Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2847: DNA Is More Complex Than Any Software Ever Written. So Who Wrote It? | Stephen Meyer

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode is a special one. We have Stephen Meyer on the podcast where he talks about how everything started. This is like a big debate, right?

Starting point is 00:00:28 Was there a creator where everything just appear? He is the main person when it comes to arguing the position of intelligent design. He's a director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's a very intelligent man. Loves to debate this. In this episode, he makes the case, and it's such a compelling case as to why there probably is a designer behind the universe behind life, behind everything.

Starting point is 00:01:02 By the way, he has a documentary coming out tomorrow. If you're listening to this when it drops, it's coming out tomorrow. It's called The Story of Everything. It's based on his book, Return of the God Hypothesis. This is going to be shown in theaters across the country. You got to go watch it. If you like this episode, definitely go watch it in theaters. Now, this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Eight Sleep.

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Starting point is 00:02:33 I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstor.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Stephen, welcome to the show. It's awesome to be here. It's such an honor. Love what you do,

Starting point is 00:02:45 but for our audience who might not be familiar with you, tell us a bit about your background and kind of what you do. Yeah, well, I currently direct a research center at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and have founded a similar institute in Cambridge, England. The focus of both institutes

Starting point is 00:03:06 is examining the scientific evidence that points to not undirected materialistic processes, but to some kind of intelligent design behind the universe, a mind behind the universe and in life. So there's a term in

Starting point is 00:03:23 British intellectual history called natural theology, the idea that nature is pointing to God. And we're, in essence, reviving that tradition. It goes back to figures like Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, and one of Newton's mentors named John Ray, who was a founder of botany. So the early scientists all believe that they were studying nature, as one book title put it, for the glory of God. There's a famous book by a historian who, a historian of science who published a book at Princeton Press called For the Glory of God about the scientific revolution. And so there's been kind of a rise-fall, rise story in the history of science that initially science came out of a Judeo-Christian milieu for very almost biblical reasons. People believe that they could study nature and understand its secrets, that it was intelligible, was their word,

Starting point is 00:04:19 because it had been made in the image of the same rational creator who gave us rationality. So we had rationality that had come from the creator that enabled us to understand the creation, the order and design that the creator built into it. So our institute in Seattle has a program called the Center for Science and Culture, and we're challenging what we call scientific materialism, the idea that there's no mind, no intelligence behind everything, and instead affirming this idea of intelligent design that there is a mind or creator behind the physical and biological world that we study.

Starting point is 00:04:57 And it's a venerable tradition in science, and we're reviving it. Yeah, that's right. When did that separation start to happen? Because you said a few things that I wasn't even aware of not that long ago. I wasn't aware that the early, like the scientific method, the scientific process came out of essentially the church. They were the ones that were putting this forward, funding it to learn essentially the order and the design of the universe. Yeah, we get such a big, a different idea today that, you know, science is opposed to faith. I guess that's part of your story.

Starting point is 00:05:31 You were, you know, pretty hard-nosed atheist and you placed your faith in science as opposed to belief in God. But people don't realize that the scientific, what we call the scientific revolution, which is differently dated by historians, but pretty much all agree. Something really big happened between about 1,500 and 1700 in Western Europe in a decidedly Christian context, or milieu, as the scholars call it. But as you study that, it goes back even further into about the late medieval period. So it's interesting. There's a Jewish contribution to this from the Hebrew Bible.

Starting point is 00:06:08 there is a Catholic contribution to this. The Catholic philosophers in the medieval universities were developing methods of studying nature, isolating variables, the kind of things that we learn about in science class. Those were coming out of places like Oxford and the University of Paris. And then there's a contribution from the reformers,

Starting point is 00:06:27 the reformed Protestant perspective. They especially were emphasized that we were made in God's image, number one, and therefore we had that rationale that enabled us to understand the world, but we were also fallen, and that affected our mind. So we had to guard against flights of fancy, expressing biases. We always had to test our ideas against the evidence. So you had a – and in the Hebrew Bible, you got the idea of this kind of order that God had built into nature. The concept of the laws of nature arguably comes out of the Hebrew Bible. So there's a kind of interesting ecumenical

Starting point is 00:07:08 Judeo-Christian contribution to the rise of modern science. And it happens, I think, in the West, really decidedly between about 1,300 and 1700, and then especially those two centuries of the 16th and 17th centuries are really, really dramatic. And so we don't really lose that perspective, that theistic perspective on what's going on in science until the late 19th century with figures like Darwin, Marx, Freud, Thomas Henry Huxley. These are staunch materialist figures, the great materialists who want to answer all the big questions that religion had answered before. So Darwin tells us where we came from. Marx has a utopian vision of the future.

Starting point is 00:07:48 Freud tells us what to do about the human condition and about our guilt. Huxley takes Darwin's ideas about the origin of new forms of life and applies it even to the very first life and tries to explain the origin of the first cell from simple non-living chemicals. So you get this kind of materialist synthesis at the end of the 19th century. and that becomes the default way of thinking in the 20th century. It affects figures like Lenin and the early Marxists in the Soviet Union. They have a materialistic worldview that they express in a Marxist way. The Nazis are very influenced by evolutionary thinking, and that's a really kind of grisly story to tell.

Starting point is 00:08:30 And in the West, too, we've been affected by a more generic scientific materialism. that has kind of, I think, undermined people's sense of meaning and purpose. So the shift takes place late 19th century, early 20th century. We kind of get a default worldview of materialism. But the argument of my book, my most recent book, Return of the God hypothesis, is that the God hypothesis, the awareness of a mind behind the universe of a creator, is coming back, not in spite of, but because of new discoveries in science.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Can you explain some of those new discoveries that are bringing people back to the possibility that there's a designer. Yeah, absolutely. That's kind of the story of my book, Return of the God Hypothesis and our new film, The Story of Everything. And in the film, we tell the story of very prominent figures in science who have had the same kind of worldview shift that you had

Starting point is 00:09:21 as they begin to reflect on the discoveries that have been made. And most of them have to do with biological and cosmological origins. Where did everything come from? And the first big shift takes place in cosmological. It actually happens, starts to happen about a century ago. And it's partly a California story because they, in Southern California, Mount Wilson, the observatory, they start building these great big dome telescopes. And because of that, they're able to resolve tiny points of light deep into the night sky.

Starting point is 00:09:55 And in the 1920s, there was still a debate about whether or not there were any, any galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. There were these little smudges that they could see on their photographic plates. But as they got better and better resolution, better photographic technology, they realized the little smudges were galaxies, represented galaxies in their own right. And one of the key figures there was Edwin Hubble, who was able to, in a number of my PowerPoint presentations, I actually have his black and white photographic images of the different galaxies, the spiral nebula and so forth.

Starting point is 00:10:33 And so the first thing they discover is we're not alone. At least there are other galaxies besides ours. But then they discovered that the light coming from those distant galaxies is being stretched out, which is indicated by the redness in the color. And they realize that if it's being stretched out, that must mean that the galaxies are moving away so that the wavelengths are stretching out. Like probably remember from high school science class, the Doppler effect. If the train is moving away, the pitch of the whistle goes, mm, drops.

Starting point is 00:11:06 And so the light similarly lowers in, or lengthens in wavelength and lowers in frequency. And so this was an indicator that the galaxies in every sector of the night sky were moving away from us, suggesting a universe that's actually expanding. And then when that was coupled with Einstein's new ideas about gravity, they became aware that it wasn't just that the galaxies were moving away from us, but that space was expanding as the galaxies moved away, that it was the expansion of space that was carrying the galaxies away, and so that we had literally a picture of an expanding universe outward from a beginning point,

Starting point is 00:11:47 and that suggested a creation of it. Now, I just learned this recently. Actually, it was from one of your talks. I did not know that there were scientists that really struggled initially with the idea that, a lot of the belief was that the universe was eternal. Right. That had always been there. Right.

