[00:00:01] Speaker A: So how could the expression of meaning ever arise in a universe that's merely an outworking of natural law?
If reality is nothing more than mindless particles and forces, I don't see any way that you can get from that kind of a mechanistic groundwork to the experience of meaning that forms the foundation of our lives.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:38] Speaker C: Well, what is the story of everything? Is life in the universe a happy accident? Or is there a very good reason we exist and we're here? Is there a scientific and philosophical basis for meaning? And what is meaning? Welcome to IIT of the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Sorry to pepper you with questions there at the beginning, but those are some of the things that we all wrestle with. And today I continue exploring those important questions with physicist and author Dr. Eric Hedin. Dr. Hedin is a professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Ball State University in Indiana. He's author of the book Canceled what Some Atheists Don't Want yout To See.
He speaks at universities around the country and writes regularly on the evidence for intelligent design at our flagship news and commentary website, scienceandculture.com Eric, welcome to the show.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: Thank you again, Andrew. It's a privilege to be with you.
[00:01:35] Speaker C: In part one, we discussed your recent articles reflecting on the documentary film the Story of Everything, perhaps we could start again there. You've written that the movie gives us a meaningful metanarrative of human existence.
Explain what you mean by the fancy term metanarrative and how. How does it give us that?
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Well, I think that metanarrative refers to kind of the. The overarching meaning of the story.
And I would say that from the film the Story of Everything, the weight of scientific evidence from cosmology, the life sciences, contradicts the myth of meaninglessness and instead points us to a story written by a divine storyteller.
[00:02:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I like that. Okay, now you make the claim that materialism fails to describe the world we experience, and I'd like to examine that idea in today's segment. Many scientific materialists and atheists are fond of using the phrase nothing more than. Now, that's language you often hear when they're trying to explain human existence or know the presence of life or the universe in general. It's nothing more than we're nothing more than meat machines. There's no such thing as free will. Our choices are nothing more than neurons firing at will in our brains, we're nothing more than mindless particles.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: What.
[00:02:59] Speaker C: What does the nothing more than statement get wrong. And what does it actually get right?
[00:03:06] Speaker A: Well, I think that that's actually fairly easy to answer that question.
First of all, the statement is right in that we are made up of various elementary particles, the elements found in the periodic table.
But it's wrong in every way that matters to our experience of the world.
An author, Stephen Talbot says the fact is that we do not as people just living out our lives, we do not have such elementary particles at all. What we have are mountains and seas and deserts and forest and much more.
So there's much more than the nothing more idea would have us believe.
[00:04:02] Speaker C: Right, okay. So nothing more than is sort of a reductionist view that is trying to, what, minimize or downplay what the results of all these particles could have produced. Is that that fair to say?
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Well, yes. And you know, as a physicist, I'm well aware of the idea of particles of matter and the forces between them, and various conservation laws and energy and all of that.
But if you look at those laws and let's say you started with that, there is absolutely no way you could go from the particles of nature, the forces between them, the laws of nature, and arrive at anything that matters to us today.
There's more than this material world.
[00:04:59] Speaker C: Right?
And that's what's missing in the nothing more than.
Now, how do you define meaning and how do we encounter it in our ordinary life?
[00:05:11] Speaker A: So this talk is going to be a lot about meaning. And actually meaning is a concept that's actually devoid of, well, meaning.
Unless we also have the perception of intelligent minds, there's no meaning. It's just rocks and matter and plasma and interstellar space.
The problem with the so called nothing more than worldview is in fact its whole scale disconnect with our everyday experience.
Everybody has experiences and nobody would be able to affirm on an ongoing basis as we go throughout our day having these experiences that, oh, this is just nothing more than atoms of carbon and oxygen interacting with the electromagnetic force that has no connection with what we actually experience.
[00:06:17] Speaker C: Okay, so you say it's very hard to walk around with a nothing more than attitude. And let's be honest, we don't. Right, we don't live in the world of just particles together.
