[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 Andrew McDermott. Today I'm delighted to share with you a recent conversation between Piers Morgan and Doctor Stephen Meyer on Piers Morgan, uncensored in a 30 minutes exchange, Doctor Meyer reminds us that though signs can't prove God, it can offer a lot of evidence to support a case for God. Meyer fields questions from Morgan on a variety of topics, from how best to respond to atheists like Richard Dawkins and Neil degrasse Tyson, to the problems with the multiverse hypothesis. Along the way, Meyer opens up about the recent loss of his mother and explains how grief can bring into sharp focus the ultimate questions of life. Here's Piers Morgan, now introducing his guest, Doctor Stephen Meyer.
[00:00:58] Speaker C: The Big Bang theory. Why would that lend support to a theory of a God?
[00:01:03] Speaker D: The picture of the universe that has emerged is a universe that had a definite beginning and therefore requires some sort of external creator or cause that comes.
[00:01:12] Speaker C: Back to the idea of a designer of all this. Are you prepared to accept you could just be completely wrong about this?
[00:01:19] Speaker D: One of the scientists who first discovered these fine tuning parameters was Fred Hoyle, later quoted as saying that the super intellect has monkey with physics and chemistry to make life possible. I would say I love the way the monkeys always make it into the origins discussion, even if it's in physics.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Always goes back to monkeys.
Is your belief that the Darwin theory actually fails?
[00:01:38] Speaker D: I think it does fail. The idea of natural selection acting on random mutations and variations is now understood to lack the creative power to generate major changes in the history of life. Bill Gates said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever devised.
[00:01:53] Speaker C: If you could get the answer to any of life's great mysteries, no one's ever worked out, what would they be? When you look at what's happened in Israel and then Gaza in the last six months, why would a God that has the universal creative superpower allow such misery? And hell, have you thought about that?
[00:02:12] Speaker D: Well, of course.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: Popular wisdom has it. The scientific understanding has challenged or even replaced the notion of God. My next guest has become one of the most controversial philosophical minds on the planet by arguing pretty much the opposite. Doctor Stephen C. Meyer says humanity's greatest scientific discoveries prove there is an intelligent mind behind the universe. He's a New York Times bestselling author who's tested his ideas on some of the world's biggest debate stages. And Stephen C. Meyer, I'm delighted to say, is here in London. Joining me on uncensored.
[00:02:45] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:02:46] Speaker C: I mean, you've got an amazing pedigree to discuss all this. You've got a PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge. You're a former geophysicist. You now direct the Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture in Seattle. You've had New York Times bestsellers, signature in myself, Darwin's daub, Return of the God hypothesis, and you've been on all the biggest podcasts in the world. Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro. Now, I'm glad to say, uncensored.
This all blew up last week because Tucker Carlson went on Joe Rogan. And I don't know if you saw this, but he said this about this very issue. Let's take a look.
[00:03:21] Speaker D: If evolution is real and if there is this constant, I don't know, but it's visible. Like, you can measure it in certain animals.
[00:03:31] Speaker E: You can measure adaptation. Yeah, but there's no evidence that. In fact, I think we've kind of given up on the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution is articulated by Darwin is, like, kind of not true.
[00:03:41] Speaker C: In what sense?
[00:03:43] Speaker E: Well, in the most basic sense, the idea that, you know, all life emerged from a single cell organism and over time, and there would be a fossil record of that and there's not.
[00:03:53] Speaker C: Your response?
[00:03:55] Speaker D: Well, I don't know what Tucker knows about all this, but probably not as qualified as you.
[00:04:00] Speaker C: But he likes to start.
[00:04:02] Speaker D: Oscar happened here in London a few years ago. 2016. Major conference convened by the royal society, arguably the world's most august and prestigious scientific body, was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who are dissatisfied with the standard neo darwinian theory of evolution. And many of the conveners are calling for a new theory because the primary mechanism of biological change articulated by Darwin and his subsequent followers, now called the neo Darwinists. The idea of natural selection acting on random mutations and variations is now understood to lack the creative power to generate major changes in the history of life.
[00:04:44] Speaker C: And at the crux of this debate, is it, as Tucker was getting at there, is it that if you actually start from where Darwin's theory begins, the creation of the human being was so complicated, the body, the way we exist, is so complicated, it doesn't make any rational sense?
