[00:00:00] Speaker A: By looking into these things at the very cutting edge of multiple disciplines of science, you're able to look and say this is just absolutely astonishing. Surprising doesn't even begin to cover it unless there is a mind behind this.
At that point, you're free to examine where else the evidence may lead. And I think that's a great reason for drawing people's attention to it. And I'm awestruck by how beautiful this documentary is in the way that it pulls these things together.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm excited to speak with Dr. Timothy McGrew, one of the experts featured in the new movie the Story of Everything.
The movie is a cinematic exploration of the scientific evidence for a mind behind the universe.
Based on Dr. Stephen Meyer's 2021 book, Return of the God Hypothesis, the Story of Everything brings the evidence for intelligent design to life through stunning footage, cutting edge animation, and engaging interviews with over 20 scientists and scholars. I'm going to take a minute to show you the 60 second trailer for the movie, just to whet your appetite and get you ready. Here's that.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Now, today I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange to you.
[00:01:28] Speaker C: How in the did this start?
Has the universe always been here or is it finite? We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Here is evidence for what can only
[00:01:40] Speaker A: be described as a supernatural event turned
[00:01:45] Speaker B: out to be the tip of the iceberg. Without guidance, we would get a life unfriendly universe. We're dealing with a system of manifold complex design.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: We associate information with a rational intelligence, the universe.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: It bears everywhere the fingerprints of its creator.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences.
The question then was, what does one do about it
[00:02:21] Speaker B: now? By way of introduction, Timothy McGrew is Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan University.
He has taught for more than 30 years. His work focuses on formal epistemology, the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in human reasoning, both its promise as a tool for discovery as well as its dangers when misuse or cognitive offloading erodes human intellectual skill. He is the author of the Foundations of Knowledge, co author with his wife, Dr. Lydia Magrus of Internalism and Epistemology, the Architecture of Reason, and co editor of Philosophy of Science and Historical anthology.
Tim, welcome to Idea of the Future.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Andrew.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Well, it's great to have you today. And I just want to start with a little bit of background on your work. For those who are not familiar with it yet, how did you first get interested in science and philosophy and some of these big questions?
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Wow, that's a trip down memory lane. I have always been very strongly interested in science. Didn't know whether I might become an astrophysicist when I was in high school, but I was also.
Oh, it did a little bit of that. Wandered down that path a bit. And I guess philosophy's halfway in between. I don't know what to say. But the study of the structure of reasoning has always intrigued me. I was focused on this even as an undergraduate and went to graduate school to focus on the theory of knowledge specifically because I wanted to go deeper into that.
And I think that when it comes to the science and reasoning design, reasoning provides a wonderful test case, like a feel for wired epistemology, if you will, where you can see how certain analyses of human reasoning illuminate what is going on and can help us to make better choices. Better theory choices, but reason well, in other areas as well.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: And you know, I was just talking with Dr. Sarah Salviander and she talks about coming from this background of atheism, you know, fueled by science fiction and. And voices like Carl Sagan, what was your faith background like and how did it interact with your study of science and philosophy?
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Which was a question. I do not have a spectacular story to tell. I was raised in a devout Christian home by wonderful people.
They gave me no cause to be disside with the way that I had been raised. But like many young people sometime around high school, I undertook carefully to consider the grounds of what I had been taught. I wanted to know, well, if this is true or false, what? Figure it out. I can't simply take other people's word for everything. I can't outsource all of this.
So I began digging into logic and philosophy of science and the history of science, the theory of knowledge, and going into that as deeply as I could in order to see whether skeptical arguments would be answered all the way down to the ground, as it were, whether you could actually give a rigorous response to these challenges, whether the evidence really did stack up. For me, it's always been about the evidence.
I was not particularly rebellious, but I was prepared to follow the evidence wherever it led. And where it led was to what I think is a deeper appreciation of the faith within which I was raised.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Now let's look at your design reasoning. You've developed a unique approach through your work, can you walk us through how you think about design arguments, design reasoning, or.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: That can be done on a number of levels. So one of the levels on which we can do this is to say, here's a whole bunch of mathematics. And that gets far to convey in a paper, much less in a podcast. But there is a doorway into it that is less intense and I think resonates well with what a lot of us do when we're not trying to be philosophers or mathematicians.
