[00:00:06] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: And intelligent design if you noticed a copy of Charles Darwin's famous 19th century volume on the Origin of Species in someone's house, what would you think? Perhaps they're committed materialists. Perhaps they simply admire Darwin's work as a naturalist.
Or perhaps they keep it around as a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific hubris.
Either way, you'd want to consider whether their life experiences match their scientific worldview.
Hey everyone. Welcome to Idea the Future, the podcast that explores the growing case for intelligent design in nature and the debate over evolution. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I want to explore the topic of scientific materialism and whether it's a good explanation for the things we see around us in nature.
And I want to do that by looking at a remarkable family in the Marvel universe, the Fantastic Four.
I'm going to share with you an article I wrote recently about a Darwinian curveball in the new Marvel movie Fantastic Four First Steps and whether the nod to a Darwinian view of life matches the experiences of Mr. Fantastic and the gang.
Then I'm going to share with you A clip of Dr. Stephen Meyer discussing one reason why the science of 19th century atheism has been eclipsed.
Does your scientific worldview align with how you actually experience life?
It's probably not a question you ask, or get asked very much, but it's a useful one to ponder of ourselves and others.
Put another way, does the scientific story of life you believe in fit the story of the life you're living?
It's a question that was on my mind when I went to see the new Marvel movie Fantastic Four Steps. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, loved the retro visuals and the Pro family message. But something popped up in one of the bonus credit scenes that made me stop and think, Are the Fantastic Four scientific materialists?
Let me read my article and then I'll share that clip from Dr. Meyer as as he discusses just one of the reasons why scientific materialism is being eclipsed by the evidence for intelligent design.
Marvel's Fantastic Four Pro Family but with a Darwinian Curveball Fantastic Four First Steps just might be Marvel's most Pro family movie yet. The bond between Reed and Susan Richards is rock solid, and the joy they share as they prepare to have their first child is is heartwarming. Along with Susan's younger brother Johnny Storm, and Reed's best friend Ben Grimm, the four make a tight knit family unit, going to great lengths to protect baby Franklin and their fellow citizens of Earth from existential threats the movie's core message is heard in Susan's words as she describes why the four work so well together.
It's about fighting for something bigger than yourself, she says.
Whatever life throws at us, we'll face it together as a family.
But just as the credits roll and we're ready to declare the movie a real winner, along comes a curveball in the first bonus credits scene that may leave us scratching our heads. It's now four years later, and sue is reading the Hungry Caterpillar to Franklin in their living room when he asks for more. Mom calls to Herbie, the family's helpful robotic assistant, to fetch another book to read.
We see Herbie hold up an old copy of Charles Darwin's famous 19th century volume on the Origin of Species.
Mom says that's not the book she's looking for, but comments that they love reading that one, too.
Having found the story she had in mind, a fly went by. Sue returns to the living room, and in typical Marvel fashion, the scene concludes with a little foreshadowing to set up the next installment.
Wait a second, though Origin of Species for story time, at first it may seem like a natural fit. Mr. Fantastic, of course, is a polymath, highly skilled in physics, biology, and chemistry, as well as mathematics and engineering. He specializes in harnessing science and technology to help the Four solve difficult problems. He's a confident scientist, but he's also curious and humble, and at times ready to admit to forces beyond his understanding.
Reid would certainly have respect for Darwin's accomplishments as a scientist, and that's probably good enough reason to keep a copy of Darwin's book around the house.
But if any superhero team would be skeptical of a purely Darwinian view of life, it would be the Fantastic Four.
Let's look at why their experiences don't match the expectations of Darwinian materialism.
Throughout the movie, the Four demonstrate countless examples of sacrificial love and commitment to a higher purpose.
Reed and Susan deny themselves regularly for the greater good.
Johnny Storm is often the first to leap into the path of danger, even willing to die for others if necessary. And Ben? Well, he's about as selfless as they come.
But in a world where life is the result of chance processes like unguided natural selection and random mutations, things like love and purpose are merely social constructs, irrelevant to the struggle for life.
Life boils down to survival and power, qualities that are actually espoused by the Four's formidable foe, Galactus.
No purpose means no value, and no value means no moral order.
But the Fantastic Four act like human. Lives and relationships have inherent worth, not just utilitarian function.
Their willingness to suffer and even die for one another and for strangers only makes sense in a universe where life and love have meaning beyond survival.
The lives of this remarkable family also revolve around a universe teeming with intelligent design.
The four contend with their fair share of intelligent beings. From the Silver Surfer, a humanoid alien from the planet Zenn La, to the mighty Galactus who devours whole planets in his quest to survive.