Starting point is 00:12:04 Therefore, Genesis would be wrong that there would be a beginning point. And then they discover everything's expanding out, which means, oh, my gosh, if rewind time, everything started in one point. And scientists, a lot of them were disturbed by this because it kind of pointed back to. Yeah, one guy with really bad hair who failed to match his socks in particular did not like this, you know, Albert Einstein. and he had this awesome new theory of gravity, and it's been borne out in so many tests, it's called general relativity. And the idea of general relativity is that massive bodies,

Starting point is 00:12:39 in some strange but literal way, curve the space around them, such that if you pass light by them, you'll see the light take a curved trajectory. But Einstein realized that if his idea about gravity was true, if massive bodies are literally curving space, then if that was the only force at work in the universe in the vast cosmos,

Starting point is 00:13:05 then we should essentially all, we should be in a black hole, that every massive body would congeal the space around it, which would, and every other massive body would do the same, and eventually that space would get drawn in, and everything would get drawn into one big glump, and there should be no empty space in the universe. But he realized we don't live in a universe like that,

Starting point is 00:13:26 We live in a universe where there's empty space. So there must be some sort of anti-gravity for some outward pushing force that's counteracting the inward pull of gravity. And he called that the cosmological constant, the constantly pushing outward force that's responsible for the growth of the cosmos. But then as he began thinking about that, he realized that implies a dynamic universe, when it's expanding outward, which again implies expanding outward from what? from some kind of a beginning point. He did not like this idea at all initially. And it kind of violated a deep metaphysical prejudice he had, that the universe must be eternal and self-existent and static.

Starting point is 00:14:07 So what he did is he fiddled with his own equations arbitrarily. He just set a value for that cosmological constant, which was precisely opposite the value of the inward pull of gravity, so that he could depict the two forces as being perfectly balanced, and the universe is being static and having neither beginning nor end and then he breathed the sigh of relief and said, okay, we've got an eternal universe again.

Starting point is 00:14:31 But then some other physicists in particular, a French Belgian named Father Lemaître, he was a Catholic priest. He started working with Einstein's equations and showed that even with his fine-tuning, his fiddling,

Starting point is 00:14:47 the equations weren't stable. That the slightest perturbation in matter this way or that way would cause either a recalapse or an expansion. And then further, Hubble was discovering that when he looked at the actual evidence that the universe was expanding. And so Lometra and a Cambridge physicist

Starting point is 00:15:06 named Arthur Eddington that challenged Einstein on this. Eddington urged him to get out to California and see what Hubble was seeing. And so there's some famous newsreel footage. We can even get you a little clip of this if you like. It's really awesome. Where Einstein is going in the telescope with Hubble

Starting point is 00:15:21 and looking, we've got it. in the film. It's pretty awesome. And they go up this kind of elevator to the telescope and they're looking out. And then two weeks later, Einstein gives an interview to the New York Times and he says, well, this is the three

Starting point is 00:15:36 hardest words in the English language. I've was wrong. And he says, Hubble and his colleague Hummison had shown that the universe was not static. It was dynamic. Therefore, it had a beginning. And he later said that this was, that his fiddling with his own equations to obscure the

Starting point is 00:15:52 reality of the beginning was the greatest blunder of his life. Wow. I misquoted him in the book. I said it was the greatest blunder of his career. He was more emphatic. It was the greatest blunder of his life. Wow. He allowed his philosophical prejudice to obscure the evidence.

Starting point is 00:16:09 Yeah. And another point that I've heard you make is that space, time, and matter, you can't, one of them can't exist without the other two coming into existence at the same time. This is part of the Einsteinian gravitational idea, is that he would talk about space time, the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time. And they're all connected intimately. And this is fully unpacked that.

Starting point is 00:16:37 You've got to get into relativity. But the basic idea is, yeah, if you think about collapsing the universe back in time, if you think about back extrapolating at a previous time, you have this, from the observational astronomy, the galaxies are moving outward, from the Einsteinian idea that space is expanding with the expansion of the galaxies,

Starting point is 00:17:01 then if you wind that back, in the forward direction of time, the matter would be getting more and more diffuse. In the reverse direction of time, the matter would be getting more and more densely concentrated. And if the matter's more densely concentrated, the space gets more tightly curved, and as you go back and back and back,

Starting point is 00:17:19 you eventually get to a limiting case where you can't go back any further. And that marks the beginning of the expansion and arguably the beginning of the universe itself. And there's a whole lot of interesting, complicated physics debates around this tiny, tiny smidgen of space where you have not only Einstein's gravitational effects, but quantum mechanical effects as well. And what do we make of that? But I think the most straightforward interpretation is that the universe, looks as you would expect it to look if it were expanding outward from the beginning.

Starting point is 00:17:53 Yeah. And talk a little bit about the just the fine-tuning of what is required for us to even exist, for Earth to even be here, for us to have water, for life. Like how precise does it have to be? Yeah, even basic chemistry is finally, the idea of fine-tuning is that there are all these fundamental parameters of physics.

Starting point is 00:18:17 Like, for example, the cosmological constant or the strength of gravity, just those two forces are exquisitely finely tuned. The mass of the universe, or the mass of the elementary particles, the quarks, for example. All these different physical parameters are fine-tuned in the sense that they fall within very narrow tolerances outside of which life and even basic chemistry would not be possible. Stable galaxies would not be possible. And the degree of fine-tuning is so exquisite that, But physicists now sometimes talk about are living in a fortunate universe or a Goldilocks universe.

Starting point is 00:18:54 That's the kind of idea. I had a – there was a professor at Cambridge when I was there who came and gave a talk to one of our groups. And his name was Sir John Polkinghornt, famous British physicist. And he used to depict the fine-tuning by asking you to imagine that you had flown out into space on a spaceship. you docked it on a spaceship. You go in and there's this big room and it says universe creating machine. So you go inside and sure enough there's this console. And on the console there's a dial for the strength of gravitational attraction.

Starting point is 00:19:33 There's a dial for the strength of the electromagnetic attraction. There's a strength for the other fundamental forces of physics, a slider that sets the speed of light. There's a little dial that sets the mass of the elementary. particles. You have all these parameters that make the universe possible, and they're all set to very precise values. And then he unpacks his little thought experiments. And so then you make some calculations, because you're a physicist, of course, right? So you pull out your slide rule or your calculator, and you start making some calculations, then you realize, if I turn that dial one click

Starting point is 00:20:07 this way or one click that way, something catastrophic would happen and life would not be possible. So take that cosmological constant, the outward pushing force that we were talking about, that Einstein talked about. Turns out that it's fine-tuned, an accepted value among physicists is one part in 10 to the 90th power. Wow. There's only 10 to the 80th elementary particles

Starting point is 00:20:28 in the entire universe. So to get that right by chance would be like putting a blindfolded man out in space, trying to locate not just one elementary particle in our universe, but looking for one elementary, one marked elementary particle somewhere

Starting point is 00:20:44 in 10 billion universe is our size. That's the degree of fine-tuning. There's another fine-tuning parameter that's even more exquisitely fine-tuned than that, and it's called the initial entropy. And that has to do with the configuration of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe. So it's as if it's all finely tuned just from the beginning to make it possible for there to be stable galaxies. So this is kind of one of the first scientists that discovered this was another Cambridge physicist named Surferfer. Fred Hoyle and he was investigating, trying to explain the abundance of carbon in the universe because he knew carbon was critical for forming life. It forms long chain-like molecules that you

Starting point is 00:21:30 need to store information, which is necessary to life. And he finally came up with a process by which it might happen. He got it tested out at Caltech. He made a very specific prediction related to the process that he had in mind. It came bang on and he realized this is probably how it happened. This is probably how carbon was formed in the bellies of stars. But then he realized for that to happen, there needed to be this whole series of just-right parameters where the relationship between gravitation and electromagnetism was just right. All these parameters fell within these very narrow sweet spots again. And he had been a staunch atheist. He actually gave the Big Bang Theory the name, the Big Bang, because he wanted to stigmatize it. It was trying, it was a pejorative

Starting point is 00:22:16 term for him. Ha, ha, ha, ha, the big bang. Yeah, no one believes that stuff. Well, he ended up, and he did that because he was very much a staunch scientific atheist, and he completely changed his worldview as a result of his own discovery about the fine tuning. And he was later quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry in order to make life possible. So he was, So like Einstein, Hoyle changed us mind. And we've had in the film, the story of everything that we have coming out at the end of April, April 30th. We tell the story of these discoveries, but also the stories of the scientists who have changed their minds about the big questions, in particular the God question, as a result of some of the discoveries that they themselves have made.