It goes back to a series of lectures given in 1903 by the American logician, Charles Sanders Hearst. Hearst is trying to talk about something kind of reasoning. He gives it various names. He calls it retroduction, sometimes he calls it abduction, sometimes. Today it's most commonly called inference to the best explanation. So inference to the best explanation is a matter of reasoning. Courtier Curse, in which we start out by being surprised. We notice something and it's not what we were expecting.
But then it occurs to us that there is a hypothesis which, if true, would remove our surprise or at least reduce our surprise.
There is therefore some reason to suspect that that hypothesis is true. It's a pretty weak claim. It's not claiming that we've got Bruce and the strong words can be reserved for things in mathematics, but it does have some little mathematical hints in it. The first is the notion of surprise. So here's a cognitive emotion that suggests that before encountering this fact, we would have considered it to be pretty improbable, pretty unlikely, but if this hypothesis were true, then the fact would not be so surprising. Change in probability. If we assume this hypothesis, and then in that connection between those two premises and the conclusion, there is some reason to suppose, well, that's like it's something that could occur on a sliding scale. So if we had a mathematical model of that that allows to say some of these are merely suggested hints and others are real solid clues, and others may be so strong that we can seriously imagine resisting the argument.
So there are places in Curse's schema, but he doesn't go into the mathematical analysis of it himself, that really leave him open to mathematical interpretation.
And so what I've tried to do is to start with those hints and then use the resources of Bayesian probability, analyze what's going on with the various arguments, dig into it, while at the same time trying to keep in mind that I need to give examples that will resonate with normal people who are not maybe of a kind statistic and listen to a bunch of math, because I think it's something that we do all the time. I guess if I had to give an analogy, I'd say there's math underlying what you do when you try to merge on a freeway.
But if you found that in the act of merging your head was suddenly filled with a bunch of trigonometry, it would be deleterious. Right. You would actually not merge better, you would merge worse. So I think it's good for us to see the connection to what we're already doing first and only later for those who are really.
Your head and slick knee go into the math of it.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, I love the idea of using, you know, that surprise, the emotion that we all feel, you know, as we're moving through life.
It's that disconnect between what we expect and what we're observing. And I just love that way of approaching the design arguments.
Now, what's an example of something we might find that's surprising, that becomes less so when we consider the hypothesis of design?
[00:09:47] Speaker A: So for a non scientific one, here's an example. And this comes up, of course, in the documentary, right, you go, you're out walking in the woods, far away from any towns, far away from any roads, and coming over a little rise in the woods and looking down into Adele, you see a little pattern and it looks pretty ramshackle, it's all bleached out and you think, wow, that must have been here since before the Civil War or something. I'm sure nobody lives there.
You walk down because you're curious about this and you push a little on the door and you find that you can get the door open. And then when you do, peering inside, you see a small table and on the table there's a cup of tea. It's hot tea, it's still steaming. It has an Earl Grey tea bag in it.
Now, initially you thought, oh, this is almost certainly an abandoned cabin. Now that you've seen that, that changes everything. You've been surprised, but immediately and irresistibly what comes to mind is it's actually not uninhabited. Somebody lives here and was here fairly recently making key.
You wouldn't perhaps have predicted that there would be a cup of tea on the table if the cabin was inhabited.
Well, it's the mismatch between the probability that the tea would be there if it were inhabited, the probability that it would be there if it were uninhabited. Right. The swirls and the acorns didn't make the T.
It's irresistible.
Course you're going to say there's someone who lives here, someone who's been here very recently for a scientific example.
The challenge is to make some of the underlying science vivid to people who are not specialists. Which is why I love so many of the things in the documentary, because I think it does exactly that. So let's take from a molecular biology standpoint, the genetic code. I don't just mean the existence of DNA, but the mapping that takes photons, little sequences of three nucleotide bases and then translates those into the instructions that build your amino acids.
