[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Tom Gilson here to tell you about today's podcast and make a handoff to Michael Medved and Stephen C. Meyer talking on the Michael Medved show about science, faith, the Big Bang, and a great book and video series produced by Dr. Meyer and the Discovery Institute.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: And another great day in this greatest nation on God's green earth. And a great day where there has been a point of view that has been advanced for years now, actually for generations.
And it's a point of view that's extremely destructive. That point of view says you have two choices in this world for a source of wisdom and understanding. And the two choices are science, which is the preferred choice, of course, or faith, which is often denigrated as something that is medieval, is outdated, is irrelevant in today's world.
Not so fast, says Steve Meyer. And say, I would say most thinking people, there is nothing incompatible between science and faith.
There is actually in fact, indication to believe that people who, who have made the most dramatic advances in scientific understanding were individuals of very deep faith. All of this is brought out in a remarkable bestseller that I hope everybody here has already gotten a copy of, which is the Return of the God Hypothesis by my friend Steve Meyer, who is the head of the Institute for Science and Culture of Discovery Institute here in Seattle.
And Steve, very glad to speak to you and I hope you continue to have a successful and wonderful recovery from the COVID 19.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: Well, thanks for those good wishes, Michael. I'm all better. It was a mild case, but it lingered. I guess a number of people have had that experience. So. But I think the last interview I did with you was right before the holidays, and that's about what time I came down with it. But we had a terrific conversation about the, the new telescope that NASA has put up, the James Webb and good memories of that conversation.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yes. And by the way, what's the update on that? Have they come back? I know that they were going to be taking a look at, I think, the best look of the far, far distant cosmos that they've ever had before. Any results yet from the James Webb Telescope?
[00:02:48] Speaker C: No report yet. They're still gathering data, but they got it up. It was a few days late. They meant to get it up on the 22nd of December. It actually was fully up and operational on, well, they launched it on the 25th of December. So it was a Christmas Day launch, which was kind of interesting.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: You have right now a very exciting new series of videos which I think is really worth calling attention.
And one of them, the first one in the series, is our Religion and Science in Conflict.
And you, you make this very profound point that lots of people have bought this whole idea of promulgated and Inherit the Wind. And in other dramatic plays, Bertolt Brecht had a play about Galileo where basically it's this struggle between religion and science. But even going back fairly far in scientific history to the age of Galileo or Isaac Newton, people who pursued science most effectively were in fact people with deep religious commitment. No?
[00:04:00] Speaker C: Well, it's absolutely true. And the historians of science who have studied this period in the history of science known as the scientific revolution, go a bit further than saying than just that. It's not just that scientists happen to be religious and therefore there was no conflict, but rather they were pursuing scientific investigation of the natural world for religious reasons.
There were certain presuppositions about nature, about the nature of God, about the nature of human beings that made science possible.
And those presuppositions were coming out of the Judeo Christian tradition, the Hebrew Bible, out of developments in late Catholic medieval theology, and out of the Reformation. All three of those theological traditions contributed to the rise of modern science and with presuppositions. For example, a very important one was the idea that nature is intelligible. It was made by a rational mind, the mind of God, who also made our minds in his image. And therefore we could understand the reason, the rationality, the order, and the design that had been built into nature. So the confidence in our ability to understand nature and understand itself, its fundamental secrets, was a product of a religious sensibility.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: And again, if you're looking for order in the universe, and certainly that is one of the goals of science, is when people talk about Newton's laws of motion, for instance, you're talking about order in the universe. The idea that the universe is ordered, and as you make very clear in this video material, by the way it's posted at our
[email protected] People can see each of these videos are about five minutes long, but they're packed with content that once you acknowledge that there's order in the universe, the question is, how'd that order get there? Is there any answer that you can think of that doesn't lead to, if not a religious conclusion, at least a religious inference?
