[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Welcome to id the future. Im your host Andrew McDermott. Today were sharing the second half of an interview between philosopher of science doctor Stephen Meyer and author and radio podcast host Justin Brierly.
The interview delves into the main arguments of Doctor Meyer's most recent book, return of the God Hypothesis, but it also serves as an update on the status of intelligent design and the growing interest in design arguments in both academia and the public square.
There's a significant shift underway, says Doctor Meyer. Darwinism is in trouble, and intelligent design is attracting high profile converts in the scientific community who are looking for a better explanation for the origin and development of life and the universe than the neo darwinian paradigm can provide.
In part two, Meyer and Brierly begin by jumping into the most popular objection to the fine tuning arguments of intelligent design, the multiverse. Do theories of multiple universes defeat intelligent design? Doctor Meyer argues to the contrary. The discussion then pivots to the third great discovery of modern science that Doctor Meyer details in his book the Discovery of Digital Information at the heart of life.
Doctor Meyer provides an update on the status of origin of life research and explains why the prevailing naturalistic theories on the origin of life fall short.
Meyer also addresses more objections to intelligent design.
Lets join Doctor Meyer and Justin Bryerly once again for the concluding half of their conversation.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: All right, let's move to the multiverse. If I can give what I would say is, my kind of summary of this particular solution to fine tuning is simply that, well, there may be evidence that in fact there is more than just our universe. We are one of many universes.
And if that's the case, then it could be that all of the many ensemble of universes all have different initial constants and values of their various forces. And we happen to live in one of the very rare universes where it worked out well for life to be able to exist.
So yeah, this idea of a multiverse, sort of solving it by simply multiplying the number of options on the table, what do you make of that particular solution? Steve?
[00:02:34] Speaker C: Well, I think it's an interesting proposal because it does presuppose that there's something important to explain about the fine tuning. And it also presupposes that the explanation for that fine tuning, given that it's a, in the very fabric of physical law and present from the very beginning of the universe itself, is something that cannot be explained terrestrially, if you will, or within the cosmos. Okay. It requires something beyond the cosmos. And whereas theists have posited an external, transcendent intelligence. What the multiverse proponent does is posit an external to the cosmos ensemble of other universes. It's still, in a way, super to our nature. It's supernatural in that sense.
That doesn't make it good or bad, but it is interesting because of what it presupposes, that there really is something there to be explained, and we need something that transcends our domain of matter, space, time, and energy to explain it. Now, the problem for the multiverse, there's a couple. One is there are huge problems with Occam's razor.
Whereas theistic design posits one single explanatory entity, the multiverse not only posits all those other universes, it has to posit a whole ensemble of other theoretical entities that are pure theoretical postulates in order to explain how you get these other universes. And this is something that multiverse advocates had to reckon with fairly early on. If our universe was.
If there are these other universes and they are causally disconnected from one another, there's a problem in trying to invoke other universes as an explanation for ours. Because if they're. If the universes are causally disconnected, then things that anything that happens in those other universes has no effect on our universe, and it would have no, would have had no effect as well, on whatever process was responsible for setting the fine tuning parameters in the first place. So the mere fact of other universes doesn't provide a causal explanation for the fine tuning in our universe. For that to occur, there must be some kind of common cause which is responsible for the production of our universe and those other universes, a kind of universe generating mechanism. So, in virtue of that multiverse, advocates of posited various kinds of common cause mechanisms, or universe generating mechanisms, that could explain why you have all these universes, so that they can portray our universe as a kind of lucky winner of a great cosmic lottery. And there have been two great universe generating mechanisms proposed, one based on something called inflationary cosmology and one based on string theory. And this is where, in the first place, you get some of these occam's razor possibilities, because inflationary cosmology can explain one type of fine tuning, the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics, but not the initial conditions of the universe. In inflationary cosmology, you have the same basic physical laws, and with each new universe that pops out of the inflaton mechanism, you get new sets of initial conditions. So the inflationary cosmology could explain. In theory, it could explain the fine tuning of the initial conditions, but not the laws and constants of physics. With string theory, it's the opposite. So, to explain the whole range of fine tuning phenomena, the multiverse advocates have now had to come up with the string multiverse combination multiverse hypothesis. So they have a string landscape, inflationary landscape, and to affirm that there are, I count up eight or ten separate theoretical postulates that you have to affirm to render that as credible as the theistic design hypothesis. So it's massively profligate in the Occam's razor sense in multiplying theoretical entities. But beyond that, and to me, this is the most fundamental problem, it turns out that the universe generating the mechanisms themselves have to be finely tuned in order to generate new universes. So you start by trying to explain the fine tuning in our universe. You massively inflate the number of theoretical, pure theoretical postulates you have to affirm to provide an explanation and to render your universe generating mechanisms credible or plausible. But then it turns out the universe generating mechanisms themselves have to be finely tuned in order for them, even in theory, to generate new universes. And so you're right back to where you started to unexplained prior fine tuning. And this is the last riff on this, but it's important, but it happens that we know. So here's the point. The multiverse doesn't provide an ultimate explanation for fine tuning, but we do know from our uniform and repeated experience of an entity that does explain fine tuning, where if we understand that fine tuning is an ensemble of improbable conditions that have to work jointly to accomplish some functional outcome or remarkable outcome. So a french recipe is finely tuned. An internal combustion engine is finely tuned.
