Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're happy to bring you the second half of a stimulating conversation between philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer and historian of science and founding editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer. The conversation was hosted by comedian and podcaster Brian Callan. On the Brian Callan show, in Part one, Meyer and Shermer discussed their mutual preference for a Bayesian approach to science, assigning a likelihood ratio to a given hypothesis based on the available evidence.
But when it comes to the origin of life in the universe, which hypothesis best explains the scientific evidence?
The two men have some meaningful back and forth dialogue about it here. In part two, Meyer and Schirmer both address where they think complex life comes from. For Schirmer, it's an interplay between matter and energy through some evolutionary process. But as Meyer points out, the highly ordered codes and complex biological systems we see at the heart of life are not the type of thing that results from an unguided evolutionary process. They also discuss the mind body problem, how the mind or consciousness interacts with the physical world, which brings up the subject of mathematics Meyer calls math mind independent. We discover it, we don't invent it. And it's conceptual, not a physical, material thing. Which begs the question, in what mind was it conceptualized if not ours?
The pair also discuss the merits of skepticism itself. I don't know is a reasonable position to take, agree both men, but is that a permanent position? Does one have to be perpetually skeptical? Or is it possible to move toward the truth and even reach it?
Lots of interesting questions and topics explored. So let's get right back to it. Here again is Brian Callan, Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer.
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Well, I mean, it's a little, this.
[00:02:13] Speaker D: Is the ultimate problem with materialism.
[00:02:14] Speaker C: There's also that idea of sort of like, you know, you, you, you can break somebody down into their parts or anything into their parts. You, you know, you could say reduction. Well, you know, Huxley and, and Matthew Arnold had that debate.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: No one thinks that's enough to explain complex systems.
[00:02:32] Speaker C: Well, but I'm saying there's something about human beings, I mean, clearly Matthew Arnold that, that, that inspired this, this, this hominid with no tale to Greek to, to, you know, there's something that inspired us to, to the music of Mozart and, and the plays of Shakespeare and Euripides and Sophocles. There's, there's something we seem to be, we do have a Mind, it is capable of understanding and it is curious and wants to understand more. And we do seem to. To.
We. We don't seem to be just materialists as human beings. We seem much more than that.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: You're making a move there where you're reifying the word mind into something that like, floats around separate from the neurons that are firing.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: And that. And that's sort of a Buddhist way of looking at it like the mind exists out there.
[00:03:19] Speaker D: That's an inference. Well, there may be difference between my experience of the color blue on this water bottle and the neurochemistry that's going on in my brain. I have a direct experience of that as a conscious agent.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: So do you think mind for that?
[00:03:32] Speaker D: We call it consciousness, we call it mind, we call it mental properties. But you're not seriously not denying the existence of your own consciousness, are you?
[00:03:40] Speaker A: No, no, it's very real.
[00:03:42] Speaker D: It's a reification of chemistry.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: What I mean is someone like Rupert Sheldrake who think that mind exists out there in the quantum field, it's not in your brain.
[00:03:51] Speaker D: Okay, I agree with that. That's. That's a. That's a weird platonic reification.
[00:03:56] Speaker C: But how about this? I mean, the idea that, you know, we are not. If you. If you have a materialistic viewpoint. Look, we. We have to sleep, we have to have. We have to eat. We have to keep our body at a certain temperature. And there's all these things we do. But. But we also create beautiful art, great music, great plays, great paintings, a great story. And this is what Schopenhauer, I think, and even Nietzsche said that sometimes you forget you're human when you watch these things, when you participate in them or you observe them, you forget you have to have. Go to the bathroom, sleep. There's this inspiration that happens that for a brief moment. And we stay alive for these moments. And frankly, we might even die for these moments, these ideas, the first kiss. All these things that kind of make us feel transcendent. There's more to it out here than just this sort of.
I'm more than just a machine, for God's sake. I'm something. I'm something that's connected to something. I guess. Maybe there's truth and beauty. Those ideas, those concepts might be romantic, but they're real. They really are real, aren't they?
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. Except, you know what you call love without evidence?
Stalking.
[00:05:11] Speaker C: What does that mean?
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Stalking? You know, you're stalking somebody.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: Oh, stalking with love without evidence.
Stalking. That's a great joke.
[00:05:19] Speaker D: Love without evidence of reciprocity.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Yeah, but I stole that, by the way, from Tim. The comedians Tim mentioned. I got to get.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: I wish, I wish I'd read.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: But, but so, but okay, so then one more question on this. So let's say I'm running an experiment at the CERN particle accelerator, or I'm using the LIGO Gravitational wave experimental apparatus and I discover something. How would introducing mind into the experiment? What, what, what value does it bring? How can I use it? What's the purpose of that? Or is it a higher metaphorical or metaphysical.
[00:05:53] Speaker C: Maybe I can religious way. Maybe I can answer it this way. Do you believe in a priori knowledge, or is all knowledge based in experience?
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Well, logic, mathematics, things like this, I think are separate from human minds. I mean, this is a debatable point.
[00:06:09] Speaker C: But that's an interesting thing, right? Theoretical math?
[00:06:11] Speaker A: I mean, when someone like Max Tegmark says, well, the entire universe is all mathematical and whatever could be derived through equations has to exist, I'm like, I don't know. I'm not really sure I'm, I'm understanding this.
[00:06:21] Speaker C: Well, there might be a number you.
[00:06:22] Speaker D: Can attach where we share some skepticism. Yeah.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Are we living in a matrix? It's like, I don't know, you know, go outside and look. I don't see, see any buffering or any pixelated. I don't know. You know, at some point the metaphysics becomes like science fiction. It's fun and interesting, but. So my point is, are we just talking sort of religion, metaphysics, philosophy?
