many as 1,000.

01:59:53.520 We're adding them.

01:59:54.840 I think we're over 500 now.

01:59:56.580 It has a guaranteed seven-night opening,

01:59:58.920 and we're hoping that it maybe lights a little bit of a spark in the culture.

02:00:03.680 The interest in the God question is coming back and percolating to the surface.

02:00:09.140 I think this film will foment further such interest,

02:00:14.080 but on grounds that people may find surprising, namely scientific discovery.

02:00:19.500 Steve, excellent to see you. All of you need to go see the movie immediately. See you next time.

The Michael Knowles Show - April 25, 2026

＂Evolution Fails To Explain This＂ Michael & Intelligent Design ｜ Dr. Stephen C. Meyer

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript