[00:00:05] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're bringing you the concluding half of a 2019 interview between Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro and philosopher of science doctor Steven C. Meyer. This exchange happened five years ago now and we thought it was a good time to dust it off and replay it. For those who havent heard it yet or dont remember much of it, Doctor Meyer considers this one of the best interviews hes done on the subject of his second solo book, Darwins doubt. Shapiro, for his part, was extremely well prepared and asked great questions, resulting in a thought provoking and thoroughly engaging hour long conversation.
In the second half of their conversation, Doctor Meyer and Shapiro discuss the origin of life. Doctor Meyer explains how the field reached an impasse by the 1980s as chemists learned just how thorny the origin of life problem really was. It wasn't just about life's building blocks, it was also about accounting for the information necessary to produce and sustain life.
Meyer explains why the rna world hypothesis doesn't solve the problem. Then he tackles methodological naturalism, the materialistic assumptions that have pigeonholed scientists since the time of Darwin.
The conversation concludes with some discussion of the fine tuning argument and the multiverse theory. Lets get back now to Ben Shapiro and doctor Stephen Meyer.
[00:01:39] Speaker C: All right, so lets talk about the origin of life problem. The question being, how did organic life arise from non organic material? There were some experiments that were done in the early 20th century in which under certain conditions it looked as though maybe organic material could be created from non organic material. But there really, as you point out, has not been a great explanation of how non organic material could create an information system like DNA. I was wondering if you could elucidate that.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: So, yeah, the famous experiment still in a lot of the biology textbooks is the Miller Urey experiment of 1950 219 53.
They sparked a chamber that had gases, known as reducing gases, that then spontaneously produced a few of the 20 protein forming amino acids, two or three.
The problem is that amino acids do not a protein make and proteins by themselves do not make life. So they were really quite a long ways away from demonstrating anything like a spontaneous chemical origin of life.
It's ironic that that experiment was performed in the same year as Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule and the subsequent elucidation of the information bearing properties of the molecule. Because in what's called chemical evolutionary theory, by the 1960s, and certainly by the early 1980s, the field reached a state of impasse precisely because the biologists and the biochemists realized that to build an actual living cell, you've got to have information rich molecules. You can't just have the components, you can't just have the letters, you've got to have the sentences.
And so there were a number of problems with the Miller Urey experiment. One was they presupposed conditions on the early Earth and in the early Earth's atmosphere that didn't actually match the conditions on the early earth. We didn't have a reducing atmosphere, had a slightly oxidizing or neutral atmosphere. You rerun those experiments, you don't get amino acids forming spontaneously. But the bigger problem was how do you arrange the amino acids in the very specific ways that are required to form a three dimensional structure called a protein fold? And that problem hasn't been solved, apart from watching DNA do it inside living cells. So to build proteins, what we know is you need information stored in the DNA molecule. And so, as the molecular biological revolution unfolded in the fifties, sixties, seventies, the scientists working on the origin of life realized the problem was much harder than they realized, because they didn't just need to account for certain kinds of building blocks of life, they needed to account for the information that would organize the building blocks into DNA molecules, into protein molecules, and into the complex information processing systems that characterize even the simplest living cells.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: So one of the theories that has been posited to sort of solve this problem is the so called RNA world thesis. Can you talk about what exactly that is?
[00:04:22] Speaker A: So one of the reasons the origin of life problem is so hard for evolutionary biologists is you can't invoke natural selection reasonably, because natural selection only, that depends on self replication, differential survival of loss of offspring. But that only happens. Differential organisms only divide and reproduce on the basis of things that are happening at a molecular level that involve information rich DNA and proteins. So if you're trying to explain the origin of information rich DNA and proteins, you can't invoke prebiotic natural selection. It's a contradiction in terms, as one of the great evolutionary biologists, Dobjansky, said. So that made the origin of life problem even harder than the problems we've been talking about previously, as far as explaining the origin of the information for new forms of life. But one theory that attempted to get around that is called the RNA world. And it was based on the observation that some RNA molecules can generate, can perform two functions at once. They can perform the function of information storage, like DNA, but they can also catalyze certain reactions like proteins, proteins catalyze at much faster rates than would otherwise occur really crucial biochemical reactions that are crucial to metabolism. So if RNA could do both, the thought was then maybe life started with an RNA molecule that could copy itself, that could get natural selection going at a molecular level before you had life. Problem has turned out, again to be an information problem. So we've done experiments on RNA. It's turned out that people have, they call them ribozyme engineering experiments. And the name is apt because it is a lot of intelligent design engineering. But people have tried to engineer RNA molecules by arranging the sequence of bases. RNA, like DNA, has these bases that carry information, and they've arranged the bases very specifically to try to build RNA molecules that would copy themselves to get a self replicating system going, which would get natural selection going. Problem is, number one, we have been able to design some RNA molecules that will copy about 10% of themselves, but only if the bases are very specifically arranged, which means that to get a self replicating system going, you got to have information. And where is the information coming from? It's coming from the intelligent biochemist who's doing the ribozyme engineering. So what's actually being simulated in these simulations is the need, we argue, for intelligent design. The RNA world doesn't eliminate or doesn't refute the intelligent design argument based on information. It actually demonstrates or illustrates the need for intelligent design. And so I don't think it really solves the problem unless RNA world, people are saying, well, that's where the intelligent designer input the information in the first place.