The integration of hardware and software in a computer is finely tuned to. So in all the systems we know, where there is fine tuning present, there's always a prior fine tuner. And so our uniform and repeated experience points to an adequate causal explanation, whereas the multiverse leaves the ultimate explanation of fine tuning unresolved. Which is why now, the proper Fred Hoyle quote just popped to my head. He said, a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect is monkeyed with physics and chemistry in order to make life possible. It is common sense because our knowledge of cause and effect shows that fine tuning always comes from a prior intelligence. And the multiverse does nothing to undermine that conclusion.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: We'll leave the multiverse and fine tuning there for the moment. There's so many other areas that we could have delved into in that. But, you know, Boltzmann's brains and all sorts of things. But we'll leave it for now, because I do want to just leave the time we have for the third big part of the return of the God hypothesis, which is, of course, the part that you have spent much of your life already devoted to looking into, just the evidence for designing living things, particularly in the information we find in the first self replicating molecule.
So let's talk about the origin of life again.
Where were we? Say, I don't know, 100 years ago? And what have we found out that for you suggests that it looks like we're living in a universe that speaks about some kind of agency behind it, rather than this sort of naturalistic.
[00:09:41] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. This is my favorite subject. But could I make one more point about our previous two?
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Please do go ahead.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: Just about the rhetoric, because this so ties into your theme in your book about the surprising rediscovery of belief in God. And that is that even the attempts to circumvent these theistic arguments based on the beginning in the first place, or based on the fine tuning, end up requiring auxiliary hypotheses or alternative hypotheses that themselves end up having tacit theistic implications. Quantum cosmology has a tacit implication that you got the universe coming out of a highly constrained mathematical conceptual apparatus. It implies the need for a mind, the multiverse implies it takes you right back to the fine tuning again. So you're right back to the need for a mind to explain things. Even the attempts to get around the theistic arguments have themselves pushed the theistic conclusion back into the conversation. So I think that's a very interesting thing about the dialectic that is causing this shift to take place sociologically that you so beautifully documented in your book.
Now to biology.
Yeah, origin of Life and my PhD. So I did my PhD on origin of life biology and my PhD.
One of the examiners, Harm Kaminga, who had written a very definitive history of original life research, noted that the origin of life and the nature of life are two very closely related questions. Because if we want to explain the origin of life, we have to define what is it that we're trying to explain the origin of. And since the 1950s and sixties and seventies, and right up to the present, every new turn has revealed deeper and deeper and deeper layers of complexity in the living cell. So if we start in the 1950s, we get the, you wanted to go back 100 years, but we'll just go back 70 to the famous Miller Urey experiment. They set up a spark discharge chamber. Zap some chemicals with electricity, and they produce some amino acids in their vat, two or three of the protein forming amino acids.
Touted as a huge breakthrough, we're on the cusp of understanding how life arose from simple chemical constituents on a prebiotic earth. That's the idea of chemical evolutionary theory, life from simple chemistry.