Starting point is 00:23:05 And a lot of this boils down to these scientists finding that the odds or the probability of these perfect circumstances, like you had mentioned earlier, one of the odds you had mentioned was greater than the amount of particles in the entire observable universe. They're so astronomically impossible that it's essentially impossible. Now, what I would hear sometimes people say or argue is that, well, if you give it enough time that this could possibly. possibly happen? Explain that first. Because they'll say they give the term like the god of time essentially, but that becomes their god. Yeah. Well, we call this, there's a term in probability reasoning called probabilistic resources. So if you've got something that's that's super improbable, you can say, well, that wouldn't happen by chance. Well, you can't say that right away. You have to know how many opportunities there are for it to happen by chance. And if the number of opportunities

Starting point is 00:24:03 are sufficient, then something might happen by chance. A simple example, think of a bike lock. Imagine there's a nice bike locked up outside and you've got a thief that comes along and you've got a four-dial lock, so that's 10,000 possible combinations. If the thief has five minutes before the security guard's going to come around the corner, it's more likely than not that he will fail to open the lock by chance. It doesn't have enough opportunities. But if he's committed to staying there. 10,000 hours. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 00:24:35 I actually did the, I think it was 15 hours. I calculated it. If he did one combination each 10 seconds, then he'd get to more than 5,000 combinations within 15 hours, at which point it would be more likely than not that he would open the lock by chance. Okay. So you always have to know the probabilistic resources. But the kinds of probabilities that we're dealing with in relation to the resources available

Starting point is 00:24:58 remain small, remain infant, small unless in the case of the in the case of the fine tuning you invoke something called the multiverse yeah well that's the probably heard of that and i love to talk about that so i'll cue you up to ask you yeah so tell me a little bit about the multiverse where did that come out good question yeah really good question and what's that what's that all about well this is an attempt to inflate the probabilistic resources to say that the the thief has an infinite number of opportunities to crack the to crack the the the code on the on the on the lock And the idea is that, well, yes, the probability of landing on the correct ensemble of fine-tuning parameters is infinitesimally small in our universe, taking into account elementary particles, second since the Big Bang.

Starting point is 00:25:53 Any factor you want to figure in, the probabilistic resources within our universe are way too small to expect that you would, settle on those fine-tuning parameters by chance. But what if there was a gbillion other universes out there? Just a made-up number? Yeah, made-up number as big as you want, big as you want, okay? And each of those universes has their own set, their own combination of fine-tuning parameters. So different strength of gravity, different arrangement of matter at the beginning of the

Starting point is 00:26:25 expansion in those universes, et cetera. Well, then, you would have arguably a number of, enough opportunities for the right sets of dials to align. Align. Perfect word. Thank you. But there's a problem with that that leads to an even deeper problem. The first problem is that other universes, by definition, are separate from ours.

Starting point is 00:26:52 We don't know about them. We're positing them. But if there are other universes that are separate from our universe, what happens in those other universes has no effect on what happens in this universe, including those other universes would have no effect on whatever process it was that set the fine-tuning parameters in this universe. So simply positing other universes doesn't solve the problem. But in virtue of that, multiverse advocates have essentially recognized that. And they've proposed instead universe generating mechanisms so that you can think of our universe as the lucky winner of a giant

Starting point is 00:27:31 cosmic lottery where there's an underlying process that's spitting out universes. So there's a kind of connection to a common cause. And so that would potentially work. But the problem there is that those universe generating mechanisms, some based on something called string theory, others based on something called inflationary cosmology, those universe generating mechanisms themselves turn out even in theory to be finely tuned, even in theory, to have to have To generate new universes, the universe generating mechanisms have to be finely tuned themselves. And so no one has been able to get around this. And so what it shows is that the fine tuning can be explained by positing other universes

Starting point is 00:28:15 if you posit an underlying universe generating mechanism, but those mechanisms themselves have to be exquisitely finely tuned. And so you're right back to where you started, which is unexplained fine tuning. And yet, we know in our experience that finely tuned, systems, think of a radio dial, think of a French recipe, think of an internal combustion engine, finely tuned systems where a lot of parameters have to fall within narrow tolerances to achieve a significant outcome. Those systems always are the product of intelligence, of a mind. So since the multiverse hasn't gotten rid of ultimate fine-tuning, I think you're right back

Starting point is 00:28:54 to where you started, which is a very strong indicator of a fine-tuner of a prior intelligence. Isn't the very fact that we find laws of the universe, that there even are laws that that could lead us to believe that there is a designer? I find it interesting. I pose this question on one of our episodes where, let's just say theoretically, we landed on Mars and we found an advanced computer. And we could get on the computer and we figured out ways to make it work and it can does these calculations. No scientists would look at that computer and say, well, this must have happened by random chance. Immediately go, there were, there was alien life here that designed this. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:33 Why is it that we look at something so many times more complicated like life and, and try to explain it away without there being someone that put it together? Well, there are two questions embedded in that, and they're both good. The first having to do with natural laws, you know, that there's something mysterious about the regularities of nature themselves. And Newton and other early scientists thought they were. mode of divine action. They were expressed that God was holding the universe together by what we call the laws of nature. And there's a whole big literature on that. And there's a, a theistic argument

Starting point is 00:30:11 from natural laws. The fine-tuning argument is a, in a way, a kind of wrinkle on that. Because in addition to just the brute fact of regularities, the regularities have very particular strengths. Gravitation could be stronger, could be weaker. There's no underlying logical or physical reason why it has exactly the strength it does, but if it were just a little different, then you wouldn't get life or even basic chemistry. So that's back to the fine-tuning argument. So it's not only the fact of regularities, which some philosophers think point to have a have theistic implications. They're better explained by theism, but it's also some of the features of the regularities that also seem to point to God in the sense that they reveal fine-tuning.

Starting point is 00:30:53 But then when we get to biology, I love your example. We have a little video right now about the iPhone and the complexity of the iPhone. There are features of design systems that we recognize from our own designs that happen to be present in living systems. And there are two things that actually three things that jump out at me. One is the digital code that's in the DNA molecule. And we run an iPhone off of code, right? So we know where code comes from. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but more complex than any we've ever created.

Starting point is 00:31:31 Richard Dawkins, the staunch, formerly Oxford scientific atheist, says that the DNA contains machine code. Well, what do we know about the origin of machine code or of digital code or of software? It always comes from a programmer. And in fact, whenever we see information and trace it back to its source, whether it's in software, or in a paragraph in a book, or hieroglyphic inscription, or the information that we're transmitting with acoustic waves right now, information always ultimately comes from a mind, not a material process. And the most fundamental discovery in modern biology,

Starting point is 00:32:12 post-Watson and Crick is that the DNA molecule and other large information-bearing structures in cells are information-bearing. They contain information. So that suggests that life owes its origin at some level to a mind. There's a master programmer behind life. This was Francis Crick's big insight. He and Watson elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. 1957, he realizes what the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA are doing.

Starting point is 00:32:49 He realizes they're functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language, or zeros and ones in a section of software. And they're providing instructions for building the proteins and protein machines that all cells need to stay alive. And this becomes known as the sequence hypothesis. And others, we have, Bill Gates is right. It's like software program. Or like a 3D printer, where we take digital code

Starting point is 00:33:15 and we use digital information to construct a three-dimensional structure. That's what's going on inside cells. And so that just kind of revolutionizes biology and also raises this huge question, where does the information come from? Because what we know from experience is that information always comes from my mind. And so that's one of the key arguments for design is in my book's signature in the cell. And also it's the third act in the film we have coming out. Wouldn't the presence of DNA in all living things, couldn't that point to the fact that we all came from some original living?

Starting point is 00:33:52 thing and evolved out from that? Well, there was an argument for a while that said, well, look, we have a universe, there's a universality of the code that all organisms use the same genetic code. They have different, they have different text, different instructions, but the text is translated according to the same genetic code. That turns out no longer to be the case. There's, I think, something like 22 different codes that have been discovered. So the idea that the universality of the code points to a common ancestor, I don't think, works.

Starting point is 00:34:27 There's other reasons, I think, to doubt the universal common ancestor thesis, and that's coming out in a lot of different branches of science. One has to do with another thing that's been discovered in the genome, which is these are called orphan genes. And that is that if you look across the phylogenetic landscape, of all the different kinds of animals and plants there are, on a Darwinian view of things, every gene, every sequence of A.C's, G's and T's, the genetic letters should have some closely related sequence in some other organism.