We live beyond that. We live above that, so to speak. Right, And I like how you put that, that without intelligent minds, meaning is meaningless. And so under the umbrella of materialism, there is no discussion about meaning because there is no meaning. But under the framework of intelligent design, where we understand that intelligent minds have a reason for their existence, then we can have this conversation, right?
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Yes. Yes, that's right.
Individual particles don't themselves possess any qualities such as love, beauty, or purpose.
And it's really only intelligent perception that distinguishes between meaning and non meaning.
And it's not like some critics would say that we just superimpose imagined meaning on what's being observed.
Reality actually lacks meaning entirely unless it's perceived by an intelligent mind that appreciates and responds to the things that are made.
We see a sunset that's beautiful, we respond to it, it has meaning to it. We see the face of a loved one and we respond to it in a way we don't just AI identify it.
There's meaning behind that smile from someone we love.
[00:08:06] Speaker C: Okay, so we find meaning in our interactions with matter at the macroscopic level. What about meaning between people? You talked about loved ones. How is that found? And how is it, I don't know, communicated or experienced?
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Well, we have the ability to build relationships with others, with loved ones, through communication that actually consists of exchanges of meaningful information. And communication itself is an irreducibly complex phenomenon.
We have to have the mechanism to speak or to communicate in some way. We have to have the ability to hear or receive the information. And then we have to have the mental processes to interpret what is being received, heard or seen.
And all of those things, I would say at least those three, the transmission, the reception, and the interpretation, all have to be in existence for meaningful communication to take place. And based on that, we, we have relationships.
So again, there's meaning in the fact that we have this ability to communicate and build relationships.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Yeah, and I remember having a good discussion with you about that.
Just the nature of meaningful communication driven by information at the heart of life.
So listeners, viewers, go back and check out previous discussions I've had with Dr. Hadim because they're pretty fascinating and very intriguing.
So matter exists and meaning exists. Both are real, both make up the fabric of reality, as you put it.
We perceive meaning and we express meaning. So far, so good. But the escape hatch for materialists is to say that meaning is an illusion.
They'll say evolution produced brains that perceive purpose and significance because it's advantageous. Why is that an inadequate explanation for meaning?
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Well, for one thing, if you take the materialist's worldview, then again, there's nothing more than elementary particles and interactions between them according to the laws of nature.
So how could the expression of meaning ever arise in a universe that's merely an outworking of natural law?
If reality is nothing more than mindless particles, and forces. I don't see any way that you can get from that kind of a mechanistic groundwork to the experience of meaning that forms the foundation of our lives.
So I see a disconnect between what we have, which is meaningful experiences, and the laws of physics that govern the particles out of which we are made.
[00:11:20] Speaker C: Yeah. Now let's ponder that word illusion for a moment. You say an illusion is a belief that doesn't correspond to reality, and you point out that material objects don't suffer illusions.
So how does that make it difficult for materialists to say we're suffering from an illusion when we perceive meaning and life in the universe?
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Well, again, from the materialistic point of view, even humans are nothing more than collections of particles that are very complicated and held together by the forces of nature.
So we are material objects, period, in the materialistic point of view. But this assertion assumes what it claims to deny. If the materialist denies the reality of illusion, it's. Or the. The reality of meaning, and says that we are only having illusions, but material objects cannot suffer illusions.
That's impossible. And some might say, well, what about AI hallucinations? Well, that's just a term referred to reaching a conclusion that is not based on sufficient data and it's a result of probabilistic software programming and so on. It's not an actual illusion. They don't. The AI machine, if you will, is not believing something.
It's stating something, but it's not believing things. And if you back away from AI and just talk about collections of particles, whether it's in a star or in a planet, collections of particles, organic or inorganic, do not suffer illusions. And if we humans are merely matter, neither could we suffer illusions.
[00:13:28] Speaker C: Right. So the whole point is moot.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
To say that we're suffering illusions is to actually admit that we are more than material particles, because in so doing,
[00:13:42] Speaker C: you're also admitting there's something there to be suffering an illusion over.
Right, Right, Right. Yeah.