[00:06:42] Speaker C: I'm talking.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: And the inference of mind in an experiment, is there some useful point of that?
[00:06:48] Speaker C: Is there a moral sense? Is there, is there an idea that we.
[00:06:51] Speaker D: Can we bracket that and come back. I think Michael's asking something very specifically scientific, which I think I, I'd like to take a rip at.
It may be that when we're looking at the Large Hadron Super Collider, that we don't. There's no occasion for inferring the activity of a mind. The phenomenon that we may be studying may be perfectly well explained by the interaction of particles or energy, but it may be that there are other types of phenomena where the, the inference to mind is completely warranted in the philosophical sense. And the key principle that underlies that distinction is a principle of reasoning in. It's part of Bayesian thinking. It's part of a method of reasoning that's commonly used in science called inference to the best explanation, where the best explanation is an explanation that invokes an Entity which is known to have the powers to produce the effect in question, sometimes called the causal adequacy principle. So I invoke mind when mind is the entity which is known from our experience to be uniquely capable of producing the effect in question. I don't invoke mind when it is not uniquely known to have those powers or when something else is uniquely known to have those powers. So just because mind is not always, or intelligence is not always a causally adequate explanation of certain phenomena doesn't mean it's not sometimes the best explanation of others. If you walk into the British Museum and you stumble upon that wonderful artifact called the Rosetta Stone that has those etchings in three different languages. We don't infer that wind and erosion did it because the archaeologists, after they broke the code, realized that they were dealing with inscriptions that were information rich. There were three different linguistic texts and they therefore inferred a scribe and intelligence had done it because they know that mind can produce information and wind and erosion can't.
[00:08:57] Speaker C: Do you find, Michael, that you are, you lean in the idea that this kind of just all happened without purpose or this was a happy accident?
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Well, not.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: Well, it might be a little simple question.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: No, I get, I get it now. I understand what you're asking.
You know, it's not just chance and randomness. I'm arguing that the laws of nature have built into them the opportunity for complex adaptive systems to arise. You put energy into the system and it counters entropy and you get complexity just by pouring energy into the system. Something like that. So we live in that kind of universe where that can happen naturally, by itself, without the invocation of a, of a deity or a higher mind. And we do this all the time. You know, what's the, how do you explain complex crystals, you know, these beautiful three dimensional crystals with the sharp edges? Well, no one thinks, well, the intelligent designer goes in there and tweaks every crystal atom. We know this happens by a purely natural or beehives or complex systems, but no one thinks the deity or the mind is pushing each bee to do its thing. It's all programmed.
[00:10:01] Speaker C: Programmed right from somewhere.
[00:10:04] Speaker D: Yeah. Those are called self organizational scenarios in origin of life research. And they've been, they're very effective at explaining what does not need to be explained in life. They explain highly redundant order.
And these are non equilibrium.
It's based on something called non equilibrium thermodynamics. Prigozhin was the great founder of this and what he found is if you pushed energy through a system Contrary to the argument of a lot of creationists, you could get order for free, you could get order arising. But it was a highly symmetric form of order with a high degree of redundancy. From an information standpoint, it's the same thing happening over and over again. You get vortices or spiral wave currents or, you know, if you put a great example is drain your bathtub, you know, gravitational energy plus coriolis forces will create a nicely ordered vortex. But that's not the kind of order we see in life. What we see in life is a code. We see. It's, it's, It's a specified arrangement of characters that are highly complex to perform an overall function, and that is not produced by simply pumping order through a system. I used to have a visual aid. I used to demonstrate this with my students. I was two Coke bottles that had been conjoined with a little plastic fitting and I had a blue food coloring in the inside in water with some sparkles. And if I made a motion with my hand, I could get a vortex to form. And you get a nicely ordered system by putting energy through. But those sparkles didn't arrange themselves to make any messages. You just had. You had, at the micro level, disorder, at the macro level, order. But you didn't have specified complexity or information. And so those are real processes. I agree with Michael, but they don't explain the origin of life or the origin of the information needed to produce it.
[00:11:53] Speaker C: You guys are so scientific, which is great, but let me, Let me.
[00:11:57] Speaker D: You want to go back to the moral?
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Not necessarily truth and beauty.
[00:12:01] Speaker C: No, well, of course I do, but forget that. But I do want to keep it. I, and I appreciate that we keep going back to these things. And I love the difference between you two, but let me maybe rephrase it. Human beings have potential. There is a difference between. See, whenever we start talking about chimps and we start talking about bees and we start talking about systems, that's all great and it's all relevant. But there's a big difference between human beings and everybody else, everything else. And that is that we have. We seem to have infinite potential, infinite potential to understand the universe we live in. And that is what we're doing here. And as you, as you point out in your book, we seem to be getting closer and closer to this idea that maybe there is a code. And what does that mean? Because we work in code now. We're creating computers.
[00:12:49] Speaker D: There definitely is a code.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: There is a code with DNA. But also we're creating computers in our Likeness, It's a very interesting thing. So we have this. If you extrapolate our. Our potential is. It seems to be limitless. We probably. My child was 16 months old. My kid. There's a chance could live to 150 thanks to, you know, regenerative science and who knows, right?
[00:13:16] Speaker A: We don't know what happens after you get to 130.
[00:13:17] Speaker C: We don't. I don't want to live that long, by the way.
[00:13:19] Speaker D: But do you know this book, the Outside Edge Michaels?
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Well, it's actually about 115 to 120. You know, there's debatable sources, birth certificates.
