The Michael Knowles Show

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00:00:30.000 The shocking discovery of modern astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy is that the universe,

00:00:38.700 as best we can tell for multiple reasons, had a beginning.

00:00:41.780 Everyone, if you pushed them far enough and you made them think, they would have to admit

00:00:45.120 that.

00:00:46.120 There are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages.

00:00:49.620 How you get from what the primates do to what we do is a complete mystery.

00:00:54.240 It's a hugely unsolved mystery in evolutionary theory, is that information always arises

00:00:58.880 from an intelligent source, whether we're talking about computer code or a paragraph

00:01:02.760 in a book or hieroglyphic inscription, information is, in our experience, a product of intelligence.

00:01:08.640 Your description of that just gave me chills.

00:01:11.160 Let me unpack it a little bit. 0.99

00:01:23.220 When I was in school, the surest way to be called an idiot was to question the theory 0.95

00:01:27.500 of evolution, which is precisely what my guest, Dr. Stephen Meyer, has done, and he's done 0.98

00:01:34.720 a lot more than that. In fact, he's questioned a lot of everything, and he has a new movie

00:01:37.960 out called The Story of Everything. Steve, thank you for being here.

00:01:42.620 Thank you for having me, Michael. It's great to be here.

00:01:44.740 I want to get to evolution. I want to get to the origin of life. I want to get to the

00:01:48.420 existence of God. I want to get to how you have contradicted the entire scientific and

00:01:53.840 philosophical establishment of the 20th century, but I want to start with evolution, because

00:02:01.620 truly it was the unthinkable heresy for the entire duration of my schooling. And you come

00:02:10.060 out with a couple other friends, this would have been what, 10, 15 years ago?

00:02:14.640 It goes back to the mid-90s when this craziness started, right?

00:02:19.860 you say, actually, Darwin's wrong. How's that? Well, an interesting little factoid is that

00:02:28.940 now leading evolutionary biologists are calling for a new theory of evolution. And they are

00:02:35.560 calling for a new theory of evolution because they recognize in their technical papers, if not

00:02:41.340 more publicly, that the fundamental driver of the modern version of Darwinism,

00:02:49.240 the neo-Darwinian theory, the mechanism of mutation acting on, or natural selection acting

00:02:56.220 on random mutations, lacks the creative power to generate truly novel forms of life.

00:03:02.900 There was a 2004 book published with MIT Press.

00:03:06.960 Two leading evolutionary biologists said that neo-Darwinism lacks any theory of the generative.

00:03:12.220 It does a nice job of explaining small-scale variation.

00:03:16.000 does a very poor job of explaining large-scale morphological innovation, the origin of fundamentally

00:03:23.400 new forms. And in 2016, there was a conference at the Royal Society in London convened by

00:03:30.720 leading evolutionary biologists who were dissatisfied with the standard so-called

00:03:35.120 neo-Darwinian synthesis. I've always considered myself a paleo-Darwinian.

00:03:41.800 You're a paleo-Darwinian. Go back further to 1859.

00:03:44.380 Because there are these different shades of evolutionary theories.

00:03:48.600 There's Darwin, there's Lamarck, there's what Darwin actually wrote, there's what modern

00:03:53.200 Darwinians actually think, and they all have problems.

00:03:58.540 Right.

00:03:59.460 They all have problems, but the fundamental problem is the origin of novel form.

00:04:04.940 The mechanism that we learn about in high school and college biology classes, natural

00:04:09.020 selection acting on random variations or mutations, does a really nice job of explaining small-scale

00:04:15.080 variation. The finch beaks that get a little bigger or smaller among the Galapagos finches,

00:04:20.140 the variations in coloration of the famous peppered moths in England and with the so-called

00:04:25.380 industrial melanism. It's the same set of examples. You always get antibiotic resistance,

00:04:31.160 but fundamental innovation where you get new body plans, new organs, new anatomical structure.

00:04:37.480 the mechanism does not do a good job of that. And there's some very good reasons for that that

00:04:42.460 are recognized in the literature in biology broadly, but also even within the more specialized

00:04:49.220 sub-discipline of evolutionary biology. And so this 2016 conference convened at the Royal Society

00:04:55.780 in London, arguably the most august scientific body in the world, was featured evolutionary

00:05:03.260 biologists calling for a new theory and exploring, looking for some other evolutionary mechanisms

00:05:10.480 that would provide the creative power that is not provided by mutation and selection.

00:05:17.140 But oddly, at the end of the conference, one of the conveners characterized the conference

00:05:21.000 for its lack of momentousness. And essentially, she said this was Susan Mazur. She was essentially,

00:05:27.740 I think, alluding to the fact that the conferees did a very good job of characterizing the problems

00:05:32.080 with the standard theory, the receive theory, but did not come up with any mechanisms that

00:05:38.100 had the power to generate body plans and fundamental changes in living systems.

00:05:45.020 Because this is the evolution of someone learning about evolution, but also taking the existence

00:05:53.680 of God seriously and taking deeper philosophical problems seriously as well. Seems to be, you

00:05:59.880 learn about Darwin in school and you're told that everything has come about because of natural

00:06:06.340 selection working on random. Undirected natural processes. Yes. The indifference of this cold

00:06:11.640 material. Right. Blind, pitiless indifference is the famous Dawkins. Yes. Yes. And then you say,

00:06:18.100 okay, well, look, maybe God exists and God is just using evolution. Evolution is an expression

00:06:26.280 of how god creates the world exactly and then you start to say well hold on evolution seems to have

00:06:32.140 trouble uh creating new species but it can change the length of your fingers or whatever and

00:06:39.540 so you keep you keep on the one hand the the materialists and the darwinists accuse us of

00:06:47.360 being a god of the gaps kind of or you know but but then i think we could probably accuse them

00:06:52.760 of being science of the gaps. Well, or materialism of the gaps, right? There's got to be a materialistic

00:06:57.560 explanation for everything. That's a pre-commitment of many scientists. But what if you're looking at

00:07:02.780 features in the living world or in the universe that are characteristic of the activity of

00:07:08.780 intelligent agents? And then maybe we need to amend that rule a bit and follow the evidence

00:07:15.620 where it leads. But yeah, the evolution of study and thinking about evolution is exactly what you

00:07:21.320 describe. I've been through it myself, but even the first step, the idea that God is using the

00:07:31.260 evolutionary process to create, is itself a bit problematic. For one, if you're affirming 0.76

00:07:38.840 Darwinian evolution, the idea of natural selection acting on random variations and

00:07:44.180 mutations, the Darwinian mechanism, was designed as a designer substitute mechanism.

00:07:49.280 And there's a way to get your head around this.

00:07:52.120 If you think of, this would be an archetypal Darwinian example.

00:07:56.620 Imagine that there are some, you're a ranch,

00:08:00.420 or you're a shepherd in the far north of Scotland,

00:08:03.220 and you want to breed a woolier breed of sheep.

00:08:05.940 Well, what do you do?

00:08:06.940 Well, you choose the wooliest males and the wooliest females 0.52

00:08:10.440 and allow only them to breed.

00:08:11.940 And then you would do that through successive generations

00:08:15.040 and you get a very woolly breed of sheep.

00:08:17.040 This is a well-known phenomenon, going back to biblical times, called artificial selection.

00:08:25.040 But at the end of the day, if you're in a cold climate like the far north of Scotland,

00:08:30.040 and you've got a very woolly sheep, now you've got a sheep that's well-adapted to its environment.

00:08:35.040 And in the 19th century, biologists thought the strongest evidence of design in nature, or in life,

00:08:41.040 was the adaptation of organisms to their environment.

00:08:44.040 environment, that birds live in the air, they have wings, allow them to fly, fish live underwater,

00:08:50.140 they have gills, and so forth. So now Darwin comes along and he says, the sheep example is my

00:08:57.820 own, but he has several like it. And he says, well, let's imagine that instead of the artificial 0.79

00:09:02.840 selection of the breeder, we have a series of very cold winters, so that only the wooliest

00:09:09.340 sheep survive. Now, at the end of, say, 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever winters, we're going to get the

00:09:15.920 same outcome. We're going to get a very woolly breed of sheep. And now that sheep is well adapted

00:09:20.480 to the environment. And so now we've got the same outcome. We've got design, the appearance of

00:09:27.420 design, adaptation, but without a designer. Instead of artificial selection, we have natural

00:09:34.760 selection. We have nature doing the work. Now, why is that important? Well, when we want to

00:09:39.760 sort of baptize Darwinism and say that this is God's way of creating, the proper Darwinists

00:09:48.980 will bristle and say, no, no, no, as Darwin himself did, and say, no, you're missing the

00:09:52.720 whole point. We're getting rid of any intelligent activity in the creation of new biological form.

00:09:58.800 And so it's nature doing the selecting, not God. It's an attempt to explain the appearance of

00:10:04.220 design without a designer. And that's actually very hard to reconcile with any meaningful form

00:10:08.760 of theism. When I was learning about this in school, and the last time I studied this seriously

00:10:15.160 was probably the eighth grade, so it never got very advanced. Yeah, right. Though, I don't know,

00:10:20.500 I never got better answers even from my friends in college or elsewhere. The argument was, look,

00:10:27.440 we can see the evidence of natural selection in all of these species and all these places of the

00:10:31.240 earth. Um, but we have no idea how life began in the first place. Right. I said, well, I don't

00:10:37.820 listen to me. What am I? I'm a layman. That seems like a big problem for you. Right. Yeah. And the

00:10:43.600 last I heard was that there was this, the, the, the leading theory is there's a primordial soup

00:10:50.700 and a bunch of molecules were batting into each other. And then just one day, I don't know,

00:10:56.620 enough molecules hit each other that you got a life form, a single cell or something.

00:11:01.820 And scientists had tried to recreate these conditions and various beakers and petri dishes,

00:11:07.880 and they've been successful.

00:11:10.200 But there were problems with the methodology, and they were tainted with germs or whatever.

00:11:15.900 And so, but anyway, we're pretty sure.

00:11:18.660 Something like this is what explains it all.

00:11:21.460 That's how you go from inorganic to organic.

00:11:23.660 And then you get natural selection kicking in.

00:11:26.620 all the new forms arise, right? Yes. Yeah. So, right. This is what I did my PhD on. It was

00:11:31.760 the origin of life biology. And I was working in the late 80s in Cambridge on this. At the time,

00:11:39.160 it was pretty widely acknowledged, including by one of my PhD examiners that original life

00:11:45.000 research had reached an impasse. She came back from the 1989 ISOL conference saying to me,

00:11:53.220 Steve R. Field has become populated with cranks and quacks, and I hate to say this, but the problem 1.00

00:12:00.500 is everyone knows that everyone else's theory doesn't work, but they're unwilling to admit it 0.99

00:12:05.620 about their own. And things have gotten no better in the ensuing, almost now, 30 years.

00:12:12.980 And the problem is that, as Jim Tour, the organic chemist from Rice, has pointed out,

00:12:17.940 is that with each passing decade,

00:12:21.480 we learn more and more about the complexity of life.

00:12:24.440 And if you want to explain the origin of life,

00:12:26.240 you have to know what life is like,

00:12:27.980 you know, what it's made of.

00:12:29.520 And at the time of Darwin,

00:12:30.880 when people first started thinking about the origin

00:12:33.420 of the first life, because Darwin didn't,

00:12:35.520 he had one little passage in a letter to a friend

00:12:38.820 where he speculated about life beginning

00:12:40.620 in a warm little pond.

00:12:42.200 But his famous bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley,

00:12:46.100 started to formulate ideas

00:12:47.600 about the origin of the first life.

00:12:49.660 And he was famous for saying that the cell

00:12:54.440 is a simple homogeneous globule

00:12:57.340 of undifferentiated protoplasm.

00:13:00.280 That's my wife's nickname for me, by the way.

00:13:02.540 Homogeneous or protoplasm? 1.00

00:13:03.380 Homogeneous globule full of undifferentiated protoplasm.

00:13:06.320 So when scientists thought that life was very simple,

00:13:10.760 that it was just a chemical goo,

00:13:12.720 then it was easy to imagine that the essence of life

00:13:15.720 might have arisen as a result of a few simple chemical reactions. But that view of life did

00:13:21.800 not hold. And by the time you get to the 1950s and 60s and 70s, in this period that historians

00:13:27.900 of science now call the molecular biological revolution, and scientists are learning that

00:13:32.160 inside living cells, there are large, what are called macromolecules, biomacromolecules that

00:13:39.660 contain digital information and that that information is part of a larger information

00:13:46.760 processing system that involves nanomachinery and that the cell as a whole can be characterized

00:13:53.380 as something like an automated factory, explaining how that arose through a few simple chemical

00:13:58.880 reactions becomes very, very much more difficult. And so that's the real problem today. It's the

00:14:04.380 problem in both branches of evolutionary theory, where does the information come from that's

00:14:10.300 needed to build new forms? To build biological form, you need information. And the key question

00:14:18.740 in the origin of life is, where did the information in the DNA come from?

00:14:21.780 Right. And I mean, at a very basic level, how is it information? You know, the very

00:14:28.480 fact that it has meaning, that is intelligible, the very fact that the world is intelligible,

00:14:35.440 would seem to suggest to my totally scientifically illiterate, but moderately philosophically

00:14:41.620 interested mind, it would seem to suggest that there is an intelligence that is outside of us.