[00:07:10] Speaker C: Okay, so it seems like the biggest blowback that you've gotten, obviously, in terms of intelligent design, is the term intelligent design, because it seems like most of the critiques that you've made of neo Darwinism are fairly well accepted. Is that accurate?
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Increasingly so. In 2016, a number of us went, attended a conference at the Royal Society of London in, obviously, London. And it was a group of leading evolutionary biologists called the meeting to address new trends in evolutionary biology. They called. It was an innocuous way of saying, neo Darwinism is dead and we need a new theory. The first talk of the conference was by a leading austrian evolutionary biologist named Gerd Muller, who enumerated five what he called explanatory deficits of neo Darwinism. Elsewhere, he's written that neo Darwinism has no theory of the generative, by which he means it explains the small scale variations very well, like the Galapagos finches, but it doesn't explain the origin of major innovations in the history of life, and so many evolutionary biologists are. Now there's an aphorism that's afoot.
Mutation and selection explain the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest. The problem is the main mechanism of evolutionary change doesn't seem to have significant creative power. And that's the problem, I think, increasingly being recognized. And as a result of that, many people within evolutionary biology are looking for new mechanisms calling for the formulation of a new theory. And that's kind of striking. It's an astounding admission when you think about how the theory is presented through the textbooks with science popularizers, the new atheists, the public spokesman for Science, the National center for Science Education, or the National Academy of Sciences, when they talk about evolution, it's a fact. Richard Dawkins has said that if you find someone who questions it, they're either stupid, wicked, or insane.
But the reality on the ground, or rather in the peer reviewed literature within evolutionary biology is very different. There's a recognition that the fundamental problems haven't been solved. And one of which is Mueller acknowledged the problem of the origin of biological form. When I saw that it's in a table, in a book that he's written with another evolutionary biologist, a list of unsolved problems, one of which they list the origin of biological form, I was stunned. It's 2003, MIT Press. That was the very problem that Darwin was supposed to have solved in 1859, and it's now an open question.
[00:09:29] Speaker C: Well, with that said, it seems like for a lot of folks like Dawkins, it's not about the God of the gaps, it's about the Darwinism of the gaps. The idea that eventually we're going to figure out that darwinism still holds in these circumstances where it appears not to hold.
Is that accurate, or does he have a theory for how to fix that?
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Well, yeah, there's a very good explanation for that in the sociology and philosophy of science.
The assumption is we have to have a materialistic explanation. We can't allow creative intelligence or agency or mind to. We can't posit that as part of the explanation for how life got here. And there's a rule that many scientists take as normative. It's called methodological naturalism. And it says, if you're going to be a scientist, you have to explain everything by reference to purely undirected material processes. And if you deviate from that in any way, you're not being scientific. That's why I got called a pseudoscientist on the Wikipedia webpage. It was a little bit of an upgrade because previously they had me down as a theologian and I have no training in theology. But in any case, this methodological rule is actually only as recent as the late 19th century in science. The founders of modern science, Newton, Boyle, Kepler, they didn't adhere to this at all. They saw design in science in the natural world, and they wrote about it in their science, in their science treatise, for example, in the general scholium to the Principi, Newton's great work on gravitation. He's got a terrific argument for design based on the fine tuning of the planetary orbits.
So design arguments were part of science from its foundation, but they became verboten in the late 19th century after the origin of species. And there's a very curious thing about this rule of methodological naturalism.
