[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. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're pleased to bring you the first half of a special two hour interview with philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer. The interview was originally recorded in the fall of 2023 by Praxis Circle, a worldview building organization that promotes open dialogue around life's biggest questions.
The word Praxis hearkens back to Latin and Greek as a word for practice, action, or doing so. Praxis refers to the process of interaction between our worldview, our conception of reality, our view of the world, and our practice of living and acting in it. An interesting mental space to begin a dialogue. I think you'll enjoy listening to Dr. Meyer's views on a host of topics related to his work and his books. First, though, a few words about the format of the interview, just so you don't lose your way. The host of the interview is Doug Monroe, and you'll hear him at intervals throughout, especially as things get going in part one. But you won't actually hear Doug asking all his questions to Dr. Meyer. The interview is recorded specifically to be broken up into 39 short response videos, so often you'll just hear Dr. Meyer answer a question. The questions are often connected to each other, though, and follow a logical progression, exploring Meyer's books and arguments. Plus, Dr. Meyer usually begins his answers by paraphrasing the question so you'll have a good idea what he's talking about as he begins each new answer.
Before we jump in, here's a rough outline of the topics covered by Dr. Meyer in this first hour of the interview.
First, Dr. Meyer explains how and when the Discovery Institute began. Then he defines worldview and explains the worldview he was born into. Next, he explains his own personal worldview journey and his season of metaphysical angst as a young man on a quest to find ultimate meaning. Here he discusses epistemology and the judeochristian idea of intelligibility, one of the assumptions that underpinned the scientific revolution.
He makes a case that there are strong philosophical and scientific arguments for God, but he notes that in this modern age, multiple different worldviews are now prevalent, so objective, rational reasons for theistic belief have become very necessary.
Dr. Myers then asked about the importance of philosophy and the relationship between materialism and relativism. He explains the fact value divide and suggests that there are certain assumptions about the world that cannot be verified empirically.
He recounts the debate between Sir Isaac Newton and Godfrey Leibniz about how to explain the force of gravity. And to conclude the first hour, he explains what lies at the heart of mind and matter. That is information.
Without further ado, then enjoy an hour with Stephen Meyer.
[00:03:13] Speaker C: Well, Dr. Meyer, I just want to thank you for this opportunity. It is truly one of the thrills of my lifetime. I would put it up there. I won't mention names because I love all my contributors the same, but having followed you, they're clapping for you there.
Having followed you, I just admire what you're doing. And I also wanted to say that having seen you and your team live at the Dallas conference, if all of America could see that, I know theists would go up 30% overnight in this country and conversion of Christianity would go up 15 or 20%. And over time, and it's just, I think you're taking the truth forward in one of the most important ways, which is in science. So I want to thank you for.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: So many good reasons to believe, and very few of our young people in particular know about them. So that's been part of the burden that we've felt, is to get the word out.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: It's truly you're fighting.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: But thank you for having me.
[00:04:23] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you. It's the culture in our university system and educational system that's against it. So I just would love to hear about you founding the Discovery Institute and what its mission and what you do there.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Well, the Discovery Institute was founded by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder, both of whom had just finished stints either advising or working for President Reagan, and they founded it in 1990. They wanted to found a regionally based think tank that had. That addressed issues of national and international scope. In other words, they wanted to be out of the DC Beltway, but still do serious policy work.
So they founded that in 1990. In 1996, my colleague John west and I founded a center within discovery called the center for Science and Culture for the purpose of investigating these scientific issues that have larger worldview implications, and if they have larger worldview implications, therefore larger cultural implications.
A big part of the focus of our work has been exploring the evidence of design in nature and whether there is such evidence and supporting scientists who have research projects investigating those questions.
Well, I think the word worldview is from the german Veltens, and it's a german philosophical word, but a way of thinking of a worldview. It's a kind of default personal philosophy that each person holds, whether or not they know it, whether they know it or not, and whether they talk about it explicitly. And a way to define a worldview is a worldview is a more or less coherent answer, set of answers to some basic questions about reality, the most basic of which is what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes? In the formal discipline of philosophy, that would be the subject of metaphysics or the subject of what's called ontology, the question of being, what fundamentally exists? But everyone has some idea about that. And the typical answers that are given are the idea that matter and energy are the things from which everything else comes. And that would be the worldview of materialism. Or a theist might say that God is the thing from which everything else comes. So that would be the worldview of theism, and there would be different conceptions of God. There'd be a deistic conception where God acts only at the beginning of the universe, or a theistic conception where God acts as a creator at the beginning of the universe, but also is active within the creation or within the laws of nature that he otherwise sustains and upholds. So you have a more passive notion of God, a more active notion of God, and then you have impersonal notions of God, such as in eastern philosophy. So that would be a pantheistic worldview. And there are other themes, variations on these various themes. But then worldviews also answer questions about the nature of human nature or the nature of human beings, about how we know things, about the nature of morality. Is it objective, or is it relative to persons and groups? What happens to us at death? These sort of fundamental questions are the stuff of worldview inquiry.
Sure, I was raised in a nominally catholic home, and so I had something of the rudiments of a christian worldview.
We happened to be in a parish where the priest seemed more interested in politics than in religion. So I'm not sure how much of the Judeo Christian or biblical worldview was inculcated to us. That varies from parish to parish and church to church, but I think I had a kind of rudimentary theistic worldview. But by my early adolescence, I was deeply confused about all such matters, and we were no longer going to church.
I really found faith in an unconventional way, let's say. So it took me a while.
My conversion to Christianity was kind of a long and tortuous affair, and it wasn't until really after college that I felt settled in that as a 14 year old, I had experience which in retrospect, I think was kind of metaphysical anxiety.
And at the time I experienced it actually as a worry about my own sanity. I was having questions that were popping into my mind that I couldn't answer. And they kind of terrified me. And to even describe them as questions is not quite right. They were more worries. What's anything going to matter in 100 years? I was, at the time, I had broken my leg in a skiing accident, and I was laid up for quite a while. And while I was convalescing, I was reading a book that my dad gave me about the history of baseball, because he and I were both huge baseball fans. And I found the stories very, very engaging. But then always at the end, a little bit depressing, because no matter how much glory the athlete in question achieved, at the end of the day, there were just some records in a record book.
So many career home runs and so many batting titles and so many trips to the world Series. But then what? What was the point of it all? And I kept having this same feeling. And to me, at the time, my mother kept saying, well, it's just a game. No wonder it doesn't seem significant. But I thought, well, but how is that different for anything else?
Even if I am a great surgeon and I save lots of lives, even the people whose lives I've saved will eventually die. And I will die, and no one will even remember that I saved those people in 100 or 200 years. And so there was this. What's the phrase I heard recently that eventually every grave goes unvisited? And so there was, I think, this strange craving for lasting meaning or significance that I could find no satisfactory answer for.
And as these questions started to haunt me, I then had another question, and which was, I wonder if this is what it means to be insane. And when I first. I remember having the day I had that pop into my head, and then I had a surge of panic, like, oh, there's something really wrong with me. And so there was this kind of anxiety that took me over at 1415 years old, and I was not able to get out and move around and do things because of the long. I was in a full length leg cast and I was immobilized, and I already had an overly active, slightly neurotic style of thinking. And so it was just a. So I spent six months in this sort of space. I got very well. Again, it was kind of a worry or a strange thought about time.
And you stop and think about time too much, it will freak anyone out, because here we are having a conversation. A minute ago, I heard some people clapping in the other room. That was an event, but that event has gone. Where did it go? I can't recover that event. It's gone forever. So we have this kind of strange series of sensory experiences that we would describe as one event after another, but they go as fast as they come, and there's nothing that seems stable about our experience. Everything is always changing. And I had this very strange intuition that there must be something that doesn't change, or else everything that is constantly changing cannot have any lasting meaning or value or significance or something.
So I was having these sorts of swirling thoughts and then worrying that there was something wrong with me because I was having them. No one at school that I knew was talking about things like this.
[00:12:32] Speaker C: You were obviously just a very bright, mature young man.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: I was a very immature young person. I had no idea how to process any of this, and my mind was just racing out of control.
Later, I got out of the leg cast. I went back to school. I have a happy go lucky younger brother who in various ways sort of pulled me out of my own headspace.
But the underlying questions were sort of still there. And sometime in the ensuing year or so, out of curiosity, maybe some desperation, something I don't quite remember, I picked up the big, white, fat Catholic family Bible, and it opened to the division between the two testaments. And there was a picture of a very manly depiction of Jesus. Not the Jesus with lipstick, with the verse, come unto me, all ye who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. And I thought that sounded pretty good to me. And I began to read the Gospel of Matthew at the first chapter, and then the next night at the second, and the next night at the third. And I was kind of blown away by what I was finding, because I had some exposure to Christianity in a nominal sort of way. But what I was finding in the gospels was incredibly compelling.
But what it did for me was I found that I couldn't go to sleep at night until I read one chapter. And then I found, as I read more deeply in the Bible, that there were other things in the biblical, what you would call a worldview that were addressing the questions that I had. And in particular, I remember coming across the verse, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. I thought, oh, could there be such a thing? And then in the third chapter of Moses, where God reveals himself to Moses at the burning bush and says that I am, that I am. And the idea of the eternal, self existent ground of all being is also a personal God implicit in the name. And so there were things in Christianity that seemed, in the Bible in particular, that seemed to address the kind of questions and concerns that I had that were, I later learned, philosophical. So when I got to college, I remember I was in a philosophy course.
It was a course on atheistic existentialism with the, I think we were studying Jean Paul Sartre, and Sartre, close paraphrase, said, something to the effect that without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. And to the atheistic existentialist philosophers, this was just axiomatic, that meaning had to be created by the individual. This was the whole idea of existence precedes essence. There's no pre given design, there's no pre given morality, there's no pre given meaning. We have to create it, we have to generate it for ourselves. Because there is no infinite reference point, there is nothing that can confer meaning that was here before we came on the scene and will be here after we pass.
To whom things can mean anything. Nothing can mean anything to a rock or an atom or a planet. Things only mean things to persons. And so if there are no persons besides ourselves when we die and we rot, then there can be no lasting meaning. And this was the sense of anguish, forlornness, and despair that the french existentialists talked about, which for them was a consequence of the death of God. And this was exactly what I was feeling as a young person, that absent God in my life or in our collective lives, there could be no personal reality that persists beyond the grave. And therefore, I came across this quotation from Bertrand Russell, where he talked about all the great achievements of human beings and our highest noonday achievements in the pinnacle of human existence. They will all die in the heat death of the universe. And so these are all very depressing thoughts. You don't have them on a day to day basis, but they were bothering me as a young person. And I found that Christianity, biblical Christianity, addressed these head on, that there was a source of lasting meaning because there was a person who preexisted us and would continue to exist us and could confer life upon us even after our death. And so there was a possibility of meaning. And so that was one of the things that really haunted me when I got to college.
Another thing that was taking philosophy courses that has troubled the philosophers since the late enlightenment is the whole question of knowledge. How is it that we can know anything at all? This was actually another one of the things that haunted me. I remember listening, looking at my sister's windowsill in her bedroom, and we had to change rooms while I was in the leg cast. So I was staring out the window and looking at the pattern on the windowsill? And I thought, well, how do I know that what I'm seeing actually corresponds to what's really there and that other people are seeing the same thing that I'm seeing? And then I thought, oh boy, there's again, something wrong with me. I'm having this weird thought. I don't know how to answer it. Later learned that this know, the big question that philosophers have been asking since Hume and Kant was, how is it possible for us to justify the idea that we have any knowledge of the world around us, that there is a mind independent reality that we can know truly? And there was a really powerful argument that I was exposed to as an undergraduate in philosophy, called the argument from epistemological necessity, because the key concern of the philosophers was the reliability of the human mind. And human Kant were especially attuned to the.
They were especially aware that there were certain things we were assuming, that our minds necessarily assumed about reality, that were necessary to making sense of reality. And then the question that naturally arises is, well, can we trust those assumptions? How do we know that nature is uniform? How do we know that all events have causes? How do we know that the way our minds spatially order, that our perceptual apparatus and the assumptions that are embedded in our minds to make sense of sensory data are? How do we know that those assumptions that our minds are making match reality? And so this is the whole question of the reliability of the human mind. And it was philosopher that I encountered in university presented the case that it was theism that could uniquely answer that question. If our minds had been made by a benevolent creator who made our minds to know the world that he made, then we could have confidence in our ability to know the world. And this, I found later, was one of the assumptions of the scientific revolution. It was called the idea of intelligibility that we can do science, because this was the assumption of the early scientists. Our minds are made in the image of an intelligent and rational creator. Therefore, he's endowed us with rationality, and we can understand, therefore, the rational structure that he built into the world, which we depict with our descriptions of the laws of nature, our understanding of the design of nature. And so there was a principle of correspondence between the rationality built into the world and the rationality. We had to understand the world and its rational structure. And so it seemed to me that theism, and particularly judeo christian theism, which is this idea of our minds being made in the image of the creator, provided an answer to what is now called the postmodern turn in philosophy, the worry about our ability to know the world and wondering if we are all kind of trapped in an isolating sense of subjectivity. So these were the weird, strange thoughts I was having more in college. But this really convinced me that this, to me, was a very compelling argument for theism, that theism alone could ground our ability to know. We all lived as though we knew things, but if we were living as though we knew things, then we were tacitly affirming that our minds were made in such a way as to know the world. And really, only theism could justify that assumption.
[00:21:18] Speaker C: Yeah. So you started worrying very early on, compared to most kids, about metaphysical issues. And as you got further along.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: The.
[00:21:31] Speaker C: Answers that made you more calm and happy were also the ones that conformed to reality. And I think you're carrying that forward in your science. It should be no surprise that the more we look, the more we see God. If all that is true, which means you would lean to be an atheist. The interesting thing to me, your first problem you mentioned as a kid, which would be, does Babe Ruth matter anymore? I call it the. What has Alexander the great or Napoleon done for me lately?
Nothing. Right.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: Well, what I can comment on is a survey that we commissioned to probe as to why so many young people were losing faith in God. You may have seen the Gallup poll from a summer ago where the Gallup people released their data showing that belief in God in the United States had dropped to an all time low. Still a reasonably high 80, 81%, I think. But they showed that there had been a precipitous loss of a drop in belief in God in the last seven to ten years, from in the low ninety s to the low eighty s, and that that was almost entirely driven by one demographic, which are young people between 18 and 30. And so we did a commissioned survey to get to find out what were the reasons that young people are citing as reasons for rejecting belief in God. And we found that, surprisingly, science was playing an outsized role in their thinking that one of the major factors was no scientific evidence for God. And something like, I think 65% of young atheists said they thought that belief in God made, or that science made belief in God less probable. And the number was in the high 40s for young agnostics, same kind of thing.
I think one of the reasons I wrote return of the God hypothesis was that there's so much compelling evidence for the existence of God, and it is precisely scientific, and yet very few people know about it. So I sort of wanted to address the existential angst in the younger generation coming up because it's not dissimilar to what I experienced as a young person myself.
[00:23:52] Speaker C: What could we say about life given 5000 years of recorded history, recorded human history, what would be the most important things that we could say about that? Taking the debate off the table?
Well, it's like red. What's red? Right.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: Yeah. One thing that's kind of crazy is that we only have about 5000 years of recorded history.
[00:24:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
Right. Which is this. Yeah.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: We don't get writing until the Sumerians. And that's the mesopotamian floodplain between the two rivers. The great cities there, which include Uruk, which is thought by archaeologists to be the oldest true city. We have oldest settlements in Jericho. We have settlements in Go Beckley, Tekli, whatever that place is called, in Turkey, but we don't really have true cities. And interestingly, Uruk is mentioned in the table of nations in Genesis ten.
[00:24:58] Speaker C: Is it really?
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Yes, it is.
[00:25:00] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: The oldest city mentioned in the Bible is also the oldest city recognized by archaeologists.
[00:25:08] Speaker C: And that's where the famous.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Well, they had lots of ziggurats in that area too.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: What's the inky do where the guy has the hero, builds the city, but he loses his friend and he tries to.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: I don't know that. You know this. You know this.
[00:25:30] Speaker C: This is the legend.
Yeah. You know that.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: But I think it that.
[00:25:37] Speaker C: Is that in Babylon? Is that in Tigris, Euphrates?
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Well, Uruk is between the two rivers, between Tigris and Euphrates. And there's another city there that included a partially built ziggurat that our friend Titus thinks is likely the Tower of Babel.
[00:25:56] Speaker C: Oh, no. Get out of.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: It's called. That one is called Eridu. I think Eric and made this. I had COVID Christmas ago, and I read a book on the history of cities and I got fascinated with this and know there's a lot more.