00:14:47.620 Let me unpack it a little bit. 1953, Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of the DNA

00:14:54.220 molecule. By this time, most scientists are suspecting that DNA has something to do with

00:14:58.500 the transmission of hereditary information. And they unpack the structure. Famous paper,

00:15:04.600 you know, Nature, April 25, 1953, they announced they've unlocked the secret of life.

00:15:11.600 Five years later, 57, 58, Francis Crick, upon deeper reflection on all this, realizes that the

00:15:19.600 the the dna has this beautiful double helix structure and on the inside there are these

00:15:24.640 chemical subunits called bases or nucleotide bases and crick realizes that these bases are

00:15:30.740 functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or like digital characters

00:15:35.780 like the zeros and ones in the section of of machine code or or computer code yeah and that

00:15:40.660 they are collectively providing instructions for other machinery in the cell to produce

00:15:47.640 the proteins and protein machines that are needed to keep cells alive. So you've got digital

00:15:52.540 information producing three-dimensional, even mechanical structures inside life. And so you've

00:16:01.540 got an advanced form of digital nanotechnology. And initially people think, oh, this helps explain

00:16:09.860 where the mutations occur. But then they start thinking, wait a minute, we know where the

00:16:15.580 information is. We know what it does, but we don't know where it came from. And as you think just

00:16:23.800 in a deeply philosophical way, just ask yourself the question or a scientific way,

00:16:30.880 what do we know about the origin of information? Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software

00:16:34.800 program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. Richard Dawkins himself has

00:16:40.240 acknowledged that DNA is like a machine code. Again, computer code. Well, where does computer

00:16:46.840 code come from? Where does software come from? It comes from a programmer. It's a product. It's a

00:16:50.980 mind product. It's a product of intelligence. And so what we know from our uniform and repeated

00:16:56.900 experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, is that information always arises

00:17:01.760 from an intelligent source, whether we're talking about computer code or a paragraph in a book

00:17:06.880 or hieroglyphic inscription or the information transmitted as we're talking or down a radio or

00:17:14.080 across a radio signal, information is, in our experience, a product of intelligence.

00:17:20.380 And so there have been numerous attempts to explain the origin of the information

00:17:23.400 necessary to produce life apart from intelligence. This is what my book Signature in the Cell

00:17:29.080 was all about and documented. But these different attempts have failed, and for very good reasons

00:17:35.260 that we could talk about and explain, but what is left standing is our knowledge based on our

00:17:41.740 uniform experience, which is that information is a product of mind. So this discovery of

00:17:47.860 information at the foundation of life is a powerful indicator of the activity of a designing mind in

00:17:53.920 the history and origin of life. But if I give a monkey a typewriter and I leave him on a long

00:17:59.940 enough timescale, he will compose, he'll certainly compose my first book, Reasons to Vote for

00:18:04.540 Democrats. He'll do that immediately. But he'll compose the works of Shakespeare eventually.

00:18:08.920 And so wouldn't the materialist come back and say, well, yes, we're all astounded by the

00:18:13.640 complexity of nature and all these data that we find in the nucleotides. How cool is that?

00:18:20.000 But it's just because of natural processes. I like how you've mastered the lingo already.

00:18:24.640 Don't tell me you can't do science. You know, I'm very good at mimicking.

00:18:30.080 I don't know about storing the information, but they would tell you, okay, on a long enough

00:18:36.820 timescale, nature will achieve this. So I don't know how long it would take the monkey to write

00:18:42.140 Shakespeare. Maybe it would be 500,000 years or 500 million years. Could you calculate how

00:18:48.340 long it would take nature? Well, it turns out to be a math problem, actually,

00:18:51.380 interestingly enough. And I did the math in my first book on the origin of life,

00:18:57.540 signature in the cell. In the early 50s, the chance hypothesis was still taken seriously

00:19:04.000 among origin of life researchers, people that were thinking seriously about this problem.

00:19:08.880 There was a famous scientist, George Wald, who said that time is the hero of the plot,

00:19:14.800 and that if you have enough time, enough chances, enough opportunities, chance is a plausible

00:19:19.960 explanation. But the molecular biological revolution that I've been describing kind

00:19:24.820 changed all that because the amount of information stored in even a modest length protein defies what

00:19:32.340 are called the probabilistic uh resources of the entire universe uh the point uh past which the

00:19:40.580 appeals to chance become implausible let me give a simple example yeah um if chance can be a

00:19:46.340 reasonable explanation under certain circumstances uh if if there's maybe there's a bike outside the

00:19:52.420 building here and it's locked with a standard four dial lock here if a thief comes along and

00:19:59.220 wants to open it by chance if he only has five minutes before your excellent security people

00:20:04.740 come around the corner it's more likely than not that he will fail by chance so that means

00:20:11.140 that the chance hypothesis is more likely to be false than true okay now if he's got more time

00:20:16.420 time, and I've actually made this calculation for a four dial lock with 10 seconds per spin,

00:20:25.300 if in about 15 hours the thief could sample more than half those 10,000 combinations.

00:20:31.300 In that case, the chance hypothesis becomes more likely to be true than false, okay?

00:20:36.160 In the case of the specific arrangement of the amino acids in a modest length functional

00:20:44.860 protein, there are not enough events from the beginning of the universe till now to have sampled

00:20:51.100 more than half the possible combinations, because you've got 20 times 20 times 20 times 20 times 20

00:20:56.640 possibilities running out to 150 sites. So I won't go into all the math on the show,

00:21:02.640 but I do it in the book. And here's the thing, it's not controversial. There is no serious origin

00:21:08.160 of life researcher today who thinks that the chance hypothesis is plausible. They're looking

00:21:14.640 for other types of materialistic explanations, not relying on chance.

00:21:18.780 As we're sitting here in outer space, well, it kind of looks like outer space, and it

00:21:22.540 also looks like the double U-legs.

00:21:23.700 There's even a DNA molecule there.

00:21:25.020 Yes, they're...

00:21:26.040 Kudos to your set designers.

00:21:27.600 They're good.

00:21:28.860 They are intelligent designers.

00:21:30.200 Beautiful.

00:21:31.220 But as we sit here, and I'm looking at outer space, there's an issue that has really divided

00:21:36.420 the daily wire, specifically me from my colleague, Matt Walsh.

00:21:40.640 Okay.

00:21:41.480 He believes in aliens.

00:21:44.000 I do not believe in aliens.

00:21:46.080 And regardless of what one thinks about E.T. and Little Green Men,

00:21:50.920 the thing that drives me the craziest,

00:21:53.180 whenever I mention anything about the supposed aliens,

00:21:55.940 is I say, I don't see any evidence for them.

00:22:00.320 And people tell me, Michael, the universe is just so big,

00:22:03.860 the odds that life wouldn't spring up somewhere else, I mean, it's zero.

00:22:08.500 There's so much to say about this, Michael.

00:22:10.040 Yes, and it drives me.

00:22:11.340 I want to put my head through a wall when they say this.

00:22:14.520 And what do I know?

00:22:15.680 I don't know anything about probability.

00:22:17.060 But I said, it seems to me if we are to ascertain the probability of something,

00:22:23.760 we need to know anything at all about how it comes about.

00:22:27.840 And if you can't do that, then you can't possibly ascertain whether or not something is likely.

00:22:32.620 Am I crazy?

00:22:34.200 You're not crazy.

00:22:35.480 Let me answer the question you didn't ask first, and then I'll segue to answer the other one.

00:22:39.300 Because 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.

00:22:59.300 Why? 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.

00:23:09.300 And so instead, they've posited that life might have arisen on another planet designed by an alien intelligence.

00:23:19.840 Why designed?

00:23:20.980 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,

00:23:30.480 which Dawkins acknowledged is a problem,

00:23:33.760 he speculated that, well, maybe there, he said, there is a signature of intelligence,

00:23:38.520 but it must have had, it must have arisen by an intelligence in outer space.

00:23:44.040 Well, that solves it.

00:23:44.800 Yeah, that's, well, it doesn't, of course, because there's no accounting for where the

00:23:48.840 information ultimately came from in space. It just doesn't kick the can down the road,

00:23:53.040 it kicks it into outer space. But this is the so-called panspermia theory, but it shows you

00:23:59.180 just how deep the impasse is in origin of life research, as far as people trying to explain the

00:24:03.940 origin of life from undirected chemical evolutionary processes. That one, though,

00:24:08.080 I've had friends who have presented that idea to me and say, you know, I don't believe in God.

00:24:13.100 That's crazy. I just believe in a big God-shaped alien. You say, well, all right, that's a lot more

00:24:18.300 credible. Okay, sure. Well, that's still an intelligent design hypothesis, right?

00:24:22.160 Yes. The problem with that hypothesis is, well, first of all, there's never any specificity

00:24:27.060 about how the information came from.

00:24:29.380 It's not clear whether they're saying

00:24:30.600 the alien designed the genetic information

00:24:33.100 or whether the alien simply transported

00:24:35.380 what had evolved on some other planet.

00:24:37.880 And it's usually the latter,

00:24:39.200 which means they haven't solved the information problem.

00:24:41.380 Of course.

00:24:41.820 But now back to your other question.

00:24:44.200 Yes, solving for the alien.

00:24:46.340 Where did the alien come from in the first place?

00:24:47.900 Well, exactly, because we also have this problem

00:24:49.160 of fine-tuning, that the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned

00:24:52.600 in its basic physical parameters and properties.

00:24:55.320 and that fine-tuning has been present from the very beginning of the universe and it's an

00:25:00.040 absolutely necessary condition of any future possible evolution of life. So no alien within

00:25:06.540 the universe could be the explanation for the origin of the fine-tuning upon which its

00:25:11.820 subsequent evolution would depend. Right. Nor could the alien explain the origin of the universe

00:25:16.260 itself. So it's a bad overall theory of biological and cosmological origins. But

00:25:22.560 this whole question about, well, is life inevitable somewhere in the universe? And it's a

00:25:29.840 numerator and denominator problem. If you can go back to just basic math, it is true that the

00:25:35.100 universe is vast beyond anything we had any inkling of even a hundred years ago. In Return

00:25:42.000 to the God hypothesis, I used the figure 200 billion galaxies, and I was wrong. It's actually

00:25:49.800 the more current estimate is closer to two trillion.

00:25:54.060 So you weren't only a little wrong.

00:25:56.200 Everyone wasn't only a little wrong.

00:25:57.440 Order of magnitude.

00:25:58.540 What's an order of magnitude among friends in physics, right?

00:26:01.800 But so, yeah, the universe is vast.

00:26:04.580 There's lots of places where life could have evolved.

00:26:07.160 But the problem is that people who just simply assert that

00:26:11.540 are not reckoning on the number of parameters

00:26:15.500 and the improbability associated with each

00:26:18.180 to make a life-friendly universe to start with.

00:26:23.180 Just one of the fine-tuning parameters,

00:26:25.860 the initial entropy of the universe,

00:26:28.980 calculated by Sir Roger Penrose

00:26:30.940 as one chance in 10 to the 10 to the 123.

00:26:36.000 It's a hyper-exponential number.

00:26:38.520 There's not even enough elementary particles

00:26:40.560 in the universe to represent the zeros in that number. 0.85

00:26:43.600 It's just ridiculous.

00:26:44.460 So 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.

00:27:01.120 And 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.

00:27:10.580 The 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.

00:27:23.660 This is at least now a very active area of debate.

00:27:29.580 There was a book years ago in the mid-2000s by two astronomers at the University of Washington called Rare Earth.

00:27:37.240 Two colleagues of mine, a few years later, wrote a book called Privileged Planet.

00:27:41.800 And 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.

00:27:55.000 And 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.

00:28:08.760 So the complexity of life dwarfs the vastness of the universe in that kind of a calculation.

00:28:16.420 But then when you tell people that, I don't say it verbatim as you do, it was a little

00:28:21.100 more eloquent than my version of it, but when I tell people that, they say, so you just

00:28:26.060 think we're special?

00:28:27.360 That's what it comes down, what you think, this vast universe that we cannot possibly

00:28:31.600 even begin to fathom, you just think that we're special?

00:28:36.660 And my answer is...

00:28:38.700 Yes, what's wrong with that?

00:28:40.000 What's wrong with that?

00:28:40.960 Yeah.

00:28:41.180 And what's your evidence to the contrary?

00:28:42.460 Right, right.

00:28:43.220 From 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.

00:28:58.660 Right.

00:28:59.640 That's pretty special to me.

00:29:00.920 The qualitative differences between humans and other, even the highest primates, are staggering, and they're obvious, and we hardly ever talk about them.

00:29:11.660 Yeah.

00:29:11.720 And the primates surely don't talk about it.

00:29:14.300 They surely don't.

00:29:15.500 And, you know, this problem of the origin of language, which has been a persistent problem for evolutionary theory

00:29:22.460 and has been acknowledged by people who are otherwise disinclined toward theistic belief, like Noam Chomsky.

00:29:30.440 Yeah.

00:29:30.800 You know, how do you get a language going without a language to determine what the language will be?

00:29:35.860 or to put it more precisely, how do you get a symbol convention established without an agreed

00:29:42.220 symbol convention by which to establish the tokens of the symbol convention? You could

00:29:49.180 conceivably get to simple sort of nouns by pointing and grunting and stimulus response.

00:29:56.960 This was the Skinnerian idea of the origin of language, which was closely aligned with Darwinism

00:30:02.000 before Chomsky came along.

00:30:03.600 If I point at this, and I say table,

00:30:08.440 does table mean gold?