If you're investigating an origin question or a causal origins question, it's a rule that actually limits the intellectual freedom of the scientist. There's a lot of areas of science where methodological naturalism is innocuous. But if you're asking the question what caused life, or the information necessary to produce life to arise, and you recognize it could be an undirected material process, or it might have been a mind, but then you decide in advance that you're not going to consider any evidence of mind. Of course, you're only going to get materialistic explanations, but the explanations may not be adequate. I mean, imagine you go into the british museum, you look at the Rosetta stone, you see all those inscriptions in three different languages, and you say, well, I'd like to say it was a scribe, but since I adhere to methodological naturalism, I've got to say it was wind and erosion or something like that.
The rule actually limits scientists from following the evidence where it most naturally leads. Information based on our knowledge of cause and effect is a strong indicator of the activity of intelligence. And yet we can't say that or consider that if we accept methodological naturalism. And that's what's going on. That's why the dialectic kind of goes in circles where you get a new evolutionary model every few years, and then they circle back to the one that was rejected 20 years ago and start the cycle all over again, because we're really looking in the wrong place. We're barking up the wrong tree.
[00:12:23] Speaker C: I mean, it does raise the question. If you're a methodological naturalist and all you believe is that undirected processes are responsible for everything, why you believe in such a thing as objective truth, for example, because or the reliability of the.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Human mind, as we were discussing before the interview.
[00:12:35] Speaker C: Right. I mean, if the idea is that the human mind is capable of grasping the world around it, and there is such a thing as objective truth that we can grasp, then that would suggest that our mind reflects the universe in some deep, profound way, as opposed to the sort of evolutionary biology belief, which is that we are just adaptable balls of meat. And so whatever we think about the universe, maybe it's helpful in terms of our adaptation, but it's not necessarily true.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: It's very well put. This was the very thing that bothered Thomas Nagel, the great philosopher of science from NYU.
Nagel got himself into a bit of trouble. He wrote a favorable review of signature in the cell in the Times Literary Supplement. And then there was a huge blowback, including from a lot of other fellow atheists. Nagel's an atheist.
But Nagel accepted the critical arguments in signature in the cell and began to get more critical of Darwinism as well. Not just chemical evolutionary theory, but biological evolutionary theory. And in 2012, he doubled down by publishing his own book with Oxford Press called mind and how the neo darwinian materialist view of reality is almost certainly false, was the subtitle. And his problem was the one that you just articulated that clearly. We live in a universe in which mind is a reality. And if neo Darwinism can't account for that, then it's missing something really big.
It's an inadequate explanation for something we observe all the time, which is the activity of minds. I see it in our conversation. I know I have a mind by my own introspective experience. This is a part of reality, too. And if evolution can't account for that, and if we exclude mind as an explanatory principle, we're going to have an impoverished understanding of the world around us. And so I think this is a very, very important aspect of the debate, is recognizing that mind is a reality.
[00:14:20] Speaker C: Well, this actually is one of the fascinating sort of theories that Dawkins puts forth, is essentially that mind is a spandrel, that mind is just something that we feel like we have, but it actually does not exist in the first place. Which does raise the question as to why he does what he does for a living. I mean, if you're in the business of explanation, why bother to operating along the spandrels?
[00:14:38] Speaker A: It's extremely self defeating. You're absolutely right. But it's interesting that the neo Darwinists say that design in life is an illusion. We have apparent design, but not real design. First line from the blind watchmaker, page one. Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. But at the end of the day, Dawkins also has to say that mind itself, purposive intelligence, is also an illusion. That's an impoverished worldview. We all know better than that.
[00:15:05] Speaker C: Well, and it does raise questions, I mean, far beyond that for civilization as well, since we all have to live together and reason together. I've had this exact argument with Sam Harris, who says he believes in objective truth and reason. And I keep saying to him, well, we're wandering balls of meat with no purpose in the universe. So what is this reason you're talking about? We're a bunch of firing neurons over which we have no control.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Yeah, two points on that, and I think you've addressed them both, and I think you're addressing the point you just made in your new book. But our whole legal system is based on notions of moral responsibility, culpability before the law, that presupposes our ability to choose as free agents, that we're not completely determined by undirected firings in our synapse. It was not just nature or nurture. There's human free will and moral responsibility. Our whole legal system is based on that idea.
And secondly, we have this epidemic of teen suicide in our country.