And alternate dimensions, portals and even multiple universes suggest a cosmos that is rich in order.
Yet a materialistic worldview contends that the universe is self contained and closed to outside influence. This would require that there's no such thing as a supernatural being, force or cause that influences the universe.
So what caused all life in the Marvel Universe to exist?
Well, our findings on planet Earth may yield an important clue here. Darwin's selection mutation mechanism has been carefully tested in the last century and found wanting.
It doesn't have the creative power or the time to produce the information necessary to power the origin and development of life.
And along with our discovery that information runs the show in biology, we've also found, based on our uniform and repeated experience, that the only known cause of information is is intelligence.
The conclusion? A designing intelligence played a role in the history of life on Earth. Could it be the same elsewhere?
Given his commitment to the quest for scientific truth, Mr. Fantastic would certainly be willing to entertain the notion.
After all they've witnessed in their many adventures, it seems unlikely that the Fantastic Four would have a strong commitment to scientific materialism.
Perhaps they keep Darwin's book around as a cautionary tale. A way to teach their children that scientific hubris can blind us to the wonder and order of the universe with dangerous and far reaching consequences.
If so, maybe Darwin's Origin of Species does belong on the shelf next to the hungry caterpillar after all.
Alright, there you have it. Now, scientific materialism still has a pretty strong hold on our culture today, as well as the atheism that it fuels.
Where did this materialistic view of science come from? Well, it goes back to Charles Darwin's famous mid-19th century book and the theory that it that all life forms originate from a common ancestor and evolved gradually through an unguided evolutionary process that did not have us in mind.
Richard Dawkins wrote that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. And over the last century and a half, a completely materialistic view of life and the universe has been built up around Darwin's Evolutionary proposal.
Let's quickly review what scientific materialism is and its basic tenets.
Scientific materialism is the worldview that matter and energy are all that ultimately exist and that everything, including life and consciousness can be explained by the laws of nature without reference to anything beyond the physical universe.
The key tenets 1 Matter and energy are the fundamental realities.
2. The universe is self contained and closed to outside influence.
3. Natural laws govern everything.
4. Life emerged from unguided processes.
5. Mind and consciousness are products of matter.
6. There is no intrinsic purpose or meaning.
7. Science is the ultimate means of knowledge.
So to be a scientific materialist is to affirm those tenets. Now I've discussed why the experiences of the Fantastic Four don't match up with the tenets of scientific materialism. The way they live doesn't match the expectations of a Darwinian view of life.
What about us though? What about the real world, you know? Dawkins frames the issue of expectations perfectly. In his 1995 book River out of Eden, he says the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
But is that true?
In his 2021 book, Return of the God Hypothesis, my friend and colleague Dr. Stephen Meyer unpacks three scientific discoveries made in the last century that render Dawkins assessment of the universe we observe as false. I'm going to share a clip with you now of Dr. Meyer discussing just one of these scientific breakthroughs. The discovery that the universe had a beginning and the implications this has for our view of the universe and its origins.
Here's Dr. Meyer now.
[00:10:33] Speaker C: The science of the 19th century that gave rise to this perspective has been eclipsed by major developments in science over the last 100 years in three main areas. Cosmology, physics and biology. Let me talk first about the the cosmology or the astronomy. The shift in this field starts in the 1920s. There's a now famous astronomer named Edwin Hubble. Most of us have heard of him because of the famed Hubble telescope. It's kind of a bummer for him because he's a really great scientist. He got a telescope named after him and it's always broken. They have to go up there and fix it. But anyway, Hubble starts working in the twenties. He comes, comes out of the field of law into astronomy at a really propitious time. They're building these great dome telescopes. This is the 100 inch diameter telescope at Mount Wilson that Hubble used. And using these great Big telescopes, the astronomers are able to, at this time, to start resolving these onto photographic plates. The light coming from little, tiny, distant, previously indistinct points of light in the night sky. And it turns out that these little indistinct points, once the light is collected with a long exposure on a photographic plate through these big telescopic lenses, the light starts revealing structure.
And this is a picture of what's called a Spindle Nebula. And there were other spiral nebulas, and.
Oh, sorry, that was. Well, that's a spiral. And here's another spiral nebula.
Now, this reignited a debate that had been going on in astronomy between astronomers who thought that our Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy and other astronomers who thought that there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way, island universes, if you will, beyond the Milky Way. And this was called the great debate in the 1920s. But in 1924, Hubble was able to settle this debate by using some new techniques for estimating distances. He was able to determine that the Andromeda Nebula was actually the Andromeda Galaxy, that it was a separate galaxy. And the way he was able to show that is he was using these new techniques for measuring distances. He determined that the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the closest ones to us, is 900,000 light years away.
