Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker C: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer concludes his conversation with Praxis Circle's Doug Munro. In this last section of a multi part interview, Doug Dr. Meyer explains why theistic evolution, the belief that God used the evolutionary process to create, is an incoherent position to take on the origin and development of life. There's no need, Meyer says, to attempt to reconcile theistic belief with a dying theory.
Meyer also discusses the topic of miracles. He thinks David Hume's classic argument against miracles is weak and goes on to explain how miracles demonstrate the independent action of a conscious agent and why they don't violate the laws of physics. It's an intriguing conclusion to a wide ranging conversation. Let's join host Doug munro again with Dr. Stephen Meyer.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: I would like a little comment between the Newton and Leibniz of our day today. And that's the dispute, if you can call it that, between you and Francis Collins, about the extent of evolution applying to things. Could, could you give a layman's comment there?
[00:01:26] Speaker D: There are different views of biological origins within the religious community, within the Christian community, within the broader theistic people who hold a theistic worldview. And one of those views which is different than the view I hold is the view of theistic evolution. And that's the idea that God in some way used the evolutionary process to create life, to create the new forms of life.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Wasn't that the church's sort of original approach to when it came up?
[00:01:57] Speaker D: Just not really, because the evolutionary theory really only dates from the 19th century and so there are figures. I'm sorry to interrupt in any case. So theistic evolution is sometimes a little bit difficult to define because there are many different versions of it. But roughly speaking, it's the idea that God used the evolutionary process to create that sounds kind of innocuous, it sounds sort of commonsensical. But it has three main problems with it. There are scientific problems associated with it, there are philosophical problems associated with it, and there are theological problems. The scientific problem is very simply the one we just covered. And that is that if the mutation natural selection mechanism, the main mechanism cited by evolutionary biologists is itself lacks creative power, then it's incoherent to claim that God used that to create.
In other words, the theistic evolutionists have been involved in kind of trying to reconcile what they regard as mainstream evolutionary biology with their religious beliefs, not realizing that mainstream evolutionary biology itself is beginning to recognize problems that are that make that synthesis unnecessary. Okay. And I would say actually that for at least 40 years now, maybe longer. I mean, in 1980, Stephen Jay Gould said that Neo Darwinism is effectively dead except as textbook orthodoxy. People have known now for a very long time about the problems associated with the creative power of natural selection and random mutation.
I explained several more than the ones we talked about already in this interview in Darwin's doubt and this Royal Society conference and other events of biologists who call themselves sort of third way. They don't want to endorse intelligent design, but they know that neo Darwinism is dead. One of the biologists at the conference in London said criticism of neo Darwinism is Now so early 90s, in other words, it's passe even to criticize the theory. So there's a disparity between what our students are being presented and what even people in the field of evolutionary biology know.
All of which is to say, why are prominent professors at Christian colleges or prominent scientists associated with groups like biologos working so hard to try to reconcile their Christian or theistic beliefs with. With a dying theory, with a theory that lacks a creative mechanism for explaining the origin of new forms of life? So that's the scientific problem. The logical problem or philosophical problem is that Darwin conceived of the mechanism of natural selection acting on random variations as a purely undirected, unguided process. And the reason for that was that he was trying to explain the appearance of design in living organisms without invoking an actual designing agent. And so he came up with this mechanism that was a kind of designer substitute mechanism.
Well, if the mechanism of mutation and selection is natural as opposed to intelligently guided, and that's how it was formulated, then how is that logically compatible with the idea that God is guiding the evolutionary process? If God is guiding an unguided process, it's no longer.
Now, if you ask the evolutionary biologists if they think that the mechanism is guided or unguided, they get famously sorry. If you ask the theistic evolutionists if they think it's guided or unguided, they get kind of famously ambiguous and will say, well, it might be guided, or they'll often say it isn't guided. If they say it isn't guided, they've got a flat out contradiction. If they say it might be guided, they have such an ambiguous theory as to not really warrant critiquing it, because it's not really a theory at all. It's not really telling us what is the true causal agency that's responsible for the origin of new forms of life. And then I would argue there are theological problems. We can set those aside for now.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a big argument among scientists and theologians. But at least you both believe in God having some role.
[00:06:23] Speaker D: I think the main problem with the theistic evolutionary position is it's not at all clear what role the theism plays.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: What role it is.
[00:06:29] Speaker D: Is that just a rhetorical add on or is God actually doing something that makes a difference scientifically?
