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.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: This is the thing that really struck me down in Dallas, which you had written about, but you know, sometimes it has to smack you in the face and that's this idea of information. And you were very attuned to that as a young man, apparently.
So what is information to a scientist and how does it trace us to the mind?
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Maybe the best way to get into it is to distinguish a couple different kinds or definitions of information.
There's a mathematical theory of information that was developed by the computer scientist and mathematician Claude Shannon, the MIT scientist in the late 1940s. Shannon's idea was that information is related to the reduction of uncertainty. If something informs you of something, it's reducing your uncertainty about something. So if you have a coin and you flip it when it comes up heads, you've reduced the uncertainty you had about whether it would be heads or tails. If you have a die, a die, a six sided die, and it comes up a three, you've reduced the uncertainty by quite a bit more because there were six possibilities in the case of the die and only two possibilities in the case of the coin. And so, in addition to the intuitive connection between information and reduction of uncertainty, Shannon developed a way to quantify how much uncertainty was being reduced. And in effect, he showed that the more improbable the event, the more improbable an event is when it occurs, the more uncertainty is reduced. If you look at the. If you think of the die, you've reduced uncertainty to the tune of you had six possibilities and now there's one. So you've reduced more uncertainty in the case where event that occurs is more improbable than in the case with the coin. Where there were only two possibilities and you have a higher probability of getting either the head or the tail than you do of getting any one of the six sides on the die. So you reduce less uncertainty in the other case. So you've imparted less information. The more improbable, the more information you're imparting.
[00:03:35] Speaker C: It's future looking, in a way, right?
[00:03:37] Speaker A: And so this is a powerful intuition. And then he's able to quantify the amount of information that is being transmitted down a channel with various. He's got various formulae and things that are based on this basic intuition that there's an inverse relationship between improbability and.
Or there's an inverse relationship between probability and reduction of uncertainty and the transmission of information. Now it turns out that Shannon, as powerful as that intuition was, was very explicit that he couldn't really distinguish a series of characters that were meaningful from a series of characters that were not. So he was actually able to measure the information carrying capacity without being able to measure whether that information transmitted was functional or not. So he's measuring the capacity, the carrying capacity, without measuring or determining whether the information had content, if it was actually meaningful or functional. And so there's another form of information that's more relevant to biology and more relevant to computer science and more relevant to human speech and communication, and that we call specified information. And a way to illustrate that, that I've used probably ad nauseam, is just comparing a string of characters, 20 or so letters long, with a line of poetry. Time and tide wait for no man. The one, because there's no discernible English words or any other words in the sequence has Shannon information. It's an improbable array, but the character's not arranged or specified in their arrangement so as to perform a communication function. And so that's a really crucial distinction because the kind of information that we have in DNA is actually the specified kind of information. The arrangement of the genetic letters in the genetic text matters to the function of the gene, the stretch of DNA that is providing instructions for building the protein.
[00:05:48] Speaker C: So a mind produces and understands.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: So the point of that is that there might be some mindless process that would produce a merely improbable sequence that did not have a specified arrangement of characters to perform a function. But in our experience, mind is the only known cause of specified information, at least specified information of a given amount. I mean, you might get lucky with a few, a couple, two or three word letters. If you're pulling letters out of a scrabble bag. But if you need a lot of information, it will always require mind. And we have a probabilistic way of making those demarcations.
[00:06:29] Speaker C: What about how was that different? I was not going to ask you this question because I said I cut them in half. But the difference between that type of thing and scientific laws and constants, it's an important distinction, right?
[00:06:44] Speaker A: The laws of nature. Sometimes people will say, well, maybe there's a law of nature that we haven't discovered yet that will explain where information comes from. That sounds kind of plausible because we think of the laws of nature as things which explain. There are fundamental tools for explaining things in the natural world. One of the reasons I like the Newton story that we just talked about is that it shows that our fundamental laws of physics very oftentimes are merely describing what generally happens without providing a causal explanation for any given event.
