[00:00:05] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Tom Gilson. Today's id the Future podcast brings you Edgar award winning novelist and daily Wire commentator Andrew Clavin hosting a clear headed conversation with the Discovery Institute's Steven C. Meyer about Meyer's recently released book Return of the God Hypothesis, three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. Klavin is first to speak as we begin.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: So I have been really looking forward to today's interview. I've been arguing for a long time that atheists are basically trapped in the 20th century, that their philosophy has become scientifically obsolete. And I just read a terrific book called the Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer. Stephen Meyer directs the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture in Seattle, is a former geophysicist. He's written bestsellers Darwin's doubt, the explosive origin of animal life in the case for intelligent design, signature in the cell, and his latest is the USA Today bestseller return of the God hypothesis, which I read. I just think it's terrific. Steve, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew, for having me on. It's a great privilege.
[00:01:24] Speaker C: It is.
It's a terrific book. It really is. It's rigorous. It's not tendentious. You don't just say what you want to be true. You make your arguments really clearly. I want to talk before we get into the argument. The subtitle of the book is the three discoveries that have brought the God hypothesis back into play. And before we get to those three discoveries, the fact that you call it the return of the God hypothesis suggests that there was a time when maybe it made more sense not to hypothesize that God had created the world or that God was at work in the world. Why is that the case?
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned that atheism is stuck in the 20th century. I think it's actually stuck in the late 19th century, which is when the worldview known as scientific materialism was really formulated.
The great scientific materialists were Darwin, who told us where we came from, Marx, who gave us a utopian vision of where we were going, Freud, who a little bit later told us what to do about the human condition, about human guilt. And between these great materialistic thinkers, all of whom claimed to be basing their ideas on science, a kind of comprehensive worldview was formulated that answered all the great questions that Judeo christian religion had always addressed.
And this became kind of the default way of thinking through much of the 20th century among elite intellectuals and it had, I think, some tragic consequences, because it was also the mode of thinking that underlay the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century as well. Both Marxism and national socialism derived tremendous amount of support from basically materialistic assumptions, in some cases even directly going back to darwinian thinking. So the title return of the God hypothesis invites a kind of story, obviously, because to say it's returning was to say that the God hypothesis, as the framework for doing science, was lost. But that implies that previous to that, it was also the dominant way of thinking about the natural world, as indeed it was during the period that historians call the scientific revolution.
[00:03:26] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, the scientific revolution. You make this argument very clearly in the book, the return of the God hypothesis, that it's really inspired in some way by christian, specifically christian thought. Is that a fair way to put it?
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. And also Judeo Christian thought, because during the period of the scientific revolution, and that's dated variously by historians of science, between, say, 1517, hundred or 1750, some go back and see very strong influences that gave rise to modern science in the late medieval period as well, going back as far as 1300 or so in the great universities like University of Paris and Oxford.
But during this period of late medieval catholic thought and the period of the Reformation, christian thinkers were rediscovering the Hebrew Bible. And there were a number of concepts that were implicit in the biblical worldview that were friendly to the rise of science. The biggest one was the idea of intelligibility, the idea that nature could be understood because it by the human mind, because it expressed a rationality that was the product of the divine mind, and that that same divine creator, who had built rationality and design and order into nature, had also designed our minds in a way that allowed us to understand that order and design. And so there's a principle of correspondence between the reason that was built into nature and the reason within us.
[00:04:49] Speaker C: And it kind of goes beyond the greek idea of reason, too, because there's a certain.
I don't know, I don't want to call it randomness, but freedom in God's work. I mean, he can do whatever he wants, so it's up to us to go out and look at it.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: That was a huge concept. The historians of science call that contingency, the idea that nature has an order that's built into it, but it's an order that's contingent upon the will of the creator. It could have been otherwise. Just as there are many different ways to make a timepiece or a clock, all of which would require a kind of orderly arrangement of the gears and parts that make timekeeping possible.