[00:13:27] Speaker D: Yeah, that's where we rely on magazines.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: We're all over the line.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: That's what I love about Michael magazine.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: You know, just. You're gonna upload your. Your connectome into the cloud. This is all nonsense. It's not gonna happen. And we have no idea what happens if you lived 150. What other things? I mean, almost no one got Alzheimer's 500 years ago because no one lived long enough to. Alzheimer's. Right. So it'd be something like that. But that's slightly after. But okay, so, so but here's another hard problem. How does the mind interact with the physical stuff? Okay, it's a problem for all philosophers. How does, you know, the mind here, my mind interact with the physical world. The same problem, it seems to me, theists have. So presumably, let's just say the mind or God or whoever reaches in to stir the particles to create pushed RNA into DNA or the eye or. Or whatever the system is. That's complex. How does the mind do that? And how can I tell that that's what it's doing? That's my question.
[00:14:21] Speaker D: I would say that's a problem for all philosophers or all philosophies of science. Materialism, theism, pantheism, nobody knows. It's called the mind body problem.
[00:14:32] Speaker C: So how does the mind. You mean the signals?
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah. No, I just have a thought between.
[00:14:37] Speaker D: Consciousness and the material substrate. It's not understood.
[00:14:41] Speaker C: I don't know, but it certainly is felt. So I can observe myself. I can step outside myself. You can see Buddhist monks, you know, the pictures of the Buddhist monk who lit himself on fire and didn't even groan. He just. All they heard was the air expel from his lungs because he had separated from his body. So there's. The mind can do things that. That are these contemplative athletes in the Himalayas, these rinpoches. Go talk to them. Whatever they're doing, they seem to Be onto something.
[00:15:09] Speaker D: I'm waiting for Michael's skeptical. Skeptical detail.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Those are stories.
[00:15:15] Speaker C: They might be stories, but I've seen. But the guy did light himself on fire.
My question. Let's go back to the potential.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: We can't interact with physical stuff is no question about it. We do it all the time.
[00:15:28] Speaker D: Because we don't know how it's done doesn't mean we can't infer that it was done when we see the distinctive effects of mind in the physical world.
[00:15:34] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:15:35] Speaker D: And that's the basis of the design, belief.
[00:15:37] Speaker C: Didn't you say belief is the things that you. That what's real is the things that you believe. Belief is real.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Well, I don't want to believe in things that have to be believed in. They should just be out there on their own whether I'm around or not. But. But again, my question for Stephen. So, you know, to what extent does the mind control, you know, everything.
Most things, just some things, just certain points, you know. In other words, the fall of every sparrow is somehow part of the mind action with the world, God or whoever. Or is it just, you know, the Cambrian explosion, DNA, the eye, whatever the steps.
[00:16:15] Speaker D: These get into questions of what's called a theology of nature. And there's been a typical theology of nature among, say, for lack of a better word, Judeo Christian theists since the period of the scientific revolution. And that is that they have typically affirmed there are two powers of God. One is what they call the potentia ordinata. This was in Newton's work. He wrote this wonderful epilogue to the Principia called the General Scholium. And he affirmed that God holds the universe together in an ongoing way. And that's the basis for what we call the laws of nature, that the regularities that we observe in nature, for which we have no. At the fundamental physical level, as we've been saying, we don't have a material explanation, a materialistic explanation for gravity or the other fundamental forces of physics. These are things that always happen at some level. We know not why. And Newton's view was those fundamental laws of nature which we describe mathematically. They have beautiful mathematical precision and harmony. They are a mode of divine action. That's God's way of holding the universe together. So God is active in that constant, ongoing way. But God also acts in a discrete way at particular points in time. And the medieval theologians used to call that the potentia or absoluta, that he acts discreetly and constantly. And these get into questions of the theology of nature. So if You're a theist, like I am. You're interested in those, in fleshing out your worldview in more detail. And you'd get into that if you're a romantic.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: So just by way of example, you know, the moment of conception where the sperm is allowed into the egg and all the other gazillion sperms are going, oh, damn, I thought it was going to be me. I thought she'd pick me. Right, right. And it's pretty miraculous. I mean, the whole story of then how it unfolds in embryology. You know, using the word miraculous is not unreasonable. Right. It's amazing. But does anybody actually think, you know, the mine or God is in there tweaking every little chemical reaction? No, I don't think so. Right. This is all just part of the natural world by the laws of nature, probably, but.
[00:18:26] Speaker D: But maybe, who knows? You know, I don't. I don't have that. I don't have the answer to all such questions that good skeptics like Michael can offer. Doesn't mean that there aren't good grounds for affirming the things that I do affirm.
[00:18:37] Speaker C: Well, they're mysteries like Goethe read, read, you know, Newton's book on light, on the properties of light, which is something like 1400 pages long. And he said, I read this whole thing. He's talking about light for 1400 pages. And I learned nothing about beauty and said nothing about beauty. It's got funny.
[00:18:53] Speaker D: He has this romantic passage in the optics where he says, have you read it? Have you read it? Well, yeah, I had to study this stuff. How is it that light has properties that match the attributes, the designed parameters of the eye?
There's a principle of correspondence between the way the eye works and the exact chromatic properties of light. He saw in that. A principle of correspondence that. That suggested design. And Michael's gonna come back and say, well, Darwinian evolution explains the origin of the eye. Damn you.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: Damn you, Michael.
[00:19:30] Speaker D: I say, bring it.
[00:19:31] Speaker C: I mean that Michael's always pissing on my parade. I'm all romanced by your argument, and he keeps interrupting.
[00:19:36] Speaker D: We can't explain the origin of proteins, let alone the sophisticated visual apparatus like the vertebrate eye on Darwinian principles. I gave Darwin shivers. It still gives evolutionary biologists shivers.