My view is that the earth and the universe are super old. But anatomically matter and cognitively endowed human beings have not been around very long. There's just very little evidence of higher cognition past before the last ICE age. Well, I don't think we know. We don't know how our own minds generate the information we're using to communicate with each other right now. It's called the mind body problem. There's a brain we know we have by our direct introspective experience. We have conscious awareness. So we have this consciousness, but that consciousness, but our brain states are necessary, but not sufficient to explain that consciousness. We're not the same thing as chemical reactions going on in our synapses or whatever is going in there. So there's something different between the mind and the brain. I can have an intention, I can have a thought, and I can convert that thought into modulated sound waves that will convey my thought to your ear and then into your brain and onto your mind. But we know nothing about that interface. We have no idea. We know that there is a mind.
We know what minds can do. Therefore we can infer the activity of mind from the distinctive things that minds do that matter alone does not. But we don't know. So we can retradict to a mind.
We cannot explain how the mind affects the body in the other direction of time.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: Yeah, which it clearly does.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Which it clearly does. But then the question is, well, what then do we make of?
How do we conceive of divine action? We don't really know. Yeah, but we don't know how our own mental action works.
[00:28:11] Speaker C: What can we say about God, assuming God of the Bible exists, that God must not want us to prove God.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:23] Speaker C: It gives us all the evidence you're talking about, which to me is proof.
If I put myself in the position of a scientist and I see all that you've written and others, I've probably read 1015 books at least down that pathway over the last 20 years.
How can you really believe that this information doesn't come from a mind?
To me, like Frank Turk says, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. I mean, it's overwhelming.
But yet God designed the world so that we cannot prove God. And the only reason I can think of is we would not be free. We would essentially be in heaven.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd have a take on that. I've never liked that argument. I think that God has made, as Romans says, that he has made himself plain through the things that are made.
[00:29:13] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: And the problem is not with the insufficiency of evidence, and therefore the arguments that can be constructed on the basis of that evidence. I think the problem is in the human heart, that we don't want to believe.
[00:29:26] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: Someone was telling me yesterday about, in this room, actually, someone in the lunch yesterday was telling me about a study that had been done of young children in different countries, Japan and all around the world.
I don't have to get that. And almost all of them have a basic belief in a creator as young children. But by the time they get through high school, and certainly by college. It gets beaten out of them by the educational system.
It depends on what I agree with.
But I've heard that argument.
I think we do have free will, but we have the freedom to suppress the evidence.
Sometimes people say, well, the evidence is ambiguous, and that's how God allows us free will. I think he allows us the freedom to suppress the evidence, which is what Roman says. We suppress it in ungodliness. But our freedom is not underwritten by a lack of evidence, by an ambiguity of the evidence.
[00:30:33] Speaker C: Right? I would agree with all that you say there. And I would say that a lot of young people and maybe people that are mad at that God would allow us to have World War I and World War II, for example, are just really upset at God, that God doesn't walk around like a person and tap us on the shoulder every day and assure us that he or she or it or whatever is there. And so the proof that God has chosen is deemed, by human standards, insufficient sufficient.
That's kind of another way of looking at it.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: I think one of the reasons that people are losing faith in God is that they don't see that there are any objective reasons for such belief. And when we did a survey of younger people in particular, we found that that was the case. 65% of young atheists said they thought that the findings of science made belief in God untenable. So when people go out to share their faith in a secular context like that, especially among those younger cohorts, and they begin to make arguments based on the Bible or based on their own subjective religious experience, those arguments have very little traction with people, because what has ensued in the recent decades is a worldview divide has arisen in the culture. There's at least two main competing worldviews, two different ways of thinking about things. And as our culture becomes more and more secular, simply preaching the gospel has no effect on people, because the christian message is making, as it's often presented, is making assumptions that are not held in common by the people to whom the gospel is being preached. Okay? And so whereas in 1954, Billy Graham could go to London and do a massive crusade and simply preach from the biblical text, and droves and droves of people, in a sense, came back to God, he was calling them, in a very real sense, to rethink. That's the literal meaning of repentance, to rethink their standing before God. That was something that could be done. That style of preaching or evangelism could be done in 1954 because there was still a strong christian memory in Britain in the United States, people still believed that God existed. They mainly had some sense of the morality, the jochristian morality, and they knew where they stood in relation to that. Maybe they felt that they didn't stand in a good relation to that. Maybe they needed to repent, but they still believed that there was an objective morality, and they believed that there was a God who was the source of that, and that they were in some way accountable to that God. And so the basic framework of a theistic and Judeo Christian worldview was pervasive in the culture. And so that style of evangelistic proclamation was very effective. But we live in a completely different time now where the majority of, at least young people, do not have a theistic worldview. If they have a worldview that's coherent, it's maybe a more materialistic worldview, or maybe somewhat aversion of materialism, which is called cultural Marxism, which has made a lot of inroads in the culture, or maybe it's a new age kind of worldview, or some. It's. Maybe it's some sort of amalgam of different elements. Maybe. One sociologist has described a common way of thinking in the United States, not so much as Christian, but as what he calls moralistic therapeutic deism. Okay, there's a combination of the therapeutic perspective of psychology combined with some idea of a creator, but also some sense that there is right and wrong, but it's not terribly coherent. It's an amalgam of different elements. And so in that kind of a context, if people of any worldview persuasion want to persuade people to change their worldview, they have to understand what is in the minds, what their interlocutors are assuming, where is their common ground, and build from there. And you see this in the book of Acts, where St. Paul, as recorded in chapter 17, you get the first snapshot of how he shared his christian message, first to a pagan world and also with fellow Jews. And in each case he sought to provide, he found a common ground basis and then built his case from there. But he did not presuppose the same worldview framework when he was trying to persuade people to adopt the worldview that he had come to believe was true. And so I think that's just a principle of persuasion.