Starting point is 00:35:04 And what we're finding is that across the landscape of different types of plants and animals, that there are these genes that have no known similarity to any other genes. They're discontinuous. They don't, and so that's not what you'd expect on a Darwinian view of things. The Darwinian view of things you'd expect everything to be closely related to something else so that you could depict the history of life as a great continuous branching tree. Instead, we have these discontinuous representations of gene sequences that do completely unique things in different phylogenetic categories of life.

Starting point is 00:35:43 But also you have the problem in the fossil record, the major groups of organisms. was just going to ask you about that. So, yeah, because they'll point to the fossil record. Say, hey, we have fossils that seem to show an intermediary between this animal and this animal. And it looks like this one was like in between them. Very few, and they typically are what are called the lower taxonomic levels. Okay. That instead, the big story is that the major groups of animals, plants and animals,

Starting point is 00:36:10 but especially in the animal kingdom, arise abruptly in the fossil record. I wrote a book about one of the big abrupt events called the Cambrian explosion. Explain what that is. What is the Cambrian explosion? Well, in the Cambrian is one of the oldest periods of life as documented by the sedimentary fossil, the sedimentary geological record. Typically dated about 520 or 530 million years ago, depending on whom you ask.

Starting point is 00:36:37 And in that, in a narrow seam of sedimentary rock all around the world, you get roughly two-thirds of the animal body plans that have ever existed. on the planet arising in that narrow window. So suddenly. Suddenly, abruptly. And a body plan is a unique arrangement of body parts and tissues. There's a unique way of putting an animal together. So you might have some animals with hard exoskeletons like trilobites or the arthropods.

Starting point is 00:37:06 You might have some with have an internal note accord or a spinal cord. The chordates. Completely different body logic. And so you've got these different types of animals with completely different body logics arising in that narrow window of time. And as you investigate, as paleontologists have investigated, the strata beneath the Cambrian, they do not find the transitional intermediates, the precursors that you would expect. And we've been looking for a long, long time. So it's very, very abrupt. There are a few pre-Cambrian animal forms, but they are much simpler. They don't connect

Starting point is 00:37:42 morphologically to the ones that arise abruptly. And the attempts to explain the absence of the of the animals as a result of incomplete sampling or incomplete preservation have failed for various reasons. So the leading paleontologists saying, hey, we have to recognize this. This is a, this is a, what Darwin called a saltation, an abrupt appearance of new form. And in 2017, I wrote an article with the German paleontologist, Gunter Beckley, about not only the Cambrian, but we, documented, I think it was 17 or 19 other major abrupt appearances of new forms of life throughout the fossil record. It's not only the Cambrian.

Starting point is 00:38:23 It also happens at other levels, not only the phyla, but the classes, the orders, the first mammals, the first, the first turtles, the first sea reptiles. Just go down the list of the major groups of organisms, the first flowering plants. These are, in fact, the flowering plants arose so abruptly that Darwin called it an abominable mystery. Wow. And I've heard evolutionary scientists point to the fact that we have been able to breed animals and plants and we can show radical changes in them just by our own selective breeding. And then they use that as evidence that, well, evolution must work that way. I think it's pretty widely recognized that we can produce modest adaptive changes through artificial selection within limits. That very fairly quickly the genetic variability that's inherent in the genome is exhausted through those types of experiments. You can make dogs only so big or only so small, and you can change their form very modestly, but you can't turn dogs into felines.

Starting point is 00:39:36 You know, that's a different kind of form. Now, that has not by itself been perceived as a problem for sort of a Neo-Darwinian view because artificial selection doesn't induce any mutations. And the mutations are kind of the go-to source for innovation in the Neo-Darwinian scheme of things. But there are other kinds of problems that I think limit the creative power of the natural selection mutation mechanism. Explain that. Explain that because I've heard people say, well, there were these random mutations that turned this, you know, sea animal into a land animal. What do mutations typically lead to?

Starting point is 00:40:18 And is that a possibility or is that? Yeah, mutations can sometimes be favorable and they can sometimes, but they're more often deleterious, but they can sometimes be favorable. But they typically lead to very limited biological change and they don't change body plans. and let me just, I'll give you a little bit of a biology lesson, but I think it's a fun one. So there's something that some Caltech scientists have discovered called developmental gene regulatory networks. So the idea is that as an organism is going through development, a fertilized embryo, fertilized egg, and it then will divide from one cell into two into four into, you know, geometric expansion. and as the organism is developing, more and more cells come online, and the cells have to differentiate

Starting point is 00:41:11 themselves one from another. You have some cells become muscle cells, some cells become nerve cells, some become maybe bone, etc. Now, when the scientists have mapped out what's controlling the different expression of genetic information in different cells at different times, they map that out, and it looks like an integrated circuit. There's this integrated control of the expression of information so that a gene will produce a gene product, a regulatory RNA or a protein, which will in turn, either turn on or turn off some other part of the genome. So it's all carefully choreographed and integrated. So when they map all this out, it looks like an integrated circuit such that, well, in what they found experimentally,

Starting point is 00:42:06 is if you start to perturb these regulatory networks, the animal will shut down. If you change them very much at all, then the animal development will just shut down. The animal will die before it reaches full development. So here's the problem. You have this gene regulatory network. It's absolutely necessary to build an animal body plan, to get all the cells in the right place so that everything is differentiated and is performing its correct function. So the bones are in the right place and the nerves are in the right place,

Starting point is 00:42:33 and the muscles are in the right place, et cetera. So you've got to have these developmental gene regulatory networks. So you've got developmental gene regulatory network A makes animal form A. Now you want to change animal form A into animal form B. But you know you've got to have a developmental gene regulatory network, right? But what do we know about developmental gene regulatory networks? you can't change them very much at all without destroying the animal form. So you've got to get from here to here, from one animal form to another,

Starting point is 00:43:06 but the underlying thing that makes animal form, animal form can't be changed without destroying the process that would produce the animal form in the first place, which would terminate the evolutionary process. And so there's a, so mutations here are, if the mutations are big enough to make a change that would produce a body plan, they're big enough to destroy the animal, the developmental gene regulatory network. And you're not going to get from A to B in the underlying architecture that's necessary to make animal form. And the scientists have discovered this, no friends of creationism or the theory of intelligent design, but they say that Neo-Darwinism is a catastrophic mistake because it cannot explain this fundamental need to transform things at a body plan level in the underlying architecture of these developmental gene regulatory networks. So it's just, it's just one of a legion of problems that scientists are coming to recognizing that the mutation

Starting point is 00:44:04 natural selection mechanism has very limited creative power. It does a nice job of explaining small scale variations, the finch peaks, getting bigger and smaller, all the stuff we learn about the technology. Yeah, the, yeah, the, yeah, the, very, yeah. antibiotic resistance, the peppered moths changing their coloration. Superficial stuff. This is a fine explanation. But to extend it beyond that, to explain fundamental changes in architecture of animals, it does not have that creative power.

Starting point is 00:44:32 And any number of leading evolutionary biologists have pointed this out. I attended a conference in London in 2016, convened by evolutionary biologists who were calling for a new theory of evolution because they know that the Neo-Darwinian theory that we all learn about, in our textbooks does not work. It lacks a mechanism, a creative, a mechanism with a creative power to generate fundamentally new forms of life. So we're all, we're in need of a major overhaul of what we're being taught at the high school

Starting point is 00:45:01 and college level because the people at the highest levels of the field know this and it's not percolating yet. What about time and carbon dating and how accurate that is? Back to Salas point earlier, that seems to be like the argument to go to is just like, if you give it enough time, you know, it's just, you know, it's just, I mean, how, how accurate is our carbon dating system that we use to depict how old things are? I think carbon dating is generally accurate. You can't have contamination of samples.

