00:22:35.480Let me answer the question you didn't ask first, and then I'll segue to answer the other one.
00:22:39.300Because what is really fascinating in the origin of life discussion is that very serious scientists, biologists, 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.
00:22:59.300Why? 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.
00:23:09.300And so instead, they've posited that life might have arisen on another planet designed by an alien intelligence.
00:23:20.980Well, 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,
00:23:30.480which Dawkins acknowledged is a problem,
00:23:33.760he speculated that, well, maybe there, he said, there is a signature of intelligence,
00:23:38.520but it must have had, it must have arisen by an intelligence in outer space.
00:26:44.460So you have this ensemble of cosmic fine-tuning parameters that have to be just right, and then you have to have all the localized fine-tuning parameters to get a life-friendly solar system and planetary system.
00:27:01.120And so when you do the math, the localized fine-tuning parameters are more relevant to assessing whether there would be life somewhere else in the universe, but they end up dwarfing.
00:27:10.580The improbability of that ends up dwarfing the probabilistic resources provided by the two trillion galaxies, at least in the reckoning of an increasing number of physicists.
00:27:23.660This is at least now a very active area of debate.
00:27:29.580There was a book years ago in the mid-2000s by two astronomers at the University of Washington called Rare Earth.
00:27:37.240Two colleagues of mine, a few years later, wrote a book called Privileged Planet.
00:27:41.800And apparently a new book out by some Italian physicists making the same point that, yeah, big universe, but the probabilities are so small that even this vast universe doesn't render life inevitable.
00:27:55.000And again, even in a very favorable planetary environment like ours, we have no explanation for where the origin of the first cell came from and the origin of the information necessary to build it.
00:28:08.760So the complexity of life dwarfs the vastness of the universe in that kind of a calculation.
00:28:16.420But then when you tell people that, I don't say it verbatim as you do, it was a little
00:28:21.100more eloquent than my version of it, but when I tell people that, they say, so you just
00:28:43.220From everything that I know, we're the only meat creature that can reason and receive universals in our intellect, which by all accounts appears to be a power, a spiritual power of a rational soul.
00:29:00.920The qualitative differences between humans and other, even the highest primates, are staggering, and they're obvious, and we hardly ever talk about them.
00:30:26.200How do you get across in a stimulus response evolutionary system, 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?
00:30:56.200Yeah, linguistics and languages, Latin, but every single human language has this complexity and suppleness of expression, all the tenses and the declensions and so forth.
00:31:15.640So this was Chomsky's, his mantra, there are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages.
00:31:26.200And, and how you get from what the, what the, the primates do to what we do is a complete mystery. It is not, it's a hugely unsolved mystery in evolutionary theory.
00:31:39.500But, but it underscores our uniqueness as well.
00:31:41.620And I, 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.
00:31:51.460But he's pretty good on language, 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.
00:32:02.680Making concessions about really fundamental issues.
00:32:06.020Go to goodranchers.com, use code Knowles.
00:32:08.240The weather is warming up, grilling season is here, and if you're like me, you're planning out every one of your delicious steaks that you're going to cook throughout the year.
00:32:17.440Frankly, you don't need to wait until grilling time
00:32:20.320because the only debate that Sweet Little Alisa and I have over our meat0.69
00:32:25.080is whether we're going to grill it or cook it in the pan.
00:38:27.940So it becomes profoundly anti-materialistic because independent of the hot, dense starting point, independent of all the matter and energy of the universe, there is no matter, there is no space, there is no time.
00:38:46.680So something that transcends those dimensions is a better explanation of the origin of matter than matter itself.
00:38:55.220matter can't explain its own origin. That's the problem.
00:38:59.420But people have tried to, like the materialists and the libs have tried. And I've only seen this in popular writing, but they say, well, no, you know what happens is you have the singularity of this really hot, dense starting point, and it expands into the cosmos as we know it, and then eventually it's going to contract again and collapse and rinse and repeat.