00:30:10.360 Does it mean the object that's holding up the glasses?

00:30:15.440 Does it refer to the glitter?

00:30:17.200 I mean, there's any number of things that...

00:30:18.960 Does it refer to the act of tapping?

00:30:20.380 Does it refer to the act of tapping?

00:30:21.860 Maybe it's a verb, not a noun that I'm trying to get across.

00:30:24.720 That's a simple problem.

00:30:26.200 How 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?

00:30:44.220 These things are difficult to convey.

00:30:45.720 What I will have done tomorrow.

00:30:47.420 Exactly.

00:30:48.160 The future perfect.

00:30:50.220 See, I didn't take those courses.

00:30:52.680 You did.

00:30:53.060 You just wasted your time on science.

00:30:56.200 Yeah, 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.

00:31:15.640 So this was Chomsky's, his mantra, there are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages.

00:31:26.200 And, 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.

00:31:38.340 I do get a kick.

00:31:39.500 But, but it underscores our uniqueness as well.

00:31:41.620 And 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.

00:31:51.460 But 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.

00:32:02.680 Making concessions about really fundamental issues.

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00:33:26.900 So, okay,

00:33:27.600 to take it all the way back

00:33:28.620 to the beginning,

00:33:29.340 which you touched on

00:33:30.020 just a moment ago,

00:33:31.520 the fine-tuning of the universe

00:33:33.640 all the way from

00:33:34.340 the very beginning

00:33:34.880 of the universe,

00:33:35.440 which itself cannot really

00:33:36.940 be explained

00:33:37.560 in some naturalistic way.

00:33:41.060 As a boy,

00:33:41.800 I was told

00:33:42.340 that there was this thing

00:33:43.440 called the Big Bang.

00:33:44.340 Right.

00:33:44.720 And if you were one

00:33:45.340 of these religious kooks who didn't believe in the Big Bang. You were just a big dummy and there 1.00

00:33:50.140 was no hope for you. And so then I just did a little modicum of research into the Big Bang 0.99

00:33:55.780 and I discovered it was posited by a Catholic priest, Father George Lemaître. Lemaître. And I

00:34:03.320 said, well, I'm pretty sure he believed in God. It depends on which order of the Jesuits. But

00:34:08.400 But anyway, I think Lemaitre believed in God, and indeed it was called the Big Bang as a

00:34:15.320 kind of mockery, a term of derision to make way for God in this scientific theory.

00:34:21.680 We tell that story in the film because Fred Hoyle, who was early in his career a staunch

00:34:26.600 scientific atheist, despised the Big Bang.

00:34:29.960 He actually, one of the astronomers, cosmologists in the film, Brian Keating, actually mentioned

00:34:37.120 that Hoyle thought that the Big Bang had been formulated

00:34:42.460 because the cosmologists were relying too much

00:34:45.220 on the Genesis 1-1 narrative,

00:34:47.440 which he then said was laughable

00:34:48.780 because of course the bias in science

00:34:51.000 was heading in the entirely other direction at the time.

00:34:54.440 But right, so yeah, it's a fascinating story.

00:34:58.220 Lemaitre synthesizes two lines of evidence.

00:35:03.220 Einstein is thinking about his new theory of gravity and realizes that it can't be the whole

00:35:08.880 of the story, that there's got to be an outward pushing force to counteract gravity, to account

00:35:12.900 for the empty space in the universe. So the theoretical physics of Einstein is suggesting

00:35:19.440 an outward pushing, an expanding universe outward from a beginning point. Einstein initially doesn't

00:35:26.880 like it, but it has to come around. And then the astronomers are discovering that the light

00:35:34.600 coming from the distant galaxies is stretched out, which is indicated by a change in its

00:35:44.000 wavelength. It looks redder than it should otherwise look if the galaxies are a constant

00:35:52.340 distance away from us so you've got this evidence from observational astronomy suggesting that the

00:35:57.380 universe is expanding the galaxies are are receding from us in every quadrant of the night sky

00:36:02.740 and einstein's theory implies the same thing and father lemaitre pulls these two lines of evidence

00:36:09.220 together and formulates what's now known as the big bang theory now he doesn't do this on the

00:36:14.660 the basis of the Genesis 1-1 account. In fact, he was a bit of a compartmentalist, a NOMA guy. He

00:36:22.560 said, keep the science and the religion separate. Yeah, I recall that he quite resisted, actually.

00:36:27.340 He did. He actually resisted this, but the connections between the two are obvious. First

00:36:33.020 of all, there's an affirmation of a creation event. And secondly, there's a kind of confirmation

00:36:40.760 of the first words of the book of Genesis, which is that there was a beginning. In the beginning,

00:36:45.540 God created the heavens and the earth. So this sets off a fascinating century-long dialectic

00:36:52.580 in cosmology where many, many astronomers and physicists and cosmologists have resisted the

00:36:59.420 Big Bang theory precisely because it challenges a materialistic understanding of the cosmos,

00:37:05.420 which presupposes that the universe is made of material stuff, matter and energy that is eternal

00:37:11.480 and self-existent and has always been here. So there's also this kind of irony that a lot of

00:37:16.500 religious people think that the Big Bang is contrary to a theistic worldview or to a concept

00:37:23.560 of creation, but in a way it's the ultimate creationist theory. Yes. I had a friend of mine,

00:37:29.240 a very serious evangelical Protestant, and he was invading against me, this was many years ago,

00:37:36.340 for believing in the Big Bang. I said, look, I'm not, it's not a matter of dogma for me. I don't

00:37:40.900 totally scientifically illiterate, but I said, you know, it was formulated by a Catholic priest,

00:37:46.900 and I don't know, it seems to jive pretty well with Genesis. So yes, people resist it because

00:37:53.620 it's science-y, but... Well, the confusion, Michael, comes in when people think that the

00:37:58.720 Scientists are saying that the Big Bang is the cause of everything, that it is the creator.

00:38:04.700 It's the first cause.

00:38:06.040 But the Big Bang is not a theory of the first cause.

00:38:08.560 It's a theory of the first effect.

00:38:10.560 Of course.

00:38:12.100 There's a fancy word in philosophy of science, a retrodiction.

00:38:15.220 You're inferring backwards in time to the first effect, to the place where all the physical

00:38:20.420 stuff comes out of, well, we're not sure.

00:38:25.500 Certainly not something physical.

00:38:27.780 Right.

00:38:27.940 So 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.

00:38:46.680 So something that transcends those dimensions is a better explanation of the origin of matter than matter itself.

00:38:55.220 matter can't explain its own origin. That's the problem.

00:38:59.420 But 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.

00:39:19.180 it's going to go in. Or they'll say, well, yeah. It's known as the oscillating universe model,

00:39:23.580 and it, by the mid-80s, was dismissed on physical grounds. Which is, of course, why? Not enough

00:39:30.000 matter in the universe, even counting the dark matter, to cause a re-collapse. Even if you got

00:39:34.180 a re-collapse, you would have no energy available left to do work. The entropy buildup would mean

00:39:40.860 that you wouldn't get a subsequent expansion. So that was one of many cosmological models that

00:39:46.800 attempted to retain the idea of an infinite universe, temporally infinite. And the one

00:39:55.280 before it was known as the steady state. And I'll tell you, there's a whole suite of new models

00:40:00.020 being formulated because the mind of the mathematician and the physicist is infinitely

00:40:05.200 creative. And there has been an impulse to try to retain the idea that the universe is infinite

00:40:12.840 duration. If the universe

00:40:15.140 has always been here, we don't need to think

00:40:17.260 about what created it. But the best evidence

00:40:19.380 we have points to a beginning.

00:40:21.620 Okay, because that model

00:40:23.400 that's interesting, it doesn't

00:40:25.320 give you infinite space, but it does

00:40:27.300 give you infinite time.

00:40:29.380 Add infinitum,

00:40:31.420 in and out, in and out, in and out.

00:40:33.180 Yes, but you're

00:40:35.360 saying that one was debunked in the 80s, basically.

00:40:37.180 Right, exactly. That makes sense that it

00:40:39.180 still, to this day, appears in popular

00:40:41.360 Exactly. Well, the chance hypothesis for the origin of life is, you know, it's in every sophomore dorm bowl session.

00:40:49.340 Right, right.

00:40:49.960 It's not credible.

00:40:51.100 So then the next one that they all offer, of course, is the multiverse.

00:40:54.800 Right.

00:40:55.340 That, well, yeah, it's amazing how finely tuned the cosmos is and the Big Bang is interesting.

00:41:00.800 But the reason that that occurred, it's not that it was designed.

00:41:04.680 it's that everything that could possibly occur in a certain sense occurs and we just live in the one

00:41:10.840 in which life could right we just happen to be the lucky one yeah right right notice what notice

00:41:15.860 the move though that's an attempt to in what we would say inflate the probabilistic resources to

00:41:21.380 give you more chances more opportunities right so there's a certain kind of logic to that right

00:41:25.560 it makes sense um but there's a problem with it uh and the postulation is that there's a billion

00:41:31.480 in other universes out there, so many, in fact, that one of them had to arise with the right

00:41:37.580 combination of fine-tuning parameters so that even though in our universe, the odds associated

00:41:44.240 with all those fine-tuning parameters arising is infinitesimally small. If you've got enough

00:41:49.980 universes, we can breathe a sigh of relief. Right. You get the works of Shakespeare. We can

00:41:54.800 posit our universe as kind of the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery. Yeah. But there's a

00:41:59.820 And the problem is, first, that if you have these other universes and they're causally

00:42:05.080 disconnected to our own, which is what we mean by a separate universe, then whatever

00:42:09.600 happens in those other universes does not affect what happens in our universe, including

00:42:14.700 whatever process was responsible for the fixing of the fine-tuning parameters.

00:42:21.020 Nothing in those other universes makes the fixing and the fine-tuning any more probable

00:42:24.960 in this universe because there's no causal connection.

00:42:27.960 So in virtue of that, multiverse proponents have proposed a kind of underlying common

00:42:34.740 cause of all the universes.

00:42:36.960 It's not just that those universes exist, it's that there's some kind of universe-generating

00:42:40.720 mechanism that spits out universes like a lottery machine.

00:42:44.980 And then we can portray our universe as the lucky winner of this giant cosmic lottery.

00:42:50.160 But that's where the real rub comes in, there's a catch, and that is that every universe-generating

00:42:56.260 mechanism that's been proposed whether it's based on something called string theory or something

00:43:00.520 based on or based on something called inflationary cosmology itself the universe generating mechanisms

00:43:06.560 themselves have to be finely tuned in order to produce new universes and and so then you're

00:43:13.820 right back to where you started which is unexplained fine-tuning and we know from our experience that

00:43:19.640 fine-tuning, what we mean by fine-tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that are just

00:43:28.240 right to accomplish some significant end or purpose. So what are examples of fine-tuning?

00:43:35.300 An internal combustion engine, a French recipe, a radio dial, the relationship between hardware

00:43:42.640 and software in a computer. So a clock. A clock. Yeah, exactly. So every system that we know of

00:43:49.140 that we would describe as being finely tuned

00:43:52.100 is the product of intelligence.

00:43:53.800 That's part of our knowledge base,

00:43:55.240 our uniform and repeated experience again.

00:43:57.260 So since fine-tuning always points to a fine-tuner,

00:44:00.800 and since the multiverse, even the multiverse,

00:44:03.260 doesn't get rid of fine-tuning,

00:44:04.980 but only displaces it to an earlier.

00:44:08.100 Because you can't just have

00:44:08.960 a random universe generating.

00:44:10.320 No, no, here'd be a good example.

00:44:12.720 Go back to your monkeys to the typewriter.

00:44:15.520 If you have enough time, yeah, you could type Shakespeare,

00:44:18.800 provided the keyboard includes the H for Hamlet.

00:44:23.660 But if you don't have the H,

00:44:25.800 if the keyboard isn't fine-tuned in a particular way,

00:44:29.100 it doesn't matter how much time you have,

00:44:30.840 you're never going to get the outcome you want.

00:44:32.760 And so this is the problem,

00:44:34.400 that every universe-generating mechanism

00:44:36.220 does require fine-tuning to get to,

00:44:39.560 even in theory, produce new universes.

00:44:42.100 So you're back to unexplained fine-tuning,

00:44:44.560 and since the only real explanation of fine-tuning

00:44:46.820 that we have is intelligence,

00:44:48.280 we're back to intelligent design. In other words, even if the multiverse is true,

00:44:52.960 intelligent design is still the best explanation. Then how come when I go on Wikipedia,

00:44:57.320 Steve, and I look up intelligent design, it tells me that intelligent design

00:45:01.640 is a pseudo-scientific creationist nonsense made by people who have insufficient brain cells and

00:45:10.880 who are afraid of the dark. And wear white shoes and are from Appalachia and all the 0.93

00:45:18.260 stereotypes, right? Yes. Well, in my own Wikipedia page, it says that I am a pseudoscientist. I

00:45:26.340 regarded that as an upgrade because the previous description of me on Wikipedia had me as an

00:45:32.460 American theologian as a way of stigmatizing our work. I have no degrees in theology. And so,

00:45:40.860 in a way, that was an upgrade too, I suppose. Well, this is the attempt to win the debate by

00:45:44.760 pejorative, by ad hominem. And so it makes it more fun, I think, really. The other epithet we get is

00:45:52.780 creationists in cheap tuxedos. And my wife took that one very much to heart because she said,

00:45:59.080 we've paid a lot for that tuxedo. It's outrageous. I love my tailor.