Starting point is 00:45:29 Carbon dating isn't really relevant for these big time scales we're talking about with the origin of animals or, you know, on an evolutionary scale. It's more on the tens of thousands of years old, more relevant for archaeological artifacts. But there are other radiometric methods like potassium argon. generally think these are pretty accurate methods. But the question is, do we have, the question of, do we have enough time is still there? It's still a big problem. And in signature in the cell, my first book, I calculated the probability of generating a functional protein by chance in a prebiotic environment, prebiotic soup or other environment. And the probabilities are astronomically small, even in relation to the probabilistic resources of the universe. If you took, if, if every event in

Starting point is 00:46:19 the universe had been devoted to searching for a new protein sequence from the Big Bang till now, call it 13.8 billion years, not nearly enough opportunities to search a space as large as that which corresponds to a protein sequence. So, so the, and then Jim Tour, James Tour, the, the, the very prominent organic chemist at Rice, University has recently come out with a paper showing that the processes that degrade biomolecules in a presumed prebiotic environment happen much faster than the processes that would be required to build biologically relevant molecules. So time is not your friend, he argues. It's actually the enemy. It degrades. Things degrade faster than they get built, which means time is working

Starting point is 00:47:06 against you, not for you. A common critique that I've heard is that intelligent design isn't false ifiable or testable. You can't make predictions with it like you can with other scientific methods. How do you answer something like that? Are there things that we can use intelligent design to test or to make predictions? Yeah, absolutely. First thing to say, though, is that many scientific theories are tested in different ways. We test theories not only by the predictions they make, but also by their comparative explanatory power. If you have one model that can explain facts that we all already have better than another model, that confers support on the model that does the better

Starting point is 00:47:47 job of explaining. We know, for example, that if we're talking about the digital code in DNA, we know of a cause that produces digital information, and that is intelligence or mind. The alternative causes that have been proposed, those based on chance, those based on natural laws, those based on some combination of the two, I go through this in great detail in some of my books, these have failed. And this is why the origin of life research, as it's called, has reached a state of impasse. There are no known materialistic causes that can explain the origin of digital information. But we do know of a cause that can do that, and that is mine. So we have this fact that we already know that DNA contains information in digital form. We know of only one cause

Starting point is 00:48:37 that's sufficient to produce that, therefore only one thing that can provide an adequate explanation for the origin of that information. And so that is itself a kind of test. It's an important test. It's the test of explanatory power. Intelligent design provides a better explanation for the origin of information than other competing hypotheses. But it also generates predictions.

Starting point is 00:48:59 And one of the predictions that generated was that the so-called junk DNA that scientists were talking about would turn out to be importantly functional. And are we finding that? Absolutely. we're finding that. It's a confirmed prediction of intelligent design over and against the prediction and expectation of the neo-Darwinist. When the non-coding, so a little background, you have a long stretch of DNA, about two to three percent of it, plus or minus, codes for building proteins. The rest of it was, for a long time, terra incognita. We didn't

Starting point is 00:49:37 know what it was doing. They called it junk. They called it junk. It's, And the neo-Darwinists sort of jumped to the conclusion that the non-coding regions were non-functional and that they were the holdovers from the random trial and error process of mutation and selection. It was an accumulation of mutations over time. In other words, evidence that you've had mutations over time. It just didn't work. It was a great way to think. If you're working in a Neo-Darwinian framework, this is what we'd expect.

Starting point is 00:50:08 we'd expect to see a lot of one scientist called it flopsom and jeptsum, you know, the genetic garbage accumulating over the millions and millions of years. And we looked at that and said, the ID people, starting in the 1990s, Dean Kenyon, Forrest Mims, William Dembsky, any number of ID proponents said, well, you know, that is a logical prediction of neo-Darwinism. but our model's different. We think that the information in life was designed, and we would expect,

Starting point is 00:50:46 we think mutations are a real process. We'd expect to see some mutational accumulation, but we wouldn't expect the signal to be dwarfed by the noise. And so we're going to predict that those non-coding regions perform very important functions that have yet to be discovered. And 2011, the Encode Project comes out. One of the early scientists working on this, one of the scientists working on this first was a man named Richard Sternberg, who was in the early 2000s predicting function for non-coding regions and was starting to find it.

Starting point is 00:51:23 But then this massive federally funded project called the Encode Project published 2011. And it turns out that at least 85% of the non-coding regions are being transcribed. ergo doing something. And we now know that the non-coding regions of the genome are not only importantly functional, they're functioning much like an operating system in a computer program that's controlling the timing and regulate, that's regulating, controlling the timing and expression of the coding files. So there's a deep functional integration of the function in the non-coding and the coding.

Starting point is 00:52:02 and it means this is a really an awesome system. I started to tell about the three big things we found in life that are obvious indicators of design. One is the presence of digital code. The second is an intricate information processing system, and the non-coding regions are part of that. And the third is the miniature machines that we're finding. Explain the miniature machines.

Starting point is 00:52:25 This is kind of an awesome thing. Anyone who sees this has to say, wait a minute, wait a minute. I've seen this. I've seen like images. of, you know, parts of the body or mitochondria moving, and they seem to be moving like a machine across a cell. Yeah, we've got, there's all kinds of, it's mind-blowing stuff.

Starting point is 00:52:44 We have a whole section in the film story of everything about this, because the producers have, they went out to some great animators and depicted these things with some real precision. But inside living cells today, we have found rotary engine. We have found sliding clamps. We have found turbines.

Starting point is 00:53:08 We have found little walking robotic motor proteins that tow large vesicles of materials along tracks that are effectively, they're like railroad tracks. I've seen them. It's incredible. It's called Kinesin Motor Walking Motor Proteins. And so we have animations of all of these in the new film because you've really got to see them to believe them.

Starting point is 00:53:29 And it beggars beliefs. strains credulity to think that any of these machines could have arisen through an undirected mutation selection type process. The problem is, and this is what Michael Behe, our colleague at Lehigh University showed back in 96 in his famous book, Darwin's Black Box, is that these machines time and time again have a property that he calls irreducible complexity or what an engineer might call functional integration, where you need a, you need a, very large core set of these parts that make up the machines to be present in the right configurational order with each other for the machine to make, to have a function at all.

Starting point is 00:54:15 And if you remove one of them, the machine shuts down. So imagine you're going to, you want to build this machine in a gradual step-by-step Darwinian way. And you've got a 30-part flagellar motor that's, you know, it's got a whip like tail, it's got a rotor, a stater, a drive shaft. It's got bushings. I mean, when you look at these things, it looks like something Mazda designed, right? Okay. So you start removing any of the core parts of that system. And the whole thing stops on it. It doesn't work. So how are you going to build that up gradually? If the natural selection selects for functional advantage, but if there's no functional advantage until you get the whole set of those parts working in close coordination, there's nothing to select. There's

Starting point is 00:54:57 nothing that will be preserved and passed on to the next generation. So you effectively have to build the whole thing all at once or not at all. And building the whole thing all at once, strains credulity because it places an enormous burden on purely random processes. Yeah, the probabilities just continue to get smaller. The probabilities in that point and smaller. And smaller. Do you find it interesting that, because as you're talking, I just think, you know, as, you know, the Christian Bible says we were made in God's image. that the way that we design things, the way that we create things,

Starting point is 00:55:31 would, to a much lesser degree, but somewhat mirror what we're finding in nature. Like these machines that you're describing, when we're looking at cells... It's inherent knowledge. What would that come from? Look very much like machines that we create before we even knew that the cells were...

Starting point is 00:55:47 It's not like we copied them. We didn't even know that they existed. It's like somebody's trying to get our attention. Oh, we've made something like that. You know? I had a, we had a Microsoft, one of their elite architect-level programmers working in our lab in Redmond. He granted his time to us for two years, took some time off of Microsoft, and he wrote 10,000 lines of code to help us simulate what's called the gene expression system, the way that, or sometimes called the system for protein synthesis. How the digital code in the DNA directs the construction of the proteins and protein machines.

Starting point is 00:56:24 and protein machines, the machines that the proteins make. Because each of these, like the flagellar motor or the ATP synthase, the little turbine, they're made of proteins that have very specific shapes that fit together with other proteins with very specific shapes. So they're like mechanical parts of an integrated system. And so he wrote 10,000 lines of code to help us simulate, and not remember from civics class how a bill becomes a law. It's how a gene becomes a protein, how the information in the gene directs the protein.