[00:12:54] Speaker D: That was his estimate at the time.
[00:12:56] Speaker C: And the astronomers thought at the time the Milky way was only 300,000 light years across. So clearly it had to be way.
[00:13:03] Speaker D: Beyond the Milky Way.
[00:13:04] Speaker C: Therefore, it was a separate galaxy. And the Andromeda Nebula, which just meant gas cloud, was renamed the Andromeda Galaxy. That was pretty awesome. And as they began to look at other points of light using these same techniques, they found that there were galaxies.
[00:13:19] Speaker D: In every direction of the night sky.
[00:13:22] Speaker C: In fact, if you look at this little square that's highlighted on the PowerPoint, that's like a little tiny part of the visual field, maybe like a dime at arm's length.
[00:13:31] Speaker D: And now, if we were to magnify.
[00:13:34] Speaker C: That, it reveals galaxies galore in even the tiniest little quadrant of the night sky.
And the current estimate is that There are about 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe.
So in just the space of a decade, our sense of the immensity of the universe was just magnified incredibly.
[00:13:56] Speaker D: Now, that was really. That was an amazing discovery.
[00:13:59] Speaker C: But even more important was what was discovered as a result of the light coming from these galaxies.
Turns out that the light was redder than the scientists expected. You know, if you shine light through a prism and it separates into colors, the Red through to the blue and the violet. And the red light has a long wavelength. And if an object is emitting light and moving away, it will cause the wavelength of the light to stretch out and it will look redder than it would otherwise look.
[00:14:33] Speaker D: So the light coming from the gases.
[00:14:38] Speaker C: In these faraway galaxies looked redder than similar light would look coming from if.
[00:14:43] Speaker D: We looked at it in a laboratory. And they call this the red shift.
[00:14:48] Speaker C: In other words, the wavelength was stretched out. It's kind of like the Doppler shift with sound, when if a train whistle.
[00:14:53] Speaker D: Goes by, it goes, well, that's the.
[00:14:56] Speaker C: Wavelength of the sound stretching out. The same thing happens with light. And so the scientists were able to discern that the galaxies are actually moving away from us.
[00:15:05] Speaker D: That's what the red shift meant. Now, that had incredible implications for the.
[00:15:12] Speaker C: Question of the origin of the universe itself. Hubble used data from an unsung hero in astronomy named Vesto Slipher about this red shift.
And so here's the implication of all this. If the galaxies are moving away from us in every direction, in the forward direction of time, the only way that could be true is if there is a kind of spherically symmetric expansion, expansion of the universe, that everything is expanding in the forward direction. So if we think of, I got a visual aid.
In the forward direction of time, you have the universe getting bigger, bigger and bigger, and the galaxies, every galaxy getting further and further away from every other galaxy.
But if you wind the time clock backwards, if you back, extrapolate and you think, well, what was the universe like 100 years ago or 1000 years ago, or a million or a billion, or however far back you go, eventually you get to the point where all that galactic material is going to congeal or would have come back to the same point, a point marking the beginning of the expansion of the universe and arguably the beginning of the universe itself.
And so we have from observational astronomy the first hint that the universe has not been here eternally. It's not eternal and self existent, but rather it had a beginning.
This is one of Hubble's plots showing.
[00:16:39] Speaker D: That there was a law.
The further out the galaxies are, the faster they're moving away. And that again can only be true if the universe is expanding in this spherically symmetric way.
Now, about this time, actually a little before this time, there was a famous physicist with really bad hair.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Who had.
[00:17:01] Speaker D: Come to a very similar conclusion. And this was Albert Einstein.
He was in the 19 teens still working in Germany. Eventually he came to Princeton to escape.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: The Nazis but in the teens, he.
[00:17:13] Speaker D: Came up with a new theory of gravity known as general relativity. And we talked a little bit about this last night. But it's basically the conceptual idea behind it is that matter causes space to bend such that other matter passing through that space will have its motion changed by that preferred. By those preferred lines of trajectory.
So as a result of this, he's thinking, well, if matter causes space to bend, then that means that if all you have in the universe is that gravitational field, then everything should be collapsed onto itself into something like a black hole.
But we don't live in a universe like that.
[00:17:58] Speaker C: We live in a universe where there's.
[00:17:59] Speaker D: Many massive bodies separated by empty space. So there must be some countervining force of expansion to offset the gravitational force, which means that the universe must be in some way dynamic. There's something pushing outward.