00:46:03.680 Yeah. But no, if that's the best the other side can do, we smile and appreciate that.

00:46:09.240 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.

00:46:31.200 And I think invariably people see through that stuff.

00:46:34.440 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.

00:46:46.480 But I think we're in a very different day now.

00:46:48.400 I think that those kinds of arguments are not working.

00:46:51.040 Once 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?

00:47:00.640 Simulation, okay.

00:47:02.260 Is that, are we?

00:47:04.420 Well, Berlinski has an hysterical line about the simulation hypothesis in the film.

00:47:11.560 So if people are interested, they should check that out.

00:47:14.100 Well, the first thing they say about the simulation hypothesis is the idea that we have a kind of faux existence

00:47:24.640 that's a consequence of some master programmer programming us as kind of bots or, but notice

00:47:32.500 what's implied there is that it is an intelligent design hypothesis. The implication is that

00:47:38.380 there's a mind behind everything. So I would say the simulation hypothesis is at least halfway

00:47:43.260 there. Where it falls down is that if the programmer has convinced us that we actually

00:47:52.060 do exist, that we're not just have a faux existence in a simulated computer domain,

00:48:01.000 then the master programmer has outsmarted himself and created real existence. It's a little bit like

00:48:07.800 the old Cartesian argument about the evil demon that's convinced us that we exist, but we really

00:48:15.940 don't, but realizing that if the evil demon has convinced us such that we think we exist, well,

00:48:22.260 then we at least do exist. We at least do that. The rest of Descartes' proofs may not be that

00:48:27.700 effective, but I think he refuted the idea that we can be talked out of an awareness of our own

00:48:35.640 existence. And I think the simulation hypothesis implies that as well, and I think it fails on

00:48:41.880 that grounds, but it does affirm the need for an intelligent agent to account for the

00:48:46.700 things we see, which I think is kind of curious and gets us halfway there.

00:48:51.120 Many, I would say actually maybe the most popular pastime for conservatives is to figure

00:48:58.580 out when everything went wrong and whose fault it is.

00:49:01.080 And so sometimes we say, oh, it was William of Ockham.

00:49:04.180 Yeah.

00:49:04.480 So sometimes it was the liberals of the 60s.

00:49:06.820 I don't know.

00:49:07.280 Yeah.

00:49:08.180 But I might give it to Descartes.

00:49:10.880 You know, Descartes just convincing us that everything that we can trust is in our own heads,

00:49:15.800 that a lot of confusion comes from that man.

00:49:18.840 Well, it's an interesting thing to comment on, actually, because what Descartes tried to do

00:49:23.680 was to establish the reliability of the mind and therefore a basis for knowledge.

00:49:29.180 And his first move in doing that was to try to prove the existence of God.

00:49:33.380 Well, he wanted to prove the existence of himself, then prove that he had thoughts that

00:49:38.160 implied the existence of God, his famous trademark argument, which not even theistic philosophers

00:49:44.100 think has any force. It's a really bad argument. And then from there, he wanted to, since there

00:49:50.040 was a God, then we could trust the reliability of the mind. There's an element of truth in all that.

00:49:56.080 The existence of God does provide a solid grounding for the belief in the reliability

00:50:02.060 of the mind, but because he tried to do all of that deductively and with absolute rational

00:50:08.560 certainty, he ended up setting philosophy back three or four hundred years. But he also showed

00:50:15.600 something, which is that trying to prove things with absolute certainty is a fool's errand.

00:50:21.560 On the other hand, then Hume came along and tried to base everything on empirical data,

00:50:28.240 and he ended up proving that we couldn't know anything at all based on that premise and so

00:50:35.340 the rationalist premise and the empiricist premise the strict rationalist strict empiricist premise

00:50:40.380 both failed to provide a foundation for knowledge and i think there's there's a there's a kind of

00:50:45.000 echo of that in theistic thought where on the one hand we've had the strict rationalists who have

00:50:52.220 tried to prove god's existence with absolute certainty using deductively certain arguments

00:50:56.660 and that's turned out to be a very high bar to meet and on the other hand we've had people who

00:51:01.800 have said well since you can't do that we just punt and we're going to be we're going to have

00:51:05.200 faith and faith alone and do the fideism thing yeah and or the or the kirkagardian

00:51:10.160 take a leap of faith and and deny that there's any rational basis for faith i've in my work

00:51:18.160 focused on a middle way where making the claim that you can have very strong reasons for belief

00:51:24.880 in god you can have good reasons to believe in god such that you can even affirm that you know

00:51:29.520 you have knowledge of god but without the kind of proof that's really only possible in mathematics

00:51:35.920 and geometry and even then only if you presuppose certain self self-evident axioms yeah so i think

00:51:43.540 we've had an epistemological crisis of belief in the west because we we've oscillated between

00:51:50.800 a strict rationalism on the one hand and a fideism and skepticism on the other.

00:52:00.560 And the title of a course I taught for years was Reasons for Faith. You can have strong reasons

00:52:06.020 for faith. You can infer to the theism as the best explanation for things without having to meet

00:52:12.040 the bar of absolute certain proof. Yes. Obviously, I don't go with Kierkegaard and I'm certainly not

00:52:19.160 a fideist. But there is something I really took from him that I love. In that book, Fear and

00:52:24.480 Trembling, when he's talking about the sacrifice of Isaac, and he says, well, how can God command

00:52:29.560 something that's so manifestly immoral? And he uses a phrase that I like to use in my own personal

00:52:35.340 life, which is the teleological suspension of the ethical, which is a great justification for when

00:52:41.280 you want to do something wrong. You say, no, no, no, you stole my donut. No, no, no, it was the

00:52:45.920 teleological. You might have that third cigar. Yes. No, there's much to appreciate in Kierkegaard,

00:52:51.780 but not his epistemology. I think his religious epistemology, I think, is one, in a sense,

00:52:58.520 it conceded that there was no rational, evidential, or other similar grounding,

00:53:04.360 cognitive grounding for belief in God. And I think that's one of the reasons that so many

00:53:08.960 young people lose their faith when they get to places where they're expected to think,

00:53:13.060 namely the university i am noticing just anecdotally but the plural of anecdote is data

00:53:18.600 yes i i've just noticed that back then people who well ultimately people who believe in god

00:53:25.760 yeah but uh people who believe in an intelligent designer or who uh don't believe in aliens or who

00:53:33.140 believe in the rational soul or any of these attendant issues non-materialists non-material

00:53:40.440 People who think something other than matter and energy exists, which is actually most

00:53:45.180 of us, because that's the way we live.

00:53:46.980 We believe there are moral principles, we believe the human mind is reliable, we believe

00:53:52.340 we have a conscious agency that is not just a matter of chemistry in our brains, the rational

00:53:59.120 soul.

00:54:00.120 Basically, everybody would seem to...

00:54:04.800 Everyone does behave that way, and everyone, if you push them far enough and you made them

00:54:08.840 think they would have to admit that. It does seem to me now that it's totally flipped,

00:54:14.460 that really the materialists now, when they say some nonsense from a Christopher Hitchens

00:54:20.260 interview or something, I don't know, the reaction I see even just on the internet is

00:54:24.160 you'll say, hey, go over to reddit.com, sir. This is for a serious discussion here. Okay,

00:54:29.220 enjoy tipping your fedora. We're going to, the adults are going to speak now. How did

00:54:33.160 that flip?

00:54:34.160 It's a great story, I think. I have a colleague in the UK, Justin Briarley, has written a book

00:54:39.360 called The Surprising Rediscovery of Belief in God. And he tells the story of the demise of

00:54:45.280 the new atheist movement with people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and

00:54:50.640 Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss and others. And part of the story is that they overplayed their

00:54:58.780 hand. Part of it is that they linked their wagon to Darwinism. And a famous quote from Richard

00:55:06.300 Dawkins, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Well, what

00:55:10.920 if leading evolutionary biologists are starting to say we need a new theory, a new non-Darwinian

00:55:15.400 theory of evolution? What happens then to your atheism? Is it properly grounded any longer?

00:55:20.720 I think a number of atheists themselves, leading atheist apologists, think that the arguments of

00:55:25.820 the new atheists were really weak. They typically avoided discussing the evidence from cosmology,

00:55:35.920 suggesting that there was a creation event to the universe. They typically avoided talking about the

00:55:40.640 fine-tuning problem, except for invoking the multiverse, which has been exposed to be an

00:55:46.940 inadequate counter-argument to the design argument. And they certainly don't like to talk

00:55:52.200 about the complexity and inner workings of the living cell and the problem of the origin of the

00:55:58.680 first life, which has been a lot of the focus of my work. And so I think the scientific case for

00:56:04.020 intelligent design and indeed for God as the designer has grown ever more strong, even as

00:56:10.160 they kind of overplayed their hand. And I think also in Britain in particular, where I spent a

00:56:14.940 lot of time, there's a sense that there's something a little bit unsavory about these

00:56:19.440 very overt attacks on religion and the sense that maybe they very much overplayed their hand there.

00:56:26.920 And in virtue of that, you see that Dawkins himself is now describing himself as a cultural

00:56:32.440 Christian at least. I'm not so bad. I'm not a terrible guy. I'm at least a cultural Christian. 0.92

00:56:36.600 I like hymns and cathedrals, you know. Yes. It starts somewhere. I'll take it. But even on that

00:56:43.240 point, because I think a lot of radical Islam has impelled people, especially in Europe and 0.78

00:56:49.400 the UK, to say, hey, we want to keep our cathedrals. We don't want minarets going up, and there are 0.92

00:56:53.960 some big problems to abandoning our Christian identity. The whole new atheist movement was 0.92

00:56:59.900 just opportunistic, it seems to me. 9-11 occurred, Muslims attacked the United States, and these 1.00

00:57:06.700 atheists took it as an opportunity to attack... Religion in general. Religion in general. And 0.98

00:57:11.820 And you say, well, hold on, wait, how is it that the Muslims attack us and then you lead 0.75

00:57:16.900 a jihad against Christianity?

00:57:18.800 I think there's been a little slate of hand here.

00:57:21.000 Right, right, right.

00:57:22.020 And out of that, and I think, I mean, there has been the accusation against the new atheists

00:57:26.400 that they attacked religion in general because they were afraid to attack Islam specifically.

00:57:30.380 Of course.

00:57:30.880 They don't want to end up like Salman Rushdie.

00:57:32.180 I don't know the motives.

00:57:34.320 But out of all of that came figures like Tom Holland, rediscovering the importance of

00:57:40.440 Christianity for the cultural foundation of the West. And that, you know, his argument that we

00:57:49.120 all are swimming in Christian waters and don't know it, that our concepts of universal human

00:57:54.080 rights, human dignity, the care, the concern for the disenfranchised, the poor, the widows,

00:58:00.640 the orphans, all of this is something that come into a currency in the West after the Nazarene,

00:58:07.600 after the Sermon on the Mount, he said, doesn't exist in any of the ancient empires.

00:58:12.460 So there's been this kind of rediscovery.

00:58:15.120 I think there's a rediscovery of the cultural benefits and importance of Christianity to the West.

00:58:21.820 But also, I think the God question is percolating to the surface of the culture now among many unexpected figures.

00:58:29.000 You have Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has announced a conversion away from the New Atheism.

00:58:34.720 She was one of Dawkins' sidekicks.

00:58:36.080 She's a double convert.

00:58:36.900 She went from Islam to atheism and atheism to Christianity, but other figures, Larry

00:58:43.460 Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, Charles Murray, the social scientist, taking religion

00:58:51.980 seriously, figures like Joe Rogan himself, who's now attending church and exploring some

00:59:01.360 of these things. So I think it's a very surprising kind of turn where it seemed, you know, the days

00:59:08.420 of the London buses with the billboards saying, you know, relax and enjoy your life. God does not,

00:59:14.680 God probably does not exist. Relax and enjoy your life was the new atheist mantra. I think that

00:59:20.980 seems almost silly to people now. It certainly does. You know, back then, so this was 20 years

00:59:27.920 ago, basically. It's not even 20 years ago, but this thing is a spent force in, I would say,

00:59:32.480 in about 15 years. Yeah, right, right. I guess in those days,

00:59:37.880 your comment or the criticism that people have made of you that it's creationism in a cheap

00:59:43.060 tuxedo. Oh, that tuxedo thing again. It's just a dagger out. I came with a pocket square this

00:59:48.780 time. Just to prove them wrong. Yeah, we can really dress. But I think that impelled a lot

00:59:54.460 of people to try to gussy up their arguments in secular sounding language, jargony kind

01:00:00.880 of language to say, no, no, no, I'm not grounding. I might be theistic, I might be a Christian,

01:00:05.340 but I'm not grounding my views on that at all. I actually have these, I've come to these

01:00:09.720 conclusions through entirely secular and nationalist means. I don't know, to me now,

01:00:14.340 it seems to flip. Like, it's kind of like the IQ bell curve meme. The guy at the end

01:00:18.760 of the IQ bell curve, the real dummy, he speaks- 0.51

01:00:21.520 That's the creationist and the cheap tuxedo.

01:00:23.480 He's the creationist in the cheap tuxedo.

01:00:25.360 He speaks in plain language.

01:00:26.980 He says, I think God made the world.