You have to build your case based on facts or assumptions that are held in common with yourself and your interlocutors, but then being aware of the differences, make a case based on what you have in common for the differences between your two worldview perspectives, and argue your case based on evidence and reasons and the common ground assumptions that you hold together. So, yeah, I think worldview is very important. I think not in the sense of talking about worldview, maybe that's not so important. But I think that being aware of the default worldview that people around you hold, and if you want to persuade them to hold a different worldview, you have to be very aware of what they hold. And don't beg the question. Don't assume the pointed issue in your argumentation or apologetic. Well, I think philosophy in one sense is just good thinking, and good thinking about certain kinds of deep questions that maybe we don't have to think about every day. But if we have a pulse, probably are questions we should be thinking about and questions about the meaning of life and what our priorities are and what's true about human nature, about where we came from, about what is the ultimate good on those sorts of things. So I think philosophy is very important. A lot of scientists in the new atheist movement would ridicule or demean philosophy or cast it aside as if it was something that was irrelevant to inquiries that they were making, or that science was a form of inquiry that could lead us to true conclusions. And philosophy was sort of vain speculation. It's kind of the impression you get from them, but then they go on to do really bad philosophy.
I think good philosophy is good thinking, and good thinking is important to get to the truth.
[00:38:18] Speaker C: One of the smartest scientists that I've seen is Stephen Hawking, and in all due respect, somebody five times smarter than me. He was not a good philosopher.
He constantly said things that would contradict his own thinking. And you mentioned the word truth.
If sort of materialism is the default of culture today, relativism is the default, I think, also of culture today, the default moral philosophy.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: And it flows out of materialism because, as Dostoevsky put it, if God is dead, then all things are lawful or all things are permissible.
There are moral objectivists who are not theists. Michael Shermer, a friendly debating partner, is a moral objectivist who is an atheist or agnostic or a materialist. He doesn't believe in God. But generally, what flows from a materialistic worldview is moral relativism. And there's a reason for that philosophically, because all moral propositions involve a different tense. They're not just offered in the indicative. They don't say, murder hurts people. That would be a factual statement. They say murder is wrong. Okay. Or you ought not to murder.
What does ought imply? Well, ought implies that there is some standard above us all to which we can appeal. That will allow us to adjudicate the rightness or wrongness of an action. So when you use the word ought. You're necessarily implying the existence of a standard of right and wrong. And theism, I think, can give an account of what that standard is. It's an expression of God's moral law. Which is an expression of his design for human flourishing. The moral law was given to help us flourish. In accord with the way he designed us to work best.
The materialistic view tries to give an account of the origin. Tries to give an account of those ought statements. In terms of our evolutionary past. And says, well, what those moral propositions are.
They are sort of instincts that were programmed into us. By the evolutionary mechanism to promote human survival. But once you know that, that's all the moral propositions are. And that you're not actually accountable to anyone, first of all, to act a certain way. But that if those moral instincts, as they'rendered in materialism. Are just instincts programmed into us to help us survive. If you discover that there's a certain course of action. That may violate those moral principles. But which promote your own survival. Or the survival or proliferation of your offspring. Then you really have no reason to any longer acknowledge and respect those moral principles. And so, as one moral philosopher has put it. That the evolutionary account of morality. Does not withstand its own exposure. Once you know that, oh, well, all those moral principles are instincts that were designed, or you can't say they were designed. If you're an evolutionist that were programmed. Well, you can't really say that either. That were somehow built into us to enhance survival. If it turns out that it will enhance your survival. To abscond with the money and run off to South America, you really have no reason not to do mean, that's just one problem with what's called evolutionary ethics, and there are many others. So I think the theistic Harold Berman, one of the legal scholars at Harvard years ago. Said that behind every moral statement is a grand says who? Question. Thou shalt not murder. Well, who says? Well, actually, the author of the universe says so. And it's not just murder is not just wrong because he says so. But there's also a rationality, a benevolent rationality that underlies those moral motions. And that is that the moral propositions or moral commands. Were given to promote our flourishing in accord with our design. So the moral law is actually an expression of divine benevolence. Well, I used to do a gag when I was a philosophy professor on the first day of class in freshman intro to philosophy, I would hand out a syllabus to the students and at the same time hand them a survey of philosophical questions. And then when they got done with the survey, I'd have the teacher's assistant gather the surveys and tally the answers. Well, unbeknownst to the students, I was really interested in only three of the answers. They gave to only three of the questions, and they were all questions about whether or not they thought that morality was subjective and relative to persons and groups, on the one hand, or whether morality had there was an objective basis for morality, or whether there were objective moral principles to which we were all accountable or needed to respect. And invariably, when the teacher's assistant tallied the responses year after year, about 85% of the students revealed that they were moral relativists, at least in their stated philosophy. Whatever's true for you is true for you. Whatever's true for me is true for me. True or false? Well, in the moral realm, it was always the relativistic answer, whatever's true for you is true for you, and whatever's true for me is true for me morally. Oprah, I have my morality, you have your immorality. Don't impose your morality on me, et cetera. So it was very easy to get them to reveal their relativistic tendencies. And so, as the teacher's assistant was tallying those answers, I was presenting the syllabus for the class. I'd get to the part about the grading. I'd explain that to get an A in the class, you needed to have so many points on tests and so many points on assignments. And 10% of the grade, I said, was assigned by their help to the professor.
And then I would just go on to the next portion of the syllabus, very deadpan. And then little by little, hands would start going up in the classroom. What's this stuff about the help to the assistance to the professor?