And the other thing to note about the laws of nature is that they describe repetitive patterns, things that happen in a similar way over and over again. So we may have. I was dropping my cell phone a minute ago, and I could drop it 100 times, and you'd see basically the same event. And we would, because we'd seen that same kind of event over and over again, we could come up with a law. In fact, Newton did a law of gravity to describe this repeating phenomenon that we see over and over again. And he used a simple mathematical equation to describe those gravitational motions. And so the laws of nature have a characteristic that information scientists call redundancy. They're describing the same thing over and over again. Remember the old joke about Department of Redundancy? Department. JJ speaking.
You've got. The laws of nature describe redundant patterns of order, repetitive patterns of order. But informational sequences are by definition something different than that. They are aperiodic and complex in that they are not reducible to simple patterns that repeat over and over again. If I sit here and say, T H e, T H E or recite a mantra, whatever information was in the first utterance I gave you has not been added to by those additional utterances. Okay? That's redundancy. And so the laws of nature describe redundant patterns of order. They do not explain the origin of aperiodic, complex, and specified sequences that are conveying information. It's the wrong kind of. It's the wrong kind of beast. It's the wrong kind of entity to explain the thing that's of interest here.
[00:09:08] Speaker C: Gotcha. That's beautiful.
The next two questions I have are.
This is the kind of question I Asked Rodney Stark, who wrote a lot about this, he could benefit from people like you in reading it.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: Well, I benefited from Rodney Stark's work. His great book with Princeton University Press, for the Glory of God, is one of the definitive works on the religious basis, the Judeo Christian basis of the scientific revolution.
[00:09:39] Speaker C: Yes, wonderful book. And that is. So I'm. My first question is if I could just get your comment about how the creator God or whatever you want to say about it concept made the scientific revolution happen. And I'm referring specifically to the period, roughly 1500 to 1750, where it was clearly dominated by Christians in the West. Not totally because you had Muslims that were doing somewhat the same stuff and really advanced mathematics, but it seems to have been more, you know, coming from Europe eventually. So the scientific revolution in the early stage, where did that come from?
[00:10:25] Speaker A: There's a famous historian of science, Joseph Needham, who was himself a Marxist in his worldview, who asked a famous question about the origin of modern science. And the question was, why there and why then? We've had great civilizations. The Chinese made gunpowder and had a very sophisticated civilization. You go back to the ancient Egyptians, you have the Romans had their aqueducts and their roads in Muslim countries, you had development of mathematics. But you don't see the systematic approach to interrogating nature, the systematic methods for investigating nature develop until this period of the scientific revolution. I mean, we could also talk about the Greeks, but there were many things about the Greek way of philosophizing about nature that actually held back empirical investigation. And so Needham was very curious, well, why in Western Europe, why? And why then in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s?
And the answer that he and numerous other historians have come to is that the difference that made the difference was the worldview, that there was something about the Judeo Christian way of thinking that inspired the scientific investigation of nature. Rodney Stark's title captures some of that. He says, for the glory of God, the scientists were motivated to study what they believed were the works of God to bring glory to him. But that's really only part of it. There were other assumptions that were really part of a biblical worldview, one of which was that nature is intelligible. It could be understood because our minds are made in the image of the same mind who made the rational order in nature that we're studying. And that was one of the reasons that mathematics was so prized by Newton and Kepler and others that they believed that the language of nature was mathematical and that that was an expression of the divine mind.
But there were other premises. One was that nature was a created order, but the order that it manifested was contingent on the will of the Creator. It could have been otherwise. I used to use an illustration when I was teaching on this.
If you have a whole bunch of paintbrushes, there's a whole bunch of different ways to use. You've got fat ones and skinny ones and tiny ones.
They all have roughly the same function, the same Aristotelian final cause to place paint on a canvas. But that Aristotelian way of thinking of final causes and the Greek way generally. The Greeks thought of the logos as the fundamental underlying explanation of things. This sort of deep logic that even the gods had to obey. Okay? And so that meant that there was a logically necessary way that nature had to be. And the job of the philosopher thinking about nature in the Greek context was simply to think, well, what is the most logical way that nature should be? So they came up with the idea of perfectly circular orbits, because that was the perfect geometric form. So that was the way that nature should and had to be. And we had 2000 years of Ptolemaic astronomy based on the idea of circular orbits. And it wasn't till the scientific revolution that people said, well, maybe we should go out and look and see how they really, you know, what the motions of the planets really actually reveal.