01:00:29.440 And then the guy in the middle, he says, no, actually, you know,

01:00:32.340 the multiverse has produced seven bazillion universes because of whatever.

01:00:39.260 And then you get up to the Jedi, who is at the high point of the end.

01:00:43.580 And he says, actually, you know, God made the world.

01:00:45.860 Then you get to a Berlinski or a Dembski or some of the geniuses in our movement.

01:00:52.200 Yes.

01:00:52.560 Berlinski 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...

01:01:06.180 But I had a conversation with him. I know you and I met him. You met him at a conference in the fall.

01:01:12.340 I'm quite taken with David Berlinski, but even before I met him, I met...

01:01:15.920 He's, by the way, featured in the film, and every time he comes on, people start laughing.

01:01:19.280 Yes, he, I mean, he's just this, so before I had met him, all I knew of him was his writing.

01:01:24.160 And so I, but I really have enjoyed his writing for a long time as, as with yours.

01:01:28.440 His wit.

01:01:28.980 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.

01:01:37.260 Even more fun, right?

01:01:38.240 Yes.

01:01:38.480 Yeah.

01:01:39.000 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.

01:01:48.280 to up their game and to articulate and formulate the reasons they had for believing in God.

01:01:58.900 And as, you know, we were kind of doing that all along with our work on intelligent design,

01:02:03.680 but they created an appetite for the kind of work that we were doing, and lo and behold,

01:02:08.860 people have found that our arguments are actually better. And, you know, some of the

01:02:13.440 new atheist arguments are incredibly weak, and such that many atheist philosophers, for example,

01:02:18.840 Dawkins' argument from complexity. If you invoke God, then you've invoked something more complex

01:02:26.240 than the thing you're trying to explain, and that violates Occam's razor. No, no, no, no, it doesn't.

01:02:30.940 That's not what Occam's razor says. It isn't that the entity can't be more complex than the thing

01:02:36.760 being explained. If that were the case, then we couldn't explain the origin of the television set

01:02:41.140 by reference to the engineers who designed it, because clearly the engineers, or you couldn't

01:02:45.080 explain Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, by reference to Dawkins, because clearly he would

01:02:51.620 have to acknowledge that his own mind and brain are more complex than the words on the page that

01:02:55.740 he wrote. Occam's razor says you shouldn't multiply theoretical entities. Your explanation shouldn't

01:03:02.700 be complex in the sense of being Baroque and convoluted with just adding new explanatory

01:03:09.080 just-so stories to make your explanation still fit. God is actually a very simple explanation

01:03:15.940 because the postulation of one God is much simpler than the postulation of a multiverse

01:03:22.520 and all the theoretical entities that go with it from string theory and inflationary cosmology.

01:03:27.660 Some would say he's so simple, he's described by divine simplicity.

01:03:31.460 Well, there's that very ancient argument from classical philosophy, absolutely. So this is

01:03:37.520 one of the go-to arguments of the scientific atheists, and even many atheistic philosophers

01:03:41.980 say, no, this is a complete misapplication of Occam's razor.

01:03:45.900 I remember reading Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great, when I was a teenager or

01:03:52.480 something, and I read it, and I said, well, and I was quite taken with him, but it did

01:03:57.940 occur to me later, I said, he doesn't even make that argument. The book doesn't even

01:04:03.000 give you what it sells you on the cover. He just whines about religion for 250 pages or so.

01:04:08.180 And then I was taken with the analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga's description of the new atheism.

01:04:14.480 They said, what do you think of the new atheists? He said, I think they're greatly inferior to the

01:04:19.220 old atheists. I think Bertrand Russell probably.

01:04:23.060 A lot better. Yes, yeah, that's exactly right. Well, and that's the, yeah, a couple of things

01:04:28.100 there. First of all, let's stipulate that Christopher Hitchens was himself great.

01:04:32.160 Yes. Yeah. Delightful figure.

01:04:34.320 Delightful 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.

01:04:55.560 It became very easy to accommodate Darwinian evolution if you thought all it was was change over time.

01:05:02.460 You could incorporate that into what was God's way of creating because God just caused the change over time.

01:05:08.500 No, Darwinism was, as Dawkins very succinctly put it in The Blind Watchmaker,

01:05:16.240 biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

01:05:23.020 Darwinism was about the denial of actual design and the affirmation of the illusion of design. 0.89

01:05:28.560 I mean, a lot of Christians who are interested in the doctrine of creation

01:05:32.940 were getting all hung up on, is the earth old or is it young?

01:05:36.980 Do organisms have a common ancestor or not?

01:05:39.680 Is there some change or no change?

01:05:41.880 No, the issue was always design or no design.

01:05:44.820 And that's the reason that our team framed the issue that way and said,

01:05:50.280 no, our theory is the theory of intelligent design.

01:05:52.400 We 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.

01:06:05.320 So 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.

01:06:16.020 That's a good point. By going so far, by being so brazen, some would say reckless in their

01:06:24.120 claims. But logically consistent. Yes, yes. He is a logically consistent materialist. The other

01:06:30.740 great Dawkins quote, which I absolutely love and repaired to several times in my book, Return of

01:06:36.380 the God Hypothesis and in the new film, Story of Everything, another number of people cite it. It's

01:06:41.000 his claim that the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom

01:06:47.140 there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. That's a beautiful

01:06:53.520 statement, not only of materialism as a philosophy, but it also implies that metaphysical hypotheses

01:07:00.360 like materialism or its opposite, theism, are testable against observations of the world

01:07:08.320 around us. They're every bit as testable as scientific theories. And so that's a wonderful

01:07:13.020 thing because if people want to separate metaphysics from the observations that the

01:07:17.340 world know that our metaphysical theories can be tested by the test of experience, by looking at

01:07:23.920 and seeing. And what I show in Return of the God Hypothesis and what we show, I think, even more

01:07:29.560 vividly in the film is that the story of everything. I don't know that we've actually

01:07:33.300 said the title of the film. The story of everything. Thank you. Is that the great

01:07:36.980 discoveries of the last 100 years in science have been shocking to the materialists. They're not

01:07:42.400 what you would expect from blind, pitiless indifference. That's shorthand for scientific

01:07:47.460 materialism. No materialist expected that the universe would have a beginning. It was axiomatic

01:07:54.240 for the materialistic philosophy or scientific atheism that the universe was eternal and

01:08:01.320 self-existent and self-creating and therefore did not need an external creator. It had always been

01:08:06.920 here, so you didn't have to think about, well, what started it or who started it. But the shocking

01:08:13.140 discovery of modern astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy is that the universe, as best we can

01:08:19.500 tell for multiple reasons, had a beginning. No materialist expected the fine-tuning. When Fred

01:08:25.460 Hoyle discovered the first suite of fine-tuning parameters, he changed his worldview. He was a

01:08:31.100 staunch scientific atheist. He hated the Big Bang, as we were saying, and stigmatized it with his

01:08:39.560 term, the Big Bang, the pejorative term. But when he discovered the fine-tuning that was necessary

01:08:44.920 to account for the abundance of carbon in the universe, he realized that there must be an

01:08:52.280 intellect, a mind behind the universe. And his famous quote was that the best data we have

01:08:58.040 suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible.

01:09:04.260 And I do love it the way the monkeys always make it into the origins.

01:09:07.640 They do. There is a role for the monkey. There's a role for every particle in the cosmos.

01:09:12.720 That was unexpected. And of course, the biggest unexpected thing is the interior of the cell.

01:09:17.320 And Dawkins, two summers ago now, was himself quoted as saying that he was

01:09:23.120 knocks sideways with wonder at the intricate data processing system at work inside the cell.

01:09:29.480 That's not what you would expect from blind, pitiless, indifference. You don't expect

01:09:34.080 intricate data processing systems, digital code, and nanomachines. And we're talking nanomachines,

01:09:39.580 we're talking turbines, sliding clamps, little walking robotic motor proteins,

01:09:45.580 little rotary engines inside cells on a miniaturized scale. This is what we're finding

01:09:51.500 inside life. No materialist expected to find that kind of thing. So it's good that he's knocked on

01:09:55.420 his side. When's he going to be knocked on his knees? How do you look at that with just the

01:10:00.820 jaw-dropping complexity, intricacy, and not just say, you know, just not start reciting Psalm 8,

01:10:09.140 you know, oh Lord, your works are manifest in the creation. Or fearfully and wonderfully made

01:10:14.740 when you think about our own bodies and our own, yeah, yeah.

01:10:18.720 No, and I say this with no glee.

01:10:20.500 I actually have a great admiration for him.

01:10:22.920 He's a tremendous communicator.

01:10:24.680 He's a very good scientist.

01:10:26.960 And he has a real talent for framing issues

01:10:30.940 in a way that is clarifying.

01:10:32.500 He's just ended up on the wrong side

01:10:34.340 of the most fundamental questions.

01:10:36.180 But maybe he's softening in his interest

01:10:38.400 in cultural Christianity. 0.78

01:10:39.980 Cultural Christianity, I'll take it.

01:10:41.040 And one of his, I don't know, people have seen,

01:10:43.260 but the interview or the conversation between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Dawkins is fascinating.

01:10:50.040 The body language there, she seems so comfortable in her own skin.

01:10:54.060 And Dawkins is almost in a manner, you know, leaning over, almost pleading,

01:10:59.340 saying, you know, how could you of all people come to this conclusion?

01:11:03.400 Yes. Yeah. I would say to Professor Dawkins, I would say the water is warm.

01:11:07.120 It's like a nice primordial soup over here.

01:11:09.080 Come join us.

01:11:09.740 Come join us on the theistic side of things.

01:11:11.660 Can I tell you one other thing about the primordial soup? It triggers those of us who

01:11:17.720 know something about chemical evolutionary theory and the origin of life. The large

01:11:22.060 biomolecules, the proteins in particular, will not polymerize. The amino acids will not link

01:11:28.800 together in water. But we've been telling students for years that life arose in a warm little pond

01:11:35.840 in a primordial soup.

01:11:37.500 I had never heard that.

01:11:38.800 Just repair to some of Jim Tours' videos online.

01:11:43.760 Jim is the most mild-mannered, gentle, humble man.

01:11:47.760 But if you start spewing chemical nonsense,

01:11:50.700 he'll get triggered, you know?

01:11:52.240 And this is one of the things that triggers him.

01:11:53.800 Of all the nonsense I've ever heard

01:11:56.200 about the primordial soup,

01:11:57.240 I've never heard that water presents a problem.

01:12:00.840 That's great.

01:12:01.380 It's energetically unfavorable.

01:12:02.280 I love that.

01:12:02.720 You 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.

01:12:22.840 That's a return to normal.

01:12:24.380 Common sense.

01:12:25.020 Common 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.

01:12:42.160 That a dummy or a midwit at best will try to impress you with all sorts of polysyllabic words. 0.87

01:12:50.460 Unless he's Bill Buckley and he's just having fun. 0.96

01:12:52.120 Yes, right. Running circles around you.

01:12:54.240 Yes.

01:12:54.520 Or our friend Berlinski can do the same.

01:12:56.020 Yes, yeah, yeah. But some people have fun with it.

01:12:58.500 But the ones who write is basically all academic papers are written today with this weak, you know...

01:13:06.040 Passive voice.

01:13:07.040 Passive voice, all Latin at words, jargon.

01:13:11.300 As if no one is there making an argument and maybe no argument is being made.

01:13:16.400 Precisely, precisely.

01:13:17.340 But the great works of science, we get attacked for being polemical because we're making an argument.

01:13:23.140 We're making an argument for intelligent design.

01:13:25.700 But the great works of science, and I would include in that the origin of species.

01:13:30.660 It's time it was a great work of science.

01:13:32.120 Galileo.

01:13:33.120 Darwin said, yeah, exactly.

01:13:34.500 Darwin said, described his own work as one long argument for the idea of common descent by natural selection.

01:13:43.240 Yes.

01:13:43.560 Newton started the Principia with, the theory of vortices is pressed with many difficulties.

01:13:49.740 And he's about to strip the bark off of the previous theory of gravity, and he executes a beautiful, mathematically rich argument.

01:13:58.940 But science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret evidence.

01:14:04.720 There's an Italian philosopher of science I like, Marcello Perra.

01:14:08.680 He's not Irish, it's Marcello Perra.

01:14:10.740 And he says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence.

01:14:15.320 And by referring to the science to shut down dispute in science, we're actually doing something profoundly unscientific.

01:14:24.580 We need to make sure that we're always allowing scientists the freedom to contest and to dispute.

01:14:30.920 And get back to that medieval disputational method where you make your case and then you address the counter arguments.

01:14:37.360 And that's a very good way of getting to the truth.

01:14:40.940 But it's not even something that is, in theory, unscientific.

01:14:44.420 Yeah.

01:14:44.820 It is demonstrably, observably unscientific.

01:14:47.520 The Galileo example came to mind because in his discourse on the world systems, he calls his opponent Simplicio. 1.00

01:14:53.940 He calls him an idiot. 0.99

01:14:55.300 That's his big mistake. 1.00

01:14:56.340 Well, that's why he got arrested.

01:14:57.700 Yeah, he knew that pope.

01:14:58.920 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:15:00.260 But he does, you know, and even there it was clever because he's referring to this commentator on Aristotle, Simplicius.

01:15:06.300 Yeah, right.