[00:45:01] Speaker C: They want the a. Yeah.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: What's the 10%? And I would just say, very seriously, I would just say, well, I live up the hill from the campus, and I've got young kids, and I'm just starting teaching, and I've just got so much work to do. And we have these pine trees on our property, and every fall, they just rain needles on our yard, and I just cannot keep up with raking the pine needles. So if anyone would come up to the house and give me a hand with that, I'd be just so grateful. And they'd look at me, say, well. Oh, you mean this is like extra credit? And I'd say, well, no, it's not extra credit, but you don't have to do it. But then they say, but wait, it's 10% of the grade. If I don't do this, I can't get an A. And I'd say, oh, well, yeah, I suppose that's right. Because you could only get a 90, and you need a 92. And so, okay, yeah, I guess that's right. They said, no way. That's lame.
No way. And so then I'd get various forms of righteous indignation and moral indignation at this. And then they'd start to tell me that it was wrong. And I said, well, why do you say that it's wrong? Well, nobody else does it that way in a class. I said, that's your idea of what makes right and wrong what everybody else does. So we'd get into the conversation, and then at a certain point, I would reveal their answers to the questions. They were revealing themselves in their reaction to be very diet in the wool moral objectivists. They believed that there were some things that were right and some things that were wrong. And in particular, my syllabus was completely wrong. And yet, when I got the Ta to reveal their answers to the questions in their stated philosophy, they were all moral relativists. And so then I would say, welcome to philosophy, and introduce the class and explain that the purpose of philosophies was to bring into a coherent synthesis one's stated philosophy and one's actions. That was part of the purpose of philosophy. And because the gag was so fun, I'd usually get five or six students signing up the next day. They're thinking that the whole class would be involved with the professor pulling stunts like that. But anyway, it was a way of illustrating that whatever we say, we, in our actions, reveal a commitment to certain moral, objective, moral principles. In no society is selfishness actually respected.
You cannot get anyone to affirm the proposition it's a good thing to kick old ladies in the shins for pleasure. Okay, there might be some situation in which there's an old lady who's about to kill the president with a gun or something, and then it would be okay to kick her in the shins, but not just for pleasure. Okay? So in ethical philosophy, you can construct these examples that show that we do have a deep seated commitment to certain objective moral principles, and that's universal across cultures. And yet we have lots of people today saying that there is no such thing, but their actions betray their stated relativistic philosophy. And so that was one of the little gags I used to do in class. Hey, just to relate the last answer to your previous question about the upper story and lower story, this was a concept from Francis Schaefer, the idea that, and it also reflects something in contemporary secular philosophy that's called the fact value divide, and the idea that there are these facts of the world that we can know by observation through scientific methods that are real and objective, but we have no knowledge, objective knowledge, of religious or moral propositions, and that these two sorts of things are of two different kinds. And so the only things we can really know are things that we know empirically through the senses, through the processed by the scientific method. And I think the previous illustration in some ways suggests that we may have moral knowledge as well. We may not get it through the senses, it may be innate, but we have a kind of universal moral knowledge.
We may have both empirical knowledge and innate knowledge of the reality of God.
Yesterday I was speaking with someone in this very room who was telling me about a survey of young children in four to five, in the kind of kindergarten age all around the world. And when asked questions about their beliefs, almost universally young children have a belief that there is some sort of benevolent creator who made them, who had them in mind, and they have to be kind of educated out of that view. So Calvin, the protestant theologian, had the concept of a census divinitatus, that there is a kind of innate knowledge of God.
You could debate whether or not that's true or not. But a philosophical definition of knowledge is justified true belief. And as a scientist and philosopher, I'm convinced there is justified true beliefs about God that we can have, namely, in the first instance that God exists. I think there are empirical and rational justifications for that belief, and therefore I think we can have knowledge of God the same way we have knowledge of the world around us.
[00:50:20] Speaker C: Well, I completely agree with that. And I also think that. I'm so glad you gave me that answer.
[00:50:26] Speaker A: So what follows from that is that the upper story and the lower story, as that metaphor is used in philosophy, are not separate.
[00:50:34] Speaker C: They are not separate.
[00:50:34] Speaker A: And in fact, knowing the lower story is not just a matter of sense perception. It also requires us to make certain assumptions about the world that cannot be verified empirically. This was the import of, say, David Hume's work or Emmanuel Kant's work in epistemology in the period of modern philosophy, in order to come to something like an inductive generalization about the laws what we would call the laws of nature. We have to first assume that there's a uniformity of nature such that our observations are in some way representative of the way nature generally works, even though we can't observe nature at all times and in all places. But is that assumption of uniformity of nature something that we can prove empirically? It's not because it's making a claim about the way nature works at all times and in all places. And we don't have the capacity to make observations about nature in all times, at all places. So there are many assumptions that we bring to bear in processing sense data to make sense of the world scientifically. In other words, our knowledge of the lower story depends upon a priori assumptions that we make that cannot be proven simply by observation. And so both we can have knowledge of things in the upper story, moral propositions, propositions about the existence of God. But we have knowledge of things in the world in a lower story in virtue of assumptions that we make that are really not justifiable scientifically, but rather they're. They're philosophical assumptions or innate assumptions that we make. And so I think the simplistic division of knowledge into science and everything else has really failed in philosophy. That was the project of what's known as logical positivism.
[00:52:21] Speaker C: And wouldn't you say the ancients overall, from our standpoint today, had a lot more agreement about the ability to have moral truth, et cetera, and that maybe the 18 hundreds starting before then, but really drilled into that and tried to destroy that foundation, and we're still recovering from that.