[00:06:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:34] Speaker D: And typically the theistic evolutionists will say no, the design of the Creator is not detectable scientifically, which means that their science is identical to that of the materialist.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we've talked. I'm going to get to sort of a bottom line question of you as a Christian and maybe a different order. We're making the turn to the last page, Steve. So you're doing awesome and I just can' Enough. And why don't you get a glass of water here?
How do you think of the resurrection? I know you think it's possible, if you want to comment on that. And how do you think of it? If I could put a picture on it, as I think about it, I don't know any other way to think about it except for the last scene in the Passion of Christ, the movie that. I forget who the director was, Milgamon, where he just. He's in the tomb and something happens and it opens up and he walks out. I don't know how else to think of it. But what do you have?
[00:07:35] Speaker D: Well, it's a big question for me, maybe as a philosopher, too many facets.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: I know you've been asked that before.
[00:07:45] Speaker D: I don't think that miracles violate the laws of nature. I think that's a misconception again, about what the laws of nature do. They describe regular patterns of occurrence in the physical world. But there is within law of nature always a ceteris paribus clause, all other things being equal. In particular a clause that says provided there is no interfering conditions. So if I were to analyze the movement of billiard balls on a table or pool table, I guess. And I know the law of momentum exchange and I know the initial conditions that are in play.
What the force is when ball A hits ball B at angle X. I can predict the outcome as a physicist in theory at least. But if when the Q strikes the ball, somebody shakes the table, then all bets are off. That doesn't mean the law of momentum exchange has been violated. It means that someone has introduced into that physical system a new causal a chain of Cause and effect.
And I think biblically, miracles are conceived of as acts of God, acts of a personal agent. In the Exodus account it says that and the Lord caused an east wind to blow.
Now it may not be the ordinary thing for walls of water to stand up, but a sufficiently strong force even produced by wind might be capable of doing that. In other words. But the philosophical point is my low.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Lying property on the bay will agree with that.
[00:09:36] Speaker D: But the point is that if an agent acts in a otherwise closed physical system, you may get unexpected outcomes without the laws that apply to that physical system being violated. So I think that and that argument and other arguments that I can make against say, Hume's skeptical argument against miracles.
I think Hume's argument against miracles is incredibly weak.
But anyway, I don't think there are good in principle philosophical reasons to reject the possibility of miracles. Miracles are fundamentally acts of God. They are impossible if there is no God to act. The prior probability of miracles given scientific materialism is zero. But if you have good reasons for believing in God, then the probability shifts to non zero. And you have to evaluate the historical evidence itself to see whether or not it suggests that a miracle took place. And in my case, without going into all the details, I have had a deep dive into some of the great scholars who have examined the historical evidence surrounding the resurrection. And I would name four. Wolfhard Panenberg, his student William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas and N.T. wright. And Habermas has some extraordinarily persuasive videos online.
N.T. wright wrote the magisterial 700 page volume the Resurrection of the Son of God. And I think that.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Is that the gold standard.
[00:11:14] Speaker D: Would you say they're all. Craig's PhD dissertation, which cost me $150, is probably Edwin Mellon Press. I remember when I got it. It's a fantastic piece of work. So they're all very, I mean there's some very profound scholarship on this. And there's two different ways of arguing for the resurrection. One is called the minimal facts argument, another called the maximal facts argument. I actually think they both work. I mean, I think the historical evidence is surprisingly strong when you get into it.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Well, we interviewed Eben Alexander, who was. He was a brain surgeon. The Proof of Heaven, that was a bestseller 2012.
[00:11:53] Speaker D: Oh, I know him because his books are always ranked ahead of mine on Amazon, making some science and religion.
That guy has done really well.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Well, he's done well, but he died and came back to life, as you know, he would say his brain was truly dead and gone and deteriorated for about five days.
And he.
Somehow that brain got put back into shape, and he is as sharp as he ever was. And he went from being a materialist to a. He's beyond a. He's not a dualist. He believes this is all consciousness. That's really where he is.
[00:12:37] Speaker D: So he's sort of a Berkeleyan idealist.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. But he's a scientist like you, and he's done his very, very best, especially his last book, which isn't selling as well as Proof of Heaven. That was just about his experience.
He's done his very best to investigate science, and that's where he's come out. So my way of saying that everything's a miracle. I'm a miracle. My consciousness, this matter and energy miracle.
[00:13:06] Speaker D: Well, I do want to say that natural entities have real causal powers associated with them. So I do think that we actually detect God's special action. I think those causal powers are a consequence of God's creation and his upholding the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry.