How does that work?
How do we view this? Well, it turns out that the code is to some extent fault tolerant. It has some redundancy at just the places where it needs it for the most common amino acids. Actually if there's a shift in the read. So instead of reading codons, you know from abc, that little triple you get bcb, so the frame shifted over.
Usually what that gives you for the most common ones is a stop.
It's an instruction to just stop reading the sequence. In other words, something's gone wrong and instead of propagating faulty information and wasting resources to do that, the machinery just calls a halt.
This is amazing. This code has been studied intensively.
Our best mathematical attempts to probe it suggests that it is highly optimized for not only rendering the the machinery to build these things, also optimized from the standpoint of error correction, frame shifting.
There's just a whole raft of things that it does so extremely well.
See, what are some of the others? There's overlapping genes, it handles those, it's own binding, regulatory protein binding, slice signaling. When you've got a broken strand and you need to connect it on and keep going, it's optimized in so many different ways, it's almost like stumbling into the middle of a 50 dimensional chest gain and wondering what in the world is going on we don't even have yet, with all the resources at our disposal, a way of measuring thus how optimized this is. Now, Francis Gray, who was one of the people responsible for discovering DNA, talks about the term and all he can think of to say is well, it's a frozen accident. And this is the way Bach's Dakota and Fugue in D minor is enacted, which is to say obviously not an accident next try, right? And so when we think about that, it's surprisingly shocking, surreal, but it also looks like code. And I mean this in the computer programming sense, written by a genius beyond genius who has anticipated all kinds of fault modes. And since this is the basis for reconstruction of living systems, can't be explained by natural selection.
This is a prebiotically established code. So there is no mechanism waving one's hands at Darwin for explaining how the code got will be there. So on the surprising fact side, this one is just off the charts surprising. Crazy but licit was an artifact designed by a super genius.
Then our surprise is greatly lessened, though our admiration remains.
Unlessone altogether, of course, we're, you know, we just stand blackjaw this code.
So that would be a scientific example.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah, those are, those are great. And we'll come back to the cabin analogy. I actually have a clip from the film that we can show those joining us today.
But I'm glad you prefaced it there. Now you've been involved actually with this project for a long time. Even before it was a movie, it was a book. Right, Return of the God Hypothesis. And you consulted with Stephen Meyer on some of these chapters. Now what was that experience like? And did you ever foresee it coming to life cinematically? And did you enjoy the sets when you came in to be interviewed? Eventually.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: So how did it come to be? Steve and I have been friends for many years now, going on more than 25 years. And as he was wrestling with exactly how to put some of these things, he reached out to me and he said, Tim, you do the math side of it. He's got a doctorate in philosophy, he's trained in the history of philosophy.
That side of it is kind of a subspecial thing. So he said to me, what should I know about this? How should I explain what's going on here? And so we had quite a few phone calls and we consulted and I would send in things by email. We went back and forth and eventually a fair bit of that made its way into the book. Some of it technical side, I put it off in a text box or an appendix or something, which I think we did, but some of it non technical, including that analogy.
And we actually talked about more even than made it into the book and about ways in which this methodology eliminates other wider issues. But I think he may be working on another book and I don't want to seal his thunder through that. So we'll just, we'll, we'll wait out on that.
I did not anticipate this would become a documentary and was flabbergasted when they asked me to come out and be even, you know, in a bit part way, a small part of the team. And I had a great time being interviewed. I thought the interviewers were very professional, the whole team, I mean, in a Sense, I'm just another talking head and these are the people who make the magic happen. So I really had excellent experience with them and thought over. Fascinating.
Clearly themselves interested in the material side.
It was a wonderful. It was great, yeah.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Now, the first chapter of the movie tells the dramatic story of how scientists discovered that the universe had a beginning. And about 25 minutes into the film, you point out the simple but profound insight known as the Kalam cosmological argument. I wondered if you could just unpack that a little bit more here. Does this argument remain as convincing as ever after the evidence of the last century has been accounted for?