Ironically, in the same year, Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule. Five years later, in 1950, 719 58, Crick puts forward something called the sequence hypothesis. And because he realizes that on the interior of the DNA molecule, that famed double helix, you have these chemical subunits called bases or nucleotide bases. And he realizes that they're functioning as alphabetic characters in a written language or like the digital characters in a section of machine code. He realizes, and very early on, people realize, the DNA contains a kind of digital bit string and that that information is being used to construct proteins and the protein machines in living cells. And it takes about seven years for Crick's sequence hypothesis to be confirmed by work that's going on in molecular biology on both sides of the Atlantic. It's a fantastic story in the history of science. But by the mid sixties, it's beginning to dawn on biologists in particular, but others as well, that we do indeed have an information storage and transmission and processing system inside the cell, and that you can't really build anything in life without the information in the DNA, at least. Later, we discovered there's other layers of information stored in life. There's the epi, or ontogenetic layers of information. But even setting that aside, just taking us to the mid sixties, in molecular biology, we now have something that's been revealed that completely destroys the idea, the 19th century idea of the cell as a simple, homogeneous globule of plasm, as Huxley put it. And so that now starts to put origin of life research under extreme pressure, because the origin of life researchers now have to explain the nature of life as we find it, the actual complexity of the cell, which is an informational complexity, it's an integrated complexity. And, and so what I've done in my first book, signature in the cell, is then trace that challenge and look at the different approaches that were taken from the 1950s and sixties on to try to explain the origin of the information you need to build the first living cell. It's very much like in our computer world, where if you want to give your computer a new algorithm, if you want to give it a new function, you want to give it a new app, you want to give a new operating system, you've got to provide code. And the same thing is true in life. If you want to build a cell in the first place, you've got to have the information to build the proteins that service all the important cellular functions. So where does that information come from?
That question came to the front, the forefront of studies in origin of life research by about the mid 1960s, late 1960s. And then there have been a series of attempts to solve that, some based on chance. But that didn't last very long, because the amount of information, I think, almost by acclimation among origin of life researchers, was so much greater than could be explained by random assembly or interactions of molecules that went by the wayside. Then people tried to explain it by reference to self organizational processes. There are problems with that. The basic laws of nature do not generate informational sequences as in digital code. They generate repetitive patterns of order, like the repeating patterns of NaCl, NaCl NaCl in a crystal, not something like a line of poetry like time and tide wait for no man in the information in life is not simple, repetitive order. So self organization has had big problems then they tried to combine chance with natural selection. But there's a problem there. You don't really get natural selection as an operative process until you get a self replicating organism further. People said, well, maybe you could get self replicating molecules like rna, but it turns out to get rna even to copy a little bit of itself. And that's all we've been able to do in the lab, and about 10% of it can be copied. But even then, the investigator has to sequence the nucleotide basis, the genetic letters on the rna molecule, to get it to achieve even that limited form of self replication. So where's the information coming from that makes that possible? It's coming from an intelligence. So what are you simulating in the lab? You're simulating intelligent design. And that, I think, underscores the key argument here that we're making, and that is that whenever we see information, especially in a digital or an alphabetic form, as we do in DNA and RNA, and we trace information back to its source, whenever we have a known source of information, it always arises from a mind, not a material process. Whether we're talking about computer code or hieroglyphic inscription or cyrillic text or english text or something in a book or the information we're transmitting over the Internet or over radio signal, information always ultimately results from a mind. One of the early information scientist Henry said that the creation of new information habitually results from conscious activity. So my argument has been that when you, the discovery of information at the foundation of life is providing a powerful indicator of the activity of designing intelligence in the origin of life and the absence of an alternative, a credible alternative, materialistic explanation is not the sole reason for the inference to design, but it reinforces it, because what it shows is that the inference to design, we know of a cause that can produce information. The naturalistic models for the origin of life have not explained where information could come from. Therefore, the inference to design is not an argument from ignorance, but an inference to the best explanation. It's the only inference that's consistent with our knowledge of cause and effect, which is the basis, again, of all scientific reasoning.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: So let me just give you a couple of common objections.
And I've heard Richard Dawkins give this one where he simply says, well, look, yes, we know that the origin of life is a very unusual occurrence, okay? Not denying that, but in a universe with so many planets, galaxies, potentially planets with life sustaining kind of abilities, then, yeah, it's going to happen somewhere. I mean, you just sort of have to look at the scale of the universe, how long it's been around. Yes. And that kind of gives you the odds you need, basically, in the end, and purely natural process, even though it looks incredibly unlikely for that to occur somewhere and it happened to be on our planet, that it in fact occurred and could be occurring on other planets as well. What's your response to that?
[00:19:10] Speaker C: Well, there's been an interesting response from some of the leading people working on origin of life, or in molecular biology. Francis Crick, in a little book, Life itself, in 1981, posited that he acknowledged that the odds of life arising on our planet were infinitesimally small, that the conditions on our planet were not right. For example, the formation of proteins from amino acids. I mean, one of the most obvious problems in chemistry, which James Tour has pointed out, is that you don't polymerize, you don't link together amino acids in an aqueous environment. The chemistry is wrong, goes the wrong direction. And yet all of the models, whether it's the hydrothermal vent or the prebiotic ocean, they've all presupposed life arising out of a soup of some kind. We're all the way back to Darwin in his warm little pond. So the conditions here were not right for the spontaneous chemical origin of life. And so what Crick proposed was something that Dawkins himself also entertained, which is the idea that life was somehow either evolved somehow on some other planet and then was seeded here by an intelligence.