[00:19:50] Speaker C: Would it be fair to say that you're. You're really trying to find measurable answers and proving the idea that there is a mind behind all this? And you're always going to be the guy who says, I don't know?
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Well, I eschew the word.
[00:20:05] Speaker D: I'll let Michael answer, but just to clarify my position, I eschew the word proof because I'm using a method of reasoning that is provisional. As Michael it's on the Bayesian scale, either Bayesian or inference to the best explanation, which is a mode of reasoning that can dovetail with Bayesianism as a kind of probabilistic mode of reasoning.
But I think good philosophy not only debunks what's incorrect, it moves towards affirming our best understanding of reality. We want to bring things together in a synthetic vision of the whole that makes sense of the world. Bacon once said, there be those discoursing wits who count it a bondage to fix a belief. And he thought those were bad people. It's better to come to conclusions if we can, based on the evidence, rather than being perpetually skeptical. But I do. I also have a very skeptical turn. I'm skeptical about some of the same things. Michael's skeptical about spoon benders and multiverses. But I also want to encourage him to apply a little more skepticism to things like Neo Darwinism, which leading evolutionary biologists are now saying, hey, it's not cutting it. We need a new theory.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Yeah, Michael, I don't think. No, I don't think we need a new theory. I think. I think the tweaking of Neo Darwinism will continue. But just as a. On a broader point, you know, I. Again, back to where we started, I don't know. And I don't want to be like Lord Kelvin in 1890, whatever that was. He said, well, we're pretty much done now with physics. And then Einstein comes along, is like, oh, okay, we're not done. And, you know, could be 500 years from now if we get chronically frozen and are brought back and we have another podcast episode going, oh, that turned. That's what dark matter was. Or that's the explanation for consciousness or whatever. I just don't know that's entirely possible, given what we know about the history of science. You go back 500 years. I wouldn't have believed. I wouldn't even know one of the stuff we know now. Right. So I don't know is a reasonable position to be in. Do you know about the mysterious philosophers, Mysterious mysteries? These are the position that we. What we know is very much dependent on the size of our brains, the structure of our brains and so on. And that had we had a brain, you know, twice the size or ten times the size, we would be able to solve different kinds of problems.
But also Conceptually there's some problems that can't be resolved ultimately like free will and determinism. Because what do you mean by these words or the existence of God? There's a few of those that the mysterian philosophy, consciousness is one. They just say that it's not solvable, it's not a soluble.
[00:22:34] Speaker C: But Michael, we do know that you're interested in the questions and that is, that is a direction. And so I keep saying.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: Well, but this is their point is that we're smart enough to ask the question and conceive of the problem.
I'm not sure I'm a mysterious. I'm just saying that there are good thinkers that think like this.
[00:22:54] Speaker C: Right, but. But you are somebody. I love that you're a skeptic. But you are still interested in these questions, which means you're not interested. Well, whether you're not. But that means you're trying to get closer to a point, the truth, so that we all hear, we're all, all here trying to get closer to the truth. So I say to you that you may not know and there may be plenty of facts and plenty of, you know, and, and, and as the evidence comes along, but it does seem that human beings are being nudged in a direction. And if we are being nudged in a direction thanks to all these discoveries or pulled or I don't know, I don't know either. Nudged together, Nudged in a direction.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: Do you mean toward complexity? Toward love?
[00:23:38] Speaker C: I mean, or something like this. I don't, I don't put words in my mouth, but I, I think toward. I like, I like the idea of truth. I like a higher truth, the highest truth. There, there, there, there seems to be at the, at the, at the height of. We all have this hierarchy of values. There, there does. The most logical explanation to me seems to be that there is and objective truth. There are plural truths. I look at a painting and I say, that's a beautiful painting. The Sistine Chapel brings me to my knees. But a chemist comes along and says it's actually not yellow. Your eyes are playing a trick to you. Your visual apparatus is very blah, blah, blah. And that's another truth. And then somebody else says, well, there's actually a bunch of atoms there and it's, it's quark, so it's actually not even matter. I know that something that's closer to God than watching a baboon throw a. At me from the zoo. You know, there's something about that baby that's just astonishing, awe inspiring me and brings me to my knees. I want to live in that world.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: You can have.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: I do have both, but I'm saying that, that human beings have potential. And we, we were given potential. It seems imagination and this limitless curiosity to do something. We are moving in some direction. Do you agree?
[00:24:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I do. Yeah.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: I win. Steve and I win. We, we, we. We've changed the skeptic.
You gotta change your.
[00:25:05] Speaker D: He made an affirmation. But in Michael's defense, I think it is perfectly appropriate to say, I don't know about a whole bunch of questions.
[00:25:12] Speaker C: I love him. That's what I love them for.
[00:25:14] Speaker D: And the null hypothesis is a legitimate hypothesis in science. Sometimes we know what's false, but we don't yet have a better explanation. But I want to get back to your point about nudging, because this was really the point of my book. We've got these major discoveries about biological, physical, cosmological origins and they're not at all what 20th century scientific materialists expected. None of them thought that the universe was going to have a beginning. Einstein twisted himself into knots trying to get his cosmological constant to have exactly the right value so that he could portray gravity, the outward push of the cosmological constant and the inward pull of gravity to get him exactly finely tuned so he could portray the universe as a static entity. And then, lo and behold, the heavens talked back. And the evidence of the red shift and multiple other lines of evidence said no, the universe had a beginning. You look at an animation today of the expanding universe with the now 2 trillion galaxies moving outward in that vast, roughly spherical expansion of the universe. And then you wind that animation backwards.
What it looks like for all the world is everything converging to point. And in fact, physically speaking, that's what is going on. You can't back extrapolate any further than that creation event. And now you add to that.