00:39:19.180it's going to go in. Or they'll say, well, yeah. It's known as the oscillating universe model,
00:39:23.580and it, by the mid-80s, was dismissed on physical grounds. Which is, of course, why? Not enough
00:39:30.000matter in the universe, even counting the dark matter, to cause a re-collapse. Even if you got
00:39:34.180a re-collapse, you would have no energy available left to do work. The entropy buildup would mean
00:39:40.860that you wouldn't get a subsequent expansion. So that was one of many cosmological models that
00:39:46.800attempted to retain the idea of an infinite universe, temporally infinite. And the one
00:39:55.280before it was known as the steady state. And I'll tell you, there's a whole suite of new models
00:40:00.020being formulated because the mind of the mathematician and the physicist is infinitely
00:40:05.200creative. And there has been an impulse to try to retain the idea that the universe is infinite
00:44:48.280we're back to intelligent design. In other words, even if the multiverse is true,
00:44:52.960intelligent design is still the best explanation. Then how come when I go on Wikipedia,
00:44:57.320Steve, and I look up intelligent design, it tells me that intelligent design
00:45:01.640is a pseudo-scientific creationist nonsense made by people who have insufficient brain cells and
00:45:10.880who are afraid of the dark. And wear white shoes and are from Appalachia and all the0.93
00:45:18.260stereotypes, right? Yes. Well, in my own Wikipedia page, it says that I am a pseudoscientist. I
00:45:26.340regarded that as an upgrade because the previous description of me on Wikipedia had me as an
00:45:32.460American theologian as a way of stigmatizing our work. I have no degrees in theology. And so,
00:45:40.860in a way, that was an upgrade too, I suppose. Well, this is the attempt to win the debate by
00:45:44.760pejorative, by ad hominem. And so it makes it more fun, I think, really. The other epithet we get is
00:45:52.780creationists in cheap tuxedos. And my wife took that one very much to heart because she said,
00:45:59.080we've paid a lot for that tuxedo. It's outrageous. I love my tailor.
00:46:03.680Yeah. But no, if that's the best the other side can do, we smile and appreciate that.
00:46:09.240When 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.
00:46:31.200And I think invariably people see through that stuff.
00:46:34.440And 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.
00:46:46.480But I think we're in a very different day now.
00:46:48.400I think that those kinds of arguments are not working.
00:46:51.040Once we get past the multiverse, the next thing that the denizens of Reddit at Wilta, they ask, well, don't you think we might just be living in a simulation?
01:00:52.560Berlinski wrote this incredible critique of the New Atheist movement when it was still hot, and the devil's delusion, atheism and its scientific pretensions, and he saw a lot of the...
01:01:06.180But I had a conversation with him. I know you and I met him. You met him at a conference in the fall.
01:01:12.340I'm quite taken with David Berlinski, but even before I met him, I met...
01:01:15.920He's, by the way, featured in the film, and every time he comes on, people start laughing.
01:01:19.280Yes, he, I mean, he's just this, so before I had met him, all I knew of him was his writing.
01:01:24.160And so I, but I really have enjoyed his writing for a long time as, as with yours.
01:01:28.980And 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.
01:01:39.000But 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.
01:01:48.280to up their game and to articulate and formulate the reasons they had for believing in God.
01:01:58.900And as, you know, we were kind of doing that all along with our work on intelligent design,
01:02:03.680but they created an appetite for the kind of work that we were doing, and lo and behold,
01:02:08.860people have found that our arguments are actually better. And, you know, some of the
01:02:13.440new atheist arguments are incredibly weak, and such that many atheist philosophers, for example,
01:02:18.840Dawkins' argument from complexity. If you invoke God, then you've invoked something more complex
01:02:26.240than the thing you're trying to explain, and that violates Occam's razor. No, no, no, no, it doesn't.
01:02:30.940That's not what Occam's razor says. It isn't that the entity can't be more complex than the thing
01:02:36.760being explained. If that were the case, then we couldn't explain the origin of the television set
01:02:41.140by reference to the engineers who designed it, because clearly the engineers, or you couldn't
01:02:45.080explain Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, by reference to Dawkins, because clearly he would
01:02:51.620have to acknowledge that his own mind and brain are more complex than the words on the page that
01:02:55.740he wrote. Occam's razor says you shouldn't multiply theoretical entities. Your explanation shouldn't
01:03:02.700be complex in the sense of being Baroque and convoluted with just adding new explanatory
01:03:09.080just-so stories to make your explanation still fit. God is actually a very simple explanation
01:03:15.940because the postulation of one God is much simpler than the postulation of a multiverse
01:03:22.520and all the theoretical entities that go with it from string theory and inflationary cosmology.