There are many different ways that God could have ordered the universe, and it's up to us not to deduce that order from some first principles or from some intuitions that we have about how nature ought to be. But rather, it's important to go out and look and see how nature actually is. The Greeks were inclined to a kind of armchair philosophizing about nature, and during the period of the scientific revolution, because of this idea of the radical contingency of nature upon the will of God. This is a consequence of the recovery of the doctrine of creation. Nature is orderly, but it's orderly because God chose to make it a certain way. And Robert Boyle put it very succinctly. He said, it's not the job of the natural philosopher, which was what people called scientists at the time, to deduce what God must have done. But instead, it's the job of the scientists to go out and look and see what God actually did do. So in addition to having a confidence that there's an intelligibility in nature, there was also the idea that nature needed to be studied in an empirical way. We needed to investigate it by looking and seeing and measuring. And this gave rise to an empirical form of science rather than deductive, as I mentioned, armchair philosophizing, which characterized a lot of greek thoughts.
[00:06:37] Speaker C: So let's talk about these three discoveries that kind of. I mean, it feels like it might have been natural after Newton to just assume that a clockwork universe was going to unfold. That was just very easy to understand. But in fact, things turned out to be a little weirder than that. And one of the first things you talk about is the idea of a big bang, which really does make things complicated. Can you describe, first of all, where did that idea come from? And why does it make things complicated for scientific materials?
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Well, there's a Princeton physicist from the 1960s, Robert Dickey, who said that an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past. And coming out of the late 19th century, physicists assumed that the universe was infinitely old, that it was essentially eternal and self existent and self organizing.
And so that made possible this great materialistic synthesis. At the end of the 19th century, we could explain the origin of everything all the way back to the elementary particles. And the elementary particles and energy had been here from eternity past. And so matter and energy were essentially had godlike powers. They were the eternal, self existent thing that replaced the idea of an eternal, self existent creator in Christianity and Judaism.
So the surprising, shocking discovery of the early 20th century was that, in fact, the material universe, the physical universe of matter, space, time and energy, seems, as best we can tell, to have had a beginning. And the first inklings of this came in the 1920s in observational astronomy, as figures like Edwin Hubble were able to establish that the light coming from distant galaxies was being stretched out as if the distant galaxies were receding away from us. And Hubble's graduate student Alan sandage, and others were able to verify that this was the case in all quadrants of the night sky. And the picture that emerged from this was of an expanding universe outward from a kind of starting point, a beginning. And this was a kind of shocking discovery, because everyone expected that the universe was eternal and self existent. Einstein didn't like it at first, though. His own theory of gravity, called general relativity, implied the same thing. He later did come around, though, when the. When confronted with the evidence.
[00:08:52] Speaker C: And then you have this idea, I think you call it the Goldilocks universe. Is that your term for it? That it's not just that it starts, but it starts with some really amazing coincidences wrapped into its very organization.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah, physicists call this the fine tuning. And some physicists refer to our universe now as a Goldilocks universe. The basic parameters of the universe, the force that drives the expansion, the force of gravity, the force of electromagnetism, the underlying strong and weak nuclear forces, the masses of the elementary particles, the speed of light, many, many basic physical parameters fall within very narrow tolerances, such that if they were a little bit different, a little bit stronger or weaker or heavier or lighter, the universe would not be conducive to life. And the probabilities of associated with these individual parameters, let alone the whole ensemble, are incredibly tiny. And yet there's no underlying physical reason, theoretical or physical reason, as to why these parameters should have the precise values that they do.
And this is known to physicists now as the problem of the fine tuning. And many physicists, including Sir Fred Hoyle, who was initially a big skeptic of the Big Bang because of his atheism, came around to theism himself because of fine tuning parameters that he discovered associated with the necessary abundance of carbon in the universe, which is necessary to life. And he was later quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology in order to make life possible.