[00:05:02] Speaker D: There's two issues, really. There's how do you get to the first life from the simpler, nonliving chemicals? That's sometimes called chemical evolutionary theory. And that's a complete mess. It's in a state of impasse, and almost everyone, even your recent guest, Richard Dawkins, acknowledges we have no chemical evolutionary theory that accounts for the origin of the first life. And many people don't know that Darwin didn't attempt to explain the origin of the first life. Rather, he presumed one or very few simple organisms, which we now know were not simple, and then proposed a mechanism by which you could generate all the new forms of life we see on the planet today. Even that now is being challenged, because the main mechanism of evolutionary change does a nice job of explaining small scale variation, what Tucker was referring to, I think, as adaptation. This would be examples like Darwin's finches, where the beaks get a little bigger, a little smaller, in response to varying weather patterns. But it does a very poor job of explaining the major innovations in the history of life, such as the origin of birds or mammals or animals in the first place. And there, in the fossil record, we do see very abrupt, many instances of very abrupt appearance without the transitional intermediates that you'd expect on the basis of the darwinian picture of the tree of life.
[00:06:15] Speaker C: So is your belief that the Darwin theory actually fails, then?
[00:06:20] Speaker D: I think it does fail. I think it captures an element of the truth.
The small scale micro evolutionary variation is certainly a real process, and no one disputes that natural selection is a real process. But what's at issue now is the degree to which it has genuine creative power. And I think at this 2016 conference, the opening talk was given by a prominent austrian evolutionary biologist, not an american talk show host. And he enumerated five major explanatory deficits of neo Darwinism, many of them surrounding this problem of the mechanism lacks the generative or creative power necessary to account for the major innovations in the history of life.
[00:07:00] Speaker C: Well, your best selling book, new book, return of the God hypothesis, you argue there are three big scientific discoveries that point to the existence of God. I want to go through these. One, the big Bang theory. So why would that lend support to a theory of a God or God?
[00:07:17] Speaker D: Right. Maybe just a little framing before I dive into the evidence.
Professor Dawkins at Oxford has said that the universe has precisely the properties that we should expect if at bottom, there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. And though I'm on the opposite side of this science v. God issue with the good professor, I think he does a marvelous job of framing key issues. And this is one of those great framing quotations. Because what he's saying is that whether we think of it as a scientific question or a philosophical question or both, if we have a hypothesis about reality, the way we test that is by looking at the world around us and seeing if what we see comports with what we would expect to see if our hypothesis were true. And his hypothesis is that of blind, pitiless indifference, which is a shorthand way of saying that everything came about by strictly undirected material processes. And what the materialists expected coming into the early 20th century was evidence of an eternal, self existent universe, one that had been here for an infinitely long time and therefore did not need an external creator. What in fact, the astrophysicists, the cosmologists, the astronomers found was evidence of a universe that had a definite beginning, and therefore one that could not have created itself, because before the matter of the universe came into existence, there was no matter there to do the causing. And so the picture of the universe that has emerged starting from the 1920s all the way to the present, both from observational astronomy and from theoretical physics, is a universe that had a definite beginning and therefore requires some sort of external creator or cause.
[00:08:58] Speaker C: Dawkins is obviously one of the world's most famous atheists. Are you a believer in God yourself?
[00:09:03] Speaker D: I do believe in God, yes.
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Okay, so let's play a clip from Dawkins on this show.
So why is it not possible that there is a superior being, power, which many people believe in different ways at the bottom of the garden, and all sorts of things are possible.
You can't deny that. Well, except I've never seen fairies in the garden. Have you?
[00:09:22] Speaker D: No.
[00:09:22] Speaker C: You've never seen God either?
[00:09:23] Speaker B: No.
[00:09:23] Speaker C: But you don't know for sure that either doesn't exist. No, I don't know that fairies don't exist.
[00:09:28] Speaker D: Fairies may.
[00:09:28] Speaker C: Well, there may be leprechauns for all I know.
You know, my big question for all atheists, well, is, okay, you don't believe in God, but what was there before the big bang, before this all started? In other words, what was there before? Supposedly nothing. What is nothing? Nothing to me seems to be a totally incongruous word. What is nothingness? And if you can't explain it to me, and I believe in God, but to me, it suggests there must be a power bigger than the human mind at the start of all this that was able to comprehend what may have happened because we can't.