01:03:27.660Some would say he's so simple, he's described by divine simplicity.
01:03:31.460Well, there's that very ancient argument from classical philosophy, absolutely. So this is
01:03:37.520one of the go-to arguments of the scientific atheists, and even many atheistic philosophers
01:03:41.980say, no, this is a complete misapplication of Occam's razor.
01:03:45.900I remember reading Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great, when I was a teenager or
01:03:52.480something, and I read it, and I said, well, and I was quite taken with him, but it did
01:03:57.940occur to me later, I said, he doesn't even make that argument. The book doesn't even
01:04:03.000give you what it sells you on the cover. He just whines about religion for 250 pages or so.
01:04:08.180And then I was taken with the analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga's description of the new atheism.
01:04:14.480They said, what do you think of the new atheists? He said, I think they're greatly inferior to the
01:04:19.220old atheists. I think Bertrand Russell probably.
01:04:23.060A lot better. Yes, yeah, that's exactly right. Well, and that's the, yeah, a couple of things
01:04:28.100there. First of all, let's stipulate that Christopher Hitchens was himself great.
01:04:34.320Delightful figure. Tremendous orator. Great oozed British erudition. And let's give Dawkins his due as well. He has a tremendous talent for framing issues. And I think in so doing did us all a favor because Darwinism wasn't just about change over time.
01:04:55.560It became very easy to accommodate Darwinian evolution if you thought all it was was change over time.
01:05:02.460You could incorporate that into what was God's way of creating because God just caused the change over time.
01:05:08.500No, Darwinism was, as Dawkins very succinctly put it in The Blind Watchmaker,
01:05:16.240biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
01:05:23.020Darwinism was about the denial of actual design and the affirmation of the illusion of design.0.89
01:05:28.560I mean, a lot of Christians who are interested in the doctrine of creation
01:05:32.940were getting all hung up on, is the earth old or is it young?
01:05:36.980Do organisms have a common ancestor or not?
01:05:41.880No, the issue was always design or no design.
01:05:44.820And that's the reason that our team framed the issue that way and said,
01:05:50.280no, our theory is the theory of intelligent design.
01:05:52.400We think that there are certain features of the living world and of the universe that are best explained by the action of an intelligent agent rather than an undirected, unguided process like natural selection.
01:06:05.320So we posed ourselves in opposition to the neo-Darwinists, and Dawkins made very clear what was at stake that helped us to clarify the issue.
01:06:16.020That's a good point. By going so far, by being so brazen, some would say reckless in their
01:06:24.120claims. But logically consistent. Yes, yes. He is a logically consistent materialist. The other
01:06:30.740great Dawkins quote, which I absolutely love and repaired to several times in my book, Return of
01:06:36.380the God Hypothesis and in the new film, Story of Everything, another number of people cite it. It's
01:06:41.000his claim that the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom
01:06:47.140there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. That's a beautiful
01:06:53.520statement, not only of materialism as a philosophy, but it also implies that metaphysical hypotheses
01:07:00.360like materialism or its opposite, theism, are testable against observations of the world
01:07:08.320around us. They're every bit as testable as scientific theories. And so that's a wonderful
01:07:13.020thing because if people want to separate metaphysics from the observations that the
01:07:17.340world know that our metaphysical theories can be tested by the test of experience, by looking at
01:07:23.920and seeing. And what I show in Return of the God Hypothesis and what we show, I think, even more
01:07:29.560vividly in the film is that the story of everything. I don't know that we've actually
01:07:33.300said the title of the film. The story of everything. Thank you. Is that the great
01:07:36.980discoveries of the last 100 years in science have been shocking to the materialists. They're not
01:07:42.400what you would expect from blind, pitiless indifference. That's shorthand for scientific
01:07:47.460materialism. No materialist expected that the universe would have a beginning. It was axiomatic
01:07:54.240for the materialistic philosophy or scientific atheism that the universe was eternal and
01:08:01.320self-existent and self-creating and therefore did not need an external creator. It had always been
01:08:06.920here, so you didn't have to think about, well, what started it or who started it. But the shocking
01:08:13.140discovery of modern astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy is that the universe, as best we can
01:08:19.500tell for multiple reasons, had a beginning. No materialist expected the fine-tuning. When Fred
01:08:25.460Hoyle discovered the first suite of fine-tuning parameters, he changed his worldview. He was a
01:08:31.100staunch scientific atheist. He hated the Big Bang, as we were saying, and stigmatized it with his
01:08:39.560term, the Big Bang, the pejorative term. But when he discovered the fine-tuning that was necessary
01:08:44.920to account for the abundance of carbon in the universe, he realized that there must be an
01:08:52.280intellect, a mind behind the universe. And his famous quote was that the best data we have
01:08:58.040suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible.