[00:26:37] Speaker C: What is that theory?
[00:26:38] Speaker D: Well, this is the Big Bang theory, okay? And it's based on multiple lines of empirical evidence, astronomical observations. But it's also, there are two lines of effectively proof, and I use that very cautiously, but the proofs that were offered by Hawking, Penrose and George Ellis of a singular beginning to the universe where matter, space, time and energy begin at a point.
And then you have a proof based on special relativity, which was not based on, which isn't based on general relativity and therefore not subject to some loopholes associated with that. So you have these multiple lines of evidence pointing to a beginning. Now, are there ways to circumvent that with creative Theorizing. Yes, there are, but my point has been those ways of creatively theorizing have their own theistic implications. And in any case, the attempt to circumvent what seems to be the most natural conclusion from the evidence and the considerations from physical theory are getting very, very weird.
It's like the old cycles within cycles when people are trying to avoid the heliocentric universe you have. And so you've got the universe from nothing idea conjoined with quantum cosmology. You've got the cyclic conformal cosmology of Penrose. Then you get the, you know, to get around the multiverse, you've got people or get around the fine tuning, you've got multiverses, you've got people positing panspermia.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Okay, but I'm told they don't do that to get around that, that it's a derivative of the equations.
[00:28:14] Speaker D: You can generate a multiverse that way. But it's. Its popularity I think derives from large part. Leonard Susskind very honestly put it. He said without. Yes, the multiverse is highly counterintuitive. But without the multiverse, he said, we'd be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. And in any case, even if you posit intelligent design. Intelligent design, but in any case, even if you posit a multiverse, it's only plausible if you have universe generating mechanisms. The two that have been proposed are string theory and inflationary cosmology. And both of them require prior unexplained fine tuning to. To generate new universe started back. So the fine tuning issue has not been solved by materialism. But fine tuning in our experience is a product of mind, thus the inference to design.
[00:29:04] Speaker C: Are you a materialist if I call you that? You're a naturalist. What is the difference?
[00:29:08] Speaker A: As opposed to what? Supernaturalism or what's the difference? My. Always my. So he used the word materialism for naturalism. Okay, so let's say that argument not.
[00:29:19] Speaker D: Sway world is naturalists say that the natural world is made of matter and energy.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: So does that, does that crack your mathematics? Probably really exists separate from human mind. Something like that. Okay, but that's a debatable point. But so, but we're back to this. How does the mind do it? So if you invoke the mind to bang the big bang out of what? Nothing. How does, how does a mind create something out of nothing? We're still left with that problem. And maybe nothing is, is the, is the odd thing and it's too unstable. So something has to exist. You know, quantum phone Fluctuation universes are popping in and out all the time and so on. But if you say, well, no, no, the mind is doing that, well, how does the mind do that? This God or whatever, we still left with that problem.
[00:30:06] Speaker C: Well, I think that that's his.
[00:30:10] Speaker D: Yeah. But sure. We don't know how our own minds generate the conversation. I was going to say generating. Right now, not knowing how that's done does not prevent us from inferring that it is being done.
And we can infer that with warrant or with justification when we see features in our observable reality which we know from our experience are only produced by minds. That's the causal adequacy principle I was referring to earlier.
[00:30:37] Speaker C: Yeah. Let me share two stories from a mathematician and from a writer. So Flannery O'Connor, great writer, said, I sit at my typewriter every morning not to write, but in case something happens. So I keep showing up until the story reveals itself to me. It's an act of faith.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:53] Speaker D: Michael and I have both written enough books that we can appreciate that.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: So what do you think he's going to say today?
[00:30:58] Speaker C: And that's what I do. That's how I write. Stand up. You know, it's like, I just. I know the joke is up there in the big template in the sky. And if I just keep showing up every day, it's just a. And sometimes just sitting there and my wife is like, what are you doing? I'm talking to myself and I'm miserable because nothing's coming.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:12] Speaker D: That's great.
[00:31:13] Speaker C: But it's kind of a cool idea of thinking of yourself rather than a mind. Sometimes you think of yourself as a beacon, sort of antenna, a radio. A radio receiver. And a guy who won the Fields Medal in mathematics. He was a Russian guy. He refused the med. Refused the award. And they found him in his. A year later in his aunt's shed in Siberia. And he was working on another theorem. And the theorem is some crazy thing. It was like 357 pages long, the one he won the Fields Medal for. And he said, well, you guys are trying to give the. The award to the. To the radio. You're giving the award to the receiver. You're not giving the award to the. The template in the sky. The equation already existed up there.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:53] Speaker C: So give that. Give the award to that rather than to the. The.
[00:31:56] Speaker A: The person was able to receive it, like Mich.
Releasing the image of David.
[00:32:02] Speaker C: And I love that.
[00:32:03] Speaker D: Right.
[00:32:03] Speaker C: He said, it's in there already. I got to get all this out of the way. It's a beautiful way of looking at art and a human being.
[00:32:07] Speaker D: Amadeus movie about Mozart. Yeah. Can I say something about the math? Because I'm trying to romance.
[00:32:14] Speaker C: I'm trying to get Michael to come over.
[00:32:16] Speaker D: I was at a conference last fall and one of the.
There were two leading mathematicians there, one from Oxford, John Lennox, whose name I can chair in this context, who told me that the other mathematician there was two league tables above him in the hierarchy of great mathematicians. One of the top three guys in the world, maybe.