So this fine tuning suggested a fine tuner. There have been contrary hypotheses, such as the multiverse that's being floated now and sometimes makes it into popular movies. But one thing that's not commonly known about the multiverse, and that's just the idea that there are gabillions of other universes out there, such that somewhere, some universe would get lucky and have those improbable parameters. The problem is, all the mechanisms that physicists have proposed to explain where these other universes have come from have themselves required prior, unexplained fine tuning, taking us right back to where we started. So the multiverse actually doesn't explain the fine tuning and fine tuning in our experience, whether we're talking about swiss watches or internal combustion engines or sections of digital code, is always an indicator of intelligence or the activity of mind.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: It's funny, these guys who are constantly citing occam's razor to say that things should be simple, make this argument of the multiverse, which is kind of like saying, this just happens to be the card game in which I drew four aces seven times in a row. I mean, it seems a very complex way of thinking about things, as opposed to just saying, well, maybe there's a creator.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: It's very convoluted and more convoluted than I can describe in a short interview, because there are two different systems of theoretical physics that have to be invoked to explain the phenomena. A single postulate of a transcendent intelligence can explain. You have to posit all these different universes as well as all these different theoretical entities like multi dimensions of space, strings, inflaton fields, in order to explain the one thing that a single hypothesis of a transcendent creator explains very simply. So it's not a parsimonious or simple explanation, the multiverse, the other, the final.
[00:12:30] Speaker C: Of the three discoveries, is this idea. It's kind of interesting because one of the guys who's supposed to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse of the new atheist is Richard Dawkins, an excellent writer, obviously a brilliant man, and it's all about evolution for him. And evolution explains so much of where life comes from.
But the idea of a code, of a genetic code that creates intelligence has caused some computer scientists to say that darwinian, absolute darwinian evolution can't be right. Is that a fair way to. Well, am I getting.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, this is the huge discovery of late 20th century science and biology, and that is that at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cells, we find an exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology started with Watson and Crick in 1953 when they elucidated the double helix structure of the DNA. Five years later, Crick formulated something he called the sequence hypothesis, in which he suggested that the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or the zeros and ones in a machine code or digital software that we would work with today. Richard Dawkins himself has acknowledged that DNA functions like a machine code. Bill Gates says it's like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. And that's a highly suggestive remark because we know from experience that software comes from programmers and that information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form, always comes from an intelligent source. Whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal or in a computer code, information is the product of mind. And so the discovery of information at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cell, I've argued, is a powerful indicator of a designing intelligence playing a role in the origin and history of life.
[00:14:25] Speaker C: We're talking about a remarkable book called the return of the God hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer. Really well argued. Scientific, but not a theological book. A scientific book. I have a question that I'd like to ask about quantum physics. I'm glad. Since I have you here, I'll take advantage of the let's take a walk on the wild.
You touch on this in the later chapters of the book, but it's not one of your three discoveries. But the idea in quantum. There is this idea in quantum physics that things are defined by our perception of them to some degree so that we can't tell the location and velocity of something before it is observed. And once it's observed, it maintains that position. We can't tell whether light is a wave or a particle until it's observed. And then once it's observed, it remains a wave or a particle. It seems that sort of implies to me that consciousness comes before matter. That the words in the Bible that the earth was without form was void and without form. And God said, let there be light could almost be literally true, that there has to be some consciousness before there can be some element. There is.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: That many philosophers have actually, you know, I think it's a very profound insight. My colleague George Gilder says, at the heart of matter lies a mystery.
We don't perceive matter without perception, without a perceiver. And one of the reasons I brought up the quantum mechanics in this book was that there is a model of the origin of the universe known as quantum cosmology, which attempts to appropriate the mathematics of quantum physics. To explain how you get a universe from literally nothing physical. But the problem with the appropriation of that mathematics is that it presupposes a mathematical structure to the universe before there's any matter. But mathematics is something. As one of the proponents of this idea has acknowledged, mathematics is conceptual. It only exists in minds. So the attempt to explain the origin of the universe. Apart from the mind of God, using quantum mechanics. Has actually brought people back full circle to the need for a preexisting mind. The very insight that you've just. You've just shared.