[00:52:45] Speaker A: Just think about that, about the idea of moral knowledge. Is there anyone who, at that point where someone is about to kick an old lady in the shins for pure sadistic pleasure, is there anyone who really doubts their visceral response to that impending action and say, no, that is wrong? They don't say, well, am I 98% sure of this, or am I. No, they have knowledge and are convinced that that is a wrong action that's about to be undertaken. So I think it's appropriate to call some things in the upper story forms of knowledge. Yeah, fascinating story in the history of physics about Newton's theory of universal gravitation, which he proposed in his famous book written in 1687, the Principia, or Principia, depending on your preferred Latin pronunciations. And it was a fascinating theory, and it's still our best classical theory of gravitation. We have relativistic theories now and that have in some ways superseded Newton or at least subsumed Newton's ideas into a larger framework. But Newton's idea was that massive bodies exert a force on other massive bodies through empty space. This was the idea of action at a distance. So we have the moon high in the sky above us, and its motions are affecting the tides on earth, but the moon is not touching the earth. There's no pushing and pulling. And so how does that happen?
Newton famously said, hypothesis non fingo. I don't feign to know the cause. I don't have a full explanation, but I can describe how it happens. I can describe mathematically the strength of that force if I know certain factors, if I know the mass of the moon, the mass of the earth, the distance between them.
And he had a famous equation for calculating the force of gravity. And so he could provide a very precise mathematical description of the amount of gravitational force in a given situation. But he couldn't tell you what caused the force.
And if you think about it, it is actually deeply puzzling. Okay, so I've got my cell phone here, and if I drop it, it falls to the earth. Now, the earth did not touch the cell phone, but somehow there was. The physicists talked about it in different ways, gravitational attraction or gravitational force, but there's a movement produced by something at a distance. So prior to Newton, the scientific ideal in the period of the 17th century was advanced by a group of thinkers called the mechanical philosophers. And so if you're going to explain something, they thought, you need to have a mechanistic explanation, a pushing and pulling.
[00:55:50] Speaker C: Early stage positivism, sort of.
[00:55:53] Speaker A: Sorry, early stage positivism, in a way. But we still have this demand for mechanism today.
We provide many good mechanistic explanations for things, but it turns out that the four fundamental force laws in physics, not only gravitation, but electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear force, all have this occult property. It was called, in the 17th century, of action at a distance.
The motion is produced in some way by the massive body, in the case of gravitation, but we know not how.
Leibniz got in wind of Newton's theory, and he opposed it and said, he accused Newton of bringing occult properties or occult causes into science because there was no mechanical pushing and pulling. And so the two great men ended up having this very spirited correspondence debate, Newton writing through an intermediary named Clark. And so there's the famous Clark Leibniz correspondence. But Newton is basically crafting all the responses or putting all the answers, giving them all to Clark. And it's absolutely fascinating. It ends up, in the end, underscoring, I think, a great mystery, which was revealed by a dilemma that Leibniz wanted to impose on Newton to hang him out to.
So it was actually a trilemma. Leibniz said, well, either you have a proper scientific pushing and pulling explanation, which you don't have, okay? And you've acknowledged that, so you acknowledge you don't have proper pushing and pulling. So it's not a mechanistic explanation. So then either you're bringing God into science and saying that somehow the cause of the motions is being produced by the spirit action of the creator, and that was not that implausible, because Newton said that gravitational action occurs instantaneously at a distance everywhere throughout the universe. Okay, so what causal agent could be responsible for that uniform motion everywhere if it's not material? Because if there's no material pushing and pulling, and this was the dilemma, then Leibniz said, either you're using one of these scholastic name game explanations. So famously, Voltaire ridiculed this.
The medievals would say that opium puts you to sleep. Why? Because it has a dormitive virtue. It has a sleep inducing virtue. We still say this today. Aspirin has a pain relieving formula, and that's the reason it relieves your pain.
Well, they're not even teleological in that they're just renaming the effect to be explained. They're proposing as a cause, a name of the effect. Okay, right. And that isn't really at all persuasive. And in the scientific revolution, the mechanical philosophers, the early scientists, said that's a way of thinking that we reject. We want more satisfying explanations, so we want to see an actual explanation. We want to see pushing and pulling. We want to imagine corpuscles of gas causing the expansion of the balloon or something of that sort. Okay, yeah. Matter and energy. So either it's a return to one of these scholastic name game explanations, or you're subtly bringing the deity in. So which is it, Newton? Which was the question that Leibniz put to him. And Newton didn't want to fess up to the theistic explanation, which is what he favored, so he said, hypothesis non finger. I don't know the cause. But in private correspondence to a bishop Bentley, who was giving the Boyle lectures on natural theology in 1691, Newton acknowledges that he thinks that the cause of gravity must be immaterial. And in examining the corpus of his work, one of my Cambridge supervisors said that Newton's view was that the explanation of gravity was constant spirit action, as in the Book of Hebrews, where it says that God sustains the universe by the word of his power. Or in the book of Colossians, where it says that Jesus Christ holds the universe together.
In Christ, all things are held together. And Newton doesn't mention Christ specifically, but he says, in God, all things are held together. He has a close paraphrase of that concept in his theological epilogue to the principia, the general scolium. And so it's really interesting. The bottom line in all of that is that scientifically, the fundamental laws of physics that we think of as our ultimate explanatory principles are themselves unexplained, that they involve forces that are occult in the sense that they involve the production of motions under certain circumstances without any materialistic explanation of what is producing those motions. And even with our newer ideas about gravity, Einstein's gravity replaces Newton's notion of gravity, or at least subsumes Newton, and then provides a broader context. But he proposes that gravity is the result of the curvature of space. So how does the curvature of an empty object over an empty something produce motion? In material things, it's equally occult and mysterious. And then subsequent to that, we have the idea of gravitons, which are massless particles that aren't even pushers, they're attractors. So how does a massless particle pull or attract? It's all quite mysterious. We can describe mathematically beautifully. We have mathematical principles that seem to describe the universe's, the phenomena of the universe, but we do not have materialistic explanations for these fundamental forces. Yeah. Chapters three and four of signature in the cell are my most detailed treatment answering that question.