[00:18:16] Speaker A: I would say that the Kalam argument is, if anything, more interesting.
Though it runs, it's an old argument. It has its roots in some of the work of John Philoponus in Alexandria in the 6th century, but it was highly developed in the Islamic world.
So you've got people like Al Kindi and Al Ghazali who contributed to it. But in modern science, we've actually added further lines of evidence for one of his premises. So it's usually presented as a deductive argument when it runs something like this.
Whatever begins to exist is caused to exist by something else.
The physical universe empire, all of space, time, all of matter, all of energy began to exist.
Therefore, physical universe in its entirety was caused to exist by something else. So when you say something else and you're compressing that with the whole physical universe, then you're talking about something that is not physical, not bound by space and time in the same ways that the events that we see around us are bound.
So what's interesting is that there are mathematical and conceptual arguments about infinity. For that claim, the physical universe began to exist. But in modern science, we've also come up with very simple empirical observations and sort of physical theoretical reasons. I think with the discovery of the Big Bang is a way to. The first or the. I should say the second premise of the poem that is easy to understand because it just says, look, you rewind the tape and 13.7, 13.8 billion years ago, everything coalesces.
And if you try to say, well, maybe that was just one crunch, you know, and then a bang and then another crunch, well, then you have a thermodynamic argument, which, again, was not available in the Middle Ages. So those empirical arguments, as well as the conceptual arguments can be added as strings to the bow. And Alex Cross is a philosopher at Baylor, had actually done some further work saying there's conceptual problems involving past infinities of causal events. So Alex has yet enlarged this gap further. So I would say the Kalam is moving more strongly than ever. But I would also say you can view this from the explanatory point of view. It is absolutely shocking that the universe should have come into being a recognizable, traceable, finite, fine ago. So shocking that Fred Hoyle, who was an atheist astronomer, was disgusted by it and thought he would give it a ridiculous name suitable for scorn so that it would go away more quickly. He called it the Big Bang Hypothesis. Of course, history has a way of coming back to bite us on those things, and that is now just taken to the commonplace. Well, yeah, of course there was a Big Bang, what else would there be? And Hoyle's own steady state universe went by the the wayside, as so many ideas do in the history of science.
So it was shocking to the point of provoking ridicule when it was introduced and then it swept all before it. Now, if it's that shocking, that suggests that the map of reality of people who were shocked by it was in some way out of kilter, defective, not lining up.
So when we go to adjust our mental view of the universe and we say, okay, what could, I suppose that would make sense of this, make it less surprising?
Well, sitting right there in the first verse of the first book of the Bible is the claim that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And in Jewish as well as in Christian interpretation, that is almost invariably taken to be a creation out of nothing, ex nihilo.
So you've got an alternative explanation sitting right there.
God doesn't run afoul of the first premise because God is not something which is supposed to have begun to exist.
So God doesn't have to be brought into existence by something else.
So it's a rather distressingly neat solution. And I think that the desire to avoid giving aid and comfort to the crazy religious people was probably one of Hoyle's motivations. But it really backfired spectacularly. There's this surprise and then it turns out, oh, there's like a real handy explanation sitting right there, developed by Christians, by Jews, by Muslims.
What are you going to do? Right.
What if they had a point?
Oh no.
But there it is. I, I don't think that we can really advance science in the long term by blocking out certain empirical possibilities.
A cry or I. If we say no, whatever happens, I'll never change my mind and believe that.
That's a pretty dangerous thing to say, right? If you are wrong, how are you going to find out yeah, we need, we need to keep that question in mind. So that's a, an example, I think in general, if I can just riff on that, I think beginnings are hard or the worldview known as natural.
I think the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, the origin of morality, the just so stories that the sociobiologists tell seem to me to be somewhat desperate and I'm not persuaded at all by them. So I think a good strategy, if you're trying to think about this the first time you say, well, you know, where, where can I make a first point of entry into these arguments? Let's go back to the beginnings of various things and look there.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: Great advice.
So, yeah, you have this solution that's been on the table for a while, but materialists who don't like that have come up with some very exotic and interesting proposals.