[00:16:42] Speaker C: Good. I'm glad I wasn't just making that up, because obviously, I do not understand. I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but it seems like that to me. You quote, remarkable quote from Thomas.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I was just interrupting a little bit. But there's a terrific quote from hawking about this very problem. He was one of the inventors of this quantum cosmology idea. But in a moment of candor, he says, what puts fire in the equations. That gives them a universe. To describe math by itself is causally inert. It's only something that exists in a mind. We use math to structure things, to design things. But the whole attempt is really an ironic story. Because the evidence we have for the beginning of the universe. Seems to imply a cause that transcends matter, space, time, and energy. Before the beginning of matter, there is no matter to do the causing. And in virtue of that, scientists have looked for some alternative to the God hypothesis. They've come up with this quantum cosmological model. But it, too, implies a priority, unexplained mental reality that is not material. In order to explain the origin of the universe. So they come right back, I think, to the God hypothesis and the attempt to avoid it.
[00:17:48] Speaker C: Yeah. This brings me back to this really remarkable quote from Thomas Nagel, who's a philosopher who wrote a book called mind and Cosmos and made a big splash called why the materialist, neo darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Got attacked by all kinds of people. But you quote Nagel. Nagel does not believe in God. And he came up with an alternative hypothesis to that. But he said, I want atheism to be true. And I'm made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't right just that I don't believe in God. And naturally hope that I'm right. It's that I hope there is no. I hope there is no God. I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be like that. I was really struck by that. Cause I felt that way about some of the things that Stephen Hawking used to say, that he was committed to this idea that there wasn't a God, that he was as committed as somebody. Religious people who know nothing but just what they believe. Why is that? Why aren't scientists open to what seems to me such a simple explanation of the world as we actually know it scientifically?
[00:18:49] Speaker A: There's so many different things to say about that, Andrew.
First of all, Nagel's candor is just so refreshing. And he went out on a limb to write some very nice things about some of the books advancing the theory of intelligent design, though he couldn't quite go that far himself. He was an atheist who was sort of experiencing cognitive dissonance. Understanding that neo Darwinism and materialistic ideas did not account for the really fundamental. One of the fundamental things about our existence, which is the reality of consciousness, the reality of minds. We have them, so we know mind exists. And if you can't account for that, you have a worldview that is inadequate. I think that part of the answer to the why can't science? Or why are scientists so wedded, or many scientists so wedded to atheism? I think it's partly a kind of default way of thinking that we've inherited from the 19th century. And there's a sort of groupthink phenomenon that is involved in any community of scholars or thinkers.
But also, I think there's a natural human resistance to the God hypothesis. On the one hand, we would like God to exist because we want to think about the possibility of a life after this life, about significance. We don't want to think of ourselves as cosmic accidents. So we have a motivation to consider the God hypothesis, but none of us. Also, I think, instinctively like the accountability that comes with thinking about a transcendent intelligence who made us to function best in a certain way, and that therefore there's a moral law, and we may not be on the right side of that all the time. So there's a push pull, I think, in every human being, about whether we want or don't want God to exist. What I tried to do in the book was to extricate ourselves from those motivational questions and issues and just look at what the evidence says. And Dawkins is so helpful because he has this tremendous quote. He's great at forming framing issues, even though I disagree with his atheism. But he says the universe has exactly the properties we should expect. If at bottom there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. In other words, materialism. And what I tried to show in the book is that there've been three major discoveries about biological, physical, and cosmological origins. They're precisely what you wouldn't expect if scientific materialism or scientific atheism were true. The universe had a beginning. It's been finely tuned from the beginning for life. And since the beginning there have been big infusions or bursts of digital information technology in our living in our biosphere. That suggests a master programmer has been at work and life. None of these things were expected on the scientific atheist view of the late 19th century, and that's the view that we've inherited that's dominated the 20th century.
[00:21:25] Speaker C: If you like science books, this is a terrific one. The return of the God hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer Steve, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew. And thanks for great questions.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: That was Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, interviewed by Andrew Klavin on Klavin's podcast, which is part of the daily wire network of commentary. For more great insights on life, the universe, and the intelligence behind it, stay tuned to id the future and pass the word along to others, too, please. I'm Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