Starting point is 00:56:54 synthesis. And one day he walks into my office and he throws a book down on my table. He's a big tall guy about 6-5. He's got, you know, shock of wild hair, genius type programmer. And he says, I get an eerie feeling that someone figured this out before us. And he points at the book. And the book is called Design Patterns. And it's a standard manual for computer programmers for writing code for what are called computer design patterns. And a computer design pattern, he explained to me is an established method of processing digital information, of storing or processing digital information. And he said, he said, I'm learning the gene expression system. I'm recognizing all these established design patterns from computer science. We have automated error correction,

Starting point is 00:57:49 right? We call it spell check. There's automated error correction in the transmitting. of genetic information. If something goes wrong and you get the wrong amino acid in the wrong place, there's a little, there's a big protein that comes along, excises it and puts the right one in place. He says, we have hierarchical filing. We've got within the genome, you've got files within files within folders and folders within super folders. And so you have this kind of hierarchical organization of information. And he just started to tick these things off. And he said, And then he repeated the, I get an eerie feeling that someone figured this out before us. It's as if we're, we're stumbling in our own information age, we're stumbling onto an awareness of a deeper form of information technology that was invented long before us and upon which our very existence depends.

Starting point is 00:58:42 Oh, wow. How often does it happen? Light drop. that a scientist who starts out atheists or maybe even agnostic and the deeper they get into their studies, the more they start to go, maybe there is a God. Do you see that often? Well, this is the story. We tell several of these stories in the story of everything. Einstein never came to a fully orthodox kind of theistic belief. He believed in some kind of mind behind the universe. He came to recognize that the universe definitely had a beginning.

Starting point is 00:59:15 And the reason he didn't like that was he thought it smacked too much of the kind of Genesis account or pointed to some sort of immaterial, a need for a transcendent and immaterial creator. Hoyle thought the same thing. He very explicitly said he didn't like the Big Bang theory because it reminded him too much of the Genesis account. And he thought that the scientists who were proposing it were being too influenced by the Genesis 1-1 thing, which is kind of comical because that's the last thing I think that was happening. But so you have these kind of conversions away from materialism, sometimes to fully Christian belief, sometimes to some sort of theistic belief, sometimes to a rudimentary awareness of a designing mind behind things. But there is this shift taking place with a lot of scientists. And in the film, we tell the story of another, a great cosmologist and astrophysicist named Alan Sandage.

Starting point is 01:00:11 And I happened to have heard him speak when I was. a young scientist at a conference, and he gave a presentation on the evidence for the Big Bang, and then announced that in his talk that he was no longer a scientific materialist. He had been a long-time Jewish agnostic about religious matters, and he now said he had become a Christian, and that his conversion to theism, to a belief in God, was a consequence of his awareness of these scientific developments. He became a God believer because of, not in spite of the scientific evidence. And what he described was the evidence for the beginning of the universe and its fine-tuning.

Starting point is 01:00:54 And there was a memorable line, and we found the footage of this. I saw this myself. This is one of the things that rocked my world as a 27-year-old scientist. A year later, I was off to Cambridge to start studying these things. And he's looking into the camera, not too happy about this, the sense of, you know, as soon as he was a reluctant convert to this position. but he said, here is evidence for what can only be described as a super natural event. There's no way this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.

Starting point is 01:01:24 Why? Because the realm of physics, as we know it, comes into existence at the beginning of the universe, in the Big Bang. Before that, there's no physics to do the explaining. There's no material to explain the origin of matter. And he recognizes this deep problem. And then ultimately comes to belief in God and through soul searching, he ends up having a specifically Christian conversion. What about your own personal story?

Starting point is 01:01:48 Did you come from a place of always believing in intelligent design? Like how did you get so passionate about what you study now? That's a great question. I was maybe like you guys, really into sports as a teenager. And I broke my leg in a skiing accident. And I also, I think I was somewhat neurotic, probably not too stable, mentally. My mind was always spinning. And during this period in which I was sort of confined to a full leg cast, my mind was just spinning out of control with all these questions that were, I didn't,

Starting point is 01:02:24 I didn't know to label them as such at the time, but they were kind of existential or philosophical. I had this question about, well, what's going to matter in 100 years? And as part of this started, because my dad gave me a book about the history of baseball while I was convalescing. And I was reading about all the stories of the greats. You know, I wanted at that, at that stage, I was 14. I was really into baseball and basketball. And the thing I wanted more than anything was to play shortstop for the New York Yankees, you know. But all the stories of the sports heroes ended the same way.

Starting point is 01:02:55 They would, they'd get scouted, they'd come up to the majors, they'd have this amazing career, they'd amass records, maybe, you know, home run records or ERA, or they'd win World Series. and then they retire at 36, 38, maybe they'd play on to 40, and then they'd live out the rest of their lives enjoying the celebrity of having been a great athlete. But then what? You know, they passed away at some point. They died.

Starting point is 01:03:24 Ted Williams is no longer with us. I think he had the greatest swing ever. You know, I read his book on hitting. But at the end of the day, there's a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper, and that's the measure of a person's life. or is it? Could there be something more? And then I raised this with my mother who hated sports,

Starting point is 01:03:42 and she thought it was this, you know, the grown men chasing a ball around was her thing always. But, you know, she said, well, that's because you should be a surgeon. You should not, like, well, okay, what if I'm a surgeon? Then I'll save people's lives, and they'll live for a while, but then they'll die. And so what's, you know, it was like that old Charlie Brown cartoon where, you know, Lucy's skipping rope, and then suddenly she stops and, you know, it all seems so pointless after a while.

Starting point is 01:04:05 And I could see this rhythm to life of routine, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. And then I had weird thoughts about time, which also really freaked me out because you could take an event. Okay, I can remember that event. It just happened, right? But it's already gone. Where did it go? And I just had this weird feeling. There had to be something somewhere that didn't change or everything that was constantly changing was of no ultimate significance.

Starting point is 01:04:29 And I didn't know how to explain it any better or worse than that. I just had, and I could go on, you know, spinning, spinning, spinning. And one day I had this thought, maybe this is what it means to be insane. And then I had a panic. I had a panic attack. Wow. I had a surge. Because I didn't see anyone at school asking these kinds of questions and nobody was talking about this.

Starting point is 01:04:53 And so then I had about just an extended period of like six months, still in the leg cast, can't do anything, overactive mind. and it's like this dark thought. I get afraid of the thoughts I'm having because it might mean that I'm insane and then I get afraid of the thoughts that I'm insane and then it's a fear of a fear of a fear and it's just a downward maelstrom

Starting point is 01:05:14 and it's just utter darkness. And I remember staring at some pattern on my windowsill thinking my life is over. This just nothing makes sense. And so I have a happy go lucky brother who's my alter ego. I'm a philosopher.

Starting point is 01:05:31 He's an entrepreneur. you know, he kind of started to pull me out of this. His school started up again in the fall. I got out of the cast. But I'd have these recurrent bouts of this kind of metaphysical panic. And I didn't know what it was until I got to college. And I had a philosophy professor. And he was teaching the work of the atheistic existentialists,

Starting point is 01:05:52 Jean-Paul Sartre and the depressing French philosophers. And one of them, Sartre had this quote. He said, without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. And I thought, oh, that's what was bothering me. And I rushed up to after a class to talk to the professor and I said, because I told him about some of this stuff that had gone on with me as a teenager. And I said, I wasn't insane.

Starting point is 01:06:16 I was just a philosopher. And he said, well, but there's a fine line between philosophy and insanity, you know. But what happened for me is, you mentioned, you know, the biblical worldview. So I started, I don't. no, I was maybe a sophomore in high school a couple years later. I picked up the big white, fat Catholic family Bible. We were sort of lapsed Catholics, nominal, and I opened it, and it fell open to a page between the two Testaments, you know, the picture, not of, you know, Jesus with lipstick on, you know, the kind of, sometimes you see the, in some sacred art, but it was, no, it was a manly,

Starting point is 01:06:54 muscular carpenter, and it had the verse underneath from Matthew 11, 21, 20, come unto me all ye who labor and are burdened and heavy laden and I will give you rest. And I thought that sounded pretty good. And I just started reading the next page, which was the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. And I couldn't get through more than a chapter a night, but I had to read a chapter a night because it was settling something inside me. And as I read further, oh, then I got, you know, all kinds of new questions. I remember, sometimes in my middle of my junior year, I resolved.

Starting point is 01:07:30 I'm going to stop thinking about Christianity. I'm going to stop thinking about Christianity. I have to stop. But I couldn't. I couldn't. But what I found was there were things that I encountered in the sort of the general, call it the worldview of the scripture, that were addressing these questions I was having.