01:15:06.640 but it was thinly veiled. It was quite polemical, let's put it. And so, yes, it just seems to me

01:15:12.740 that 20 years ago when people would say, 15 years ago when people would say, well, you have religious

01:15:19.360 priors, and so that's why you're making the scientific argument. Then you would say, no,

01:15:23.800 no, it's not because of it. Now I would say, yes, I have an integral view of the world.

01:15:28.940 I, being an integral whole of matter and soul, yes, I have a view of the cosmos that includes

01:15:34.560 this. I think of St. John Henry Newman and his great work, The Idea of a University.

01:15:39.860 He points out that a university purports to universal knowledge.

01:15:43.480 Univenitas.

01:15:44.480 Yes, correct. And so you say, now they no longer teach theology at universities. How

01:15:51.200 could a university even pretend to universal knowledge if you're taking out a pretty integral

01:15:57.700 part of that? And what has happened since we've done that? The universities now have

01:16:01.240 splintered into specialization and more often nonsense.

01:16:04.020 Right.

01:16:04.580 Well, this is actually, back to that Dawkins quote,

01:16:07.380 one of the things I love about the idea,

01:16:09.480 he's tacitly affirming that metaphysical systems of thought,

01:16:13.320 worldviews, can be tested.

01:16:15.540 So we have a worldview.

01:16:18.600 I'm a theist, a Christian, like you are,

01:16:20.840 and so I hold that worldview because it does such a good job

01:16:24.100 of explaining so many things around me.

01:16:26.820 You know, the old Chesterton quote,

01:16:28.540 I don't believe in God because I see him,

01:16:30.260 but because by him, I see all other things.

01:16:33.760 But that doesn't mean that even if you have a worldview

01:16:36.060 that's very integrated,

01:16:37.420 that it's still not subject to critical tests.

01:16:41.860 That there might not be,

01:16:42.780 data might come along that might either challenge you

01:16:45.780 or provide further confirmation.

01:16:48.340 And the idea that, you know,

01:16:50.820 the universe has exactly the properties we should expect

01:16:53.340 if at bottom, there's no purpose, no design.

01:16:55.880 No, I think the universe has exactly the properties.

01:16:58.720 This is what we show in the film.

01:17:00.260 vividly we show because we do it uh with with cinematography and animations you can see the

01:17:06.580 things that you would expect to be the case if there was a designing mind behind everything

01:17:10.300 and so it's it's the the the having prior uh prior commitments uh epistemologically things that you

01:17:20.340 assume it's not a bad thing to have intellectually because it doesn't mean you're not open to

01:17:25.220 adapting or refining or modifying your worldview, but it's necessary to have such a system to make

01:17:33.220 sense of the world. It's the Augustinian believe in order to know, you know, the Tredo Udentelegom.

01:17:39.960 But also to posit that one does not have any prior, that one is purely neutral,

01:17:45.480 is just a lie. I mean, it's not possible to be that way.

01:17:48.360 Exactly. And that's the positivistic pretension on the other side, the idea that, well,

01:17:53.440 You theists have your prior assumptions, your faith commitments.

01:18:00.340 We're just all about the evidence.

01:18:03.100 But as many of the people we've been talking about on the side opposite demonstrate,

01:18:09.100 they have their own set of assumptions.

01:18:11.460 And what actually has caused people to not see the evidence of design in nature

01:18:16.520 is a deep prior presupposition known as not just materialism in the sense of metaphysical materialism,

01:18:25.060 but a commitment to methodological materialism that says that if you're going to be a scientist,

01:18:29.960 we have to explain everything by reference to purely material processes or entities,

01:18:34.980 irrespective of what the evidence is.

01:18:37.600 Right.

01:18:37.800 So if you see evidence for a dualist understanding of the mind,

01:18:42.240 the mind is not just the chemistry at work in the brain.

01:18:46.520 And there's a wonderful book out that provides a very strong evidential case for a kind of dualist understanding.

01:18:52.700 That's the work of Michael Egnor in his book, The Immortal Mind.

01:18:59.040 Dualist meaning that the mind is distinct from the brain.

01:19:02.420 They interact, but the physical brain is not the whole of our existence.

01:19:09.220 that we are a composite entity that involves more than just the chemistry at work or the cells in

01:19:16.760 the brain. Neurophysiology has been constrained in its understanding of human nature and reality

01:19:24.480 because of this principle of materialism. When we think about the origin of life,

01:19:29.280 what I've seen in researching this now for nearly 40 years is that you have these cycles where

01:19:35.540 you'll have the chance hypothesis will arise.

01:19:37.880 And then that obviously doesn't work.

01:19:39.180 And then we'll get theories that invoke natural laws.

01:19:41.760 And those don't explain the origin of information either.

01:19:44.240 Then we'll have theories that combine the two.

01:19:46.320 And they have deep problems.

01:19:50.160 And so then we go back to the chance hypothesis.

01:19:52.380 But there's another possibility.

01:19:54.040 Maybe the information necessary to produce life

01:19:56.380 is in fact the product of an intelligent agent.

01:19:59.100 But if you've precluded that

01:20:00.460 from the outset of your investigation,

01:20:02.480 you'll never get there.

01:20:03.740 You'll never see that.

01:20:04.580 It'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.

01:20:17.340 So you miss something, right?

01:20:19.460 And so it's not just theists that have prior commitments.

01:20:25.280 And I think being aware of those prior commitments allows you to subject them to critical tests when the need arises.

01:20:33.680 If 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.

01:20:48.660 But, 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...

01:21:00.740 It's what's of interest to us.

01:21:02.120 It's what's of interest to us.

01:21:03.680 who have posited a problem, a conflict between reason and faith.

01:21:08.960 Absolutely.

01:21:09.380 And there are well-established flavors of Christianity that adopt this.

01:21:15.360 Whereas you bring up the example of this shocking new discovery

01:21:18.920 that the mind and the brain might be distinct.

01:21:21.820 I think, well, all human beings in our civilization,

01:21:25.560 at least for the last, I don't know, 2,000 years or so,

01:21:28.940 maybe a little longer. 0.97

01:21:30.140 Back in the period of the Greeks? 0.97

01:21:31.040 Yeah, yeah. Approaching 2,500 years, 3,000 years, have recognized this for pretty simple reasons. 0.86

01:21:38.660 You 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.

01:21:46.720 Those are the two.

01:21:47.480 You've worked it in at least one. We haven't got to describe it.

01:21:48.920 There's one, yes. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't want to let it go.

01:21:50.720 But 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.

01:22:03.520 So 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.

01:22:16.000 It thinks about mathematics.

01:22:17.460 Mathematics, yes.

01:22:19.040 And so a purely physical object could not deal in any material substance.

01:22:24.840 And so there has to be a distinction between the mind and the brain.

01:22:28.460 Good enough for me.

01:22:29.640 An argument from the First Vatican Council says that God can be known,

01:22:35.760 the existence of God can be known with certainty.

01:22:38.360 With reason.

01:22:39.040 By human reason in the created world.

01:22:40.920 Simple as that.

01:22:41.620 Two things to say about that.

01:22:42.420 One, just a quick experiment that Michael Eggner cites in his new book.

01:22:46.000 when brain physiologists have, for various reasons, therapeutic, needed on occasion to sever the two hemispheres electrically.

01:22:55.480 And they find that a person who is still consciously aware can relate sense data that's presented to one hemisphere only

01:23:08.120 only to sense data that's been presented to the other hemisphere only and can relate the two and

01:23:16.820 make intellectual connections and draw analogies between the two, even though there is no physiological

01:23:26.240 center of the brain that's processing that information. You want to hear something really

01:23:30.760 weird that imply that implies an immaterial entity yes that is in that is doing the processing

01:23:36.840 which you can call the mind your soul your description of that just gave me chills

01:23:41.460 even though you just described evidence for the thing that i just said i believe yeah i just yeah

01:23:47.440 not 20 seconds ago i believe it and yet your description of the physical evidence for that

01:23:52.200 just gave me yeah well i would recommend egner's work on this i had the same experience when he

01:23:56.500 explained it to me over the phone one time. Which is to say that neuroscience is catching up with

01:24:03.360 or providing additional evidential support for the dualist philosophy of the classical

01:24:11.040 philosophers. So that's pretty exciting. And the other thing is on the faith-reason divide,

01:24:17.680 um there there has been this anti-intellectual strain in recent last hundred years christianity

01:24:26.360 in particular in our country yeah and i think uh in fact just the other day i well i was on

01:24:31.840 an interview this morning on a television interview and the host said well why is it

01:24:37.540 in your film you talked about science and its relation to god not scripture why didn't you

01:24:44.620 talk about scripture. And I think there's the sense that science has been opposed to

01:24:51.500 a biblical or Christian worldview rather than seeing it as the fact. And I just made the point

01:24:57.220 that, well, there's been this dichotomy, the sense that religious people have the faith,

01:25:05.220 and the scientists and the philosophers and the scholars have facts, and the facts oppose the

01:25:09.220 faith. And so, many religious people, many Christian people have withdrawn from the realm

01:25:15.080 of intellectual discourse, feeling that it's opposed to what they value most, rather than

01:25:21.120 seeing that the facts support the faith. And you go back to just something very simple

01:25:24.460 in the scripture, Romans chapter one, from the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities,

01:25:32.520 his eternal power and divine nature, sometimes in older translations rendered wisdom,

01:25:37.080 have been clearly seen from what has been made.

01:25:41.080 The facts of the world point to not only God's existence,

01:25:44.440 but they even tell us something about his attributes.

01:25:46.120 Yes.

01:25:46.540 And so there's no necessary separation.

01:25:49.060 We don't have to keep the world of the intellect,

01:25:52.500 the world of facts, the world of reason down here,

01:25:54.800 and the realm of morality and religious belief

01:25:59.860 appear ever separated in the manner

01:26:02.260 that Stephen Jay Gould commended to us

01:26:04.540 with his idea of Noma, non-overlapping magisteria.

01:26:08.160 No, the realms overlap because it's God's world.

01:26:11.240 Yes, yes.

01:26:12.940 I don't know.

01:26:13.740 To me, I would jump headlong into that

01:26:15.520 because I'd say, well, look,

01:26:16.360 either it's true or it's not.

01:26:17.840 Right.

01:26:18.260 And if it's true, then it must obtain in the world.

01:26:22.860 In the world.

01:26:23.240 Not just in this one classroom.

01:26:25.340 Right, right.

01:26:26.220 So it seems to me there's something very attractive now.

01:26:30.000 And maybe it's because it's so subversive.

01:26:33.640 You have seen a spike in conversions in Europe and in the United States, and specifically to Catholicism, I've noticed.

01:26:44.480 And 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.

01:26:57.720 And it's really weird because in this country, Catholicism used to be a low-class thing. 0.97

01:27:03.540 It was for your Irish maid. 0.96

01:27:04.960 It was not for, you know, the... 1.00

01:27:06.480 The intellectual Christians. 0.99

01:27:07.440 Yes, right. 0.66

01:27:08.900 But now it's weird.

01:27:11.760 Catholicism and to some degree the high church Protestant traditions, and Eastern Orthodoxy

01:27:16.980 even, have this kind of intellectual cachet to them.

01:27:21.800 They're catching on.

01:27:22.960 The Catholic Church is still bleeding members because cradle Catholics are falling away.

01:27:26.880 But the number of adult conversions is skyrocketing in the West. 0.88

01:27:31.520 And I wonder if there's this flip of ethos in that now the atheists have lost their mojo.

01:27:41.480 They've lost their cred. 0.96

01:27:42.780 And the intellectual mojo is...

01:27:44.580 This is a point I wanted to come back to before with your quote of Plantinga.

01:27:47.840 Yeah.

01:27:48.280 One of the funniest things or the most ironic things about the new atheism is that it wasn't

01:27:53.560 new at all.

01:27:54.140 It was reprising the village atheism of the late 19th century, the scientific atheism of

01:27:59.600 the late 19th century. And I think when you asked, well, why did it lose its mojo? I think it was

01:28:06.160 partly because it wasn't really offering anything new. It was offering something that had been

01:28:10.480 that had either been refuted or for which the evidence was right there to do the refuting.

01:28:19.380 And 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.

01:28:31.640 And 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.

01:28:53.640 it's jumped among young men to 21 or 22 percent from like two percent almost a tenfold increase

01:29:00.300 and among young women from four to 16 a fourfold increase something like that so there's there's

01:29:06.200 something going on and this is one thing that excites us in coming out with this film into

01:29:12.200 the culture right now we we feel like we're it it's we're hitting a cultural scene where there's

01:29:16.860 receptivity to the message of this that people are looking not only for evidence that supports

01:29:23.100 belief in god but i think people are also young people in particular looking for something that

01:29:27.740 would ground a yearning for meaning yeah there's a harvard study that uh show that in which it was

01:29:36.140 documented that something like 56 of young people in the 18 to 30 range acknowledged having

01:29:43.180 persistent doubts about whether their own lives had any um enduring or lasting meaning and and

01:29:51.180 This makes perfect sense in light of the new atheism and the dominance of materialism, naturalism, as a worldview.

01:29:59.140 It's not just been the new atheism.

01:30:00.580 This has been the default way of thinking in the West for quite some time in the elite intellectual culture,

01:30:06.680 in the universities, the law schools, the courts, the media.

01:30:10.460 Young people pick up on that, of course.

01:30:14.560 It makes sense.

01:30:15.660 If your worldview is materialistic, nothing can mean anything to a rock or a planet or a galaxy or even a DNA molecule.

01:30:26.860 Things only mean things to persons.