01:09:04.260And I do love it the way the monkeys always make it into the origins.
01:09:07.640They do. There is a role for the monkey. There's a role for every particle in the cosmos.
01:09:12.720That was unexpected. And of course, the biggest unexpected thing is the interior of the cell.
01:09:17.320And Dawkins, two summers ago now, was himself quoted as saying that he was
01:09:23.120knocks sideways with wonder at the intricate data processing system at work inside the cell.
01:09:29.480That's not what you would expect from blind, pitiless, indifference. You don't expect
01:09:34.080intricate data processing systems, digital code, and nanomachines. And we're talking nanomachines,
01:09:39.580we're talking turbines, sliding clamps, little walking robotic motor proteins,
01:09:45.580little rotary engines inside cells on a miniaturized scale. This is what we're finding
01:09:51.500inside life. No materialist expected to find that kind of thing. So it's good that he's knocked on
01:09:55.420his side. When's he going to be knocked on his knees? How do you look at that with just the
01:10:00.820jaw-dropping complexity, intricacy, and not just say, you know, just not start reciting Psalm 8,
01:10:09.140you know, oh Lord, your works are manifest in the creation. Or fearfully and wonderfully made
01:10:14.740when you think about our own bodies and our own, yeah, yeah.
01:12:02.720You know, on the point of the plain language versus jargon and these kind of abstract and needlessly convoluted theories like the multiverse, another shift, it seems to me, is that people now seem to want to back away from the jargon a little bit, which is good.
01:12:25.020Common sense. 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 words that are less evocative.
01:12:42.160That a dummy or a midwit at best will try to impress you with all sorts of polysyllabic words.0.87
01:12:50.460Unless he's Bill Buckley and he's just having fun.0.96
01:12:52.120Yes, right. Running circles around you.
01:20:04.580It'd be like going into the British Museum, looking at the Rosetta Stone and saying, well, I'd like to say it was the product of a scribe, but because I'm committed to methodological materialism, I'm going to have to invoke wind and erosion.
01:20:19.460And so it's not just theists that have prior commitments.
01:20:25.280And I think being aware of those prior commitments allows you to subject them to critical tests when the need arises.
01:20:33.680If you're not aware of them, you get blinders on and you just work within one framework and you keep trying to jam materialistic square pegs into theistic or round holes.
01:20:48.660But, you know, the theists are not blameless here in as much as there have been plenty of people under the banner of Christianity or really any other religion, I guess, who, but Christianity is the one that matters here because it's...
01:21:31.040Yeah, yeah. Approaching 2,500 years, 3,000 years, have recognized this for pretty simple reasons.0.86
01:21:38.660You know, St. Thomas Aquinas, who, you know, on basically every show, I can't help but talk about my Mayflower cigars and St. Thomas Aquinas.
01:21:47.480You've worked it in at least one. We haven't got to describe it.
01:21:48.920There's one, yes. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't want to let it go.
01:21:50.720But Aquinas makes a pretty clear argument for it, which is the mind can't be physical, the intellect can't be physical, because it deals in immaterial substances.
01:22:03.520So the eyes, what is the eyes receive? Color. And that's how we see the physical world. The ear receives sound. And the mind receives universals. So justice.
01:26:26.220So it seems to me there's something very attractive now.
01:26:30.000And maybe it's because it's so subversive.
01:26:33.640You have seen a spike in conversions in Europe and in the United States, and specifically to Catholicism, I've noticed.
01:26:44.480And you've seen a little bit of a spike, a return to the mainline Protestantism, which had been basically eradicated over the last 60 years, but a return to liturgy, to smells and bells and complexity.
01:26:57.720And it's really weird because in this country, Catholicism used to be a low-class thing.0.97
01:27:54.140It was reprising the village atheism of the late 19th century, the scientific atheism of
01:27:59.600the late 19th century. And I think when you asked, well, why did it lose its mojo? I think it was
01:28:06.160partly because it wasn't really offering anything new. It was offering something that had been
01:28:10.480that had either been refuted or for which the evidence was right there to do the refuting.
