Episode Transcript
[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, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer sits down with Praxis Circle's Doug Munro to offer insights into the intersection of science, philosophy and religion.
In this section of a multi part interview, Dr. Meyer begins by discussing the nature of information. He explains the difference between mathematical information, or Shannon information, and a more meaningful type of information called specified information.
Dr. Meyer then turns to the theistic assumptions that fueled the scientific revolution.
Why did modern science begin where and when it did? What was the spark that ignited that famous period in human learning and history? Dr. Meyer has answers. The episode concludes with Dr. Meyer explaining why he's bullish about the Intelligent Design research program. And he offers some examples of his reasons for confidence and optimism.
Let's join host Doug Munro now with his guest, Dr. Stephen Meyer.
[00:01:19] Speaker C: Could you just list not explaining each one, sort of the basic three to five arguments for God. What areas of science do you see that?
[00:01:29] Speaker D: Well, right. The subtitle of my book Return of the God Hypothesis is Three Discoveries that Reveal the Mind behind the Universe. And I start in a sense building on the biological arguments that I made in the.
Actually, the order is reversed in the new book, but the here's the story of the book. I wrote two books beforehand, One Signature in the Cell and second, Darwin's Doubt. And these were books arguing that the information needed to build the first life and major new innovations in the history of life is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence. In 1957, Francis Crick advanced something called the sequence hypothesis. This was four years after he and Watson had elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule. And in 57, Crick realized that the subunits along the interior of the molecule, along the spine of the molecule, subunits called the bases or nucleotide bases, were functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters, like the zeros and ones in a section of software.
That is to say, that is not the material properties of those chemical subunits that give them their function. It's not their weight or their shape, but rather their arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention now known as the genetic code. And so what Crick was able to elucidate with the help of other scientists in the ensuing seven or eight years was a whole information storage, transmission and processing system. And that DNA was literally carrying instructions for directing the construction of the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive. And so at the foundation of life, we don't just have matter and energy. We don't just have chemistry, we have code. We have information. And that raised the really huge question in biology, where does that information come from?
And that question scientists, because they could not answer that question within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, either chemical evolutionary theories at the origin of life, or I would have and have argued biological theories of the origin of the new information needed to build new forms of life are also inadequate to account for the origin of the information needed to build new biological form. It takes, just as in our computer world, you need new information to generate a new program or operating system to give your computer a new function in the biological world, you need information to generate new biological form. It takes information to create form. And so that has turned out to be a very, very difficult problem to solve within the framework of evolutionary biology. I argued in Signature in the Cell, my first book, that information in our uniform and repeated experience is always the product of an intelligent cause. And our uniform and repeated experience is the basis of all scientific reasoning. So there's actually a scientific basis for inferring that there was a designing intelligence responsible for the information necessary to life. Whenever we see information, whenever we detect it, and we trace it back to its ultimate source, whether it's in a section of computer code or if it's in a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book, or even information embedded in a radio signal, whenever we look at that information, trace it back to where it came from, we always find a mind, not an undirected material process. So the discovery of information at the foundation of life in every single cell of every living organism, including the very first simple one, celled organisms, suggests that a designing intelligence played an important causal role in the origin and development of life. And that's the argument of the first two books. And that's what I pick up in the third book, you know, because people then asked, well, who do you think that Designing Intelligence is or was exactly?
[00:05:34] Speaker C: We. I'm sure you've seen this because you've probably seen everything. But Del Tackett did. Did a worldview thing and he had a classroom that he put on about the cell, and he had a. He has a movie of what's in a cell. And it is the most amazing thing where he makes it look almost like a factory, you know. And have you seen that by any chance?
[00:05:57] Speaker D: Well, I won't say it might be part of the. May have been part of the Truth project that he did.
[00:06:01] Speaker C: Yes, it was the Truth project. Exactly.