Of course, the multiverse. And we won't unpack all of these today, but they're very exotic and they're getting more exotic as they tried to explain some of the elements of this argument. And of course some even point to math and say, well, the universe exists because the math is there. You know, which might be a cheeky way of, without knowing it, pointing to a mind because we know that math comes from a mind. What would you say to those who point to the laws of nature and say, well, that's the reason, you know,
[00:25:11] Speaker A: it's, it's the math, right? I mean, first of all, mathematics deals with matters of tautology, matters of necessity.
And the laws of physics and the laws of biology are not matters of necessity. In no formulation that we have of any of them is it necessary that there be a universe at all.
Once you stipulate certain things, certain other constraints follow, right? If you take, oh, Einstein's field equations and they show you the geometry of the universe, well, you empty out all of the matter from the equations, right? You reset that Reiki tensor and oh, now we have Euclidean geometry, right, the simple geometry that would happen if there weren't any of this massy stuff around.
So you can play with the math, you can see consequences of the math, but self confidence is nothing. I mean, I, to paraphrase Woody Allen, I wish that the mathematics would make a large deposit in my name. This was bank account, that would be really convenient. But math, let's go up and do things like this and I, I think that maybe we need to retain our sense of humor and just say, wait, now you want to say the math is responsible for this.
How does that Work. Exactly.
So I don't think that that works. That's an example of sort of taking the can one step down the road and saying, well, there's all this math. Yes, wonderful. Why is that the math that models our universe and not some other equally elegant piece of math.
It is true that the math is beautiful and that's a clue, but that doesn't at all mean that math can bring anything in the by itself as you know, as if it could wave a wand and make matter and energy just appear.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: Well, speaking of beauty, later in the movie, the story of everything you do say that sometimes the path towards the truth leads through beauty. And this is the part of the film that introduces the beauty principle and why that adds to the surprise that we have.
So what did you mean by that? Can you unpack that just a little more?
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Sure. So this is a fun one.
In the history of science, we have many cases where seeing that something is beautiful has been a key to our appreciation of its merits as a piece of reasoning.
Simple example.
It had been known since antiquity that if you look at the superior planets, the ones that are visible to the naked eye, but further away from the sun than we are, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, every one of them does a little donut in the sky. So it's graveling along through the constellations. And then at a certain point it will slow down, stop, turn around, move backwards, slow down, and it's backtracking, turn back around and head back the way it was going again.
This happens all three of them, if you ask, on the old fashioned Earth centered model. Well, why does that happen? You have to put an the cycle on each one of them. It's like a circle that rides along a circle and it's swinging backwards at just the right moment. And by doing that you can predict places planets will be. But then it turns out that every one of those planets is backtracking just exactly when it is overhead at midnight.
Which means, of course, when it's on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun.
And that's exactly when it's doing its backtracking.
And moreover, you find that every one of those planets has a cycle or an epicycle that's got a period on it of exactly 365 and a quarter days. Funny mathematical coincidence that. Why?
Well, why? That's why. It's just, this is the math thought I can calculate. We told you where to point to find the three points of light in the sky. And that was the only answer for coming along comes Copernicus and he says, look, the Earth is at the center. The sun is the center. The Earth makes one trip around the sun, it takes 365 and a quarter days. And we're just passing out those other planets on the inside track. So, of course, they seem like an optical illusion for us to be moving backwards when we're lapping them, when we're coming around on the inside track.
And it's so elegant, it's just ravishing. Galileo says, we have one argument to persuade everyone that Copernicus is right.
And it's interesting because there were difficulties, there were empirical challenges to Copernicus as well at the time. But since here beauty of it just swept people away, other people at the time wrote, surely this is the great argument.
One of Copernicus students, Reticus, wrote, my master has solved this, and now I see, as it were, with both eyes open, and I will follow and walk in his footsteps as though he were a God.
I'm sure some of my students like me, I doubt if any of them has ever said that about it. But such was the impression that this piece of reasoning made. It was spectacularly beautiful. Did Copernicus get everything right?
