[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. Im your host Andrew McDermott. Today were sharing the first 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 one, Meyer and Bryerly discuss the current status of intelligent design.
They also jump into the first two of three discoveries that Meyer lays out in his book, the discovery that the universe had a beginning and the discovery of the fine tuning present in the initial conditions of the universe, and the subsequent fine tuning that allowed for advanced life to flourish.
Along the way, Doctor Meyer addresses some common objections to his arguments.
Now let's join Doctor Meyer and Justin Brierly for part one of their conversation.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: We've been attracting some very high profile converts to our position from within the scientific world itself. Neo Darwinism, which has also been a key plank in the whole worldview of the scientific atheists, is itself in trouble, even among evolutionary biologists. 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 alternative hypotheses that themselves end up having tacit theistic implications. 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. I've made a calculation that actually shows that Dawkins is wrong.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: Welcome along. Today I'm speaking with Stephen Meyer. He's well known as an advocate of intelligent design. He's been at the forefront of that movement, has published many books in the area, including a very recent book, a large book called the Return of the God Hypothesis, and I'm going to be talking to Steve about that today and about the whole area of intelligent design theism and more. Thanks for joining me, Steve.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Thank you for having me, Justin. It's great to connect at last.
[00:02:45] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Really looking forward to what we're trying to cover today. A lot of material actually, so we'll often be just scratching the surface of things that people can go and read in much greater detail in the book, and I'll make sure we're linked to that as well from today's show. But tell me a little bit about how this whole area has changed in recent years, because I've seen you pop up talking about the evidence for God in cosmology, biology, and elsewhere on all kinds of interesting platforms. The Joe Rogan podcast, for instance, the uncommon knowledge show. Michael Shermer, who's a skeptic, had you on his show not so long ago, and it feels like that's quite different to the atmosphere that prevailed, say, 1520 years ago, when new atheism was riding high. Do you sense something has shifted?
[00:03:30] Speaker A: I think there's been a very significant shift. And in fact, after I did the interview with Peter Robinson on uncommon knowledge, it was a three way interview. He had John Lennox and Michael Behe and me all talking about the case for intelligent design in biology and in nature generally.
Peter called me after the show went live and wanted to know if I thought the dynamics in the debate about intelligent design had shifted dramatically. And the reason he asked is that three years prior, he'd done another three way interview with David Geleranter, the computer scientist at Yale University, and David Berlinski and me about the mathematical challenges to neo Darwinism. It was an extremely popular podcast. I think he's running at about 3.5 million views of that particular episode. But he had a lot of people who were theistically minded, even religious believers, some people who are more conservative than progressive still at that point in 2019, sort of warning him off any association with us and saying, hey, these guys are, you know, they're a walk on the wild side. You better be careful. He said he had some of the same people watch the interview with Behe and Lennox and me and say, these are amazing arguments. Why haven't I heard this before? Darwinism is in serious trouble. This intelligent design idea is very intriguing. This was fantastic that you had the guts to have these guys on. And then he said the comments were just off the charts positive. And so, and again, that podcast episode has had over 2 million views already. So I think there's a huge interest in this. I think what's going on in the darwinian world, in the field of evolutionary biology, is itself part of the reason for that. You may remember that in 2016, there was a major conference at the Royal Society. It was convened by third way evolutionary biologists who were openly in calling for a new theory of evolution. And one of the most prominent people at that conference was Gerd Muller, who did an opening talk on the explanatory deficits of neo Darwinism. He listed five major problems that the theory doesn't explain and portrayed it as effective in explaining small scale variations of organisms like the Galapagos finches, that whose beaks changed a little bit in response to changing weather patterns, or the famed peppered moths whose coloration patterns changed. But so the evolutionary theory, he says, explains those minor variations well, but not the major innovations in the history of life, and we need a new mechanism for that. And many people at the conference were saying that, or proposing things that they hoped would help. At the end of it, one of the conveners characterized the conference for its lack of momentousness, essentially suggesting that the conferees had done a good job of defining the problems associated with neo Darwinism, particularly the lack of creative power associated with the mutation selection mechanism, but had come up with no mechanisms or nor any broader theory that could compensate for the explanatory deficits of the received theory. So I think one of the things that's going on is that neo Darwinism, which has also been a key plank in the whole worldview of the scientific atheists, is itself in trouble, even among evolutionary biologists. And so I think that's been one of the intellectual shifts that have made people more open to our point of view. And I think there's very exciting and powerful positive evidence for intelligent design, both in cosmology and physics, but also in biology.