01:28:19.380And so, yeah, there's a study in Britain, again, I cite my friend Justin Briarley, and there's a study in Britain on the quiet revival.
01:28:31.640And this is happening very rapidly. In 2018, the number of young people, I forget the cohort, maybe 18 to 30, who were attending church was in the low single digits, about 4%, very low among young men, only slightly lower among young women.
01:28:53.640it's jumped among young men to 21 or 22 percent from like two percent almost a tenfold increase
01:29:00.300and among young women from four to 16 a fourfold increase something like that so there's there's
01:29:06.200something going on and this is one thing that excites us in coming out with this film into
01:29:12.200the culture right now we we feel like we're it it's we're hitting a cultural scene where there's
01:29:16.860receptivity to the message of this that people are looking not only for evidence that supports
01:29:23.100belief in god but i think people are also young people in particular looking for something that
01:29:27.740would ground a yearning for meaning yeah there's a harvard study that uh show that in which it was
01:29:36.140documented that something like 56 of young people in the 18 to 30 range acknowledged having
01:29:43.180persistent doubts about whether their own lives had any um enduring or lasting meaning and and
01:29:51.180This makes perfect sense in light of the new atheism and the dominance of materialism, naturalism, as a worldview.
01:38:16.540It was highly specified, but it was very complex.
01:38:20.920And a lot of times, physicists hope that we'll be able to explain everything in the
01:38:24.940universe by reference to one simple theory of everything, but I don't think it's going
01:38:28.400work because we live in a world of a universe a world and especially the living world of beautiful
01:38:35.120specificity and complexity combined and that that's something that that is derivative of
01:38:40.960information you need instructions to build that kind of thing because i thought the secret of life
01:38:44.800was 42 or 40 yeah exactly or this thing that uh my grandson says about six seven he says yeah he
01:38:52.160says i don't i don't know what it means either either but everyone at school is saying it six
01:38:57.040six, seven, six, seven. Yeah, maybe that's it. Like cigar is the secret of the universe. Yes,
01:39:01.920it is. But of course, that is what everyone wants, is the secret of life. The theory of
01:39:06.040the universe is this simple equation or something. Yeah. But I fear that you have had some deceit in
01:39:12.300the marketing here, because you told me you have this movie based on this book about telling the
01:39:17.400story of everything. Right. Now you tell me there's no simple theory. Well, there's no simple
01:39:21.020theory, but there is a simple explanation that involves the importance of a mind behind the
01:39:28.020universe. Minds are not simple, and minds do things that are complex. Yeah, there's a biblical
01:39:38.260connection here too, that what we've realized in the 19th century when people did think things
01:39:44.000would end up being simple, everything by natural laws, and there were two fundamental entities,
01:39:48.160matter and energy. And the big story, the story of everything is that there's a third fundamental
01:39:55.220element, and that is information. And this is something that was anticipated biblically,
01:40:03.220beginning of the Hebrew Bible. In the beginning, God said. And in the beginning of the John 9
01:40:10.640prologue in the New Testament, in the beginning was the Word. And so, in fact, one of the
01:40:16.060scientists in the film who was a leading chemical evolutionary theorist first had a scientific
01:40:22.260conversion to skepticism about his own theory, then had a scientific, a deeper scientific
01:40:27.540conversion to the idea or theory of intelligent design, and then finally had a religious conversion
01:40:33.700to Christianity. And one of the things that elicited his sort of aha moment was coming across
01:40:41.520a passage in the New Testament describing Jesus Christ as the word of life, and realizing that
01:40:47.300this connection between creativity and information was anticipated in the Bible itself.
01:40:54.940Even in the, as you mentioned, those first verses of Genesis, you do see Trinitarian imagery,
01:41:02.480the idea that the Father speaks, you know, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God,
01:41:06.520And even the air, like the aspiration of the word, is an image of the bond of love between the Father and the Son, as I see it, as the Holy Ghost.
01:41:16.260And so you see that all right there, and the notion that from the very beginning there is...
01:47:46.900by Eric Larson and co-author with MIT Press.