Huh. Interesting. Well, we often talk about intelligent design in connection with things like fine tuning biological information and molecular machines. Are you saying meaning, then, is itself a feature of reality that points us toward mind?
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Yes, I certainly would. And I would ask our listeners, especially skeptics, to consider the concept, the experience of meaning that you've had. I mean, even if someone is disappointed with life, they've certainly had some meaningful interactions, they've had some meaningful experiences or thoughts or. Or they've read a story that had meaning to them in some way.
So that, I would say, is evidence that there is some sort of design that is transcendent to matter and energy, something that has entered this universe.
The very existence and meaning pushes us to acknowledge the continual influence of material mind upon this material world, or the influence of immaterial mind.
So I would say that meaning actually wins out over mindlessness.
If you wanted to superimpose a description on this world that we live in, meaning corresponds with reality more than mind. Mindlessness does.
[00:15:25] Speaker C: Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, our ability to take the raw materials of the world around us and create something is suggestive of the fact that that could be operating on the cosmic level. And I suppose you could say the same thing here. You know, our ability to make meaning from the raw physical particles of life is suggestive that there's meaning on a grander scale. Again, it's not proof, you know, but it's suggestive of the fact if we can do it, something else can do it, you know?
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Yes, yes, I would say so. We can extrapolate from our own abilities to perceive meaning, to even create meaning, to realize that it makes sense that there is a higher being that has the ability to bring things into existence that would not just follow from the natural outworking of the forces of nature.
[00:16:31] Speaker C: Yeah, well, there's a big difference between saying we invent meaning in a meaningless universe and we perceive meaning that is actually there.
I know that it's quite obvious what you're saying through all this, but again, can you put into words which best fits our experience?
And why do materialists.
What is preventing them from acknowledging the meaning that is actually there, do you think?
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Well, I think the starting point that the materialists work from.
We mentioned earlier the idea that in the materialistic worldview of science, there's sort of a rule that the only causes that can be considered for anything are natural causes, natural forces of nature.
But I would say that that is what I might describe a desiccated outlook of materialism.
It's. It's dried out, it's unproductive, it's not alive. It doesn't actually supply an answer or an explanation for the meaning that we perceive and experience on a daily basis.
So again, if we ask how could we account for the qualitative richness, the infinite sort of qualitative differences of the experience world if reality were nothing more than just particles that are all the same?
You know, every electron in the universe is the same as every other electron, and the same could be said of other kinds of particles.
So meaning is real.
We have that experience. We can't say it's an illusion because that's a self contradictory statement.
The material world is real.
It's not one or the other. We experience meaning in a material world because we are more than material objects.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: Yeah. It sort of reminds me of the demonstration that Stephen Meyer likes to give. You know, the, the whiteboard and the magnetic letters. You know, he puts a bunch of letters on the board and he's done so by, you know, applying forces to the board. There's the force of magnetism, there's the physical force of him putting things on there, moving them around.
But by itself, all of that doesn't create a message. The message actually comes from the mind as he re adjusts all the letters until it delivers the message in a pattern we recognize.
So you could say this is happening at the chemical level in life as well.
Something you could speak to as a physicist, perhaps.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: Well, certainly even just taking the information rich structure of DNA as a familiar example, the electromagnetic magnetic force is what's responsible for holding the components of DNA together, the nucleotide bases, the sugar phosphate backbone and all of that.
And yet there is no explanation for the complex specified sequence of nucleotide bases within DNA that gives rise to all the functionality of, of the enzymes and proteins that are produced by that sequence.
So you can't explain what we have in DNA by appealing to the laws of nature. There is something more than the laws of nature. We're not denying nature. We're not denying that the forces and the particles and the compounds are all present, but we're denying the meaning, in this case, the ability of, say, DNA to functionally produce genes, proteins, enzymes that are essential for living things. That has to come from a transcendent source.
[00:20:58] Speaker C: Right. And that brings us back to the story of Everything, the documentary film that was recently released.
You know, that documentary has a whole chapter where it's talking about the DNA enigma. You know, the information in DNA and the fact that it doesn't come from the physical stuff that's there.