[00:07:20] Speaker C: I mean, one of, I could imagine, though a skeptic coming back and saying, well, if the conveners of the conference were saying they didn't feel many solutions were on the table, certainly intelligent design isn't the one they should be reaching for, because that is a non solution. It's a typical objection that essentially it's God are the gaps. It's just inserting a supernatural entity when we should be looking for further science to explain these things. I mean, what's your response to that kind of objection?
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Well, I think it all begs the question as to the definition of science. And this has been why people have been unwilling to reach for anything beyond science has been defined in recent years by reference to a principle that has a fancy name from the philosophy of science is called the principle of methodological naturalism. If you're going to be a scientist, you must limit yourself to strictly naturalistic or materialistic explanations of everything, irrespective of what the evidence may or may not show. And this is a principle that is relatively recent vintage in the history of science goes back to the late 19th century.
It was implicit in Darwin's argument in the origin of species. But if you go back even a bit further, if you go back to the period of the scientific revolution, you have people making design arguments as part of their scientific works. I was just talking to a very fine Newton scholar just the other day, Steve Snobel, and who did his PhD in Cambridge in the history and philosophy of science. And he's going to be giving a talk about how the role of natural theology in the most important work of science ever written, that is, in the Principia, and then later in Newton's epilogue to the Principia, the general scholium. So the idea that scientists must limit themselves to explanations that do not, in any case, invoke creative intelligence is something of recent vintage in the history of science. And in any case, it's intellectually limiting. Imagine if you go into the famed assyrian room, or you go into the british museum and you see the Rosetta stone, and you look at that and you say, well, what caused these interesting etchings?
If you're committed to methodological naturalism, you're going to have to say, well, it must have been something like wind and erosion or chemical etchings, or I something purely naturalistic. But of course, that's not the best explanation, because that stone is carved with information in three separate languages, and we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the actual basis of scientific reasoning, that information always arises from an intelligent source. So what we've been arguing is that we want to let the evidence determine whether invoking a designing agent or invoking purely natural causes provides the best explanation for a given phenomena, and not allow a meta level methodological principle that has been advanced in a normative way to dictate the outcome of the investigation. In other words, we should be open to the best explanation, not simply the best naturalistic explanation, if in fact the evidence points to something beyond what we know matter and energy can do, and instead points to something that we know uniquely intelligent agents can do.
[00:10:40] Speaker C: William, I mean, if you dont mind me speaking just for a moment more with some of the cultural issues around intelligent design. Before we move to the material in the book, the recent podcast documentary series ive been working on, and the book kind of relives some of the highlights, if you like, from the new atheism. And I think to some extent that the movement was arguably at one point trading on a kind of supposed clash between science and faith in the classroom. There was the Dover Kitz Miller trial, which was very famous people who claimed that creationism was being snuck in under the guise of intelligent design and everything else. I mean, again, do you feel like those kinds of issues have sort of quietened down? What would you say is the feeling in scientific community around those sort of hot button issues, the way in which it was being perceived, at least in the mid two thousands around that time?
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Right. I mean, that's a very perceptive question, Justin. In zero five, we had the Dover trial.
I and a number of other leading id proponents decided to stay out of that. Mike Behe agreed to be a witness to defend his own work, which was cited in the trial. We thought that the.
The policy that had been formulated by the little school board in central Pennsylvania was a bit benighted and was certainly going to come in for a constitutional challenge.
And so we thought it was poorly formed and we actually urged the school board to withdraw it. We thought it was not the right way to go by any means.
Nevertheless, the trial ended the way it did.
The ruling that was issued only applies to a small jurisdiction in central Pennsylvania. So the constitutional status of teaching about the theory of intelligent design in american public schools is still yet to be decided.