[00:10:07] Speaker D: Right. Dawkins wants to portray theistic belief as if it's equivalent to belief in fairies.
And he'll concede that while it's possible. But I think there's a stronger argument for the theistic case, and that is that when scientists and philosophers reason from evidence, they typically use a method of reasoning that has a technical name. It's called inferring to the best explanation, where the best explanation is one where you're invoking a cause which has the kind of powers that would be required to explain the phenomenon of interest. And you correctly pointed out in your conversation with him that when you get back to that, what physicists often call the singularity, the point where matter, space, time and energy begin to exist, the materialist is really up against a huge conundrum, because prior to the origin of matter, there is no matter to do the causing. That's what we mean by the origin of matter. That's where it starts. And so if you want to invoke a cause which is sufficient to explain the origin of matter, you can't invoke matter. It's in principle. The materialistic explanations are in principle insufficient. So you need to invoke something which is external to the material universe and is not bounded by time and space as well. And that starts to paint a picture of the kind of cause you would need that has the sort of attributes that traditional theists traditionally associated with God.
God is outside of time and space, has causal powers, is an agent with volition, and therefore can initiate a change of state from, in this case, nothing to say.
[00:11:41] Speaker C: And do you believe that God created this original single cell from which everything flows to us?
[00:11:48] Speaker D: Oh, the single cell as opposed to the universe?
[00:11:50] Speaker C: Well, I guess you go back to the universe, yes. And then you go back to the creation of a single cell that has this incredible complexity that eventually, through the process of evolution, leads to human beings. Do you believe that's really the most likely scenario?
[00:12:03] Speaker D: Yeah, I do think there's incredible evidence of intelligent design at the point of the origin of life, because that first simple cell in the 19th century, Thomas Huxley, said that the cell is a simple, homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
[00:12:17] Speaker C: Brilliant phrase.
[00:12:18] Speaker D: Wonderful. He was one of the great scientists of the 19th century. But we know so much more now that he didn't know. And what we now know is that inside even the simplest cell, we have digital nanotechnology. We have the information stored in the DNA. We have an exquisite system of information storage, transmission and processing. And that information is being used to build protein machines and other even more complex nanomachinery inside the cell. So it's a sort of automated factory run by digital information. People didn't know about that in the early 19th century.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: But do you believe, like I said originally, there's just one single, solitary cell that's created?
[00:13:00] Speaker D: Well, right. Presumably that's where.
[00:13:02] Speaker C: So what do you think?
[00:13:03] Speaker D: I do think there was an original cell that was created because the theory.
[00:13:06] Speaker C: Of evolution says the journey from single cell to the full complexity of life on earth and so on happen by random trial and error. But your position, I think, is that it's so complicated, this original single cell, so complex, for all the reasons you've just articulated, that that's just simply not feasible, that it would be just random trial and error. It had to be the creation of some superior entity.
[00:13:27] Speaker D: Right?
[00:13:28] Speaker C: Is that right?
[00:13:28] Speaker D: Well, again, there's two contexts. There's the how do you get to the first cell, and then how do you get from the first cell to everything else? Let's just take the origin of the first cell.
[00:13:34] Speaker C: So if you. Do you think the creator of the universe is God?
[00:13:37] Speaker D: I do.
[00:13:37] Speaker C: And then out of the universe comes the creation of a single cell.
[00:13:41] Speaker D: Right. Here's the evidence, though, that when we see information in a digital or alphabetic or typographic form, and this is what we actually see in the DNA. When Francis Crick elucidated what he called the sequence hypothesis in the late 1950s, he realized that the four subunits along the interior of the DNA are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters in a section of software. What we know from experience is that whenever we say information of that sort, it always comes from a mind. Bill Gates, our local hero, has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever devised. Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that it functions like a machine code. Well, what we know is that software comes from a programmer. And in fact, whenever we see information of that kind, whether it's in a software program or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book, it always arises from a mind, not a material process. So the discovery of information at the foundation of life in even the simplest living cell, I argue, is decisive evidence of the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.
[00:14:46] Speaker C: What is the Goldilocks zone, another your big bedrocks of your book?