I heard something you did on your show a little while ago, and I had a very similar experience of existential anxiety as a young person. It was a fairly middle class upbringing, had no great deprivation. But I had this recurring question, what's it going to matter in 100 years? Will any human achievement ever matter? And this question of the purpose of human existence, I think, is gnawing at a lot of people in our culture, especially young people, because only agents, only personal agents, can confer meaning on something. Nothing can mean something to a rock or to an atom, and we find meaning in relationship to other persons. And if at the end of the day, we're just going to have this heat death of the universe, and there's no mind behind the universe, no personal agency behind the universe, there's no possibility of ultimate meaning, and a lot of people sense that, and it's very deeply troubling, and we're really not answering that question. For a lot of young people, I think one of the philosophical implications of intelligent design, which doesn't attempt to prove the existence of God, but it does imply that personal agency is fundamental to the cosmos, and it opens up the possibility that there could be a good answer to that question. Of meaning and purpose that I think is gnawing in a lot of people.
[00:17:07] Speaker C: So let's talk about how intelligent design should be taught in schools. As we've mentioned, a lot of scientists basically accept the generalized critiques of neo Darwinism that you've expressed in your books. Is there a reason why we don't just say we don't know? In other words, why don't we try and just teach it this way? Here's the theory of neo Darwinism. Here are all the flaws in the theory of neo Darwinism. It would be very difficult for folks to try and kick that out of school. Since you're not mentioning God and you're not mentioning any intelligent designer at all, why not teach it that way? And then you're firmly within even the skeptics view of what science ought to be.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: That happens to be our science education policy at the Discovery Institute. We propose that students are allowed to teach to learn about the strengths and the weaknesses of different scientific theories, including darwinian evolution. But there are many.
A lot of people have a stereotyped view of science which is really inaccurate. It's the men in white coats, and it's just about the facts. And there's no role for interpretation or debate or argument advances. There's a wonderful italian philosopher of science named Marcello Perra who says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence. And what we've done is present a stereotyped view of science to students, where we just tell them the answer and say, well, here are the facts and the theory that explains it. And it's all a fait accompli. A much better way to learn science is to learn about the arguments that are ongoing. Now, we have this complication in the United States with our church state jurisprudence, and we at discovery think that at this point, at least, it's sort of.
It's just borrowing trouble to try to buck that. But what we certainly can do, without any problem with the constitutional precedent, is to allow students to learn the strengths of darwinian theory and also the scientific weaknesses as we find them increasingly in the peer reviewed literature in biology and evolutionary biology. I testified before the Texas State Board of Education several years ago in favor of a proposal to do exactly what I'm describing to teach the strengths and weaknesses. And I submitted into evidence about 100 peer reviewed papers of leading people in evolutionary biology pointing out serious weaknesses in the theory, especially around this problem of the lack of creative power of the mutation selection mechanism. At that same hearing, well, prior to my opposite number, at the National center for Science Education, a Darwin only science education lobby said to the press, the Dallas Morning News, you can't apply the strengths and weaknesses standard to evolutionary theory because the theory of evolution has no weaknesses. Well, that's actually laughable when you get into the scientific literature. And students ought, just as a matter of scientific literacy, to know about the problems with the theory that the scientists themselves are talking about. So that's what we've been advocating.
[00:19:51] Speaker C: And so let's talk for a second about the intelligent designer. So when you say intelligent design, everybody goes to, okay, that's God. But your theory doesn't actually suggest that it's necessarily God. It just says there has to be some form of mind or intelligence that was responsible for this. How do you connect the intelligent design theory to God? Or is it connected to God at all?
[00:20:08] Speaker A: Right, thanks for asking. It's a great question. And the first thing is to understand why, from the biological evidence, we make an inference to a mind of some kind. When we're reasoning about the history of life, we're using this darwinian principle, the Veracaza principle, or using our knowledge of cause and effect. What do we know from cause and effect? Well, we know from cause and effect that it takes a mind with self conscious awareness to create or generate information in a digital form. And so we can infer that there was a mind that at least had the kind of capabilities of which we are familiar because of our own introspective experience of having minds. Now, when we're talking about the biological evidence, the designing intelligence responsible might be an imminent intelligence within the cosmos, or it could be a transcendent intelligence that has the attributes that Jews and Christians ascribe to both are logical possibilities. So I've always said, when in my books on the evidence of design and biology, that the theory of intelligent design isn't an argument for God's existence, but it may have theistic implications. It's theistic friendly. Now, I happen to be writing another book that is extending the design argument into the realm of cosmology and the foundations of physics, where we find at the foundation of physical law these incredibly finely tuned parameters. It's called the anthropic fine tuning. And the physicists since the fifties and sixties have been discovering dozens of these fine tuning parameters, both in the way the universe was set up at the beginning, in the configuration of mass energy and in the relative strengths of the different forces of physics and a number of other parameters like the expansion rate of the universe and the speed of light and things like this. And it turns out we live in what they call a Goldilocks universe, that the forces are not too strong, not too weak, the expansion rate not too fast, not too slow, the arrangement of the mass energy just right at the beginning. We live in a just right universe that has made life possible. Now, that, I argue, and many physicists have argued, is also evidence of design. But that evidence of design is located at the very beginning of the universe. And neither the beginning of the universe, which we now know of as a result of our big bang theory, nor the fine tuning can be accounted for by an agent within the cosmos. Clearly, no space, alien or imminent intelligence could be responsible for the laws of physics and the fine tuning of all those laws that make its very life possible. Nor could such an agent be responsible for the origin of the universe itself. So I think when you bring that other evidence into the picture, that I think you can make a very strong theistic design argument. And in my next book, which is going to be called the return of the God hypothesis, I look at how theism, as opposed to other competing metaphysical hypotheses, such as pantheism or materialism or deism, best explains that ensemble of evidence from biology, physics and cosmology. So I do think you can make a theistic argument, not a proof for God's existence, but again, an inference to the best explanation of this ensemble of evidence we have about biological and cosmological origins.