But we have no interest, at least right now, in pushing that. We're much more interested in the discussion that's going on at the highest levels of science and academia. And so we made a strategic decision to stay out of it, with that being my colleagues at the Discovery Institute and a wider network of scientists in the intelligent design research community. And instead we started cranking out books and articles and peer reviewed articles and developing new research programs. And I think what's happening is we've been attracting some very high profile converts to our position from within the scientific world itself.
One notable person, for example, is Gunter Beckley, the german paleontologist who had started thinking seriously about intelligent design when he was curating the Darwin Bicentennial exhibition at the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History as one of the lead paleontologists there. And he began, partly because of a challenge from one of his colleagues, to read some of the books about intelligent design and realized very quickly that we had been unfairly maligned as creationism in a cheap tuxedo, creationism 2.0. And we engaged, began a long conversation with him. By 2016 to 17, he was not only ready to express public skepticism about darwinism, but his support for intelligent design. And David Glaringer, whom I mentioned, the chairman of the Yale computer science department, encountered our mathematical argument against the creative power of the darwinian mechanism and was quite persuaded by it and ended up writing a very influential long book review of my book Darwin Stout. And David Berlinski's book deniable Darwin in the Claremont review of Books was called Darwin a Fond farewell. And then he was later on the podcast I mentioned with Peter Robinson, which had 3.5 million views, and I could go on. There's a number of very high powered scientists who have been seeing that there are scientific reasons to doubt darwinism. That's happening within the community of evolutionary biologists, but others who are coming all the way to embrace intelligent design. And so we made that strategic decision to focus on the science and stay out of the culture fight. And I think that's been the wisdom of that has been borne out in multiple ways.
[00:14:57] Speaker C: One more question, if I may.
Has the stigma, if you like, that comes in academic circles with questioning the neo darwinian synthesis and potentially embracing intelligent design? Has that changed? I mean, there was a time when it appeared.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: I mean, I think it's second tier schools, say in the US, you know, northwestern corner of Missouri State, where professors feel that's a hypothetical school. But I think.
I think in second tier I colleges and universities, people still feel the need to convey the alleged consensus view. But I think people at the highest levels of academia are much more open to considering alternatives. And you have these very prominent people in this third way movement. They don't want to embrace intelligent design because they want to work within a natural, strictly naturalistic framework. They're committed to methodological naturalism. But they're saying things like, neo Darwinism is so early. This is what was one of the most prominent people at the Royal Society conference said, well, we all know that criticism of neo Darwinism is so early nineties. It's not just that it's okay to criticize it now. It's becoming passe to criticize it because we've known about the problems for so long now. Stephen Jay Gould said it was 1980. He said that neo Darwinism is effectively dead except as textbook orthodoxy. So if you're in a place where you feel honor bound to teach textbook orthodoxy, neo Darwinism is not dead. But at the highest levels in biology, people know about the problems. And so you have people like James Shapiro at the University of Chicago with his ideas about natural genetic engineering, or Dennis Noble at Oxford, who's had some recent, very recent and influential pieces in top, I think, even in nature. You had the article just, I think, last week or two weeks ago by Nick Lane and Johanna Xavier. About the problems in origin of life research. And Johanna, not very long ago, kindly commended my book signature in the cell to her colleagues who are working in the field of origin of life research, saying, I can't go with Meyer to embrace the intelligent design solution. She said, if I did, I'd be out of a job. But he's raising the right questions, and questions, in fact, that we haven't answered. So I think there's a lot more candor about these things now than there was 20 years ago, when really there was a very strident ideological defense of darwinian thought. And I think that's changing.
[00:17:35] Speaker C: Very, very interesting. Thank you. I had so many more questions I could ask, but I'm aware of time.