[00:14:50] Speaker D: Well, this is something, this one way that the physicists refer to something that they call the fine tuning of the universe, or sometimes they talk about the anthropic fine tuning. The idea is that the most fundamental parameters of physics fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances, outside of which, we have discovered life would not be possible, even basic chemistry would not be possible. So the force responsible for the expansion of the universe, called the cosmological constant, is fine. Tuned and accepted value is to one part in ten to the 90th power. So a smidge faster or slower in that expansion, and you either get a heat death of the universe, or you get a big crunch, a great black hole. In either case, life is not possible. That's just one of many parameters that fall within that kind of a sweet spot. So sometimes the physicists do talk about are living in a Goldilocks universe. Luke Barnes has written a wonderful book about the fine tuning. A physicist who also did his PhD at Cambridge has written a book called the fortunate universe. So these types of terms are now making their way into physics, because physicists did not expect that life would depend upon such an exquisitely and improbably arranged set of basic parameters. But there we have it. This is what they found.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: But again, that comes back to the idea of a designer of all this.
[00:16:10] Speaker D: Well, one of the scientists who first discovered these fine tuning parameters was Fred Hoyle. And Hoyle was a pretty aggressive scientific atheist. He opposed the big Bang and even gave the big Bang its name, the big bang, as a kind of pejorative to make fun of them, the concept. But after he discovered some of these fine tuning parameters, he had a shift in his philosophical perspective, in his worldview. And he was later quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the data, the fine tuning data, suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible. And I would say I love the way the monkeys always make it into the origins discussion, even if it's in.
[00:16:50] Speaker C: Physics, always goes back to monkeys.
[00:16:51] Speaker D: All these monkeys either had a typewriter or something.
[00:16:54] Speaker C: There are other scientific hypotheses that don't use God as an explanation for all this. One is the simulation matrix theory, which Elon Musk talks about, or the idea of a multiverse. And when I had Neil degrasse Tyson on the astrophysicist, he said this.
What was there before the beginning of the universe? Everyone asks this question. What's the simple answer?
[00:17:17] Speaker A: I'm delighted I can respond to you. We don't know, but we got top people working on it.
[00:17:22] Speaker C: Okay, you know what?
[00:17:23] Speaker A: There may have been a multiverse.
[00:17:26] Speaker C: I like that. I like the honesty. So we genuinely don't know. People just don't know, right?
[00:17:32] Speaker A: We don't know. There might have been a multiverse that's birthing universes and we're one of them. But that just pushes the question one step further. Before that, what was around before the multiverse? So we just don't know. It's a frontier question right now.
[00:17:44] Speaker C: What is your response? I mean, you know, a lot of Astra visitors and Elon Musk and others think it's actually about the multiverse. For those who don't know, what is the multiverse? And what's your response to that?
[00:17:54] Speaker D: Sure, the multiverse is the idea that, yes, the universe is incredibly finely tuned, against all odds, to make life possible. But the explanation for that is not that there was a cosmic fine tuner, an intelligence, who set the universe up so that life would be possible, but rather that there's a billion or gabillions of other universes out there that have different combinations of these different settings, of these different parameters, and that ours just happens to be the lucky one. And the reason that we have life in our universe is not that it was designed for life, but rather there was a kind of giant cosmic lottery that is responsible and that life must have arisen somewhere. And again, we just happen to be in the lucky universe.
In my response, yes. Yes. Right. Well, the multiverse hypothesis is specifically relevant to explaining this fine tuning, but there's a problem with it, and that is that if you have all these other universes out there, the very existence of these other universes does not explain the fine tuning in our universe. And here's why.
If those other universes are separate from our own, then there's no causal connection between them. So whatever happens in those other universes has no effect on our universe, including it has no effect on whatever process was responsible for setting the fine tuning. So, in virtue of that, multiverse proponents have had to propose a kind of common cause of all the universes, a universe generating machine of some kind that could allow them to portray our universe as the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery. And that's where the rub comes in.
[00:19:32] Speaker C: But is that possible?