So that's just maybe a cheeky point on my part, but it's something that I think underscores how difficult the problem is from the standpoint of prebiotic chemistry. But I've made a calculation in signature in the cell that actually shows that Dawkins is wrong, that the entire universe does not have what are called the probabilistic resources to explain the origin of the first crucial biomolecules by chance alone. And remember, natural selection always operates after the fact of random variation. So you can't invoke natural selection until you get something like a self replicating rna molecule or system of molecules, or a protein DNA replicating system. So, in signature in the cell, I made a calculation based on about the chance origin of a protein molecule. You could do a similar calculation for the DNA or an rna molecule. And it turns out that the number of parameters that have to be right and the constraints that have to be applied to each parameter are such that the odds of generating a novel protein by chance on our planet are vastly greater than the probabilistic resources available. And so it comes down to if every event in the history of planet Earth, from the big bang till now, where an event is defined as an interaction between elementary particles, were devoted to looking for one of the extremely rare combinations of amino acids that would give you a folded protein, you would not have nearly enough time to search but a tiny space of the possibilities, such that it would be always overwhelmingly more likely that such a random search would fail than succeed. And I can run the numbers. So any appeal to chance, whether it's a. Actually, I did this not based on the probabilistic universe or resources on planet Earth. I did this based on the probabilistic resources from the Big bang till now. So there's been ten to the 16th, 2nd since the big Bang, there's ten to the 80th elementary particles in the universe.
I ran all the numbers and compared it to the vastness of what's called amino acid sequence space and the rarity of proteins within that space. And turns out, if you change the metaphor a little bit, if you think of all the combinations that there could be, the combinations that are functional are tiny, tiny needle within that big haystack, and you don't have but a fraction of the time needed to search that haystack, even with a 14 billion year universe, I don't think the Dawkins objection solves the problem at all, even as it were, kicking it out into space or out into the universe.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: That's really interesting, I guess.
[00:23:15] Speaker C: And by the way, no serious origin of life researcher is any longer invoking chance as the explanation for the origin of the first DNA or self replicating RNA or proteins. They're looking either at self organizational models or trying to find some more favorable environment or something. But chance is really not where it's at.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: But you don't find that any of the other kind of naturalistic models hold much water, either, by the sounds of it. Steve.
[00:23:44] Speaker C: So I give them a lot of. I give them a lot of airtime, or I allow them their due. In my book, especially in signature in the Cell, which is my first book about the origin of life, I think they have to be taken very seriously. I don't dismiss anything in a cavalier way or out of hand. I spend three chapters on self organizational models. One of the leading proponents of intelligent design, another convert to that position is Dean Kenyon, who was a leading origin of life researcher through the sixties, seventies, eighties, and then ended up repudiating his own self organizational model, which he developed in a best selling graduate postgraduate level text called biochemical predestination.
And the problem with these self organizational models, and that's been where a lot of the interest has been in origin of life research, is that they really misunderstand. They do a great job of explaining what doesn't need to be explained. They explain simple order, repetitive order, not what Leslie orgel called specified complexity or functional information. Think your viewers and listeners can think of two strings of symbols. You could have the monkey typing gibberish at the typewriter and maybe get 40 characters of that. And then below you have a line of poetry roughly the same length. Time and tide wait for no man.
And oh, and a third string would be a mantra or ABC, ABC, ABC, ABC.
Self organization does a nice job of explaining repetitive order like a crystal. Nacl, Nacl, Nacl.
These are processes where the underlying physics and chemistry determines a highly order and highly regular, orderly outcome. You could think of pulling the plug in the bathtub and watching the vortex develop. So the physics of that, the Coriolis forces and gravity will give you that nice, orderly structure. But that's not what we have in life.
We have not simple order, not mere complexity like the monkey of the typewriter, but a complexity that defies reduction to a simple algorithm or law, which is nevertheless specified to achieve a function. And that's what we have with human language. That's what we have with computer code. And that's what we have with the coding sequences for proteins and DNA.