So. Well, let me move along to the. And then you said yesterday that, you know, you got into astronomy to write your third book, more than you typically had prior to that, and the Big Bang. And this is just another Diddy. But have you ever seen Stephen Colbert and Lawrence Krauss?
[00:06:25] Speaker D: I've seen that little interview. Yes.
[00:06:27] Speaker C: That. That pretty much.
I mean, my. In reading his book, Colbert brought out the humor of what he was saying there, that every time he said, you know, nothing creates something, he always had something there creating something, you know, and so.
[00:06:49] Speaker D: Well, that's the idea what Krauss was popularizing in his little book, Universe from Nothing. It was one of the two main models of what is called quantum cosmology, the idea that we can explain the universe out of nothing physical by reference to some underlying quantum mechanical laws of gravitation. So Stephen Hawking famously said that there is a law such as gravity explains why there is something rather than nothing. You know, why the universe came into existence. But what's not stated there is that the nothing.
Oh, yeah, is not really nothing. It's the laws of, you know, that there is a law such as gravity explains how you can get the universe to create itself from nothing. Well, if there are laws of gravity, then that's not nothing, Right. So if the laws are explaining how you get from nothing to something, then that presupposes that there are those laws and the laws are mathematical in character. And that really exposes an even deeper paradox for the quantum cosmologist, because, as Alexander Valenkin pointed out, who is one of the other great advocates of quantum cosmology and whose work Krauss was popularizing, he pointed out that the mathematical equations, and the mathematical equations we use to express those quantum physical laws are conceptual, that math exists in the realm of the mind. And so what these quantum cosmologists ultimately are arguing is that matter and energy emerge out of a conceptual realm of math, which necessarily implies a preexisting mind to think the math, to think the idea, the mathematical ideas. And so they've invented quantum cosmology to get around the theistic implications of the standard Big Bang theory and its affirmation that there was a beginning to the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy, before which there was no matter that could do the causing of the universe. You see the problem, and they saw the problem, too. And so they developed this other model. But so, first of all, they did not end up getting rid of the beginning. In all the quantum cosmological models, there's still what's called the singularity at the beginning. But their explanation for the origin of the universe out of the singularity is a preexisting mathematical reality that could only have reality if there was a pre existing mind. And so in their attempt to circumvent the theistic argument, sometimes called the cosmological argument, they ended up showing that if you adopt a different cosmological model, you still end up having inadvertently, you end up reaffirming the need for information. The need for information, but also a mind.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: A mind.
[00:09:53] Speaker D: A mind behind the universe.
[00:09:55] Speaker C: Yeah, and that's a little bit. And this question isn't asked exactly, but kind of the ontological argument where they'll say, well, who created God? And at some point you have to believe that there is something eternal, that is a mind that creates. It's not a turtle's problem.
Where else can you go?
What do you say?
[00:10:22] Speaker D: Yeah, sometimes people will object to the design hypothesis saying well, or a theistic design hypothesis more specifically by saying well, then if you're positing God as the explanation for the origin of the universe, who created God? And doesn't that therefore render your explanation absurd?
And my answer to that is no. That every philosophical system has to posit something as what philosophers sometimes call a primitive the thing from which everything else came. Or in worldview studies they call it the prime reality. Or in form of philosophy, they'll talk about the issue of ontology. What is the thing from which everything else came? And the materialists have long the eternal self existent thing from which everything else came. The thing that doesn't need explaining. And materialists have long affirmed that matter and energy are those things.
And I would say in the aftermath of the great revolution of thought that's taken place in the last hundred years in cosmology, where we have multiple lines of evidence and developments within theoretical physics suggesting that the universe itself, the physical universe, had a beginning, that matter and energy are now a poor candidate to be the thing from which everything else came. They themselves appear to have come into existence a finite time ago, before which, whatever that means, there was no matter and energy to do the causing. They can't be the eternal self existent thing, because they began a finite time ago. They haven't been around forever.