[00:19:33] Speaker D: Well, yeah, there's a problem with it, and that is that all of the different universe generating mechanisms that have been proposed, some based on something called string theory, others based on something called inflationary cosmology, themselves, require prior fine tuning in the universe generating mechanisms. And so you explain the fine tuning in this universe by invoking a universe generating mechanism, but that mechanism, in turn, has to be finely tuned. And so you're right back to where you started without an ultimate explanation for fine tuning. And yet we know from our experience that when we find something that's finely tuned, think of a french recipe or an internal combustion engine or a radio dial. Fine tuning always requires, in our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning. It always requires a fine tuner and intelligence. So, given that the multiverse hasn't explained, given an ultimate explanation for fine tuning, the best explanation for fine tuning is still intelligent design.
[00:20:26] Speaker C: You obviously have a gigantic brain, that's clear. And you obviously know all about this stuff, but are you prepared to accept you could just be completely wrong about this?
[00:20:36] Speaker D: Oh, of course. Science is inherently prepared.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: I mean, if you could. I asked Neil degrasse Tyson is. But if you could get the answer to any of life's great mysteries, if I said to you, Khan, the two or three things you'd most like to know the answer to, that no one's ever worked out, what would they be?
[00:20:53] Speaker D: I think it's the. Well, I just lost my mother.
And I think the deepest and hardest questions in life are not actually these big metaphysical questions. I think if you think carefully about them, there's a pretty clear answer. But I think it's the questions that come up because of the events in your own life and sometimes suffering, sometimes joys, why things went this way rather than that way. Those are the questions I think are the hardest ones, the existential questions of one's own personal experience.
[00:21:21] Speaker C: I'm very sorry about your mother.
[00:21:23] Speaker D: Oh, I shouldn't have introduced a personal element like that. But it is.
[00:21:25] Speaker C: No, no, I'm glad you do, because actually it does play into what you just said.
Did that whole experience of losing your mother, did it change any of your thinking about any of this?
[00:21:36] Speaker D: I think the experience of grief was something that was unexpected and how intense it was. She had dementia and had been in decline for several years. You think you're prepared when you're losing someone by degrees, but there's a finality of death that I think overtakes all of us in that moment of grief. And there's something about the grief experience that seems to make everything else pale, to insignificance in that moment. And I think it's kind of my own view of it is kind of a signal, like, your conscience tells you what's right and wrong. I think grief is telling you about what's really important, and that in that instance, what was important is that we had lost a person of eternal value. And so, yeah, I think it's. It was.
You're never really prepared for the loss of a parent. And I thought I was, but I wasn't.
[00:22:21] Speaker C: Do you take comfort because of your religious conviction that you'll see your mother again in an afterlife?
[00:22:28] Speaker D: I absolutely do, yeah. And I think when I was on the Rogan program, he was probing about both the objective evidence for belief in God and my subjective experience. And I would never base an argument to another scientist or philosopher on my subjective experience, but I think belief in God has, I think, legitimate, objective and subjective basis. And I think that mysterious moment when you see a loved one passing when the body is there but the person is gone, it raises some profound metaphysical questions, or maybe a metaphysical awareness that there is something more than the material that is part of all of us.
[00:23:08] Speaker C: So in a way, what you went through with your mother may have actually intensified your own belief in your theory about it.
[00:23:14] Speaker D: Yes, sure.
[00:23:15] Speaker C: Because you felt it.
[00:23:16] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: You see, that's where whenever I argue with atheists, I'm always struck by their refusal to go there into stuff like that. And yet they must themselves, through their own life experiences, have moments and experiences which must test their own conviction that there is nothing else.
[00:23:33] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a both hand thing. If you're a believer, there's plenty of good solid scientific evidence, good philosophical reasons for belief. But then there are these experiences too, that we have along the way that suggest it's not just matter in motion. You know, there's more to the world than the material stuff.
[00:23:48] Speaker C: When you hear someone like Richard Dawkins, when he's so emphatic that he's right and, you know, believing in gods, like believing in fairies and all this kind of thing, what do you. I mean, do you respect that or do you think it's just performative somewhere?
[00:24:01] Speaker D: Well, I honestly, I've never. He signed a book for me once in a line. You know, I've never met him, but when I see, I watched the interview you did with him, and I honestly, there's something about the guy. I love the guy. He's so intense about me.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: He was quite rude about me afterwards. I don't know why. I really quite enjoyed the interview. I thought it was quite like, you know.
[00:24:17] Speaker D: Yeah, it looked like you were having fun.