We've got a lot of ground to cover, as I say, because I'd love to just get an overview, at least of some of the key areas that you cover in the return of the God hypothesis, three specific fields which you feel have really changed the nature of the conversation on God and science in the last several decades. Let's start with the big Bang cosmology. Perhaps you could just sketch where we were and where you feel we are now when it comes to the implications of big bang cosmology on our ideas about agency behind the universe.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Absolutely. And if you don't mind, I think there's a nice framing quotation for this discussion, and it comes from Richard Dawkins himself. He says that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect. If at bottom there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, where blind, pitiless indifference is his shorthand or poetic way of expressing the idea of strictly materialistic processes. And I love the way he frames the issue, because he's implying that metaphysical hypotheses, in his case scientific materialism, in my case theism, have generate expectations about what we ought to see in the world around us. That metaphysical hypotheses, every bit as much as scientific ones, are testable against observations of the actual physical and biological worlds. And so the question I raise in return of the God hypothesis is, well, is that true though? Is it true that what we observe is what we'd expect on a materialistic understanding of the origin of the universe and the origin of life, etcetera? And cosmology is the first place where I think it's pretty obvious that what the materialists expected to find is not what they actually ended up observing. And this has created cognitive dissonance through across now virtually a century. Because the first indications that the materialist expectation was inconsistent with observations came in the 1920s, maybe even back to the teens.
The standard understanding of the origin of the universe was that there had not been an origin event, that the universe was eternal and self existing. It did not need an external creator. It had always been here, and therefore, there was nothing external to it that needed to act to bring it into existence. It was what worldview scholars and philosophers sometimes called the prime reality.
It was the thing from which everything else came, matter and energy in space and time. And the big discovery of, at least by the 1920s, we were getting very strong inklings from observational astronomy that the universe was expanding outward in a roughly spherically symmetric way. This came from the redshift data that Hubble was collecting at the palomar observatory through his big 100 inch telescope. Previously, vessel Slipher had been getting similar data about nebula before he knew that the nebula were actually galaxies. And so we had this observational evidence of an expanding universe. And just very simply, if you wind the clock backwards on that in the forward direction of time, the universe is expanding. But you wind the clock backwards in your mind's eye, and you realize that the galactic material would have been closer and closer and closer and closer together at every point in the progressive past, until eventually you reach a limiting case where everything would have congealed to a starting point and arguably the beginning of the universe itself. And you had a parallel development in theoretical physics with Einstein's development of general relativity, 1915. He realizes that from his own equations, of his own field equations, that the universe, it must be dynamic and expanding.
If gravity, as he's conceived it, is the only force operating in the universe, then all the material of the universe would congeal upon itself.
There would be no empty space. We'll be in one big black hole. But we don't live in that kind of universe, he realized, and there's empty space between bodies, so there must be a counteracting anti gravity force that creates that empty space, which suggests a dynamic universe that's again expanding. And so Einstein famously Jerry rigged his own equations and attempted to portray the universe as static in a way, so that what he did is he introduced an exquisite degree of fine tuning so that he could depict the gravitational pull inward as exactly counterbalancing the anti gravity force, now known as the cosmological constant pushing outward. But later, it was shown that that didn't actually work from the physics standpoint of things, that even slight perturbations would cause either a recollapse or an expansion.
And then there was the data from the redshift, which showed that the universe actually was expanding. And Einstein famously, in 1931, acknowledged this. He went out to the Hubble telescope and had a look for himself with Hubble famous newsreel footage, and then two weeks later gives an interview with the New York Times and acknowledges that he was wrong, that Hubble and his colleague humisen had shown that the universe was expanding. It was not static. There must be a beginning. And then we had a century of debate about whether that that initial conclusion held or not. There was the steady state universe, there was the oscillating universe. There have been attempts to get around the beginning with quantum cosmology, but eventually, I think the consensus now that the universe had a beginning and that even space and time are part of what came into existence, I think is completely unexpected from a materialistic standpoint. The universe does not seem to have been eternal and self existent. It had a beginning in the finite past. Therefore, that does raise the ultimate question of causality. What could cause matter, space, time and energy to come into existence? And that question, I think, has re raised the ancient considerations from the cosmological argument that the best explanation, the way I argue the case in the God hypothesis, is that the best explanation for the origin of the universe is something that must transde, transcend matter, space, time and energy. And therefore you start to the kind of entity that has those attributes or that meets those criteria is something like a personal God, an agent capable of initiating a change of state, and who has existence independent of the physical world. And God fits that bill. And therefore, the way I argue case, I think that either a deistic or a theistic God provides a better explanation for the origin of the universe than either a pantheistic or materialistic worldview.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: Hi, it's Justin here. Hope you're enjoying the conversation. Just to say, if you'd like a free chapter of my book, the surprising rebirth of belief in God, I'll send it to you when you join my newsletter, and if you want to support my work, you'll get early access to episodes and bonus content. Gold supporters even get signed copies of both of my books and the charts for monthly catch ups. The links are with the info. And now back to where we left off.