Whereas if you posit God and a God possessing the attributes that say Jews and Christians have long ascribed to God, then you are positing the existence of an entity which has precisely the type of attributes that you would need to explain the origin of the physical universe from nothing physical God is an entity who exists outside of space. And time is immaterial and is thought to have great power. So if such a being exists, it provides a better explanation. To suppose that such a being exists provides a better explanation for the origin of the universe than does materialism.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: Yeah, it's all we know that we see in human experience that could explain it. And it's why I think the Genesis first few chapters is so amazingly accurate. Because humans could see that or it was revealed to them one of the two or both.
[00:13:12] Speaker D: Just to amplify the last answer a little bit, there's a great physicist, Arno Penzias, who discovered co discoverer of the cosmic background radiation, which was one of the very important confirming pieces of evidence in support of the Big Bang theory and the concept of a cosmic beginning. And he famously said, the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted if I had nothing to go on. But the first five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.
If you take a kind of Bayesian take on this, where you think, okay, I've got two different metaphysical hypotheses, what expectations would I generate from one as opposed to the other? Well, the idea of materialism or scientific materialism was the idea that matter and energy were eternal and self existent. They'd always been here. But then we discovered no, the material universe had a beginning. So that's not what you would expect on a materialistic world given a materialistic worldview. But given a theistic worldview, indeed even a biblical worldview, you would have greater reason to expect a beginning, because on a biblical world or on a theistic worldview generally, you would be positing a creator for the universe and therefore that would suggest the possibility of a beginning. But on a biblical worldview, we have an even greater reason to expect a beginning to the universe because it's affirmed in the Bible as the first words of the Bible and in other places.
So I think Penzias quote highlights how the way in which the Big Bang theory or the evidence we have supporting that theory is confirmatory of a theistic or biblical worldview and disconfirming of a secular materialistic worldview. Interestingly, Richard Dawkins has framed the issue beautifully. He says the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect. If at bottom there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. But that turns out that's a great way of framing it because it says, hey look, we can test our competing metaphysical hypotheses by looking and observing the world to see what kind of properties it has, but the properties of the universe suggest that the universe had a beginning, and that's not what you'd expect given Dawkins scientific atheism. So it's disconfirming he pulled the rug.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: Out from under himself a little bit there.
Let's move to fine tuning a little bit. And you know, that argument has been around a while now, and it's really gained momentum because I think there were, I don't know, three or four basic fine tuning measurements. And now I've seen 20, you know, things that have needed it. 25. It just seems there are more and more things that as scientists look around, laws that had to be just right for life. And if you look at the probability of all these things, it's almost. It's really zero. I mean, it's not even rounding. It's as close you can get to zero without being zero itself.
My question is, where is that argument now and what is the counter argument to it?
I mean, to me, as you said earlier, it proves God really.
[00:16:33] Speaker D: Well, the second class of evidence that I address in the book that I think reveals the mind behind the universe that points to intelligent design is the evidence that physicists have discovered in their analysis of the conditions that would be needed in their analysis of the physical property, the basic physical properties of the universe. And they found that time and time again there are very fundamental properties of physics, such as the strength of gravitational attraction, or the strength of electromagnetic attraction, or the mass of the elementary particles, in particular the quarks, or the. The strength of the force that's causing the universe to expand, called the cosmological constant, that each of these different fundamental parameters have to fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances outside of which life would be impossible. And the probability of getting even one of these parameters in that just right sweet spot is oftentimes extremely small. Sometimes it's just small, but other times it's almost vanishingly small. So, for example, the cosmological constant is the name of the force that physicists give to the force that is causing the expansion of the universe. It turns out that that force is fine tuned to one part in 10 to the 90th power.
So it's a big, you know, 10 to the 90th big exponential number. There's a tiny, tiny smidgen within a vast range of possibilities. To put that probability of getting that force just right in context, it would be that roughly the same probability as a blindfolded man floating in free space would have, of choosing one marked elementary particle among not Just all the elementary particles in our universe. But in having to explore 10 billion universes our size, it's incredibly improbable. Okay, and yet the universe is sort of balanced on a razor's edge and.