[00:06:07] Speaker C: Well, I think actually, no, it's a very big mystery. Especially in fundamental physics. We have these four basic laws, the four fundamental forces of physics. And what we. What physicists do is they describe these patterns of order or Repetition.
So we could call it the orderly concourse of nature. And in the period of the scientific revolution, they did that. They started to do that using mathematics because they were convinced there was an underlying order there that expressed the mind of God.
And in physics at the time and even up to the present time, these fundamental force laws describe how one part of the universe or how matter interacts with other matter in a very orderly, mathematically describable way. But we don't really know what causes those fundamental forces. And this was a great mystery in the time of Newton. He proposed the universal law of gravity, which described the way in which matter in one part of the universe affects the movement or motion of matter in another. The Earth is affected by the movement of the moon, and we see that in the movement of the tides. But the Earth and the Moon aren't touching each other. And this was called the problem of action at a distance. A force is being transmitted through empty space, but there's no material medium of the, no pushing and pulling that explains that motion. And Newton thought ultimately, because there wasn't a material explanation for gravitational attraction, that ultimately the explanation was immaterial. It was one of my Cambridge supervisors put it when I was in grad school studying this. He said Newton's view was that the ultimate explanation for the laws of nature is constant spirit action. There is the spirit of God is holding the universe together in an orderly fashion. And we describe that with the laws of nature. But the laws tell us how things happen. They don't tell us why.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: That's Stephen Meyer, and that's part of the background that you can get when you go to our website and check out some of the material that he has put together on these videos about science and God. And they are fascinating and very well produced. And by the way, he mentioned his graduate school at Cambridge University. I should say Steve, who's been talking about the history of Science, has a PhD, a doctorate degree. It's Dr. Meyer from Cambridge University.
We will be right back with more from Steve Meyer. You can get further information again, just go to michaelmedvedved.com look for the material from Discovery Institute and the new videos that are now available.
The videos are Science and Religion in Conflict. And then coming up when we're going to talk about it just a little bit more is how did the universe begin? Why was Albert Einstein, of all people, one of the most brilliant scientists ever, such a strong opponent of the Big Bang theory, which is now accepted widely in the scientific world? That and more. More coming up with Steve Meyer of Discovery Institute on the Michael Medved show, speaking for a few minutes more with my good friend Steve Meyer of Discovery Institute. He's the author of the triumphant bestseller the Return of the God Hypothesis.
And right now he is promoting a new series of videos that I'm very glad to help spread the word about because they're so provocative and so substantive, answering questions, asking questions, but also providing some answers based on science and based on history.
You can go find out more information about these videos, which are free.
You can find
[email protected] Steve, we're talking about the second of the videos in this series, how did the Universe begin?
And you bring up something that I was been.
I knew it because I read your book Return of the God Hypothesis, but I had forgotten the reason, the basis for it. Why would Albert Einstein, obviously somebody, one of the brilliant, significant and perceptive scientists in human history, why would he be so determinedly opposed to acknowledging the likely truth of the Big Bang hypothesis?
[00:11:04] Speaker C: Well, it's a fascinating story, Michael. The short answer is that he let his philosophical predilections or biases trump the scientific evidence in his thinking.
The longer answer involves the story itself, which is that Einstein, in the late teens, 1917ish, came out with a new theory of gravity called general relativity. And his theory implied that massive bodies actually cause a curvature to the fabric of space, or what he called space time.
And an implication of that theory was that if gravity was the only force working in the universe, then it would have curved space so tightly, all the massive bodies would draw towards each other, making one big clump of matter and causing space to curve very tightly. And we'd all be living in a giant black hole, or rather, we would not be living at all, because you can't live in a black hole.
And he realized, well, that can't be the whole of the story. So if gravity is.