But I do think we detect God's special agency against the backdrop of what nature ordinarily does. And so I think distinguishing between two powers of God, as the medieval theologians did, between his ordinary power of sustaining and upholding the regular concourse of nature, and his special action where he acts as an agent within the matrix of natural law that he otherwise sustains and upholds, is a good way to think about nature. It's a good theology of nature, if you will.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Okay, well, that's a lead into the next question. A little bit about. We haven't talked about the Cambrian Explosion. That was new to me. Maybe five years ago.
How did. Did. Did that happen somehow in your mind, in a way like the resurrection, it just. God, before man was around, could see it, or. I mean, how would that. How would those beings be created?
[00:14:28] Speaker D: The answer to that is we don't know.
I think there's a.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: Like gravity. Right.
[00:14:33] Speaker D: Well, there's an asymmetry in science, often between prediction and explanation. And this is a slightly different asymmetry, but it's the asymmetry between our ability to detect the activity of an agent and being able to understand how mental agency affects matter.
No one has any idea about how mental agency. Well, we may have ideas about it, but we do not have an adequate explanation of how mental agency affects matter. And that applies to divine agency as well as human agency. You and I are communicating with each other using words right now, but we're actually modulating acoustic signals and sending them across a room. Our Ears are picking them up. They're sending a signal to our brains. Our brains are processing that, and somehow our minds are interpreting that signal and we're understanding each other.
All that was initiated by, in my case, a desire to communicate something to you. So my mind, through conscious deliberation, my mind of which I'm aware through direct introspective experience, has causal powers of which I'm aware. But I don't really know how the mental realm affects the physical. And so we can't really answer the question, well, how did God.
We can see evidence of the activity of mind in an event like the Cambrian Explosion. For one thing, we have a massive increase in the amount of information in the biosphere in a fairly narrow window of time.
And I think the increases of information are, in our experience, solely produced by mental agents. Therefore, we have evidence of mental agency in the history of life. That's a radical conclusion, but one I think that follows from the evidence and our knowledge of cause and effect.
But going the other direction is difficult. We don't really know how, presuming it was the mind of God, how God's mind affected matter. The scripture uses metaphors like the spirit of God brooded over the waters. Well, we don't get a full account.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Is it fair to say? I'm asking a leading question.
[00:16:45] Speaker D: But I guess the payoff point there is that just because we don't know how mind affects matter in the forward direction, if the causal arrow is running in that direction, doesn't mean that we can't retrodict or detect the activity of mind in the reverse direction from the distinctive effects that we know only minds produce.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yes, and that's pretty obvious. Along those same lines, at least to me and you. Along those same lines, would it be fair to say that like gravity for one, how life started. Number two, what consciousness really is. Number three, in spite of Daniel Dennett, there's really no scientific explanation for that. Those things that are satisfying yet, right? Or we don't feel like we.
[00:17:35] Speaker D: Well, I would quibble with the framing of your question slightly. Okay. Because we want to say that positing an intelligent cause is a properly scientific explanation for certain types of evidence, especially within certain types of science. If I am asking a question about causal origins of something that happened a long time ago, and I have every indicator in that event of the distinctive activity of an intelligent agent, then the best explanation is to infer that an agent played a role. And that's also a scientific explanation, or it's at least as scientific as its competitor. A Darwinian materialistic explanation. Because we're trying to. The difference between Darwinism and Intelligent Design is not that they are two different types of things rather than they're two different competing theories trying to explain the same types of events and they're even using the same methods of reasoning to do so. So I would say it's yes, I don't think we've had materialistic or evolutionary explanations for the origin of the Cambrian animals or the origin of the other abrupt appearances of living forms in the history of life or the origin of life. Nor have we had materialistic explanations that explain the fine tuning or explain consciousness. But that doesn't mean that there might not be non materialistic explanations that have an equally good claim to be scientific.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: I'm with you 100%.
I just remembered the name of Dr. Alexander's last book. It's the Mindful Universe, I think.
[00:19:16] Speaker D: And so we'll have to get to know each other.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. He's a real good guy and he was very generous with his time like you are. I actually knew his sister at Carolina. And you know, he's a little bit older.
Okay. Now we've only got like three or four more questions. Are we okay?
[00:19:36] Speaker D: I think we're okay. Yeah.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah.
[00:19:38] Speaker D: Well, maybe not all three or four, but maybe I'd have cut off by two. Two. Just.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Okay. Two. All right.
Are you a dualist? How do you think of.
[00:19:47] Speaker D: I'm a dualist interactionist. Yeah. I'm not a Cartesian dualist, but there's a model of mind body interaction that was developed by Sir John Eccles and some of his colleagues in the 90s. A great brain physiologist who was a mind body dualist. And that's. He and Popper wrote. Karl Popper wrote a book called the Self and Its Brain. And a book that I love is a book about how to treat anxiety disorders.