I guess a key question in all of this is whether the science, and you obviously cover this in great detail, does justify a beginning per se, because, and I am not a physicist or a scientist in this area, but my basic understanding of one of the objections might be, well, at the point where you go back to that singularity you're not dealing with normal physics anymore, time anymore. You're dealing with something quite different. Something very different is happening in those first tiny quantum seconds of the universe. And so to speak of it having been caused doesn't necessarily apply when you're talking about a kind of a quantum field or fluctuation in quantum vacuum or whatever you might say is at that first moment. So is it legitimate to say something must have caused this when you're talking about something very, very different to our normal experience at that point?
[00:26:12] Speaker A: It's a very perceptive question, Justin, and something that I deal with in the last three chapters of Return of the God hypothesis, and I think it's the most original material in the book. And that is that I show that, in a sense, there's a decision tree. If you're a naturalist, if you are content to allow observational astronomy and general relativity to provide our best understanding of cosmology, including the earliest part of the universe, you do definitely get to a beginning. You can circumvent that conclusion or try to, using what's called quantum cosmology, in invoking the idea that as you back extrapolate that you get to a point where the universe would be small enough that quantum effects would then come to predominate. We always have quantum effects with us, but they would become. They would predominate. And that's the idea behind quantum cosmology. What I show in the book is that, well, if your cosmology is based on general relativity and observational astronomy, you get to a definite beginning, and that raises the question of ultimate causation.
But then I show that quantum cosmology itself has its own theistic implications. And some of this, you have to get into some of the math of this. But basically what happens in quantum cosmology is that the earliest state of the universe is depicted as what's called a universal wave function. It's something that rather comes out of a universal wave function, which is not a physical state, but rather a description of mathematical possibilities. So you have this strange paradox in quantum cosmology. You get a physical universe out of pure mathematical possibility.
And Hawking himself was very worried about this. He said, what puts fire in the equations that give them a universe to describe? And even more poignantly, Alexander Valencian, another advocate of quantum cosmology, in the end of his little book, many universes in one says, before there was matter, space, time and energy, what tablet were these quantum physical equations written on?
Because, he says, mathematics in our experience is conceptual, and concepts exist in a mind. So if we're saying that the universe came out of math, essentially, are we really saying that the universe came out of a mind? And so I go into great detail on this in the chapters 17 and 18 in return of the God hypothesis, to show that in two separate ways, if you want to, there is a way to circumvent the conclusion of an absolute beginning, although even there, not entirely, because the singularity in quantum cosmology is never eliminated. It's eliminated as an intermediate step in a mathematical transformation that hawking performs. But he acknowledges that that intermediate step exists in the realm. It's in the realm of imaginary numbers and has no physical correlate. And so if you convert back to real numbers, the singularity reappears. So in Vilenkin's quantum cosmology, there is still a singularity, an absolute beginning. It's also presupposed in the Hawking Hartle model and is not really eliminated, except, as hawking himself acknowledges, as a mathematical trick. So the first thing to say is that you don't actually get rid of the beginning in quantum cosmology, but secondly, the attempt to get rid of it depicts the universe as arising out of a purely mathematical state. A quantum field or a quantum foam is not a physical state. It's a description of mathematical possibilities. And even so, even beyond that, the mathematical possibilities have to be constrained in order to get a universe like ours as the natural outcome.