Crick realized this very early on, that when we talk about information and DNA, we're talking about a specificity of sequence, and therefore not mere complexity or not simple order, and so self organizational processes. It was a very innovative approach. It seemed to have promise. But there was a conceptual problem at the heart of it, in misunderstanding what needed to be explained. We're not trying to explain order. We're trying to explain information in the sense of specified sequences for function.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: So if the field of origin of life in terms of these natural explanations is really going nowhere, and I hear other people, like James Tour, saying the same thing, I guess the question is, what would it take for design to kind of be taken seriously? Because I think there's almost an aesthetic problem that a lot of people have with the whole idea of moving from kind of trying to find purely physical explanations for the origins of life to what some people imagine, I think, as sort of a divine hand, kind of basically putting a set of amino acids in the right place and in the right order, and kind of creating, sort of intervening at that point. And then we can let natural forces take over or whatever. I mean, I think a lot of people just don't like the implication that God had to poke around in the natural order to get this going. It doesn't feel right. I even hear this from some christians who don't like the idea of a kind of intervention in that way.
[00:27:42] Speaker C: Yeah, but essentially, that's an aesthetic objection. You know, I would prefer that the situation were otherwise.
I've had some really nice interactions with Thomas Nagel, who's an extremely honest atheist, and he's famous for saying, I just simply do not want the universe to be the kind of place in which there is a person such as God. And I think, well, fair enough.
And of course, the problem of imagining exactly what this looked like when it happened is not something that the theory of intelligent design can help people with. Our theory is a theory that retrodicts from effects back to a kind of cause without depicting in toto exactly how the mind interfaced with matter.
In defense of that, I would say that you and I are doing something right now that is equally mysterious. None of us know is called the mind body problem in philosophy. None of us know how our mental states, our intentionality, generates information or physical actions in real time. That interface between mind and physical brain is not understood, but we can infer the action of a mind from the effects of a mind and the effects that a mind leaves behind in the physical world. We do that all the time, and that's what the theory of intelligent design does. Without attempting to answer the question, well, how does. How did the mind of God interface with matter? What would it have looked like if you were there when the molecules were finding themselves into a proper arrangement to create a living cell?
So I am afraid we can't help anyone with that. But we do want to argue that there is strong evidence that a mind played a role, even if we don't know exactly how to envision what that would have looked like when it took place. So I understand the aesthetic objection, our preference. It's easier to hope that we can somehow imagine some chemical reaction. But as James Tours pointed out, everything we know about chemistry shows that chemistry does not move in a life, tropical life, friendly direction.
Molecules don't care about life, as he likes to say.
And so we have to take what nature is telling us seriously.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: One person, I just want us to maybe finish by sort of talking about in this respect, someone I've had a number of interesting conversations with is Paul Davies, and he's obviously a popularizer in this area.
I think he's been very shy of being sort of, you know, associated with intelligent design, but. And he doesn't like the word God, I think. But he does seem to be reaching out for something transcendent when it comes to the way in which the universe has been organized. And one of the recent conversations I had with him on the subject of the origins of life, he said this, which I felt was a really interesting statement. He said, the directionality in the universe going from matter to life to consciousness. He said, I would also add comprehension to that. There's an arrow of time in the direction of comprehension. If that is the case, if this is not just an enormous fluke, a happy series of accidents, then that, to me, comes very close to something like a meaning or purpose in nature. He said, I think that's a sort of religious feeling, what Einstein called a cosmic religious feeling.
I mean, what do you think about that idea? That. Because for me, that's one of the main things. When we even talk about the origins of life, why does inanimate matter go to all the trouble of becoming self replicating and then becoming conscious and then becoming self reflecting and able to even understand? It seems like that itself just seems like an interesting fact about the universe, that it has this propensity.
[00:31:33] Speaker C: It feels indirected, which is to say teleological, which is to say designed one of the most famous quotes from Davies is the impression of design is overwhelming. Speaking about the fine tuning, I've been at a conference with him. He's a very thoughtful guy. His book, the Fifth Miracle, is it's almost the same argument that I make in signature in the cell. He comes to the water's edge and then sling pulls back from saying the most what I would regard as the most logical conclusion of the analysis. But he's also focusing on the importance of explaining specified complexity. And sometimes people have said, oh, this idea of specified complexity or specified information or functional information, this is just a concept that intelligent design people have dreamed up. Well, no, the term came from Leslie Orgel, one of the leading origin of life researchers. Said, life is not like a crystal that has repetitive order. It's not like static coming over a radio signal. It's not merely complex. It's complex, but also specified to ensure the performance of an independent function. And that's what needs to be explained. Schrodinger talked about aperiodic crystals in life itself, or in his book sorry, what is life? In 1944.