[00:32:38] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:32:38] Speaker D: And anyway, this other mathematician, whose name I'm not going to reveal yet, but can in a year or so when he comes out with a book that we're going to be publishing, he took me aside and said, you know, I love your new book, Return of the God Hypothesis. He said, my wife's an agnostic, but after reading it she's going wobbly. He said, wow. But he said, I have a beef with you. He said, you got three way, you know, the three discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. He says, there's one more, it's math. And I had just read in a long essay that he had written and I kind of knew where he was going with this, but he starts to explain. He says, all mathematicians regard are basically mathematical. Platonists, they believe mathematical structures, equations, mathematical objects, as the mathematicians call them, circles, geometric forms have an objective reality. A circle has all the same properties to every geometer, irrespective of their preference.
[00:33:34] Speaker C: We're not their language, their location on.
[00:33:37] Speaker D: The earth, the quadratic equation or differential equations, they have certain properties and they are stable and they are mind independent and yet they are independent of our perceptions. But they are conceptual, they are not physical, they are not material. So they're objective, they're conceptual, but they do not. But mathematicians believe they are discovered, not invented, because they have a reality independent of ours. Well, if they're.
[00:34:05] Speaker C: That's one of the great ideas of philosophy, Pythagorean, A squared plus B squared equals C squared, that reality exists whether you're here or not. Whether the exactly firmament is here, it doesn't matter. That's a reality.
[00:34:17] Speaker D: So if they're conceptual, meaning mental, and they're independent of our perceptions, in whose mind do they exist? And this mathematician now writing a book on this with our colleague David Berlinsky, says this seems to point towards an immaterial mind, towards theism. And so you missed, you missed.
[00:34:42] Speaker C: That's the number three mathematician in the world.
[00:34:45] Speaker D: He said, there was it should be four. Four things that revealed.
[00:34:49] Speaker C: That's so cool though. What an endorsement.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: Let's see what numbers one and two think of that. But again, how does science work? It's very much a collective social enterprise of trying to convince your colleagues that you've got something worth listening to and that you have evidence for it. If you don't, well, that's just the way it goes. I mean, I get letters all the time from people that, you know, they have an alternative theory of physics too. There's hundreds of them, but most of them.
[00:35:11] Speaker D: This isn't an alternative theory of math. This is, this is a. Oh, I understand.
[00:35:14] Speaker A: No, no, it's a question of philosophy of mathematics.
[00:35:16] Speaker D: And it happens that most mathematicians are mathematical Platonists. They recognize this objectivity and immateriality of mathematical objects. And that raises a question. If something's conceptual, in which mind does it reside? If it doesn't reside in ours, in.
[00:35:30] Speaker C: The template in the sky, and that would be God.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Well, okay, so that would be.
Take some basic laws of nature, like you know, the. When a star gets to a certain temperature, it fuses hydrogen into helium, and you can describe this with math. All right, but where is that description? I mean, where's the math existing? I mean, it's not in the star, it's where. I mean, it's in somebody's mind. Describe it. But it's. The process is actually happening. It's out there.
[00:35:58] Speaker C: It's separate from us, isn't it?
[00:35:59] Speaker A: But, but we, but we use words to describe it or we have equations to describe it. Where are those?
This is a hard problem.
[00:36:07] Speaker D: It's a great question. And it's one of the reasons that I think quantum cosmology, the alternative to a straight up Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, has its own theistic implications. Quantum cosmology does, because the explanans, the thing doing the explaining in quantum cosmology is a mathematical function called a universal wave function and an apparatus that stands behind that called the Wheeler DeWitt equation. In super space, there's this whole mathematical apparatus that pre exists the universe, the physical universe. And the physical universe is explained as a consequence of the mathematics that pre exists the universe. Now the people, the guys at the forefront of this, not the popularizers, but people like Vilenkin have said, wait a minute, doesn't that imply. Then aren't we then saying maybe we don't want to be saying this, maybe inadvertently we're saying this, but doesn't that imply that there's A mind behind the universe. And Hawking himself tumbled to this uncomfortable realization. He said, what is it that puts fire in the equations, that gives them a universe to describe? And what he's saying, he's building off of what Michael just said is that math by itself has no. It's causally inert.
It's just there conceptual. It's not a physical thing that causes other physical things to happen.
[00:37:25] Speaker C: Yes, it is though you. There are, there are theoretical theorems that later on. So, so somebody writes a theory, somebody dedicates his life to a theorem, they die at 85, 100 years later, somebody pulls that off the shelf.
[00:37:41] Speaker D: Well, that.
[00:37:42] Speaker C: To use to measure.
[00:37:44] Speaker D: That is crazy. This mathematician that I was talking about.
[00:37:47] Speaker C: I mean, that's incredible.
[00:37:48] Speaker D: This is what his essay was about. Is this, this unreal. The unreasonable applicability of mathematics to the physical world. Quantum mechanics was developed.
Sorry, the mathematics of complex variables was developed long before it had any application on the basis of pure deductions, mathematical deductions from first principles. And then 100 years later or so turns out to be absolutely critical to doing quantum mechanics. There are many, many examples of this in the history of physics. What is it that provides. Why does the. John Polkinghorne, the great Cambridge physicists, used to say, why does the reason within the mathematics that we develop on the basis of our deductive reasoning match and describe precisely the reason that is built into the universe, the design of the universe? He says the best explanation for that is again theism. It provides a principle of correspondence that the same God who made the design, the rationality, the orderly patterns we see in nature made our minds in such a way to discern the mathematical structure that is inherent in those systems. And that's why we can do science. And actually that principle of correspondence was one of the key things that inspired the scientific revolution. It was called the principle of intelligibility. And all the great theists who were the early founders of modern science, Boyle, Kepler, Newton, believed that nature was intelligible and could be understood by the human mind because the design in nature issued from the same intelligence, namely God who made our minds inhaling in his likeness so that we could understand nature.