And Robert Boyle captured it beautifully. He said that it is not the job of the natural philosopher to ask what God must have done, but instead to go out and look and see what he actually did do. Okay? And so that the impulse to investigate things empirically came out of a view that, yes, nature was a created order, but it could have been created in many different ways. There might have been. Newton might have discovered that gravity had an inverse square law, which is what he did discover. Or maybe gravity might have been an inverse cube law, or maybe it would have as just a linear function. There were many different possible ways that nature could have been ordered. And it was our job as the natural philosophers to look and see what was done. So that was another premise. Nature was a created order. It was intelligible, but it was also contingent on the will of the Creator. So we had to go and look and see. And one other premise that came out of the sort of the Protestant side of the equation, I think both the Catholics and the Protestants and the ancient Hebrew scriptures, many concepts from the Book of Job were inspirational to the early founders of modern science. So there was a contribution from all those different faith traditions. But one of the things that the Protestant Reformers emphasized was the depravity of man, that humans were sinful, and that that sin affected our noetic capabilities, that it affected our thinking. And so we were. That made us prone to flights of fancy, made us prone to bias. It made us prone to wishful thinking. And so to check our theories, to check against those aspects of the fallenness of the human intellect, we needed to check our theories against actual data. And we needed to come up with rigorous ways of testing our theories to make sure that they were actually conforming to the way the world worked and weren't just flights of fancy or products of our own biases.
So that was.
[00:16:10] Speaker C: That's four right there.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Yeah. A whole mix of assumptions about nature, about human nature, and about the relationship of God to nature. In particular, that he was a creator and a rational creator were part of the inspiration for science and also part of the conviction that science could be done, that it was worth the hard effort to try to figure out what those underlying rational principles that were governing the world.
[00:16:37] Speaker C: That's kind of what Stark ended with, is you don't go looking for things you don't think you can find.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: That's exactly right. You don't go looking for things you.
[00:16:45] Speaker C: Don'T think you can find. And so we ended up with Ben Franklin getting electrocuted to go out and check nature out. He probably had a mistress or two, who knows? So he had a.
A sinful nature you got to watch out for. So that's a good lead into the next question, which is the period 1750 to today where you have increasing knowledge of the description of nature, but somehow man associates that knowledge with himself and not the Creator. How do we get here? How do we get here?
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Well, it's a long story.
There's a scientific aspect of a philosophical aspect. But I think that there's an ancient maxim of St. Augustine Credo UT and Telegom believe in order to know. If you have a prior belief in a benevolent creator, that implies that has positive implications for our ability to know the world, because it implies that our minds have been made in a way that allows us to do so. When knowledge in the field of epistemology, the subject of how we know what we know and the grounds and justification of knowledge in the field of epistemology, when you get secular figures like David Hume and they want to separate our ability to know from theistic belief, and they want to ground knowledge only in empirical observation, what arises out of that is skepticism. Because Hume, Hume famously argues that we can't know, we can't know those inductive generalizations which are the very object of scientific inquiry. We want to know the general laws that describe nature. Well, that's the very thing Hume says we can't ever know. And so you have this postmodern turn as it comes down to us in the last couple centuries, where there's a doubting of our ability to know. And so that's taking place in philosophy and then in science, extreme skepticism. In the 19th century. You have this corresponding affirmation from people that science is the only way to know and that what science is figuring out is how everything came to be without the assistance of any designing intelligence whatsoever. So you have the 19th century origins theories. You have the Laplace explaining the origin of the solar system. You have Darwin explaining the origin of new forms of life. You have Huxley and Haeckel extending his ideas to try to explain the origin of the first life. Darwin himself extends his idea in the other direction to try to explain the origin of human life. And then you get figures like Marx and Freud and many other scientific materialists.