[00:18:45] Speaker C: You only need one right. Of the key forces.
[00:18:48] Speaker D: Yeah, but many of these probabilities, some of the probabilities might be derivative. Some of the parameters might be derivative of others. And so the probabilities in those cases would not be independent. But, but many of the probabilities and the parameters are certainly independent. So the probabilities are multiplicative. But you start with just a few parameters that you have insanely small probabilities, and yet you're in the sweet spot where life can exist. So Fred Hoyle, who discovered some of the first and most important fine tuning parameters, had been a staunch scientific atheist. He has a reversal of worldview as a result of his own discovery of the fine tuning, and later is quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics to make life possible. And it's pretty compelling. Fine tuning suggests a fine tuner.
[00:19:50] Speaker C: What else can you say? At some point, and I don't know if they can disprove that, when are we going to disprove that?
[00:19:57] Speaker D: Well, I'll tell you what the scientific materialists are saying as a counterpart, they argue that, well, yes, the probability of getting one or all of these parameters just right is infinitesimally small. But what if you had a nearly infinite number of universes? Then, yes, the probability, if you have an infinite number of universes, then you could conceive that the combination of factors that would be life friendly would have to arise in one of those universes just by chance. Okay? And then we just happen to be the lucky ones.
But there's a two fold, there's a problem with that. And there's two aspects to it, and that is that if you just have all these other universes, then the mere existence of those universes doesn't, and they're not interacting causally with our universe, then the mere existence of other universes does nothing to explain whatever process it was that set the probabilities in this universe, because there's no interaction.
So in virtue of that, multiverse proponents have suggested that there are kind of universe generating mechanisms that produce all the different universes, including our own. So they can portray our universe as a kind of lucky winner in a great cosmic lottery. But that's where the ultimate rub comes in. Because it turns out that for those universe Generating mechanisms, whether they're based on something called string theory or inflationary cosmology, for those universe generating mechanisms to produce new universes, even in theory, to plausibly generate new universes, those universe generating mechanisms themselves have to be exquisitely finely tuned. So there's unexplained prior fine tuning in the multiverse hypothesis. So it takes you right back to where you started. And given what we know, what we mean by fine tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that work together to accomplish a significant outcome or function.
And when we see fine tuning in our experience, whether we're talking about a finely tuned French recipe, or a finely tuned internal combustion engine, or a finely tuned radio dial, or any finely tuned system, those systems always result from a mind, from a prior intelligence. So even if the multiverse hypothesis is, is correct, it only underscores the need for prior fine tuning, which takes you right back to the need for intelligent design. And so I think either way you go, you have evidence of either way you go.
[00:22:40] Speaker C: And is it fair to say, just in the vernacular, to the common man, there's no evidence of another universe, Right. We don't have. Oh, there it is. Or maybe some of those. There's no evidence.
[00:22:52] Speaker D: But by the same token, the materialists could say, well, there's no direct evidence for God. We posit God because of the explanatory power.
[00:23:00] Speaker C: No, but they're wrong about that. There is tons of evidence.
[00:23:03] Speaker D: So anyway, well, God is also an unobservable, and the same way that the other universes are unobservable. But the point is that the multiverse doesn't get rid of the need for an intelligent agent to explain the fine tuning, Nor is it a simpler explanation than the theistic explanation.
It turns out that if you think of those two different universe generating mechanisms that the materialists have had to propose to explain the fine tuning, when you posit those mechanisms, they themselves require belief in all kinds of unobservable entities.
Extra dimensions of space in string theory, unobservable strings in string theory, a force called an inflaton field, et cetera. And so you end up multiplying explanatory entities in the materialistic multiverse explanation, Whereas in the theistic explanation, you can explain the same data more simply by reference to one single explanatory entity, namely, a transcendent intelligence. So the theistic explanation passes the Occam's razor test much more nicely than the materialistic one does.