Starting point is 01:07:47 About time, for example. I got to passage in the book of Hebrews and said, and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And then I found in the Exodus that when Moses wanted to know the name of the the voice from the burning bush who was sending them and the and the and the voice says tell them that i am that i am has sent you i'm the eternal self-existent one and so there was oh i sensed there had to be something that didn't change or else everything that did would have no meaning well maybe there is something that doesn't change and so i began this sort of exploration

Starting point is 01:08:21 and uh so i i ultimately through college i took a lot of i did i did a double major in science but I was always sneaking over and taking philosophy classes. And I had this great Christian philosophy professor who kind of helped me start to make sense of all this stuff. And so I became convinced that Christianity was true in the middle of college, but I wasn't quite ready to, I didn't want it to be true quite yet. I didn't really settle to my first year out of university

Starting point is 01:08:51 in my first job. And then soon after that, I attended this conference where Alan Sandidge was, where Dean Kenyon, one of the origin of life, scientists who also changed his mind from being a chemical evolutionary theorist to a proponent of intelligent design. I started to encounter some of these early proponents of the idea of intelligent design, and then I just got seized with this. So I had my reasons for conversion were mainly philosophical and somewhat biblical, and then I found that it was this scientific

Starting point is 01:09:21 support for the basic worldview of biblical theism as well, and that's what, that's what, Then I just got, I got lit, you know, I got ignited. And, you know, I went back to this old professor after I had been at this conference and told him about, in particular, the DNA argument, the idea that the digital code in DNA was pointing to a pre-existing intelligence. And he said, this is, he said, you get in the middle of this stuff as fast as you can. He said, this is the most significant thing to have happened in philosophy in 300 years. This is about what you're talking about is the reformulation of the design argument.

Starting point is 01:10:02 And if there is validity to that, that changes everything in philosophy and in our whole Western culture. Because that's where we lost the conviction that there was public evidence of God. And if that comes back, that's going to change everything, he said. Wow. Do you think breaking your leg was a blessing? In the end, I do. Yeah. Boy, it was a miserable time, though.

Starting point is 01:10:22 I mean, you know, because I had no structures to make sense of anything. and, you know, but yeah, I think back on that. And I still have the book. My dad wrote me a very moving inscription in the baseball book, you know, about the experience of the broken leg. I lost him. He died a year ago. Came to faith late in life in some significant measure because of reading.

Starting point is 01:10:45 He read a book by Lee Strobel called Case for Creator. Yeah. And the Strobel book had two chapters in it about his kid, about me. So he had to read it. And he was an engineer, and then the intelligent design stuff started to make sense to him. And one of his best friends became a believer, having attended one of my talks and seen the animation of how the digital code in the DNA directs the construction of the protein machines. He walked out of the talk, turned to my dad, fellow engineer. They'd been buddies and coworkers at Boeing and other aerospace companies for like 50 years.

Starting point is 01:11:22 He walks out and turns to my dad and says, Chuck, did you see that anima? of the interior of the cell. My dad nods and he says, he said, Chuck, there's got to be a God. And so these two old codgers in their 80s start taking themselves to church without the wives prompting them. That's great. One of the first things that I, the moments I had reading the Bible where I was just, it just hit me.

Starting point is 01:11:46 And it sounds silly. But for me, it was such a big deal. It was in Genesis. It was the first time I'd ever read from beginning to end or actually any of the Bible. and it was literally in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I said, time, space, and matter have to exist at the same time. It literally says it right here in Genesis and it completely... There's an astrophysicist in our film named Sarah Salvander,

Starting point is 01:12:07 who has some very interesting videos about how just the first couple verses of Genesis comport so beautifully with our modern cosmological understanding of the origin of the universe. It's definitely worth a look. And she's in the film. She's awesome. So has it has anyone made that I know you've had the opportunity to debate other people on the other other side has anyone made a good argument that's made you go back and like check and research and feel like oh wow that's a good argument there well can I can I make one more comment about Sal's and then come back to your question the other thing in the Genesis account and also in the in the in the what's called the John nine prolog the first chapter of the book of John so you get this connection between between God creating and information in the beginning God said in Genesis. Okay.

Starting point is 01:12:54 And then in John 1, it's in the beginning was the word. And one of the scientists that I heard at this initial conference where I also heard Sandwich, a man named Dean Kenyon, he was a leading chemical evolutionary theorist who repudiated his own theory because he realized it couldn't explain the origin of the information in DNA. And so he had this kind of interesting multifilitary. phase intellectual, first intellectual conversion, where he shifted from chemical evolutionary theory to saying at this conference, it's time for the theologians and the philosophers to reopen the natural theological question. In other words, is nature pointing to God? Because of the

Starting point is 01:13:37 information in DNA. And so he first shifted from being a chemical evolutionary theorist to being a proponent of intelligent design. And then he came across the scriptural passages, also in one of the letters of the epistles of John, it talks about Jesus Christ being the word of life. And this recurrent idea that word is necessary to creation, you realize that's what we're seeing in biology. You can't build life. You can't build biological form without biological information. So he ended up having a full-on religious conversion as well as a scientific conversion.

Starting point is 01:14:14 And it was predicated by some of these insights that he was having scientifically. in which he was also finding an echo in the biblical text. So, yes, many debates, lots of, some really great interlocutors. One just hat tip to a gentleman I like very much who passed away last year, Michael Ruse. We were frequent-friendly debating partners going back to my first year out of grad school. Oh, wow. Yeah, and he was very kind to me, offered to, even though we were on the opposite sides of the issue, He offered to help me get established in my career in the philosophy of science,

Starting point is 01:14:51 and so I always appreciated him very much. We have a book coming out in the Cambridge University Press next year that's co-edited by my colleague, William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design, and Michael Ruse, who passed away before the book could come out, so it's a posthumously edited book by Ruse, so I'd just give him a hat tip. There's an interesting debate going on right now

Starting point is 01:15:15 about the origin of the universe. There are leading physicists and cosmologists who are still uncomfortable with the idea of a beginning. And there has been a proliferation in recent years of new cosmological models that attempt to restore the idea of an infinite universe. They're infinite universe cosmologies.

Starting point is 01:15:38 And I had a debate in Oxford in October with a science writer's, journalist named Phil Halper, who's worked closely with a lot of these cosmologists who are formulating these infinite universe cosmologies. And Halper's argument and the argument of one of his co-authors, a Persian cosmologist named F. Shorty is that, look, there are lots of these new models, so we can't really say that the universe had a beginning after all. And my counterargument in the debate, and this was a really interesting. It's a good. It's a good. going to be a very current debate going forward, is that, yes, it's always been possible to model

Starting point is 01:16:20 the universe into infinity. This is what Einstein attempted to do. Remember that he set the cosmological constant at just the right value so he could portray the outward push and the inward push in kind of an equilibrium. But it turned out not to be consistent with the evidence. and what's going on now is that people are very cleverly reintroducing for completely different ways in infinite universe cosmologies. But what we've found in studying all of them is that they have a high cost, a high cost in terms of credibility or evidential support. The cost is that, number one, most importantly, all of them involve. some kind of unexplained fine-tuning.

Starting point is 01:17:11 Remember that Einstein's model, he had to fine-tune the cosmological constant to get it to balance the gravitational force in order to depict things as static. Well, if you bring fine-tuning in, add new fine-tuning. You're just providing additional support for the theistic argument,

Starting point is 01:17:27 but on other grounds. So you're not getting around theism by getting rid of the beginning in your modeling. You're just providing additional support for it. A lot of the models have very wonky physics, too. They invoke physics that violates established physics in order to bring the infinite universe back into currency. Some of them involve some mathematical slights of hand, kind of funky things that other physicists are saying, wait a minute, that's not a move you can actually make. And lots of them involve postulating purely unobserved ad hoc hypotheses.

Starting point is 01:18:06 So they end up violating Occam's Razor because they're so convoluted and baroque in all of the theoretical, pure theoretical postulates. You invent a kind of force or a field that doesn't, of which we have no experience. But it helps you reposition the universe as being infinite. So yes, you can remodel the universe as being, you can model it as being infinite, but the cost of doing so, there's a huge cost of the credibility of the model. and even if you posit these models, you don't get around theism because you have this unexplained fine-tuning to deal with. And so this was a major focal point in the debate that he and I just had, and it's very, very current. He wrote me a nice inscription in his book afterwards that it was the toughest debate he'd ever had. And I have to give a hat to him.