[00:24:18] Speaker C: Yeah. I didn't think it was a problem, but he clearly thought there was.
[00:24:21] Speaker D: I always feel that anyone knows that level of intensity about the big questions in life is someone with whom I share a kindred spirit. Now we're in the opposite. We've come to the opposite conclusion. But I also think he has this great talent for framing issues. You know, the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect. That's a great quote. If no design, no purpose. Another one. He says that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. And yet Dawkins himself acknowledges that he can't explain the origin of the first life.
[00:24:53] Speaker C: Right?
[00:24:53] Speaker D: So.
[00:24:54] Speaker C: And that to me, right there, his inability to do that is where his whole position to me collapses. Because if you're going to just make assumptions that another person's view is completely wrong, there cannot be a God. Well, okay, fine, but you've got to better explain.
[00:25:10] Speaker D: You've got to deliver the goods. In the interview with you is so telling. When you asked him what he wished he knew and could explain, he said, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of consciousness. Well, those are the very things that materialism is. Not just that science can't explain those. A materialistic world fails to explain it.
[00:25:31] Speaker C: Yes. And actually, a belief in God is, in a way, endorsed by those big questions, because the human brain cannot come up with any other logical explanation. So a logical explanation based on science and data, it doesn't exist.
[00:25:47] Speaker D: And this is not God of the gaps. Okay? There are gaps there for materialism, but the materialists assume that any explanation that doesn't involve a purely material process is an explanation that is just filling a mere gap. But the rules of explanation are a little different than that. A good explanation provides a causally adequate explanation where you infer an entity which, if true, would be capable of generating and therefore explaining the thing of interest. We look at the origin of the universe, and we understand that matter, space, time, and energy come into existence. Then prior to that, no, there's no matter, again, to do the causing. So, materialistic explanations are inherently inadequate. And yet positing an external entity that has volition and agency does fit the bill. If true, that would provide a positive explanation.
[00:26:44] Speaker C: So here's the tough question, because I've had family members who renounced their faith over the Holocaust, for example. Right, right.
How could a fair, just God allow that to happen? When you look at what's happened in Israel and then Gaza in the last six months, a lot of people might question, well, why would a God that has the universal creative superpower of the kind that you believe God had to create all this? Why would they allow such misery and hell to also exist on tragic.
Have you thought about that?
[00:27:18] Speaker D: Well, of course, there's a traditional theistic answer, goes back to St. Augustine and maybe earlier, the idea of sometimes called the free will defense. If you're in an argument about the so called problem of evil, I actually find it persuasive and compelling. And it's the idea that God created us as free moral agents and understood, in creating us that way, that he was taking a risk that we could use our agency for good or for ill. We could use it to love him and to love the other creatures he's made, or we could use it to aggrandize ourselves.
And we have instances of both on this planet, and the people will say, well, why would God do that? Well, I think the answer is that God understood that creating agents with free will opened the possibility of evil, but it also opened the possibility of genuine love.
If he had created mere robots, we wouldn't really be persons. We wouldn't have the quality of life that is possible to us. So in a sense, it's evidence of a divine risk, but it was a risk that I think he deemed worth taking. And ultimately, in the christian tradition, which you and I share, there's a plan for sorting all that out at the end, redemption.
[00:28:34] Speaker C: Do you believe in aliens?
[00:28:36] Speaker D: Well, I'm very skeptical about extraterrestrial intelligence.
[00:28:39] Speaker C: It used to be, isn't it more likely than not that there are aliens?
[00:28:43] Speaker D: That's a very good question, piers. It used to be thought among physicists and astrophysicists, the answer to that question was yes, because there's so many galaxies. And this is part of the cosmological question that's so fascinating. I wrote in return of the God hypothesis that there were 200 billion galaxies. I've since been corrected by an astrophysics colleague who says probably closer to 2 trillion now.
[00:29:05] Speaker C: Insane number.
[00:29:06] Speaker D: Insane number of galaxies.
[00:29:07] Speaker C: So how can we say with any real conviction that we're the only things like this?