Practical sort of book for people to help with anxiety called you'd Are not yout Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz. And the same kind of concept that the self or the soul or the mind controls the brain or can control the brain as an instrument of.
We have what Jeffrey Schwartz, a great psychiatrist at ucla, has discovered is that the most effective ways to treat anxiety disorders are to help people to retrain their brain, retrain certain patterns of thinking that are reflexive. And you can use your mind to do that. And so the very success of those modes of treatment suggests a distinction between mind and brain.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: I'm sorry, I thought it was more like 1:32 more questions for you. Two more questions with four minutes to go.
What is wokeness? What's your view of cultural Marxism, postmodernism and identity politics together? What would you have to say about that?
[00:21:29] Speaker D: I think I'm going to pass on that one. For some reasons. I. I have, you know, a lot of interest in that, but I think I'll just pass.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. What about the. This is another political question. I think you answered the last one.
Anything to say about Christian nationalism?
[00:21:48] Speaker D: Same. Same thing there. But I will say something about our current political and cultural setting.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of a speech, a great speech that was given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, his men have forgotten God speech. And it has an incredible sort of anecdotal opening where he tells about, as a young person, the news is spreading across Russia about the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the old people are weeping in the fields. And he's told repeatedly by older people that these great disasters have befallen Russia because men have forgotten God. And I think we're facing a situation in our culture where we have a lot of disasters that are beginning to befall us. We have these, I mean, almost every third day, evidence of a brawl somewhere.
So we have violence, we have crime, we have epidemic teen suicide, we've got the fentanyl crisis, we've got epidemic levels of anxiety in the culture.
A lot of things in our infrastructure are not working our political. And we have. Anyway you could enumerate, right. And some of them can be directly traced to a loss of belief in God and the moral convictions that go with that. I think certainly the crime epidemic can be. I think the loss. From my own experience, I'm incredibly sensitive to the experience of angst that a lot of young people have. I don't think it's just anxiety about future prospects. A lot of the anxiety of the teen suicide is taking place among kids that are coming from very affluent homes.
It's more of a metaphysical anxiety. It's a quest for meaning that's not being satisfied. And so I think that if there is a hope for our country to reverse these trends that so many people find are disturbing, it is in the re. Embrace of our belief in God. Our whole system of human rights was based on the idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. There was this idea of intrinsic dignity that informed the whole Western tradition. And we had dignity because we had been made in God's image. And that dignity meant that we had Rights that even the state could not take away. And so I think we're at a pivotal moment in our culture where there is a lot of pain. There is an increasing dysfunction in society, in cities, in families, and our last, best and greatest hope is to return to God. And I wrote Return to God Hypothesis in part because I'm completely persuaded by the evidence. And I think it's a great story that's been not told. But now that the book's out, I'm also hoping it will have an effect in opening people's minds and hearts to the reality of God, because I do think we can, as the philosophers say, have knowledge of God. There is justification for true beliefs about our Creator. And I think it provides returning to that theistic foundation for culture and for family life and for personal life. I think provides the best hope for all of us.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: We want to help you with that and practice a circle. And John Haidt is writing a book about the anxiety problem. But you have a window on this because I think you're at the tip of the spear. Are you optimistic or pessimistic for us in this country over, say, the next 10 years? Do you have.
I get answers all over the place on this. And you believe me, people you think would be optimistic will be pessimistic. And people you think it's just.
[00:25:58] Speaker D: I'm agnostic and pray every day. The. The cultural moment.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: You're just staying in the now.
[00:26:03] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I just.
[00:26:07] Speaker D: The shortest answer. I gave you all this.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Well, no, but this has just been an honor and a privilege to speak with you about this. Thank you so much.
[00:26:15] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:26:18] Speaker C: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer with host Doug Munro discussing the problems with the theistic evolution perspective on the origin and development of life on Earth and sharing his view on miracles. This exchange originally aired on the Building Worldviews podcast, and we're grateful to Praxis Circle for permission to share it at ID the Future.
Look for previous segments of this interview in separate episodes. As always, you can learn more about Dr. Meyer's books, videos, online courses, and more at his website, stephencmeyer.org that Stephen C. Meyer.
And before we go today, Dr. Meyer has one more thing to share with us.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: 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 encourage 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 work by providing whatever you're able to ensure that that work goes forward.
[00:27:48] Speaker D: To Give, go to discovery.org iddonate that's discovery.org iddonate thanks so much.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