Those mathematical possibilities are constrained by the choice of the physicist. And so you have a big, hairy equation in quantum cosmology called the Wheeler de Witt equation. It's the analog to the Schrodinger equation. In ordinary quantum mechanics, it has an infinite number of solutions because it is a type of differential equation that has an infinite number of solutions. So the quantum cosmologist wants to says they'll explain our universe if the solution to the equation gives a wave function that includes our universe as a reasonable possible outcome. But you can't get such a solution until the physicist constrains the degrees of mathematical possibility and essentially inputs information into the mathematical apparatus so that they can depict our universe as a natural consequence of all that. So you've got the universe coming out of math, but also coming out of a math that has to be artificially constrained by an intelligence to get the right answer. It's a teleological, undirected simulation. So you've got, what you have is a mind inputting information to simulate the origin of the universe. That's what's happening in quantum cosmology. So I think actually the move to go to quantum cosmology to get around the clear evidence at the beginning just ends up adding additional weight to the theistic argument.
[00:31:41] Speaker C: Just one more question as we close out.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: That was a little long and complicated.
[00:31:45] Speaker C: No, no, it's fine.
It's all good stuff. I mean, to what extent would you say there is potentially a bias at play among some scientists who are committed to, say, methodological naturalism, to want to avoid, as it were, any possible divine foot in the door? I know, for instance, that when these models were first being proposed, Fred Hoyle was not a fan of them, arguably simply because he didn't like the implications.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: He was explicit about that, and that he coined the term the big bang as a pejorative to make fun of it. He said he was a democratean. He didn't believe that, that something could come from nothing. And he didn't like the idea of invoking a cause that he could never verify. Well, understandable, but science involves invoking all kinds of postulates that we cannot directly verify. Science has a structure where we infer from what we see to sometimes what we cannot see, and we hold as real those things that we cannot see because of their I explanatory power with respect to the observables. And if that's legitimate, to do that for subatomic particles or subsurface geological structures or molecular biological structures, or if you're a psychiatrist, states of mind and your patient, why is that a legitimate move to infer to an unobservable intelligent agent responsible for the origin of the universe? The causal profile that's required to account for what we see directly matches what theism affirms about God. And so this is not an intellectually illegitimate move. This is the kind of thing that scientists and philosophers do all the time in inferring an unobservable from the observables, where the observable entity inferred has the attributes that, if true, would be necessary to explain what we see.
And you're right.
I'm sorry I went philosophical on you. But just history, science. You had multiple attempts to circumvent the idea of a beginning. And in Hoyle's case, he was very explicit about his metaphysical motivations. He did not like it. He was a scientific materialist at the time. He then later changed his worldview, though, in response to his own discovery about the fine tuning of the universe that was necessary to account for carbon in particular, in life in general.
[00:34:09] Speaker C: Well, that neatly segues into our next sort of argument, then, which is, of course, the fine tuning of the universe for life. Again, if you could, in layman friendly terms, sketch out what this particular phenomenon is, and again, how it's changed our understanding of the universe and our place in it in the last several decades.
[00:34:27] Speaker A: Sure, it's a little easier to understand than quantum cosmology, so I'll try to do better than my last answer. Sorry.
So, yeah, Hoyle is actually one of the first, maybe the first physicist who stumbles across this phenomenon of the fine tuning. He's thinking about the importance of carbon and some of the other heavier elements. But it's in particular carbon. Carbon has unique properties, forms long chain like molecules that can store information. It's critical to all biological life that we know. And he's trying to think, how could we get a, how can we explain the abundance of carbon? And he, for the life of him, can't really come up with a solution. He knows the atomic weight, so he's trying to think of how it could be built up from smaller elements. And he ends up coming up with an idea that if he combined beryllium beryllium atom with a helium atom, that that would form a carbon twelve. But he realized that the energy level of that molecule, what's called the resonance, would be higher than what normal carbon has. And so he's wondering if that resonance level exists. He goes out to Caltech, he gets some guys to run some experiments there, and lo and behold, the resonance level that he predicted on purely theoretical cosmological grounds turns out to exist.
And that's a kind of fine tuning in itself, but it's actually the tip of an iceberg, of a whole series of other fine tuning parameters. And what fine tuning is, if you could think of it as a sort of a Goldilocks zone, that we live in, a Goldilocks universe, where there are all these fundamental parameters that are not too heavy. The atomic weights of things are not too heavy, not too light. The speed of light, not too fast, not too slow. The expansion rate of the universe, same, not too fast, not too slow.