01:30:28.980 Things are meaningful to people.

01:30:30.880 And yet we all die.

01:30:32.980 and so if there is no ultimate person that whose existence precedes ours and can can continue

01:30:45.520 beyond ours outlast ours outlast ours that's the verb i was looking for thank you there can be no

01:30:50.960 possibility of ultimate meaning this is axiomatic and there was a great bertrand russell quote about

01:30:56.540 the heat death of the universe and the sense that this is, you know, completely, everything's

01:31:02.980 pointless because of the heat death of the universe. This is beyond certain. This is

01:31:07.940 absolutely certain. And I think young people perceive that. And so I think there's a craving

01:31:13.980 for a basis for meaning again. And if there is a personal God, a personal creator who wants to

01:31:23.080 know us. And if there is evidence of that, moreover, then the question of meaning is back

01:31:29.700 on the table. Yeah. And I guess I even come at it from the opposite direction, which is the

01:31:34.740 materialist would say, yes, isn't it a pity? You wish there were meaning. There isn't. That's why

01:31:39.620 you're depressed. That's why you're taking drugs. But, you know, cope with it. I love the condescending

01:31:44.880 affect. So sorry. But I guess my reaction to that is, there is meaning. There manifestly

01:31:54.960 is meaning. We all behave as if for all of history, everywhere in the world. And we can

01:32:02.740 even investigate meaning. We can know things about it. One discovery of semiotics, of the

01:32:08.500 study of symbols, is that meaning participates both in the real world with real things,

01:32:14.080 and touch, you know, and with rational creatures, you know, objects of my mind. And that, you know,

01:32:20.480 a yellow light, for instance, means something. It's a convention, just a symbol, but it means

01:32:26.760 something. And what's so curious about the yellow light is its meaning is not totally fixed. I

01:32:33.000 participate in its meaning because if I were a granny and I saw the yellow light, the meaning

01:32:38.540 that I would pull out of it is to slow down. But the meaning that I pull out of it is, of course,

01:32:42.720 to speed up because I want to get past the light. I know what it's trying to tell me. I know what it

01:32:47.400 says about the law. I know what it says. And yet there's this dynamic meaning that is pulled out

01:32:53.160 of the universe, both from tangible things. I love that move, Michael, because you can make

01:32:58.320 an evidential case for theism, which grounds a belief in a transcendent or ultimate persistent

01:33:06.520 meaning. Or you can presuppose the reality of meaning and point out that we all live as if

01:33:13.860 there was such a thing and then challenge people to fess up and acknowledge what is implied by

01:33:21.500 the existence of such a thing. Surely it's a curious fact. Which is namely some ultimate

01:33:26.840 person who is the ground of it all. I think there's a moral argument that can be unpacked

01:33:32.540 the exact same way or an epistemological argument. We all live as though we have objective knowledge

01:33:37.900 of the world, which implies that we believe that our minds are reliable. There are all kinds of

01:33:44.460 post-enlightenment epistemologies, philosophies that deny the reliability of the mind, but we

01:33:50.140 live as though our minds are reliable. And perhaps the best, I think the best grounding of that

01:33:56.460 belief is actually theism, the idea that our minds were made by a benevolent God to know the world

01:34:01.340 that he made. And so you can start with a presumption of knowledge and work backwards

01:34:06.620 to its necessary condition, which is theism, or you can make a case for God and then say,

01:34:11.880 hey, good news. We have good reason to believe our minds are reliable and therefore science is

01:34:17.180 possible. Yeah. You know, the people who would say that, well, we have no reason even to believe

01:34:22.020 that the product of our mind is accurate, you know, have the courage of your convictions. Go

01:34:27.600 run into the wall exactly go jump into the fire why don't you you never seem to do that do you

01:34:32.000 right and so i remember part of my reversion i was an atheist for 10 years right right year after

01:34:38.460 college and but part of it it was an agon sounds like we settled about the same time that's really

01:34:43.460 interesting i had about 10 year protracted um agonizing uh conversion it wasn't really an

01:34:50.940 experience you know it was a bit but that's interesting that's precisely the same it was 10

01:34:54.680 years, and especially at the end. Overthinking everything. Overthinking everything. I took the

01:34:59.320 long way. I took the stubbornness. The last thing in the world to a Damascus Road experience. Yes,

01:35:06.100 yes. I remember when I was finally, the scales were very slowly falling from my eyes. I was

01:35:13.940 sitting in my little ugly house that my mother had bought, and I had this little ugly house in

01:35:19.720 New York, and I was sitting in front of my little ugly dying rose bush, smoking a cigar on my little 0.94

01:35:25.560 ugly... Even then, huh? Even then. The cigars have been persistent. That's the real grounding of

01:35:32.040 your existence. Truly, yeah, truly. And I was sitting there smoking it, looking at this little

01:35:35.960 ugly... It's important that it wasn't beautiful. It was kind of ugly. And yet, I couldn't help but

01:35:42.300 notice the particularity of it, the complexity of it. The fact that the leaf looked one way and not

01:35:47.620 another way. The fact that the, the vine turned one way and not, not another way. And I thought,

01:35:52.900 well, isn't that funny? Isn't that weird? That I thought the universe would be so neat and pat

01:35:59.260 and simple and generalizable and all, but it's so, why is it all, why is this, why does the

01:36:05.160 concrete look this, that the way that it does? Why does it, does it, and, and why does it evoke

01:36:10.440 something? Why am I drawing some meaning out of that? Right, right. That in, that in itself

01:36:15.420 seems beautiful. This is ugly, but there's a meaning that is drawing my mind to something

01:36:21.540 beautiful. How the hell does it mean anything at all? And I was reminded of this line from the

01:36:27.220 South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who in their own charming way had said, you know,

01:36:33.060 we make fun of all these religions. They had the musical about Mormons and so we make fun of all

01:36:37.400 these religions. I said, but you know, of all the crazy religions of the world, the craziest one we 1.00

01:36:42.880 ever heard about was this idea that everything that we know, that we experience, that is beautiful,

01:36:49.300 our loves, our joys, our desires, and all, it's all here just because. Just because.

01:36:56.120 That's the start of the Birch and Russell quote. You know, our greatest desires and hopes and loves

01:37:03.340 and the highest accomplishments, the noonday brightness of human achievement, it's all

01:37:10.540 destined for, for destruction in the heat death of the universe. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That, and that's

01:37:16.120 the, that, that's fat. Well, your, your, your description of that reminds me of the, the

01:37:21.260 account of the conversion of Whitaker Chambers, who was looking at his daughter's ear. Yeah. And

01:37:26.500 it also reminds me of a, of a kind of conceit that exists within science that we will be able

01:37:34.500 to explain everything by a set of pure, simple regularities. And time and time again, we've not

01:37:42.980 been able to come up with a theory of everything in physics, but in biology in particular, there

01:37:47.620 was the assumption that when we figured out the secret of life, it would be a real simple,

01:37:54.660 repetitive molecule. And then the shocking thing was the immense three-dimensional complexity of

01:38:03.420 the proteins, the amazing linear complexity of the sequence of the characters in the DNA

01:38:10.600 and the sequence of the amino acids that turned into the three-dimensional, everything in

01:38:14.960 biology was complex.

01:38:16.540 It was highly specified, but it was very complex.

01:38:20.920 And a lot of times, physicists hope that we'll be able to explain everything in the

01:38:24.940 universe by reference to one simple theory of everything, but I don't think it's going

01:38:28.400 work because we live in a world of a universe a world and especially the living world of beautiful

01:38:35.120 specificity and complexity combined and that that's something that that is derivative of

01:38:40.960 information you need instructions to build that kind of thing because i thought the secret of life

01:38:44.800 was 42 or 40 yeah exactly or this thing that uh my grandson says about six seven he says yeah he

01:38:52.160 says i don't i don't know what it means either either but everyone at school is saying it six

01:38:57.040 six, seven, six, seven. Yeah, maybe that's it. Like cigar is the secret of the universe. Yes,

01:39:01.920 it is. But of course, that is what everyone wants, is the secret of life. The theory of

01:39:06.040 the universe is this simple equation or something. Yeah. But I fear that you have had some deceit in

01:39:12.300 the marketing here, because you told me you have this movie based on this book about telling the

01:39:17.400 story of everything. Right. Now you tell me there's no simple theory. Well, there's no simple

01:39:21.020 theory, but there is a simple explanation that involves the importance of a mind behind the

01:39:28.020 universe. Minds are not simple, and minds do things that are complex. Yeah, there's a biblical

01:39:38.260 connection here too, that what we've realized in the 19th century when people did think things

01:39:44.000 would end up being simple, everything by natural laws, and there were two fundamental entities,

01:39:48.160 matter and energy. And the big story, the story of everything is that there's a third fundamental

01:39:55.220 element, and that is information. And this is something that was anticipated biblically,

01:40:03.220 beginning of the Hebrew Bible. In the beginning, God said. And in the beginning of the John 9

01:40:10.640 prologue in the New Testament, in the beginning was the Word. And so, in fact, one of the

01:40:16.060 scientists in the film who was a leading chemical evolutionary theorist first had a scientific

01:40:22.260 conversion to skepticism about his own theory, then had a scientific, a deeper scientific

01:40:27.540 conversion to the idea or theory of intelligent design, and then finally had a religious conversion

01:40:33.700 to Christianity. And one of the things that elicited his sort of aha moment was coming across

01:40:41.520 a passage in the New Testament describing Jesus Christ as the word of life, and realizing that

01:40:47.300 this connection between creativity and information was anticipated in the Bible itself.

01:40:54.940 Even in the, as you mentioned, those first verses of Genesis, you do see Trinitarian imagery,

01:41:02.480 the idea that the Father speaks, you know, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God,

01:41:06.520 And 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.

01:41:16.260 And so you see that all right there, and the notion that from the very beginning there is...

01:41:21.320 Personhood.

01:41:22.300 Personhood.

01:41:22.660 And relationship.

01:41:23.400 And relationship, yes.

01:41:24.320 And interesting, too, we were just discussing the triadic nature of meaning, signs and symbols.

01:41:30.560 Yeah.

01:41:30.660 And you see the, you basically just see God as Trinity embedded in the entire creation.

01:41:37.760 And some people will look at that and say, nah, just, just a coincidence.

01:41:41.540 Just a coincidence.

01:41:42.540 Everything's just a coincidence.

01:41:43.820 Yeah.

01:41:44.120 It's a lot of coincidences.

01:41:45.140 Yeah.

01:41:45.560 Yeah.

01:41:47.020 The movie is the story of everything.

01:41:49.700 The book, the people should read all of your books, of course.

01:41:51.920 Well, thank you.

01:41:52.560 But the movie is based on the book.

01:41:54.180 Mrs. Meyer, thanks.

01:41:54.960 Yes, yes, certainly.

01:41:56.520 You can get more cheap tuxedos.

01:41:58.420 Yes, right.

01:41:58.680 Exactly.

01:41:59.340 Right.

01:42:00.080 Right.

01:42:00.660 Before I let you go, on that point, actually, which we haven't totally hammered, what is the

01:42:06.160 difference? They say you're just a creationist. What is the difference between this unthinking

01:42:13.680 God of the gaps, knuckle-dragging, dumb creationism and intelligent design? 0.86

01:42:21.560 Well, the term creationist has been deployed as a pejorative term against those of us in our 0.61

01:42:29.580 research community, our network, who are advancing the theory of intelligent design.

01:42:35.420 And that's because there is a form of creationism which is committed to the proposition that the

01:42:43.140 earth is very, very young on the order of, say, six or 10,000 years or maybe a bit older,

01:42:48.520 and that the days of Genesis are meant to be understood as six 24-hour periods.

01:42:54.820 our theory of intelligent design is different from that form of creationism in two ways

01:43:01.760 one is that it's not a deduction from scriptural authority first of all it's an inference from

01:43:08.880 biological physical and cosmological data we're seeing evidence of the activity of a mind an

01:43:16.140 intelligent mind and in the cosmological realm even a transcendent intelligent mind and secondly

01:43:22.140 the theory of intelligent design is an age-neutral proposition. It's not committed to a young Earth

01:43:29.720 or an old Earth. It's simply saying that there are certain means by which you can detect the

01:43:35.340 activity of a mind or an intelligence, and we see evidence of those distinctive hallmarks of

01:43:42.080 intelligent activity in the living forms that came on the planet before us, and even in, for

01:43:48.640 example, the fine-tuning of the physical constants and parameters of the universe. So it's an inference

01:43:54.160 in biological data, and it takes no position per se on the age of the earth. I myself hold to

01:44:01.520 the great antiquity of the universe and life, but there are scientists who

01:44:07.060 affirm intelligent design who might beg to differ with me, and maybe because they read

01:44:15.280 the genesis account differently than I do hold to a young earth. But intelligent design is not

01:44:20.400 affirming a young earth. Bound by that, yes. But even today, I mean, we have a new study

01:44:27.800 center that we've started in Cambridge, England, and one of the libels against us is that we're

01:44:33.180 young earth creationists. And well, that's not what the theory affirms. On the point of a

01:44:40.460 distinction between the mind and the brain. What does this mean for AI? Artificial intelligence.

01:44:47.260 Because one thing I noticed that the head of NVIDIA claimed that they stumbled on artificial

01:44:52.280 general intelligence. They had reached it, but then no one can define what that is. Everyone

01:44:58.520 said, does it mean the AI can run a billion dollar business? Does it mean that the AI is

01:45:02.820 indiscernible from a human being in the way that he reasons a general task? I don't know.