But if something's pushing outward, then that would imply that there could have been a beginning. And that troubled Einstein, because at this point in his career, it was different later, but at this point in his career, he was very much a scientific materialist.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: And so he posited something. It was kind of a fairly arbitrary.
[00:18:34] Speaker D: Conjecture on his part, but he proposed that this outward pushing force, which he.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: Called the cosmological constant, had exactly the right magnitude, so that the outward push.
[00:18:45] Speaker D: Was exactly balanced by the gravitational pull. And you had a universe that was static, neither expanding nor contracting.
[00:18:53] Speaker C: It was kind of a contrived value that he assigned to this.
[00:18:56] Speaker D: But it worked to eliminate the idea of a beginning and for time. For him, that was a sigh of relief.
But then in the 20s, other physicists.
[00:19:07] Speaker C: Started working with these equations, and they.
[00:19:09] Speaker D: Realized, you know, that's pretty contrived, Einstein. That would be an incredible degree of fine tuning to have that cosmological constant with exactly the value that you, Einstein, chose for the math allows a lot of other values that would imply most other values would imply a dynamic universe.
[00:19:25] Speaker C: That's thing one. And then this amazing physicist, a Belgian Catholic priest named Father Lemaitre, is with Einstein at a conference in the 20s.
[00:19:36] Speaker D: And they're in a taxicab ride going to the conference. And Lemaitre tells Einstein, first of all, your physics is contrived. The equations really suggest a dynamic universe. You know it and we know it.
But also, have you heard about this red shift data that Hubble's working with out in California? Because it's showing that the dynamic expanding universe is really what the heavens have talked back, in effect.
[00:20:03] Speaker C: And Einstein listened to Lemaitre and eventually.
[00:20:09] Speaker D: Made his way out at Hubble's invitation to Pasadena, California, and, and had a.
[00:20:15] Speaker C: Peek for himself through the Hooker hundred.
[00:20:19] Speaker D: Inch telescope and came out and announced to the media, after seeing this in his heavy German accent, he came out.
[00:20:26] Speaker C: And said, I now see the necessity of a beginning.
[00:20:32] Speaker D: And later explained that the value, this arbitrary value he chose for the cosmological constant was the greatest mistake of his.
[00:20:41] Speaker C: Scientific career because he allowed his philosophical presuppositions, his predilections, to determine his scientific theory rather than letting the evidence decide the question.
[00:20:53] Speaker D: And anyways, a great moment in the history of science.
[00:20:56] Speaker C: It established what is now known as the Big Bang theory, when you have.
[00:21:00] Speaker D: This convergence of theoretical physics, general relativity, with observational astronomy. And that in turn established that the universe had a beginning.
[00:21:08] Speaker C: Now, Einstein was not the only scientist at the time who didn't like this. Sir Arthur Eddington, a famous British astrophysicist, said this. He said, philosophically, the notion of a.
[00:21:18] Speaker D: Beginning of the present order is repugnant to me.
[00:21:20] Speaker C: I should like to find a genuine loophole.
[00:21:22] Speaker D: I simply do not believe the present order of things started off with a bang.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: The expanding universe is preposterous. It leaves me cold. He says, said this in psychology is known as the theory of denial.
[00:21:37] Speaker D: You notice what the evidence he's citing, he's not citing it. He says philosophically he doesn't like it.
[00:21:43] Speaker C: And later physicists, you know, because you.
[00:21:46] Speaker D: Have to ask, well, what's the big deal?
[00:21:47] Speaker C: Why are physicists so upset about the.
[00:21:48] Speaker D: Idea of a beginning?
[00:21:50] Speaker C: Princeton physicist Robert Dicke put it this way.
[00:21:52] Speaker D: He said, he said an infinitely old.
[00:21:54] Speaker C: Universe would relieve us of the necessity.
[00:21:57] Speaker D: Explaining the origin of matter at any.
[00:22:00] Speaker C: Finite time in the past.
[00:22:01] Speaker D: If matter itself comes into existence, then.
[00:22:04] Speaker C: You can't invoke matter as the cause.
[00:22:07] Speaker D: Of the origin of the material universe. You need something that is immaterial, that transcends matter. And this conclusion was highlighted later in the 1960s by some work by Stephen Hawking. There's a bigger story here that I'm compressing, and maybe with Guillermo we can talk a bit more about it. After the Big Bang was proposed, there were some other models proposed. The steady state model, the oscillating universe model. These were each attempts to preserve an infinite universe that didn't have a beginning. But one by one, as more observations of different kinds came online in astronomy, these were set aside as inadequate theories. And then in the mid-60s, there was an extraordinary development in theoretical physics.