Maybe the best way to get into it is to distinguish a couple of different kinds or definitions of information.
There's a mathematical theory of information that was developed by the computer scientists and mathematician Claude Shannon, the MIT scientist, in the late 1940s. And Shannon's idea, intuitively, was that information.
[01:02:47] Speaker C: We've had interviews where they've been in New York City. Welcome to sirens.
[01:02:51] Speaker A: You know what I mean? Welcome to the sirens.
Shannon's idea was that information is related to the reduction of uncertainty. If something informs you of something, it's reducing your uncertainty about something. So if you have a coin and you flip it, when it comes up heads, you've reduced the uncertainty you had about whether it would be heads or tails. If you have a die, a die, a six sided die, and it comes up a three, you've reduced the uncertainty by quite a bit more, because there were six possibilities. In the case of the die, and only two possibilities in the case of the coin. And so, in addition to the intuitive connection between information and reduction of uncertainty, Shannon developed a way to quantify how much uncertainty was being reduced. And in effect, he showed that the more improbable the event, the more improbable an event is when it occurs, the more uncertainty is reduced. If you look at the think of the die, you've reduced uncertainty to the tune of, you had six possibilities, and now there's one. So you've reduced more uncertainty in the case where the event that occurs is more improbable than in the case with the coin, where there were only two possibilities, and you have a higher probability of getting either the head or the tail than you do of getting any one of the six sides on the die. So you've reduced less uncertainty in the other case. So you've imparted less information. The more improbable, the more information you're imparting.
[01:04:29] Speaker C: It's future looking, in a way.
[01:04:31] Speaker A: Right. And so this is a powerful intuition. And then he's able to quantify the amount of information that is being transmitted down a channel with various. He's got various formula and things that are based on this basic intuition, that there's an inverse relationship between improbability, there's an inverse relationship between probability and reduction of uncertainty and the transmission of information. Now, it turns out that Shannon, as powerful as that intuition was, was very explicit, that he couldn't really distinguish a series of characters that were meaningful from a series of characters that were not. So he was actually able to measure the information carrying capacity without being able to measure whether that information transmitted was functional or not. So he's measuring the capacity, the carrying capacity without, or determining whether the information had content, if it was actually meaningful or functional. And so there's another form of information that's more relevant to biology and more relevant to computer science and more relevant to human speech and communication, and that we call specified information. And a way to illustrate that, that I've used, probably ad nauseam, is just comparing a string of characters, 20 or so letters long, with a line of poetry. Time and tide wait for no man. The one, because there's no discernible english words or any other words in the sequence, has Shannon information. It's an improbable array, but the character is not arranged or specified in their arrangement so as to perform a communication function. And so that's a really crucial distinction, because the kind of information that we have in DNA is actually the specified kind of information. The arrangement of the genetic letters in the genetic text matters to the function of the gene, the stretch of DNA that is providing instructions for building the protein.
[01:06:41] Speaker C: So a mind produces.
[01:06:43] Speaker A: And point of all that is that there might be some mindless process that would produce a merely improbable sequence that did not have a specified arrangement of characters to perform a function. But in our experience, mind is the only known cause of specified information, at least specified information of a given amount. I mean, you might get lucky with a couple, two or three word letters if you're pulling letters out of a scrabble bag. But if you need a lot of information, it will always require mind. And we have a probabilistic way of making those demarcations right, the laws of nature.
Sometimes people will say, well, maybe there's a law of nature that we haven't discovered yet that will explain where information comes from. That sounds kind of plausible, because we think of the laws of nature as things which explain that there are fundamental tools for explaining things in the natural world. One of the reasons I like the Newton story that we just talked about is that it shows that our fundamental laws of physics very oftentimes are merely describing what generally happens without providing a causal explanation for any given event.
And the other thing to note about the laws of nature is that they describe repetitive patterns, things that happen in a similar way over and over again. So we may have. I was dropping my cell phone a minute ago, and I could drop it 100 times, and you'd see basically the same event. And because we'd seen that same kind of event over and over again, we could come up with a law. In fact, Newton did a law of gravity to describe this repeating phenomena that we see over and over again. And he used a simple mathematical equation to describe those gravitational motions. And so the laws of nature have a characteristic that information scientists call redundancy. They're describing the same thing over and over again. You remember the old joke about department of redundancy. Department JJ speaking.
The laws of nature describe redundant patterns of order, repetitive patterns of order. But informational sequences are, by definition, something different than that. They are apyotic and complex in that they are not reducible to simple patterns that repeat over and over again. If I sit here and say, t h e t h e or recite a mantra, whatever information was in the first utterance I gave you has not been added to by those additional utterances. Okay? That's. That's redundancy. And so the laws of nature describe redundant patterns of order. They do not explain the origin of a periodic, complex and specified sequences that are conveying information.
It's the wrong kind of beast. It's the wrong kind of entity to explain the thing that's of interest here.
[01:09:46] Speaker B: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer speaking to Doug Monroe in an interview for Praxis Circle. In another episode, we'll share the second hour of this conversation with Dr. Meyer, discussing more topics related to intelligent design and worldview building, including how judeo christian theological assumptions sparked the scientific revolution, where intelligent design stands in the scientific community today, how ID offers a better explanation for the universe than quantum cosmology and the multiverse, and what Dr. Meyer considers the ultimate problem facing society today.
Don't miss the second half of this stimulating discussion.
Learn more about
[email protected] and you can keep up with Dr. Meyer's work at his website, stevencmeyer.org for idthefuture, I'm Andrew Mcdermott. Thanks for listening.
[01:10:43] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