Now, GK Chesterton has suggested that if there's a story, there's a storyteller. Intelligent design gives us scientific evidence that the universe is intelligible, purposeful, and filled with meaning. How far does this take us toward a storyteller? And where do you take it from there yourself?
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Well, again, I think this is a fundamental concept to kind of dwell on for a minute here.
If there is meaning, there has to be something to impart meaning.
And it cannot just arise as some sort of an emergent property of natural forces that's a popularized concept, emergent properties, but it's outlived its basis in reality.
We don't have functionality, life emerging from the fundamental forces of nature. It is something that is given from the outside. Just like a story doesn't arise by some mixture of ink and paper. It's requiring a storyteller.
And so I would say that the evidence that we as a community at large, the intelligent design community, the evidence that we have discovered about the complexity of living things, about the fine tuning of the universe, tells us that we are intended as people. We are intended rather than accidental. There was a storyteller writing the universe, and we're part of the story that's being told.
It implies that we're significant rather than pointless, that our lives have value rather than being worthless, and that ultimately we're loved rather than lost.
I have read about authors who are in love with their characters.
They love the character that seems to almost take on a life of its own in a story. But. But in this universe, we can definitely say confidently that we are loved by the author of the story we are living now.
[00:23:50] Speaker C: If meaning is something we can perceive and express, how can and should we participate in the meaning inherent in life in the universe? Just remind us of a way or two to do that, Encourage us, inspire us in how we can participate in this meaning?
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Well, I want to take this to the theistic framework of design. And in this theistic framework, God held the universe in his mind. He created it according to his will, and then he perceived it in its fullness as good.
In doing so, he imbued the creation with meaning.
So meaning is imparted by the Creator, just like the meaning of a story is imparted by the author of the story.
As humans, we are made in his image, and we talked about this earlier, that we're enabled to even in a small way participate in creation by our manipulation of the raw ingredients of the universe into useful and functional outcomes.
But we're also enabled to participate in creation by perceiving meaning, just like the Creator did. And he said it's good we can perceive meaning in the things that are made. It's a tragedy to deny meaning when it's there in front of us. It's one of our gifts that we've been given is to see it. It's a tragedy to deny it.
We experience this meaning in a deepest way through relationships. And we even have the rare privilege of being able to have a relationship with the Creator. It's not like we're disconnected from the storyteller. There's an opportunity through this life to come into relationship with the story of this life.
The author of the story of this life.
[00:25:47] Speaker C: Well, the joyous takeaway is that matter is real. Yes. But meaning is real as well.
And so if you see both as real and both as part of the fabric of reality, what then do you do with that? And I love that it's a two way street. I love that it's not just a passive we can perceive all this meaning around us, but we can also participate. Right. We can express it in the way that we relate with others, in the way that we gather the raw materials of life and produce something beautiful.
That's awesome that we can participate in this meaning and that it's real.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Yes.
I truly believe that the story goes on. It's more than just we live and then we die. There's a connection beyond even the span of our lives. And I think that gives a true kind of eternal meaning to the story that we're living.
[00:26:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, Eric, thank you for your time. It's always a pleasure to sit down and chat with you about these things.
I just love it. So really appreciate your efforts here.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate all your time and putting this interview together. Thank you.
[00:27:08] Speaker C: Well, if you missed the first half of this conversation, do go back and enjoy it in a separate episode.
Let's close this segment by reminding you of a couple of resources you can use to dig deeper into this topic. First, there's the movie itself. If you haven't seen the Story of Everything, it's available to stream on Amazon prime and you can order it now on Blu Ray and dvd.
To get the details on all the ways you can access it, go to discovery.org story discovery.org story and then there's Dr. Hedin's book canceled what some Atheists don't want you to know. Eric tells his own story of being canceled by militant atheists and and then he shares some of the evidence for design, purpose and meaning that they didn't want people to know.
So it packs a punch for sure. You can get a copy of Canceled Signs online at places like Amazon.com or basically anywhere you can order a book these days for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and Intelligent Designers.
This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