If gravity works like I think it works, then there must be a counterviewing force that's pushing outward, that's creating the empty space all around us between planets and galaxies and so forth. Now, meanwhile, the observational astronomers were detecting evidence of an outward pushing force of the universe actually expanding in the light coming from distant galaxies. That was what they call red shifted. The light waves were stretched out towards the red end of the ultraviolet spectrum. And so there were two lines of evidence, evidence supporting his theory of general relativity and evidence from observational astronomy that were both giving the picture of an expanding universe outward from a beginning. But Einstein realized that that raised The Genesis question, that sounded an awful lot like the book of Genesis and suggested that the cause of the universe couldn't be within the universe. It couldn't be matter, space, time or energy, because those are the things that began to exist. It must be something that transcended that. To him that sounded an awful lot like a theological implication. And at that point in his career, he was more stridently materialistic. Later, after seeing the evidence of the red shift for himself out in California at Edwin Hubble's telescope, he announced in an interview with the New York Times that his attempt to to avoid the conclusion of the beginning was the greatest blunder of my life. And that Hubble and others, the Belgian priest, physicist Lemaitre, were correct that the universe must have had a beginning.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: And again, the whole idea of the universe having a beginning has unbelievable implications to it, because in conversations just with friends.
This goes to one of your other video subjects, which is what's wrong with atheism?
The idea of the universe having a beginning.
What's the atheist answer to how a universe began, how reality began, what existed before reality, etc.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, sorry to interrupt the question.
Yeah, it's a very difficult thing to explain the origin of matter, space, time and energy, the physical universe physically, because before there was a physical universe, you can't invoke physics to explain it. You can't invoke matter to explain the origin of the universe, because before the origin of matter, there was no matter to do the causing.
So another way to describe atheism is the idea of materialism, the worldview that says that matter and energy are eternal and self existent. They are the things from which everything else came. And that was the worldview that Einstein originally held. It's been a default way of thinking among many scientists in the 20th century. But the discovery that the universe had a beginning from Big Bang, cosmology and general relativity and associated disciplines has really challenged that materialistic way of thinking and left people a bit stumped. I mean, what Lawrence Krauss, the physicist that I've sometimes debated, has a book called Universe from Nothing. But his nothing is never a real nothing. It's hard to imagine how you could get everything or something out of a real nothing. And that's been the problem for the scientific atheists.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people talk about intelligent design because you can say that evolution works, going from a paramecium, as you say in one of your pieces here, you can go from bacteria to Beethoven, but how do you get from nothing to A bacteria. How do you get from dead rock to a living anything? Or for that matter, how do you get to even the existence of dead rock?
[00:16:08] Speaker C: Well, absolutely. And when we talk about life, it gets even more interesting because what we've discovered in even the simplest living cells, which were in Darwin's time thought to be simple, is an immensely complicated automated factory that's run in accord with digital code that's stored in the DNA molecule, which is part of a larger information storage, transmission and processing system. This is not what anyone expected to find from a materialistic or atheistic point of view. We're looking at the kind of technology which, in our experience, we associate only with the activity of a prior intelligent agent. Bill Gates has said DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. Richard Dawkins, the great scientific atheist from Oxford, says the same thing. He says it's machine code, but code comes from a programmer. And so at the foundation of life, in even the simplest living cells, we have evidence of the activity of a designing mind. So when you combine that with the evidence that we have of the universe being designed from the beginning, and having had a beginning, the argument I make in my new book is that that creates a powerful evidential basis for an argument for theism, for a transcendent designing intelligence who is also active in the creation.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: That's Steve Meyer of Discovery Institute.
You should take a look at his book, if you haven't already, the Return of the God Hypothesis, because it asks and answers precisely some of these questions. Also, this series of new videos which are
[email protected] and one of those videos is entitled Aliens, the Multiverse or God?
Interesting Choices. And then there's one on what is Intelligent Design as well. All available for you. And they're stimulating and mind expanding.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: That was Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture with Michael Medved on the Michael Medved Show. Stay tuned as we'll have more great conversations to come like this one centered on the science of where the universe and life came from, as well as what that science implies for what we can know about all of reality.
For idea of the Future, I'm Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