[00:23:08] Speaker C: Now, is there an easy way out for folks when it comes to the fine tuning argument or to the information argument? By simply saying that there is no such actual distinction between meaningful information and Shannon information. There's no such distinction between fine tuning and non fine tuning, except that we're here to see it. In other words, the only thing that distinguishes an information rich segment of text from a non information rich segment of text is the fact that we speak English. So if there's a bunch of letters and we can read them, then we think that they're meaningful. If there's a bunch of letters and we can't read them, we think that they're not meaningful. So, in other words, are we reverse projecting mind onto a universe simply because we're here to.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Well, no, because we do objectively recognize meaning and function. There is a possibility of false negative judgments. We might see a string of characters and not know the symbol convention, and therefore conclude that that string is just random or complex without being specified. But when we make a qualitative judgment of specificity, of arrangement, when we see that the arrangement of characters is necessary to perform an independently observable function. That's a kind of information that is real and is something that we know is only associated with the causal activity of intelligent agents. So no biologist, really, when you get down to it, wants to say, well, the sequence of characters in the DNA, the a, cs, and g's in the DNA molecule, the arrangement doesn't matter for building proteins, because all we have to do is change the arrangement and see that the protein unfolds and doesn't catalyze a reaction. There's a real objective way of recognizing function in biology, just as there is in human language. So I think this qualitative, in the information sciences, there's a distinction between specified or functional information on the one hand, and mere complexity or randomness or Shannon information on the other. And that's a real distinction, and it underwrites the whole case for intelligent design. You're right.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: Okay, so the countervailing case for a lot of this stuff is the theory of multiple universes.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: I was hoping you would ask about that.
[00:25:05] Speaker C: People essentially saying that we are above bubble universe, that is, on a bunch of other bubbles, there are an infinite number of universes. So all of the probabilistic arguments that you make in favor of the chain of life and the creation of life, none of this matters in the end, because there are bajillion universes, right?
[00:25:20] Speaker A: We just happen to be the lucky ones.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: We're lucky ones, exactly.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: And they call it the observer selection effect. We think we're special because all the conditions that are necessary for our existence are so incredibly improbable. But in fact, some universe somewhere had to arise that produced organisms such as ourselves. Conscious, aware.
Conscious and intelligent agents. Indeed.
But there's a problem with this whole approach, many problems, in fact. And you might imagine in this new book that I'm doing, I'm writing quite a lot about the multiverse and critique of it. But let me give you the most important problem, and that is, the multiverse itself requires prior fine tuning. The multiverse hypothesis presupposes prior fine tuning. Here's the problem. If you have all these different universes out there, a gabillion of them, if the universes aren't in some way connected, then what happens in one universe has no material effect on events in another universe. So the fact that there may be a gabillion other universes out there, if they're disconnected, doesn't change anything in our universe, including the probabilities of our being here. So to solve that problem, and in recognition of that problem.