No. Was that insight sounded on a genuine, actual physical fact? Yes, it was. We are on the inside track. We are passing planets out that way. Subsequent refinements of astronomy never got rid of that part. Copernicus legacy there is secure.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: So the beauty in the universe is a surprise in itself. And the movie actually does talk about the gratuitous beauty we find in nature as well. And that that's surprising, you know, didn't need to be this way.
So a lot of that gets unpacked in, in the film, and I think they do a pretty good job. Well, as the film wraps up, you quote Richard Dawkins and then you share the analogy that you previewed for us already, the cabin and the cup of tea.
So I'm going to show a clip of both of those things right now, and then we'll come back and discuss it a little further.
[00:31:49] Speaker C: Richard Dawkins has very famously said that the universe has at bottom, just those properties one would expect if there were no design, no purpose, only blind, pitiless indifference.
That's an interesting claim. What I find interesting about it is that it's the right kind of claim to be trying to make. We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what consequences they have, what they point to, how well they account for various things.
One of the most important questions any of us can ask when Should I change my mind? Or to put it a little bit differently, if I am wrong, how am I going to find.
Consider you're walking through the woods.
In a stretch of woods that you had thought totally uninhabited. You stumble upon an old sort of run down cabin.
Looking at it, you think it's just a relic leftover from a long time ago.
Then you go up to the door and you push it and it opens. And as you step inside, you see a cup of tea, still hot, steeping on a little table in the middle of the cabin.
When Richard Dawkins says the universe has exactly the features that we would expect if there were, at bottom, no reason, no, no purpose, what he's saying is that there should be no signs of intelligence in the universe.
Where Dawkins goes wrong is that there actually is a cup of tea on the table
[00:33:46] Speaker B: and so much more.
Now, you call that famous comment from Dawkins an interesting claim. Why is he making the right kind of claim but coming up with the wrong conclusion?
[00:33:59] Speaker A: So actually he, I, I think he's looking at subset of the KGS of the universe. It's not even the right claim. I think the claim is false. My point there was to say, look, if you're going to say cosmos has exactly the features that we would expect if there were no mind behind it, that claim requires some argument.
You don't get to just make a substantive claim like that and walk away. And there is, as the documentary amply shows, a mountain of evidence to the contrary. And it needs to be engaged, not just dismissed. If it were true that the universe shows absolutely no sign of intelligence, then that would be evident against the notion that there's an intelligence beyond all sorts of. So to that extent, it's the right kind of move if it were true. But since it's false, we wind up in a curious position of saying, but really what we see is quite different from that. And that's why I brought up the cabin analogy, which is this parallel case of reasoning. And again, just to make this really, really clear, what I'm claiming is that the underlying structure of the reasoning was the same across all kinds of examples.
We are surprised to, you know, be wandering in and find that there's a cup of tea on the table, dumbfounded, the our clock is the greater as we anticipated that the cabin was uninhabited.
And the only explanation that really makes any sense at all is that now there's, there's someone, there's been there and done this.
We know how cups of tea come about, we know how Code gets written.
We understand how things that come into being are made.
We have experience of that. We don't just hug our shoulders, say it's a frozen accident.
How remarkable that, you know, chat GPT works, given that it was all programmed by monkeys. No, no, no, that's not, that's not the answer. We know that there's intelligence behind many of these things. Pattern is the same. We're surprised. We think of a way, maybe the only way we can think of that reduces our surprise then to the extent. And the. I can get a little mathy here. This is measured as a ratio, not as a subtraction problem.
So it can be many, many, many orders of magnitude that the numerator is greater than the denominator. That is the piece of math that is driving all of this.
And that gives us some reason and sometimes overwhelming reason, which is second.
Yeah.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: Well, let me ask you, why do you think now is a good time for such a movie to come out? I mean, we've got, we've got evidence that more people are looking for answers to the big questions. You know, there's, there's media exploring that right now.
People are, are needing a spiritual connection these days. So why is, why is it good that the story of everything's coming out now?