Stephen Hawking, you probably know of him, wonderful inspiring figure. You know, he Physicist confined to a wheelchair with the ALS disease. When he's working as a PhD student, he's working on black hole physics. And he's aware of the way that, you know, matter causes this, the space to curve. And he begins to think, and that's what, you know, he's thinking, okay, that's what's going on with the black hole. There's so much matter, its curves are tightly. You can't get anything out. But he starts to apply this idea to the universe. And he's realizing that as the universe is going forward in time, matter is getting more and more dispersed. But as you wind that clock backwards again in your mind's eye, you eventually get to the point where the matter is so tightly curved or the matter so densely compact that space is getting tighter and tighter, more tightly curved in its curvature. And eventually the mathematics, something called the field equations of general relativity, which he and Roger Penrose solved, implied that there is an infinite curvature at some point in the finite past.
Now, an infinite curvature corresponds to zero spatial volume. And then you have to ask what we discussed last night. How much stuff can you put in no space?
And the answer is, well, no things go in no space. I mean, it's.
And so this singularity theorem has this profoundly anti materialistic implication.
And it happens that Hawking worked for.
[00:24:14] Speaker C: Much of the rest of his life to try to, as W.C. fields put it, he was looking for a loophole. You know, he was looking for a.
[00:24:21] Speaker D: Way around this conclusion. Hawking was a really interesting figure.
[00:24:25] Speaker C: He was a kind of theologically sensitive.
[00:24:27] Speaker D: Even you could say God obsessed atheist.
[00:24:30] Speaker C: And so he was aware of what.
[00:24:32] Speaker D: He'D shown in 1968 with Penrose.
[00:24:34] Speaker C: But then he was developing other ideas, one called quantum cosmology, which we can.
[00:24:39] Speaker D: Discuss in the Q and A and.
[00:24:41] Speaker C: Which I discuss at length in my new book, trying to find a way around this conclusion.
[00:24:46] Speaker D: But the straightforward application of general relativity to the origin of the universe implies a creation event.
And we'll have a little quiz on these equations afterwards. But.
[00:25:00] Speaker C: Anyway, this is the idea. Curvature goes to an infinite zero spatial volume. The astronomer Robert Jastrow said this is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians he's writing in the 80s.
And notice our starting point. Remember my starting point with Dawkins? He said that the universe is exactly as we should expect if there's nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
But these astronomers are saying, no, this.
[00:25:25] Speaker D: Is totally unexpected from a materialistic standpoint.
[00:25:28] Speaker C: But it was expected by the theologians and Jastrow went on to say, for the scientist who's lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story.
[00:25:35] Speaker D: Ends like a bad dream.
[00:25:37] Speaker C: He scaled the mountains of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak. And as he pulls himself up over the final rock, he's greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
[00:25:49] Speaker D: Entirely expecting that the universe would have a beginning. Because after all, well, in the biblical witness you had, the very first words are in the beginning. Arno Penzias, one of the leading physicists who played a big role in this story in refuting what's called the steady state theory with his work on what's called the cosmic background radiation. Put it this way, he said, the best data we have concerning the Big Bang are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the seven Psalms, and the Bible as a whole. And indeed, it is rather striking. The first words of the Bible are in the beginning. In the epistles in the New Testament, there are two different mentions of the plan of God existing before the beginning of time, which is really striking in light of relativity theory, because the singularity theorem implies that time itself is a created entity which has a beginning.
And there's even mentions 11 or 12 separate mentions in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, of God stretching out the heavens.
[00:26:50] Speaker C: Either having stretched or stretching out the heavens.
[00:26:53] Speaker D: So this new cosmology is in a way, very much expected from the standpoint of theism. It also helps revive an ancient argument for the existence of God that went like this. Everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The universe began to exist, and the universe therefore must have a cause separate from itself. All causes are separate from their effects. We call that transcendent or separate cause God.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: So there you have it. Dr. Stephen Meyer reviews just one of the scientific discoveries of the last century that suggests life and the universe are products of a designing intelligence rather than a blind, purposeless process.
Now, before I go, let me bring it back to the question I posed at the beginning. Does the evidence of complexity and engineering, from the simplest living cell to the foundations of the cosmos, the better match up with the predictions of scientific materialism or intelligent design?
It's a crucial question that impacts the way we live our lives. I'm grateful to consider the question with you today.
If you're watching this on YouTube, please like and subscribe. And don't forget to leave a comment.
I'll see you next time.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