I think Darwin, Marx and Freud in a way are illustrative of the zeitgeist Marx trifecta. Darwin tells us where we came from in materialistic terms. Marx has his dialectical materialistic account of where the human race is going with his utopian vision of the future of a social state. And then Freud in the early 20th century has an account of what to do about our guilt, but explaining it away, and then also argues that that God did not create man, that man created the concept of God. And so you have this complete reversal in the establishment of this materialistic worldview, and a worldview that's often asserted with great certainty by the scientists at the same time that the philosophers are saying we can't know anything at all and that the scientific method doesn't, that we should be skeptical about the scientific method. So you have this kind of. Kind of schizophrenia within intellectual thought.
And that's why I think one of the wonderful things that commends theism, theism, I think, affirms scientific realism and also allows us to do good science.
[00:20:48] Speaker C: Okay, we're almost to the core of what we heard about yesterday, which is where all your work is, the scientific questions. And we'll be able to get through that pretty quickly. I'm not going to.
I'm going to try and go lightly. And you can feel like you can go lightly too, because there's so much available on the Internet and in YouTube already about a lot of this stuff, But I thought you. Before turning there, I thought I'd ask you a little bit about where we are as you see the scientific community today.
Are they becoming more and more open to intelligent design?
Do you feel like you're possibly, you know, a Francis Bacon in the middle of a big new wave, or do you feel like you're just a little piece of light in the night like David Hume, who might have been early in the secular movement? I mean, where are you, where are we with Intelligent Design?
[00:21:51] Speaker A: I have no idea where I personally am other than here at the Heritage foundation with you today. But I would say I'm extremely bullish about the development of the Intelligent Design research program and the development of the community of scientists who are advancing that program. We've had some very high level conversions, scientific conversions, that is, and changes of mind about these origins issue.
One very striking example of that is the case of Gunther Beckley, a very prominent German paleontologist who in 2009 was curating the Darwin Bicentennial and Sesquicentennial exhibition celebrating both his birth and the work the Origin of Species. He created a display that was in some way mocking the idea of intelligent design. One of his colleagues challenged him and said, gunther, if you're going to make fun of the ID people, you should read their books because you're our spokesman. You may get asked in the media. And Gunther later told me, he said that was my mistake. And he found. He came out to see us in Seattle to the Discovery Institute. We had some long and deep conversations. He told us he had concluded by reading a number of the key ID books that we were being unfairly maligned, that there was a lot more science supporting our work than he had any inkling about before. And that led him into a kind of a deep think about the whole issue. And within several years he was openly acknowledging that he was now a proponent of Intelligent Design and a skeptic about Neo Darwinism. And he's doing some great research work for us as a paleontologist. He's really first rate. David Gelaranter is another interesting case. Yale computer scientist who read my book Darwin's Doubt and David Berlinski's important collection of essays the Deniable Darwin, where he encountered the mathematical argument that we've made against the plausibility of the Neo Darwinian mechanism as an explanation for the origin of information and the origin of new forms of life.
And Gellerenter wrote a really extraordinary review essay called Darwin of Fond Farewell in the Claremont Review of Books.
And there have been many other leading scientists who are either coming out of the woodwork and becoming more public in their support for this, or offering to sponsor graduate students in their laboratories as mentors, or announcing scientific conversions. So I think this is and in fact, this has been going on through much of the 20th century. In my book, I talk about the scientific and philosophical conversion of the physicist Fred Hoyle, who was a staunch scientific atheist who embraced some form of sort of theistic belief to account for what's called the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics. You have figures like Dean Kenyon who were Kenyon was a prominent evolutionary, chemical, evolutionary theorist who repudiated his own theory and then embraced the Intelligent Design hypothesis. Alan Saanidge, the great cosmologist who was a staunch scientific materialist who ended up having a religious conversion in part because of, not in spite of his own scientific discoveries relating to the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. So there have been many of these cases of scientists moving away from a scientific materialist viewpoint and embracing either intelligent design or theism, or at least a skepticism about the scientific materialist views that they once held.
[00:25:40] 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.org that's stephencmeyer.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Visit us at id, future.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