[00:39:22] Speaker C: It's a hell of an argument.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: I mean, although I should point out some of this since I mentioned Michael skepticism. Well, you mentioned Mag's take Mark before.
You know, he deals with the same problems and does not come to the theistic conclusion at all.
[00:39:34] Speaker C: Well, he's always got, he's always got to bring this spoilsport into the party.
[00:39:38] Speaker D: Well, what Tegmark does is, says that every mathematical structure that's logically possible must exist in some possible world.
And.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Yeah, but my point was this. I'm not sure.
[00:39:53] Speaker D: Michael and I are both skeptical about that.
[00:39:54] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:39:55] Speaker D: That does nothing to undermine the argument.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: But the point is that it's not necessarily the right induction to the best explanation theism. I mean, you know, it could be that we're just going to hit an epistemological wall where we just can't know. Like what was there before the Big Bang, what was there before time began. Again, Hawking's analogy. What's north of the North Pole? You know what, how does something come for nothing? Well, what do you mean by nothing? Well, not only just no matter, space, time, energy, but no logic, no ideas, no gods, nothing.
[00:40:27] Speaker D: No eternity, laws of physics, nothing. Krause. Sorry, you're cheating.
[00:40:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, nothing. I mean, you wouldn't even have no thing. I mean, the word itself, no thing, implies there's a thing that doesn't exist. True. Nothing wouldn't even be that. You know, there's, there's no eternity because there's no time. At some point, I don't even know what I'm talking about.
[00:40:48] Speaker D: Right.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: You know, these words are just like. Well, yeah, right.
[00:40:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I think for what it's worth, you. You make a hell of a. An argument to me. I've been romanced.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Damn. I was going to get you some flowers, Michael, take you out to dinner.
[00:41:06] Speaker C: He still holds firm. I know, I'm a soft touch. I'm a soft touch.
[00:41:10] Speaker D: It's always a great iron sharpening iron conversation with Michael.
[00:41:13] Speaker C: You guys are great. Yeah.
[00:41:15] Speaker D: I always feel, first of all, I always enjoy the interactions with him, but I always feel like anybody who has interest in these deep questions, irrespective of what side of the argument they're on, is to me a friend and a colleague, a kindred spirit. Because there's a lot of people that just go through life, you know, just don't want to think about it.
[00:41:35] Speaker C: They're not interested in the questions.
[00:41:37] Speaker D: That's, that's to me, just not the unexamined. Life is not worth living, said Socrates. I kind of agree with him.
[00:41:45] Speaker C: I'm right with him.
[00:41:46] Speaker A: Well, and if you're right, I guess I'll find out.
[00:41:48] Speaker C: Yeah, he will.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: And I'm kind of hoping, you know, that God will go, hey, Elise, Shermer gave it a shot. We'll let him in.
[00:41:54] Speaker C: Well, yeah, Michael, I mean, what I love about you is that you're always interested in the truth and you, you're tireless in, in asking the right questions and pushing back and you live a moral life. I mean, you know, just being a moral objectivist is, is to me whether, you know, we all slip up here and there, but for the most part there is scaffolding.
[00:42:13] Speaker D: He puts out, he puts out a fine magazine too.
[00:42:16] Speaker C: Skeptic is a great, a lot of.
[00:42:17] Speaker D: The stuff that he's skeptical about, I'm skeptical. Skeptic is a great ID colleagues are as well.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:42:22] Speaker C: Well, your magazine is very important, especially now when everybody's coming up with their own truth.
[00:42:26] Speaker D: My final question, crisis in our culture is crisis of authority.
[00:42:30] Speaker C: Well, there's. Nobody can even agree on where people.
[00:42:32] Speaker D: Are people skeptical about people overstating certainty about science. But then that means that then people just are throwing babies out with bathwater and we got to find a happy medium here where we learn to evaluate scientific claims and keep the debate open. But also we have to respect people that have done the hard work to come to some conclusions that are necessary for us to live our lives.
[00:42:54] Speaker C: Objective truth. Are you religious at all?
[00:42:57] Speaker D: I am personally religious. I'm a Christian, like sometimes say denominationally confused Christian, but I'm also a church.
[00:43:06] Speaker C: Why Christianity?
[00:43:07] Speaker D: I believe that there is evidence in support of the reliability of the New Testament. And I think there's evidence actually of a design to the Bible that's quite compelling that makes it self authenticating as an unusual source of truth. And I'm very compelled by the person of Jesus Christ. I think he's. Can I add for reasons that you, you stated.
[00:43:29] Speaker A: I want to ask my question that I ask everybody on this, on this particular question. Why don't Jews believe this? They believe in the same God, the same book, at least the Old Testament. They know all the arguments for the resurrection of Jesus, the empty tomb and Mary and the apparitions, you know, the whole thing, the eyewitnesses and so on, they don't accept it. Why is that? You can't say, well, if they understood the arguments, they'd accept the.
[00:43:51] Speaker C: My answer, My answer would be one of the great strengths to the, of the Jews is their, their endless capacity for debate. And the idea of you could show that about this is a story about you could show a, a room full of rabbis, a miracle and all of them would be like, but how can we be sure of that? And how do we know I'm not being tricked? And I think that part of progress is always saying, well I'm not really going to rely on, on what I've been told. I'm going to find out for myself.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: Well, but you know, I asked Ben Shapiro, I asked Ben Shapiro this on his show. He's Jewish. And he goes, well, because the Old Testament did not predict that that's who would come, that the carpenter from Nazareth, that it would be a warrior, not a peacemaker. And so, you know, he had his arguments based on Old Testament. Okay, so why does it, if, if he listened to your arguments, would he become a Christian?