And in the fifth miracle, Davies talks about it. So people universally are recognizing the phenomenon that needs to be explained, that is, specified complexity, or specified information, or functional information. And my argument has been that in our experience, we know of one and only one known cause for the origin of that entity, and that is mind. And therefore, when we find that at the foundation of life, we have powerful indicator of the activity of the designing intelligence in the origin of life. And indeed, I would say in the history of life, because we have these big jumps in complexity that require further inputs of information. And so I think whereas in the 19th century, scientists portrayed the universe, the scientific cosmology, if you will, prized matter and energy as the fundamental realities. I think in 21st century biology and in cosmology, we now recognize that we have three fundamental entities. We have matter, energy, and also information. And given that information, in our experience, is a mind product, I think what we're looking at is a return of what I call the God hypothesis, that we need both an active and a transcendent mind to explain the information that we find in those three domains of biology, physics, and I also cosmology.
[00:34:14] Speaker B: I mean, just as we conclude. And thank you so much for your time. Appreciate giving me so much time, Steve. Tonight, my book is called the Surprising Rebirth of belief in God. It touches on science, but lots of other areas where I see there being a kind of a new openness to God as an explanation for things in the science community, then do you think that we are moving in a similar direction, that actually, you know, through things like the fact that the neo darwinian synthesis just doesn't seem to be holding water anymore, the fact that we are having these extraordinary revelations about the nature of our universe and so on. Do you think that's actually coming back to God? Is that where people are ultimately landing, or will it take? I don't know. They say science progresses one funeral at a time. Maybe it'll take a few generations before there's an openness to that.
[00:35:03] Speaker C: I see that happening in my experience, not only among some very seasoned and senior scientists who have had conversions. My interest in this whole topic began when I was early in my career, and I attended a conference where Alan Sandage announced his public, announced publicly his conversion to Christianity, not in spite of scientific evidence, but because of it. He was a pretty well known, hard bitten scientific materialist who began to have a real deep and deliberative set of conversations with colleagues about the meaning of the new cosmology. And he realized that there was something in him that did not want there to be a beginning to the universe. And he realized that reason for that was it had obvious metaphysical implications.
At that same conference, Dean Kenyon announced that he had repudiated his own theory of chemical evolution and Washington and stated that it was now time for the theologians to open, reopen, or the philosophers to reopen the natural theological conversation, and that he himself was becoming sympathetic to the design hypothesis. So I began, that was very early in my career, in the mid eighties. And so I've had 35 years to think about this. And I found that there are many, many scientists who have been on that same exact trajectory. Gunther Beckley, as I mentioned, I think Jim Tour, who has been a believer for a long time, but is, I think, increasingly interested in these origins questions and seeing that they do not point in a materialistic direction.
And the other thing I'm seeing is that a lot of younger people, we have these summer programs for young people, and we're attracting an incredible amount of very energetic talent. And people are ready to look at biology in particular in a new way.
Systems biology is a big new direction. And I think looking at biology as a design system leads to making predictions that can be tested in the laboratory. It leads to new approaches to studying life. And so it's not just a matter of saying God did it. It's a matter of saying, well, if life was designed, then what else should we expect to find? Maybe that junk DNA isn't going to turn out to be junk after all, just to name one example. And it didn't. That was an id prediction. So anyway, I think it's a new day in science and there's a tremendous amount of energy around these looking at life as a design system, looking at the universe as a design system, and then seeing where that leads. That is taking us back full circle to the scientific revolution.
Newton's God hypothesis was not a science stopper, it was a science starter for him. And you're be hard pressed to find anyone in the history of science who is more productive than Newton was.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: So great to chat with you. Thank you Steve for the time.
I do encourage anyone who's watching or listening to go and check out the return of the God hypothesis. I'll make sure there's a link from today's show for now. Thank you so much for joining me.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: That was doctor Stephen Meyer and Justin Brierly discussing the arguments of Meyer's book, Return of the God Hypothesis and the current status of intelligent design research today.
Dont miss the first half of the conversation, available in a separate episode.
Were grateful to Justin Brierly for permission to share his interview here on id the future.
This conversation is part of Brierlys new podcast documentary, the surprising rebirth of belief in God. Learn
[email protected] thats Justin Brierly, and brierly is spelled b r I e rhe l e y. Justinbrierly.com for id the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org dot this.
[00:38:59] Speaker C: Program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