[00:37:22] Speaker A: Well, everything that you just said, and then one thing more, which is that as no other period in the history of the human race, we are actually at a point where we're able to lay out in detail what many of these things look like. We're able to lay out how does the genetic code work?
What are the conditions for the possibility of life. We can do mathematical analyses. We can, to some extent, model some of these things. We've been able to load down the bacterial flagellum enough to be able to capture with nanoscale imagery some of what it's doing as it rotates, how rapidly it can stop a turn.
We've got amazing technology that really wasn't available, you know, 15 years ago. You could not have done this kind of a job with it. And so by looking into these things at the very cutting edge of multiple disciplines of science, you're able to look and say, this is just absolutely astonishing. Surprising doesn't even begin to cover it.
[00:38:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:30] Speaker A: Unless there is a mind behind this, at that point, you're free to examine where else the evidence may lead. And I think that's a great reason for drawing people's attention to it. And I'm awestruck by how beautiful this documentary is in the way that it Pulls these in together.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're right on all those fronts. So great a time to be exploring the big issues.
Re evaluating what we thought of scientific hypotheses of the past. It's a wonderful time.
Now, one of your memorable lines in the movie is that given the three lines of evidence for intelligent design presented in the film, one might rethink the story of everything. Now, if somebody watches the movie and is curious to learn more about the design of the universe and of life, where would you recommend they turn?
[00:39:23] Speaker A: So there are a lot of good places. Let me just name a few and we can go on and on and on.
First, the book on which the documentary is to some extent based, Return of the God Hypothesis, is I think an excellent one stop place for people to go if they want to look into some more details of maybe some byways that weren't as heavily explored in the movie. I would recommend a set of books by Michael Denton, one of which is the Wonder of Water, another which is the Miracle, I believe. So Denton set a whole series of these books and I found them extraordinarily compelling.
Again, these move along a parallel track to the documentary, but they're not simply rehashing stuff that Steve has in his book. So those are just some initial places to start if anybody wants to look at the structure of such reasoning and has a tolerance for the mathematics. I would suggest my former student Jonah Schubach's book Asianism and scientific reasoning. But strumming 2022 and that's a really fine, maybe upper level undergraduate introduction for those who have a little bit of tolerance for math but didn't do a master's degree in mathematics. If they want to get into that a little bit more and see where that goes.
Those are just a few places of many.
I'm sure they can go to the discovery.org website and find many, many more.
[00:40:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Resources we have aplenty and even intelligent design.org we've upgraded that site over the years and we've got just a plethora of videos, articles, there's even online courses you can take, you know, so no shortage of material to turn to. But we're grateful to this movie for, you know, kickstarting the question for some and just the journey that some will take after seeing it. So that's exciting. Well Tim, where can we learn more about your work?
[00:41:30] Speaker A: Oh goodness. I've got a webpage, TimothyMcGrew.com that you can go to and you can also find me on I'm on X dot com. I'm on Facebook.
You can go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where I've written an article on miracles. And you can also check out my wife's work, Lydia Nickrew, he has a podcast which she keeps up regularly.
How she finds the energy to do it. I don't think I could do that.
And so you can find out. A lot of work occupies our thinking by going there and emptying out those resources. Also, my daughter, Bethel McGrew is making her own way in the world as a writer. And so you can find her again at Twitter, slash X, whatever we're supposed to call it these days, and bylines in many other places as well, including some mark for Discovery.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And we'll include some links in our show notes, too, to point people to some of those things. Well, Tim, thank you very much for your time and for just unpacking your experience with the movie and some of the insights you've included. We really appreciate it.
[00:42:37] Speaker A: My pleasure. Thank you so much, Andrew.
[00:42:39] Speaker B: Well, to learn more about the movie and find out where it's showing locally near you in theaters Again, it opens April 30, 2026. You can go to TheStoryOfEverything film. That's the website TheStoryOfEverything film. And if you're interested in bringing a group to a theater or even a whole theater buyout, we've got a special website to learn more about that. That's discovery.org story discovery.org story well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and in intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