[00:44:41] Speaker D: I, I don't, I think well beyond the scope of this discussion to get into the case for Christianity one way or another. But I would say your retort, your question is a kind of ad hominem, not in the sense it's an insult, but it's really trying to base the truth based on what one person or another does or doesn't believe. And I think to really evaluate the question, you have to look at the evidence itself. I will say there is an interesting contemporary phenomenon which is that there are more and more ethnically Jewish people who are adopting Christianity by belief. Now I have very close Orthodox Jewish friends, very close conservadox Jewish friends, very close secular Jewish friends. My friend Berlinsky invites people of all those persuasions and people gentile academics. We do a conference most years in Europe. Last year we had, I think, 13 Jewish scientists and scholars. Five of them were Christian by belief, underscoring the old maxim, you know, two Jews, three opinions, you know. So I don't think it's as simple as all Jews reject or all Jews except. And in any case, he was a rabbi.
[00:45:48] Speaker C: He was a rabbi.
[00:45:49] Speaker D: Yeah. I don't think you can tell. You can't tell the truth about any proposition by simply counting heads about who does or doesn't believe it. You got to get into the evidence and you got to apply the Bayesian type analysis.
[00:46:00] Speaker C: Is there a book or is there an argument that sways you? Because you said that there was about the New Testament. There was.
[00:46:08] Speaker D: My story is that for all these scientific arguments that I've been making, the thing that deeply persuaded me, first of theism and eventually of Christianity, were more philosophical types of arguments or perceptions. I had an existential Crisis as a 14 year old. It's a little embarrassing, but I had questions that I later learned the French existentialist philosophers were asking and I didn't know where they were coming from. I just thought it meant something was wrong with me. And so I had a period in my early adolescence where I was afraid I Was going insane because I was asking questions like, what's it going to matter in 100 years? I couldn't imagine anything that I did in my daily routine that would have any lasting value. I read a book about baseball and all my heroes and the history of baseball. And when they got to 40 years old, they had their records. And then what was the point? Eventually there's just going to be some numbers on a piece of paper and. And I kept thinking, well, but what's the point of anything I might accomplish? And later, in college, I was taking a course on existentialism and came across this passage in Sartre where he says, without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. Well, that's just axiomatic. And so that sense that all of us have, that when we die, we rot, and then what did it all mean? I think was just a haunting thing for me as a teenager. And then I started thinking about time, and I couldn't make sense of that.
And so I was a mess. And I started reading the big fat Catholic family Bible. We were nominally Catholic, hardly ever went to church. And as I started reading it, first of all, I was compelled by the figure of Jesus Christ for the sort of reasons you were describing it. It's just an extraordinary person.
But then there were passages in the. In the Bible that spoke to these deeper philosophical questions that I had. I had this intuitive sense that there must be something that didn't change. We live in this world. The ephemeral nature of our sense perceptions. I hold up this water bottle, I drop it to the table. I can remember now that event from three seconds ago, but it's permanently gone. And where did it go? I had this sense there must be something that doesn't change, or else all this constant flux of the empirical sense perceptions of the world floating by me is ultimately meaningless. There's got to be some grounding. And I can't prove that even now speaking, but it was this deep intuitive sense I had. And then I came across passages in the Bible like Yahweh revealing himself to Moses at the burning bush and revealing that his name was the I am that I am. Or in the New Testament, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And I thought, this is worth investigating. Because if these claims are true, Some of these haunting philosophical questions that I am, I didn't really know they were philosophical questions until I got to college. I had a professor when I was taking the course in existentialism. I said, oh, I wasn't insane. I said, I was just a philosopher. And the Prof. Says, yeah, but there's a fine line between philosophy and insanity.
[00:49:15] Speaker C: Damn right there.
[00:49:16] Speaker D: Be careful. Anyways, sorry to go on about the stuff, but for me it was a long, I didn't have a Damascus Road conversion. It was a long period of more intellectual. Yeah, but you know, I found there are really intellectually satisfying answers in that Judeo Christian tradition. And you know, and I, you know, I have conversations with people across all these worldview divides and religious divides. And I just think it's, it's really a good thing for our culture to be refocusing on this because we've gotten distracted by other themes and other concerns. And I think that's mentioned baseball.
[00:49:53] Speaker A: I should point out Steve Gould, like used to say that DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak was totally transcendent. Should never have happened. It was miraculous.
[00:50:03] Speaker D: Would have convinced him.
[00:50:05] Speaker C: Gentlemen, this has been awesome.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: All right.
[00:50:07] Speaker D: To both of you. I really enjoy, enjoyed it.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:50:10] Speaker C: Yeah. And I'm glad I was able to follow it. I just consider that, that an accomplishment.
[00:50:14] Speaker D: You did a great job leading it. You know, a couple guys like us is like, I'm in high cotton.
[00:50:19] Speaker C: I'm in high cotton here.
[00:50:21] Speaker A: All right, very good. All righty. Yeah, that was great.
[00:50:24] Speaker D: Awesome.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: Really fun.
[00:50:25] Speaker C: Come back anytime and we'll do a round two. Round three. I want to get into this more.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer with their host, Brian Callan discussing a variety of topics related to intelligent design, evolution, information, mind and God. All with a view to answering the question posed by can science find God?
We're grateful to the producers of the Brian Callan show for permission to share this exchange on ID the Future. If you missed the first half of the conversation, look out for it on a separate episode. Check out more from Brian callan at his YouTube channel, Ryan Callan Comedy. That's Ryan Callan Comedy for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this.
[00:51:17] Speaker A: Program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded.
[00:51:21] Speaker D: By its center for Science and Culture.