[00:29:11] Speaker D: There's a couple books that came out in the early two thousands. One called rare Earth by two astronomers at University of Washington, another called privileged planet. And yes, there's a lot of galaxies out there, but it turns out that the number of parameters that have to be finely tuned in a just right way to make not just a universe consistent with life, but a life friendly solar system, a life friendly planet. The number and improbability of getting all of those parameters right may actually dwarf the number of galaxies and planets out there. It's an open question, but it used to be thought of slam dunk. There must be life elsewhere. Now, I think there's an argument both ways among the astrophysicists, but the truth is nobody knows. Nobody knows. We haven't found anything like it.
[00:29:59] Speaker C: Final question, what's the meaning of life?
[00:30:03] Speaker D: Well, I think it ultimately is to come into a relationship with the creator who made the universe.
In the closing chapter of my book, I talk about Viktor Frankl and the man's search for meaning and how universal that is, and that nothing can mean anything to a rock or to an atom or to a planet. Things only mean things to persons. So if there is to be meaning in life, there must be genuine persons to whom we can mean something and who can mean something to us, and yet we all die. And so I think if there is a God, it reopens that question of ultimate meaning. The french existentialists used to say, sartre, without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning, right? But if there is an infinite reference point and that infinite reference point is personal, that is to say, if the universe was created by a personal agent who wants to know us, then the possibility of enduring meaning is again on the table.
[00:31:00] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, if you. I've had this conversation with Ricky Gervais. It's like, well, if everything, if you only believe that what happens in your existence here is. That's it. How sort of pointless, transitory and vacuous it must all be to you. Whereas if you believe in the concept of infinite life, albeit in a different way, that's great.
[00:31:22] Speaker D: That's the question that haunted me as a teenager.
What's it going to matter in 100 years, no matter what I worked on, no matter what I achieved, no matter what goal I set, I thought I couldn't. What was the point? And I one time came across the quote from Bertrand Russell, where he talks about all the great labors of the human race and the noonday, the brightness of human achievement. Noonday, human achievement is destined for extinction and the vast death of the solar system. I wasn't much fun at parties, as junior said, but those sorts of. At a certain point in life, whether it's when you're very young, often when you're nearing the end, those sorts of questions.
[00:32:01] Speaker C: Perk will particularly, I think, when you get near the end.
[00:32:04] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:32:04] Speaker C: When you're really questioning, am I right? It just seems to me completely in the same way that when atheists can't explain what happened before the big Bang and when they can't say that, when they say nothing happens, when you die and stuff, that's where my belief in God gets massively increased. It's one of the main reasons I think there must be a God, is that actually none of that would make sense, that we just started one day and there was this weird thing called nothing before there, which no one can really explain to me what that is. And at the end of it, it just ends. And then that's the end of that. That doesn't make any sense, that someone would create something so extraordinary that's led to us, the human being. And then at the end, that's it.
[00:32:47] Speaker D: And that's the other thing about the grief emotion, is that it seems to be telling us there's something profoundly unnatural, not intended by death. But then on the flip side, in that realm of objective scientific evidence, and this is the message of my book to me, when I look inside the cell and see the evidence of that digital storage, transmission and processing system. Richard Dawkins himself said upon seeing an animation of this recently that he was knocked sideways with wonder at the intricacy and complexity of the digital information processing that's going on inside cells. This is extraordinary. It's like a, a 3d printer. You've got digital code directing the construction of three dimensional structures and machines all inside the tiniest recesses of the cell. There is no materialistic, chemical, evolutionary or other account of that, but we see features inside the cell that are reminiscent of our own high tech information and digital technology. This seems to be pointing obviously to a transcendent mind.
[00:33:47] Speaker C: Fascinating stuff. Return of the Godheart brothers. What a great book. Great to see you.
[00:33:50] Speaker D: Wonderful.
[00:33:51] Speaker C: Doctor Meyer, thank you very much. Yes, really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: That was Doctor Stephen Meyer in conversation with Piers Morgan about intelligent design, atheism and the evidence for God. We're grateful to the producers of Piers Morgan uncensored for permission to share the interview here. We'll include a link to it in the show notes for this
[email protected]. dot and you can find the video version on YouTube. If you fancy an even longer conversation with Stephen Meyer, listen to or watch Doctor Meyer's interview on the Joe Rogan experience, which came in at a whopping 3 hours and 20 minutes. It's long, but definitely worth it. You'll find that one on Spotify. For id the future, I'm andrew mcdermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