Proponents of the multiverse have proposed a common cause for all the universes, so that they can portray the multiverse, all these different universes, as the result of something like a big cosmic lottery, where there's some mechanism that's churning out universes, where eventually one of them would have to have the right combination of factors to make life possible. Now, the problem, though, is that in all the universe generating mechanisms that have been proposed, there is prior fine tuning. There's something called inflationary cosmology, and there's something called the string theoretic landscape. So there's a string theory version of the multiverse, and there's an inflationary cosmology version. And in both cases, there has to be exquisite fine tuning for the universe generating mechanism to actually produce multiple universes. So the problem of the origin of the fine tuning has just been pushed back one generation. One of my philosopher physics colleagues, Robin Collins, uses an illustration like this. He says, so imagine if some chef presents a beautiful loaf of bread to you, and you say, oh, chef, I'd like to compliment your skill as a chef, but I know you didn't actually design the recipe. It was a bread making machine. There was no design in this. There was just a bread making machine that produced the bread. But even if that were the case, the bread making machine required prior design, as did the recipe for the dough that was put in it. So this is kind of analogous to what's going on with the multiverse. It only it doesn't eliminate the problem of fine tuning. It just pushes it back one generation.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: Now, how's the problem with regard to the big bang? So, a lot of folks have suggested that the big bang is not actually the beginning. So there is no in the beginning. There was prior universe that sucked in on itself and then blew out again, that basically time is eternal, and there was no beginning to time, necessarily.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Well, there really aren't good cosmological models that eliminate what's called the singularity at the beginning. Temporally, the standard big bang or the inflationary cosmology model, both terminate in a definite beginning. There have been a number of developments in theoretical physics that have reinforced that. The singularity theorem of Hawking, Penrose and Ellis in 1968, and also a theorem independently in physics, the Borg Volinken theorem, that established a beginning. But what people have tried to do, theoretical physicists have tried to do to get around the theistic implications of there being a beginning, a very abstract model of physics called quantum cosmology. That's where the action is. If you want to get around the theistic argument for the existence of God based on the beginning of the universe. And I'm writing about this, too. It's really heady stuff, but it's based on an analogy to quantum physics. And some of your listeners and viewers are very smart, so they might know about the weirdness of quantum physics, where particles act like waves and waves act like particles. So there's this, there's this thing called a wave function that describes all the different places that a particle might be and then how it might collapse and manifest one particular set of attributes upon an observation. And by analogy, some of the physicists have said, well, maybe the universe came out of a bigger wave function, what they call a universal wave function, where there were all these different possible universes that were existing in what quantum physicists call superposition, sort of existing simultaneously in an abstract mathematical space of possibilities, not as physical reality. And then somehow, someway, all those different possibilities collapsed, and we got a universe like ours. Okay, now, this is a very bizarre thing for a number of reasons. One, they've got a mathematical equation generating a material universe, which is a very not materialistic explanation of things. It's almost, as one of the proponents of this, Alexander Valencian, noted, he said, math is an idea that exists in mind. So when we say that the universe came out of a big universal wave function equation, are we really saying that the universe came out of a pre existing mind? He raises that as a rhetorical question near the end of one of his books and then simply changes the subject to finish the book. The other crazy thing is that to get that mathematical equation that might explain our universe, you have to solve a prior mathematical equation, and you can't do that without an input of information, which comes from the theoretical physicists. So, like in those origin of life experiments, they're actually modeling the need for a mind to generate information. And you get this weird conclusion in the beginning was the word, you know, so it's it's very strange. The attempt to get around the theistic implications of the Big Bang have just have generated other models, which themselves have implications that are very theistic.
[00:31:02] Speaker C: Okay, so in just 1 second, I'm going to ask you a final question. I want to ask about your own religious background.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:31:07] Speaker C: You come from religiously. If you want to hear Steven Meyer's answer, you have to be a daily Wire subscriber. To subscribe, go over to DailyWire.com Comma Click subscribe, and you can hear the end of our conversation there. Well, the book is Darwin's doubt, the author, Stephen Meyer. Stephen, thanks so much for stopping by. Really appreciate it.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: Yeah, we covered a lot. Thank you.
[00:31:28] Speaker C: The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay, executive producer Jeremy Boring, associate producer Mathis Glover. Edited by Donovan Fowler. Audio is mixed by Dylan Case. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo. The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a daily wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: That was Doctor Steven Meyer and Ben Shapiro in a 2019 interview about intelligent design and Doctor Meyer's book, Darwin's doubt. If you missed the first half of this interview, be sure to go back to the previous episode and catch it. And if you haven't read Darwin's doubt yet, now is a good time. Learn more about it and order a
[email protected]. dot that's darwinsdoubt.com. we're grateful to daily Wire and the producers of the Ben Shapiro Sunday special. For permission to share this interview at idthefuture. Find more episodes of the Ben Shapiro Sunday
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[00:32:31] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