And everything is just right to allow for the possibility of life with multiple different parameters. If things fall outside very narrow ranges or tolerances, then life for various reasons would not be possible. In fact, even stable galaxies, planetary systems, and for many of the fine tuning parameters, even atoms heavier than helium would not be possible. And so you have this kind of stunning recognition. And this hits Hoyle and other physicists at a really fundamental level, because they understand how fundamental these parameters are to the universe. We live in. And yet, in opposition to their expectation, the conditions that are necessary for life to exist are not common. They're not easy to produce. They're extremely improbable. They fall within narrow ranges among very much, much, much wider possible ranges, or natural ranges, as they put it. And so Hoyle ends up shifting his point of view on the big metaphysical questions from his staunch atheism to a kind of quasi theism, and is quoted as saying, physics and chemistry look as if they've been monkeyed with, he says, to make life possible. And so he ends up writing about this and having a major shift in worldview. Many other physicists end up adopting the same perspective. The great physicist at Cambridge University, John Polkinghorne, who was late in life, also took on holy orders and was, became part of the anglican church, was a spokesman for the science and faith issues. He was a very capable advocate of this fine tuning argument, that fine tuning suggests a fine tuner. And so that's been a big shift, and there have been more and more of these fine tuning parameters discovered in recent years. The young physicist Luke Barnes, who did his PhD at Cambridge, did a joint book with his PhD supervisor called the fortunate universe. Supervisor was an atheist. Barnes is a theist.
They describe the fine tuning parameters that are known and list at the end of the book all the different physicists who accept that fine tuning is a real phenomenon that needs to be explained. And then they have a dialogue between the two of them about how best to explain them the fine tuning. Barnes argues for theistic design, and his supervisor poses other explanations. One of the most popular right now is something called the multiverse, which we can talk about.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: Well, before we get to the multiverse, let's deal with maybe a few common objections to this, sometimes philosophical objections of one sort or another.
Perhaps at one level you've got the Douglas Adams sort of objection, which is, well, life is rather like claiming that life is fine tuned for the universe is a bit like saying that this puddle is fine tuned for the shape of the water in it. The point being that if you like, when the puddle says, look how perfectly formed I am to contain this water is obviously just happens to be the water fills the available space and takes the shape it does. And I think people kind of make a similar argument for life. Look, life will find a way. There is a sort of sense in which it's arrogant for us to claim that we were always the intended outcome of this universe. It could have been something different. A different set of circumstances might have produced some completely different life form. Who knows? What do you say to that kind of an objection, right?
[00:40:00] Speaker A: Well, I've had exactly that, an argument about exactly that objection with Lawrence Krauss in the journal inference. And Krauss's way of putting it is very crisp. He says that life isn't possible because there was pre existing fine tuning. Rather, life evolved in accord with the fine tuning parameters that had been pre established. And so there's nothing special about life. The fine tuning was life simply took advantage of and evolved in accord with the universe that was produced by the fine tuning parameters. The problem with that is that you don't get with many of the fine tuning parameters, you can't get stable galaxies, you can't get planetary systems.
You can't even get atoms heavier than helium. That the fine tuning is necessary, a necessary condition of there being any subsequent evolution at all. So in other words, the fine tuning is more primary, more prior. It's prior to any even possible evolutionary process. So you can't say that. Well, of course, evolution accommodated what was present. There wouldn't be anything present to make evolution possible if it weren't for the fine tuning. It's that primary and that fundamental.