[00:24:15] Speaker C: No question.
[00:24:16] Speaker D: Plus, you're invoking a gabillion other Universes, which is fantastically extravagant as part of your explanatory framework.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: Yeah, we'll just, we'll just leave that aside for now. I'd love to go on about it because I just think it's crazy that we're even talking about.
[00:24:34] Speaker D: I think that's a good reason to leave it aside.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: I think God's more or less proven, but. Okay, so let's assume you have three minutes to tell a man off the street.
I think everybody today believes in Darwin's theory somehow they're taught it all their educational life.
And you've got Francis Collins out there in biologos. That's a second question. Where do you all stand? In all due respect, I lean toward you if there is a difference.
[00:25:09] Speaker D: Very significant difference, but.
[00:25:12] Speaker C: So how would you explain to a man off the street why Darwinism is most likely false as they think of it?
[00:25:22] Speaker D: Well, the term evolution has multiple meanings. It can mean simply change over time. It can refer to small scale variations among very similar organisms, like the Galapagos finches that got a little longer, a little shorter beaks in response to varying weather patterns. It can also refer to the idea that all organisms are related by common ancestry.
And most importantly, and this is the most important aspect of the Darwinian idea of evolution, it refers to the idea that there is an undirected, unguided process called natural selection acting on random variations. And in our modern times, we would also talk about acting on random mutations. And that undirected process produces all the forms of life we see and all the change that's implied by Darwin's depiction of the history of life as a great branching tree.
So in explaining my skepticism about evolutionary theory, I typically explain why I am skeptical about the creative power of that mutation natural selection mechanism, because that's the most important element of the theory. I don't doubt that there's been change over time. I don't doubt microevolutionary change. I think that some organisms may be related by common ancestry. I'm skeptical about universal common ancestry because there's too much evidence of discontinuity in the fossil record and in the genomic record. But the main focus of my skepticism concerns the claims for the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism. In 2016, I attended a conference at the Royal Society in London, where leading evolutionary biologists convened a conference to evaluate new developments in evolutionary thinking and evolutionary biology. But the main unstated reason for convening the conference was that they recognized the need for a new theory of evolution and that the Mutation selection mechanism does a nice job of explaining that small scale variation in the Galapagos finches, but it does a very poor job of explaining the origin of birds or insects or the first animals or what biologists call morphological innovation. It explains small scale variation, but not major change, major innovation in biological form. And at that conference in 16, the first lecture was given by a leading Austrian evolutionary biologist named Gerd Muller. And he started his talk by enumerating what he called the explanatory deficits of textbook neo Darwinian theory. The first one of which had to do with this lack of creative power associated with the mechanism. And so I have various ways of explaining that, but one easy way to grasp that is to think about the problem of generating new information.
Because in our biological in biology today, we now realize that if you want to build a new form of life, or if the evolutionary process is to succeed in building a new form of life, it must produce a lot of new information. You need information to build new biological form, you need new information to build proteins, to service new types of cells, et cetera.
So where's that information come from? Well, in the Darwinian scheme, it comes as a result of random changes in the DNA in the sections of DNA that have the, or in the, in the characters, the information bearing subunits of the DNA that carry the information.
Well, we know from our computer world that if you start randomly changing zeros and ones in a section of computer code, you're going to destroy that code, that operating system or that program long before those random changes are going to have a chance of generating some new program or operating system. And it turns out from very careful studies have been done by, on mutating DNA and proteins, it turns out the same thing is true in DNA in the cell. If you start changing the ACs, GS and Ts, the digital characters or the genetic characters in the genetic language at random, you will invariably degrade the structure of the resulting proteins long before you'll generate the capacity to build a new protein. And so the origin of information is a crucial problem that has not been solved by the standard neo Darwinian evolutionary model or I would argue and have argued in Darwin's doubt any of the post neo Darwinian theories of evolution that have been proposed either.