01:47:50.260And his previous book was The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, which was a critique of claims for
01:47:55.640artificial general intelligence. And I would recommend these two books for readers that are
01:48:00.120interested. And he shows for a bunch of reasons, technical reasons and other, more than I've just
01:48:06.520stated, that there's a lot of reasons to doubt the almost utopian program of artificial general
01:48:16.400intelligence. And nothing in the LLMs, the large language models, the chat GPTs, that sort of
01:48:21.520technology undermines that conclusion. Listen, I'm going to preface this and say some of my best
01:48:27.400friends work in AI, but I mean, some of them will say we're building God. So they're describing
01:48:34.400the opposite process, that this thing is going to achieve liftoff and become much, much more
01:48:38.760intelligent. You're saying, no, no, no, if it's just feeding on itself, it degrades pretty quickly.
01:48:43.060My only challenge to that is I seem to observe the same phenomenon among actual human intelligence in society.
01:48:51.900I don't, you know, writing has declined low these last hundred years.
01:48:56.920Well, you know, what turned me on to this, Michael, was an analogous problem in origin of life research, which has been my main field.
01:49:02.780And that is, there's a model called hypercycles that was meant to simulate how you could get in, produce something analogous to cellular metabolism.
01:49:14.340But with each cycle, there was a loss of information and what was called an error catastrophe, an accumulation of essentially genetic gibberish in the modeling of the origin of life.
01:49:25.780And that's what you have in the AI with the model collapse.
01:49:28.980It's an error catastrophe where you gradually lose meaning and coherence with each iteration unless you have a conscious agent inputting information.
01:49:41.440And so this also underscores one of our key principles in intelligent design research, which is the conservation of information,
01:49:47.420that the information, the specified or functional information of a system
01:49:53.060will either remain the same or degrade over time
01:49:56.620unless there is an input of information from a conscious agent.
01:50:01.380The initial input will exceed the output.
01:51:04.520Yes, exactly, yes. But what Galileo upended was this idea that the Earth is the center of everything, the cosmos, these spheres on which the celestial body is moved.
01:51:20.140And now we find ourselves in Carl Sagan world where we say we're just some little rock far-flung in the middle of nowhere.
01:51:26.540But I've heard that from cosmic background radiation, we have determined that actually maybe we are back at the center of things.
01:51:36.000And anyway, I really want that because, one, I want to beat up.
01:51:38.960We're special for new and different reasons than we're thought in the Middle Ages.
01:51:50.360I mean, I've been selling Mayflower cigars now twice on this show.
01:51:53.460Well, there's a wonderful opening where we set up this contrast between the two great stories of reality, the materialistic story and the story that affirms a creator or a mind behind the universe.
01:52:04.660And there's a wonderful clip that we found of Sagan where he's talking about, Dawkins has just said, just affirmed how that when we die, he's asked by Piers Morgan in the film, what happens to you when you die?
01:52:21.320He says, well, of course, I'm either buried or I'm cremated.
01:54:34.160the next question which is well is that it you know that we we are the gods that we previously had
01:54:41.360expelled or do we have to take it one step further and say maybe maybe we are made for
01:54:48.400something or someone maybe we are made with a purpose too and maybe uh to your point earlier on
01:54:55.920you know when you when you have faith it all kind of makes sense and that's one good argument for
01:55:00.560For Christianity, it's explanatory power. When I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing imperfectly but nevertheless doing my best, when I am in a state of grace, to use the Christian language, when I am cooperating with God's will as best I can, when I am not disobeying God to the best of my ability, things do seem to make more sense. I get along in the world a lot better.
01:55:55.440And so when you're doing the thing you were designed to do,
01:55:58.080This idea of design and purpose and teleology, it isn't just a matter of something we see in the cosmos or something we see at the foundations of physics or that we see in the interior of the cell.
01:56:11.180Once you are able to affirm that as a metaphysical reality, as an ontological reality, it begins to have implications for the rest of life.
01:56:18.560You can begin to now think about, well, what is my purpose?
01:57:17.960What is the thing that you were uniquely designed to do?
01:57:21.260Find that, run with it, and you will find a kind of joy,
01:57:25.260and you will be useful to other people.
01:57:27.180You will serve and bless other people.
01:57:29.220Yeah, 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.
01:57:43.080And in fact, any story of everything that does not include both of those things probably does not comprise everything.