[00:41:24] Speaker C: You don't have chemistry full stop to be able to mess with if you don't have the fine tuning to enable atoms.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: And there are multiple types of fine tuning. There's the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics, and there's the fine tuning of the planetary system. But then, even at a very, very fundamental level, there's the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe, sometimes called the initial entropy fine tuning, which is the arrangement of mass energy in the initial plasma state of the universe. Turns out that it's exquisitely finely tuned. This is the number that Roger Penrose, the calculation that he made that is hyper, exponentially fine tuned. One part in ten to the ten to the 123. So you've got stuff that's set from the very beginning that's necessary to even getting basic chemistry off the ground. So I don't think that objection works. I think it's facile in a way. Sounds good. It's like the old Abraham Lincoln thing about isn't it great that the man's legs are just long enough to reach the ground? But no, that's funny, because the law of gravity is actually what we would say is responsible for that. But the law of gravity is finely tuned to make carbonous, and other things are finely tuned even to make more simple molecule or atoms. So I think there's a decisive response to that objection.
[00:42:43] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, that number from Penrose one in whatever it was, ten to the one, two, three. But I heard it said that if you put a zero on every single particle in the universe, you still wouldn't have a number big enough. I mean, it's a extraordinarily, I mean, even to call it fine tuning doesn't do it justice, really. But anyway. Okay, let's talk about just one more.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: Riff on that cosmological constant, you know, which is the degree of fine tuning of the force that's causing the expansion of the universe that's accepted at about one part in ten to the 90, I think, is an accepted.
And so that would be.
And if that's off, then you get a recollapse of the universe, and no evolution is possible at that point, or you get a heat death. Okay. If it's off in either direction. And just to put that in perspective, there's ten to the 80th elementary particles in the universe by many estimates. So getting the cosmological constant fine tuning right would be equivalent to the odds of a blindfolded person floating in free space trying to find one marked elementary particle, but having to search not just one universe, not just our universe, but 10 billion our size. So the degree of fine tuning with some of these parameters is beyond exquisite. We just. We simply don't have modifiers and adjectives to capture this.
[00:44:14] Speaker C: So, one other quick objection before we get to the big one. The multiverse.
[00:44:20] Speaker A: Multiverse, yeah.
[00:44:22] Speaker C: This is, again, a sort of a philosophical objection, which just says, well, look, of course, it's unsurprising that we live in a fine tuned universe because we're here to observe it. We wouldn't be observing a fine tuned universe if it wasn't fine tuned for us to be able to be here.
What do you make of that particular.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: Well, there's two different versions of that. There's one thing, one called the weak anthropic principle and the strong anthropic principle. I deal with both in the book. The strong anthropic principle trades on the old kind of sophomore philosophical saw. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, did it make a sound? And the idea is that you really couldn't have a universe unless there was someone there to observe it.
And therefore, the universe had to be finely tuned at the beginning, so it would evolve to produce observers long after the fact. And that's the strong anthropic principle. The obvious problem with that is that if the observers are the ultimate cause of the universe, then the observers are evolving after the universe has evolved to produce them. So you've got the cause after the alleged effect that the cause explains, which is, I think, simply irrational because cause and effect don't work that way. It's cause precedes the effect. The weak anthropic principle is a little more subtle.
You may remember also that Martin Gardner, the former editor of I think Scientific American, he talked about all the different anthropic principles. And when he got to the strong anthropic principle, he said he called not the SAP for strong anthropic principle. He called it the completely ridiculous anthropic principle and gave it the name crap. So the weak anthropic principle is a little more subtle. It says that that, yeah, we shouldn't be surprised because of course we live in a universe that is consistent with prior conditions that are consistent with our existence. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. Doesn't make the observers the cause. It just says we shouldn't be surprised.
Problem with that, though, is that it still doesn't explain the origin of the fine tuning. It explains.
It cites a necessary condition of our existence. That is, the fine tuning parameters are necessary for us to exist without explaining what caused the fine tuning parameters themselves. So there's a logical confusion between necessary condition and cause. Those aren't the same thing, and it also explains the wrong thing. We're not trying to explain our surprise, or lack thereof, of being here, or even why we are here, given that there is fine tuning. Rather, we're trying to explain how the fine tuning came to be. And there the design hypothesis provides a causal explanation. We're simply saying, hey, we're not surprised. We shouldn't be surprised provides no such causal explanation.
[00:47:17] Speaker B: 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 second half of the conversation coming up next, were grateful to Justin Brierly for permission to share his interview 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 Bryerly and you spell Brierly b r I e rhe for id the future. I am Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. dot this program is copyright discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