01:45:06.200 And it occurred to me, I think they can't define artificial general intelligence because they don't know what real intelligence is.

01:45:14.160 Like they literally, they no longer know what the intellect is.

01:45:16.860 So is the, what does that distinction mean for AI?

01:45:20.880 Let's set the definitional question aside for a minute.

01:45:23.500 But there's a very significant result that's emerged out of the most cutting edge versions of AI, the large language models.

01:45:31.340 and it's something called the model collapse or mod uh yeah model collapse and i think it's the

01:45:40.060 tell it's the philosophical tell if if you the the extraordinary thing about the ai technology

01:45:47.360 especially these large language models is what they can do it's amazing yeah and if you feed in

01:45:53.020 lots of text written by actual human agents um you can then query that body of information

01:46:00.140 and you will get coherent answers spit back at you

01:46:05.820 in response to your queries.

01:46:08.280 But if you take the output of those answers,

01:46:13.780 if you take those answers as output

01:46:15.360 and treat that as more data to feed into the AI system

01:46:20.120 or make that the basis of a new iteration

01:46:22.660 of large language modeling, if you will,

01:46:28.100 and now you query that data set your next set of answers are not nearly as coherent

01:46:37.880 and if you keep doing that iteration after iteration after iteration without correcting

01:46:43.140 things without an input of a conscious intelligence correcting things you'll you'll get to pure

01:46:48.740 gibberish within a couple of generations so you have a kind of devolution of informational

01:46:55.700 coherence with each iteration. And what this shows is there's a fundamental asymmetry between

01:47:01.980 the information that comes from the conscious intelligence, which is the source of the original

01:47:06.600 data set, and then the artificial data that's output by the AI in response to your query of that

01:47:13.580 first real data set that's come from agents, from conscious agents. So the AI is dependent

01:47:20.820 on either both the initial input

01:47:25.020 and subsequent inputs by way of correction

01:47:28.260 in a way that the agent is not dependent on the AI

01:47:32.780 for the production of genuine meaning.

01:47:36.460 So this shows that the mind will not be replaced

01:47:39.700 by the artificial intelligence.

01:47:42.320 There's a great book coming out

01:47:44.220 called Augmented Human Intelligence

01:47:46.900 by Eric Larson and co-author with MIT Press.

01:47:50.260 And his previous book was The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, which was a critique of claims for

01:47:55.640 artificial general intelligence. And I would recommend these two books for readers that are

01:48:00.120 interested. And he shows for a bunch of reasons, technical reasons and other, more than I've just

01:48:06.520 stated, that there's a lot of reasons to doubt the almost utopian program of artificial general

01:48:16.400 intelligence. And nothing in the LLMs, the large language models, the chat GPTs, that sort of

01:48:21.520 technology undermines that conclusion. Listen, I'm going to preface this and say some of my best

01:48:27.400 friends work in AI, but I mean, some of them will say we're building God. So they're describing

01:48:34.400 the opposite process, that this thing is going to achieve liftoff and become much, much more

01:48:38.760 intelligent. You're saying, no, no, no, if it's just feeding on itself, it degrades pretty quickly.

01:48:43.060 My only challenge to that is I seem to observe the same phenomenon among actual human intelligence in society.

01:48:51.900 I don't, you know, writing has declined low these last hundred years.

01:48:56.920 Well, you know, what turned me on to this, Michael, was an analogous problem in origin of life research, which has been my main field.

01:49:02.780 And that is, there's a model called hypercycles that was meant to simulate how you could get in, produce something analogous to cellular metabolism.

01:49:14.340 But 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.

01:49:25.780 And that's what you have in the AI with the model collapse.

01:49:28.980 It's an error catastrophe where you gradually lose meaning and coherence with each iteration unless you have a conscious agent inputting information.

01:49:41.440 And so this also underscores one of our key principles in intelligent design research, which is the conservation of information,

01:49:47.420 that the information, the specified or functional information of a system

01:49:53.060 will either remain the same or degrade over time

01:49:56.620 unless there is an input of information from a conscious agent.

01:50:01.380 The initial input will exceed the output.

01:50:03.600 Right.

01:50:03.860 Or sometimes if you have an error correction,

01:50:07.840 you can maintain the fidelity of information across a channel,

01:50:12.280 but that error correction has to have an input from an intelligence.

01:50:14.880 So it's this fundamental connection between conscious intelligence and the creation and even the maintenance of information.

01:50:22.800 That's not something that nature does on its own.

01:50:25.840 Nor something that the computers do on the road.

01:50:27.660 Even the computers are dependent upon us and not the other way around.

01:50:31.860 We use them.

01:50:33.200 They're fantastic technology.

01:50:34.560 There's all kinds of ways they are improving life.

01:50:37.300 We need them in the medical industry.

01:50:39.160 We need them in defense technology.

01:50:41.000 technology. AI has got a lot of great potential, but it also, like any technology, can be used

01:50:46.380 for ill as well, and we have to watch that side of things.

01:50:49.260 Right. On points that are called dumb and uneducated and all, we were talking about 0.95

01:50:55.620 Galileo earlier, who got exactly what he deserved as far as I'm concerned, but not for scientific 0.81

01:51:00.180 reasons because of impudence.

01:51:02.520 His imprudence.

01:51:04.520 Yes, 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.

01:51:20.140 And now we find ourselves in Carl Sagan world where we say we're just some little rock far-flung in the middle of nowhere.

01:51:26.540 But I've heard that from cosmic background radiation, we have determined that actually maybe we are back at the center of things.

01:51:36.000 And anyway, I really want that because, one, I want to beat up.

01:51:38.960 We're special for new and different reasons than we're thought in the Middle Ages.

01:51:42.400 Is it possible?

01:51:43.140 There's a fantastic, in the opening of the film, if I can just tout it one more time, I'm sorry.

01:51:48.100 I don't mean to be here selling.

01:51:49.540 Please.

01:51:50.360 I mean, I've been selling Mayflower cigars now twice on this show.

01:51:53.460 Well, 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.

01:52:04.660 And 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?

01:52:21.320 He says, well, of course, I'm either buried or I'm cremated.

01:52:26.980 There's just nothing.

01:52:27.840 There's just nothing.

01:52:28.460 How could there be? 0.97

01:52:29.060 You have a brain that decays.

01:52:31.060 And then Carl Sagan comes on and says, here we are like mites on a plum on this little 0.98

01:52:36.920 planet of this obscure, tiny solar system and the edge of an insignificant galaxy among

01:52:44.380 something like 400 billion other galaxies.

01:52:47.760 and then there's this beautiful flyby from you start start on planet earth and you go out into

01:52:54.240 deep space and then you end up with all the galaxies and it gives you this great sense of

01:52:58.420 this insignificance and i think so as far as being at the center of the solar system or the center of

01:53:05.980 the universe now we can't we can't derive significance from that but being the outcome

01:53:11.260 of a plan, of a finely tuned universe, of a genetic and other levels of informational

01:53:22.800 programming that make us possible, that reveal a master programming behind everything, well,

01:53:28.500 maybe we are special after all. Maybe we were intended. And I think when we talk about evidence

01:53:33.320 of intelligent design in life, in the universe, we're talking about a mind that intended what

01:53:39.000 is here, what has been created, the things that are made, as the Book of Romans puts

01:53:43.680 it. And so maybe that whole question of human significance also needs to be revisited, because

01:53:50.200 we are the outcome, I think, the highest form of life that has been created on the only

01:53:56.040 planet in which we have any inkling that life exists.

01:53:59.320 Yes. You don't just think that. It is a demonstrable and inescapable fact. And so

01:54:06.520 So then they say, you're so special, you're so unusual, they'll say, you think this is

01:54:11.520 all for us?

01:54:13.420 This whole cosmos is for us, and I say, well, yeah, you're talking about the birds of the

01:54:16.960 air and the fish of the sea, for instance?

01:54:19.580 You think all the creeping things that creep across the land?

01:54:22.400 Yeah, I actually do.

01:54:23.640 The Earth was progressively prepared for humans to inhabit it.

01:54:27.700 There's nothing, there is absolutely nothing irrational or anti-scientific about affirming

01:54:33.160 that.

01:54:34.160 the next question which is well is that it you know that we we are the gods that we previously had

01:54:41.360 expelled or do we have to take it one step further and say maybe maybe we are made for

01:54:48.400 something or someone maybe we are made with a purpose too and maybe uh to your point earlier on

01:54:55.920 you know when you when you have faith it all kind of makes sense and that's one good argument for

01:55:00.560 For 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.

01:55:29.680 There's even a joy in that, right?

01:55:31.840 One would say there's even a joy in that.

01:55:34.200 The film that sparked my enchantment with Oxford and Cambridge,

01:55:40.560 I ended up going to Cambridge, was the Chariots of Fire in the 1980s.

01:55:45.220 And there's that memorable line where the Scottish runner is,

01:55:51.660 and when I run, I feel his pleasure.

01:55:55.440 And so when you're doing the thing you were designed to do,

01:55:58.080 This 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.

01:56:11.180 Once you are able to affirm that as a metaphysical reality, as an ontological reality, it begins to have implications for the rest of life.

01:56:18.560 You can begin to now think about, well, what is my purpose?

01:56:21.020 Where do I fit in all of this?

01:56:22.760 Might there be a calling that I have?

01:56:25.780 What was I made to do?

01:56:27.920 Those sorts of questions come back on the table as well.

01:56:31.120 Indeed, it has implications not just for when you're engaged deeply in your vocation,

01:56:36.980 but it has implications for when you're chopping carrots.

01:56:39.440 It has implications for when you get cut off in traffic.

01:56:41.200 Yeah, exactly. Ordinary work is good work. It's part of what God made us to do.

01:56:45.500 So, yeah, all those things start to make sense.

01:56:47.820 And when you are in that zone, there is a kind of joy that comes from feeling his pleasure.

01:56:54.680 You're doing what you were made to do.

01:56:57.180 This idea, it's an ancient idea.

01:56:58.680 It goes back to Aristotle, the idea of atelios,

01:57:01.520 or an entelechy, the purpose for which something was made.

01:57:05.240 And as you, I was a college professor for 15 years,

01:57:09.360 and I used to talk to students a lot about this.

01:57:11.460 This is part of what you're here to do

01:57:13.340 in your educational experience,

01:57:15.400 is to discern what your entelechy is.

01:57:17.960 What is the thing that you were uniquely designed to do?

01:57:21.260 Find that, run with it, and you will find a kind of joy,

01:57:25.260 and you will be useful to other people.

01:57:27.180 You will serve and bless other people.

01:57:29.220 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.

01:57:43.080 And in fact, any story of everything that does not include both of those things probably does not comprise everything.

01:57:51.420 That's fantastic.

01:57:52.240 But we still haven't talked about cigars.

01:57:54.200 Well, that's my purpose.

01:57:55.920 That's my, obviously, you need to go watch the story of everything right now.

01:58:02.140 And as a little amuse-bouche to that banquet, we have a trailer.

01:58:07.480 Today, I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange.

01:58:15.120 Galileo, Kepler, Newton.

01:58:19.280 Each tried to explain events in the history of the universe.

01:58:22.120 Has the universe always been here?

01:58:24.440 Or is it finite?

01:58:25.920 Is there something else that would lay these questions to rest?

01:58:29.040 It reopens that question of ultimate meaning.

01:58:32.460 How in the world did this start?

01:58:35.300 The simulation theory?

01:58:36.600 The multiverse.

01:58:37.440 You can't trust what's in front of your eyes. 0.98

01:58:39.160 Come on, that's ridiculous. 0.98

01:58:40.860 That belongs in the movies. 0.90

01:58:45.640 We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to.

01:58:51.400 And I can remember him saying...

01:58:52.860 There is evidence for what can only be described as a super-natural event.

01:58:58.860 He himself made a discovery that shook his personal philosophy.

01:59:03.860 The fact the universe sprang into being at a definite moment seems to me theological.

01:59:08.860 And it is science that has revealed this.

01:59:11.860 We are dealing with a system of manifold complex design.

01:59:16.860 It turned out to be the tip of the iceberg.

01:59:25.980 We associate information with a rational intelligence behind it.

01:59:31.760 It had an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string, very much like an information carrier.

01:59:38.740 You can read the same segment forward to get one protein and backwards to get another.

01:59:43.400 It struck us with a tremendous impact.

01:59:45.480 If without guidance, we would get a life unfriendly universe.

01:59:50.160 Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that's relevant for their survival value.

01:59:54.800 The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences.

02:00:03.860 The question then was what does one do about it?

02:00:15.480 the movie comes out april 30th it's in theaters across the country uh possibly as many as a

02:00:25.440 thousand uh we're adding them i think we're over 500 now um it has a guaranteed seven night opening

02:00:31.500 and we're hoping that it maybe lights a little bit of a spark in the culture the the interest

02:00:37.360 in the god question is coming back and percolating to the surface i think this this uh this film

02:00:44.340 will foment further such interest,

02:00:47.280 but on grounds that people may find surprising,

02:00:49.640 namely scientific discovery.

02:00:52.340 Steve, excellent to see you.

02:00:54.160 All of you need to go see the movie immediately.

02:00:56.960 See you next time.

＂Evolution Fails To Explains This＂ Michael & Intelligent Design ｜ Dr. Stephen C. Meyer

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