[00:29:48] Speaker C: Yeah, so it's producing the information that's beyond complicated and then reproducing it is a whole nother issue that you all got into. Very, very definitely.
[00:29:58] Speaker D: It's not just that you've got information in DNA, it's that DNA Is part of a larger information storage, transmission, and processing system that includes the ability to copy information from one cell and as cells divide into other cells.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: All right, while we're hot, I want to ask you about is theory of everything more or less dead? Because physics can't necessarily talk to chemistry, can't necessarily talk to biology.
There are just so many blockages that people are seeing that they can't think we can get around. Is that a fair statement or not?
[00:30:38] Speaker D: Theories of everything are, I think, conceptually incoherent. The idea that there could be a theory of everything Is conceptually incoherent because there's a fundamental misunderstanding that is prevalent among a lot of physicists. Physicists think that the laws of nature explain particular facts, and the laws of nature tend instead to describe general patterns of behavior in nature. But they don't.
They may sometimes explain particular facts, but they don't explain all particular facts. And here's why.
Imagine you have an apple falling from a tree, and you use the law of gravity to describe the motion. Okay, so far, so good. But now you also see a rocket ship flying to the moon, and you also use the law of gravity to describe its motion. It's crucial. We needed to know the laws of gravity to be able to put a man on the moon. So the law of gravity is applicable to describing both of those motions, but there's a big difference in the motions, and the law is not the difference that makes a difference. And to explain why the apple fell as opposed to the rocket ship flying, we need to invoke other factors to explain the different. To provide an explanation that explains the difference. And the other factor actually has to do with the way that metal was configured and the parts were made to make a rocket ship that had the ability to constrain thrust and fly.
And so that pertains not to the laws of nature, but rather to the configuration of matter and what, in a different context of physicists, might refer to as the initial conditions of the material state.
So the laws of physics by themselves, the idea of a grand unifying theory was we'd get one law that would explain everything. Well, if the law was so general, if it was even more general than the law of gravity, it will describe aspects of all motions or all events, but it won't explain why one event happened as opposed to another, because it's so general, it applies to everything, and it can't be a difference that makes a difference between two contrasting event scenarios.
[00:33:03] Speaker C: So I think I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
[00:33:06] Speaker D: So it's conceptually confused.
[00:33:08] Speaker C: Is that dying or is interest in that?
[00:33:11] Speaker D: There's always interest in this among physics. They want to reduce the four fundamental laws to one fundamental law of physics, and they may succeed in that, although I'm doubtful because for other reasons I could explain. But even if they did, then they would just have a very general description that applied to every piece of matter and every piece of energy and every. Every realm of space time. But they wouldn't be able to explain why one thing happened rather than another. They wouldn't be able to explain the origin of any biological system because that requires explaining how specific configurations of matter arose against the backdrop of these very general laws that don't explain why one configuration as opposed to another is favored.
[00:33:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer with host Doug Munro discussing the theistic roots of the scientific revolution and the nature of information.
We're grateful to Praxis Circle for permission to share this exchange at ID the Future.
Look out for two other segments of this interview in separate episodes.
Learn more about Dr. Meyer's books, videos, online courses, and more at his website, stephencmeyer.
That's stephencmeyer.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Hi, this is Steve Meyer, and I want to thank you for being a regular listener of the ID the Future podcast. We appreciate your interest in intelligent design and the work we're doing to develop the case for the theory of intelligent design. And I'd like to include you, if you find these broadcasts edifying, intellectually or otherwise, to become a regular financial supporter of the work of the center for Science and Culture. You may know that we depend entirely on private donations. We don't get any federal money, we don't get government money for our scientific research program. And if you find the work that we're doing interesting, we'd be awfully grateful if you'd consider becoming a partner in that by providing whatever you're able to ensure that that work goes forward.
To give, go to discovery.org id donate. That's discovery.org id donate.
[00:35:30] Speaker D: Thanks so much.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Design Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