Starting point is 01:18:56 He was a very good debate or two. I think the framing that we're offering here is really, it gives you a roadmap to all this proliferation. It's not a healthy thing in the history of science to have a proliferation of models. If the community can't settle on something, it's usually because you're trying to put a round hole or a square peg in a round hole. And if you just look at the observational astronomy, you've got an outward expanding universe. The evidence suggests outward expansion in the forward direction of time and a collapse or contraction in the reverse direction of time. to a stopping point, past which you can't not go any further. There's nothing in what we're observing that suggests a static universe from infinite past.

Starting point is 01:19:48 What we see is exactly what you'd expect if the universe is expanding outward from a beginning point. Yes, you can cleverly model your way out of that, but only at a cost. I wanted to ask you just personally, something I've been tripping out. on ever since I've read about this. And I know quantum physics, very complex, like the theory of it and everything, but the double slit theory and then the observer effect. And if you could kind of explain that a bit for me, maybe how that kind of weaves into. And by the way, side note, quantum physics is one of the first things that made me go,

Starting point is 01:20:24 wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is weird. Yes, it's really weird. And it doesn't act, you know, according to the natural. One of my colleagues, George Gilder, likes to say that quantum physics has shown that the heart of matter, at the heart of matter is a mystery. If matter can be both spatially extended,

Starting point is 01:20:41 if it gets small enough, matter can be both spatially extended and spatially discreet at the same time. What kind of a thing is that? Well, maybe it's not actually a thing. Maybe it's more of a, well, they call it a wave function. You know, it's more conceptual than it is material. Yeah, so I do explain that nicely in,

Starting point is 01:21:00 and I worked hard at this. I got help, you know, retooled with some. I did a physics major, Some of this stuff you have to go brush up on before you write on it to make sure you get it right. And we've got a great network of scientists. And so I explain this in chapters, I think 17 and 18, a return to the God hypothesis. The experiments that give you this idea that matter can, it's the double-slid experiment, that it can be, that small bits of matter may act as waves and particles at the same time.

Starting point is 01:21:35 This becomes relevant in the cosmological context for a really interesting reason that relates to what I was just saying. One of these infinite universe cosmological models, maybe the most popular one, is called quantum cosmology. And the idea is that when you go way back in time, the universe would be small enough that in addition to whatever's going on with Einsteinian gravity, there would be quantum effects would start to take over. And so when the universe is super, super, super small, it's whatever that is is going to act in a quantum way. It's going to be spatially extended and spatially discrete at the same time. And if it's spatially extended and spatially discrete, can you really say that it's the kind of thing that would cause curvature? Like most matter does in larger chunks of matter do in Einsteinian gravitational physics. And so there's this worry, well, maybe we can't back extrapolate all the way to the beginning

Starting point is 01:22:39 because we just don't know what things would have been doing in that kind of a regime when things are that tiny. But here's the interesting thing. Our best attempt to depict that is we've applied one of the equations from quantum physics called the Schrodinger equation and adapted it to that cosmological context. And that adapted equation is called the Wheeler-Dewitt equation. and when the physicists try to solve that equation, they get a picture of all the different types of universes that could emerge, the different universes with different gravitational fields and distributions of matter,

Starting point is 01:23:22 different spatial configurations and distribution of matter. And so they depict that, the solution, you've got a big hairy equation. If you solve it, then you get a what's called a psi function. a wave function that describes an ensemble of possible universes that exist in superposition. So different universes, they're different from each other, but they exist simultaneously, but they don't really exist physically anywhere. It's more of a mathematical, it's a mathematical expression. It's a function, okay?

Starting point is 01:23:53 And so out of that, they say the universe comes. So you have this weird paradox where out of math comes, matter, space, time, and energy, number one. Yeah. And secondly, to get the right math, the right wave function that would include a universe like ours, which would allow the physicist to say that we've explained our universe, you have to solve this big prior, hairy equation. But the equation has an infinite number of solutions. Unless you artificially constrain what are called the boundary conditions.

Starting point is 01:24:29 So you've got to restrict the degree. of mathematical freedom of this big hairy equation to get an output that you want that enables you to say, well, our universe could have come out of that. But what are you doing? You're inputting information into the math to get the output you want again, which is say you are modeling the intelligent design of the universe.

Starting point is 01:24:53 So this is supposedly a model that gets you around the beginning and around the implication of a creation event, but it just brings in a need for transcendent. a need for transcendent design on other grounds. So this is what I was talking about. It's an unexplained fine tuning. It's a kind of fine tuning. So I explain this in the,

Starting point is 01:25:09 so there's a big quantum dimension to all of this, but it doesn't, it doesn't solve the problem of the creation, of the need for a creator. It actually reinforces it in a different way. And also, what is this thing about matter coming out of math? Math is conceptual. Math is an idea.

Starting point is 01:25:25 And one of the great quantum physicists, Alexander Villenkin, has said, you know, if before there was matter, space, time, and energy, if these equations, this realm of equations existed before matter, space, time, and energy, what could that be? Because equations, math, this is the realm of,

Starting point is 01:25:47 these are conceptual. And so are we really saying that the universe came out of a mind? He actually poses that rhetorical question at the end of one of his books. Why do you think so many scientists are uncomfortable with the idea of a designer? Yeah. There has been a deeply rooted,

Starting point is 01:26:06 default way of thinking for at least a century and a half in science. And I think it's the same reason Christian people get uncomfortable, people, if someone challenges their beliefs, you know, it's a human thing. You know, if we have a deeply,

Starting point is 01:26:24 if we're deeply, have a deep conviction about something, we tend not to want to give it up easily. and so there's a Michael Ruse, the gentleman I mentioned, philosopher of science, used to, he wrote a book arguing that that Neo-Darwinism functioned as a kind of religious system of thought for many people working in evolutionary biology. Why? Because it answered one of the great worldview questions. Where does life come from? Where, you know, the most fundamental worldview question is what is the thing the entity or the process from which everything else comes. And evolutionary biology, neodarwinism in particular, provides a partial answer to that. It says that life comes from this undirected materialistic process. And so Ruse said, you know,

Starting point is 01:27:15 that this is functioning in a quasi-religious way for many of his own colleagues, who he was a neo-Darwinist himself. And so I think all of us feel, you know, when those kind of deep convictions are challenged, We react in a human way, and we don't want to rethink those things, and we don't do so readily. Have you ever had anybody who's come to your talks, or maybe even someone you debate, changed their mind, come to the faith as a result? I get a lot of mail from people who've read my books that have had that kind of experience, particularly the last book on Return of the God hypothesis.

Starting point is 01:27:51 sometimes people that have had 30, 40-year careers in physics or in biology or whatever. Debates, I have had people make interesting concessions in debates about specific points. In fact, in the debate I had with Phil Halper at the end, he said, the moderator asked us each to, you know, give the other guy a hat tip on something and say, what did you, you know, was anything you learned? He acknowledged, I'll have to think about this point Steve made about these cosmological models invoking unexplained fine tuning. I haven't thought enough about that yet. But there was one debate we had about the bacterial flagellar motor where I explained that the genetic evidence showed that the parts of the flagellar motor had not, the flagellar motor had not evolved. from simpler parts, but it rather, oh, no, excuse me, there's, there's a, the phlegelar motor, there's another thing called the type three secretory system, which is a kind of, it's, it's got

Starting point is 01:29:00 the inner workings of the flagellar motor, but not all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, accoutrema. And some people have proposed that the type three secretory system was the ancestor from which the flagellar motor evolved. And in the debate, I explained that the genetics showed that it was the other way around, that the flagellar motor was the aboriginal form and the type 3 secrecyst system was a devolutionary byproduct of the system or something that had arisen independently. And after the debate, one of the guys on the other side came up to me and he said, he said, I won't say the name of the other scientists, but some other scientists had given him the argument about the type 3 being the ancestor. And I said, I told him it might, it might be, it might

Starting point is 01:29:47 be the opposite and now you've made me look foolish. So anyway, yeah, so you have people that do debates that want to win at all cost, and you have people that want to do debates to want to get to the truth, and I've encountered both. And I, you know, I think it's coming on me and my side, our side also to, when we get something wrong, we got to own up to that. So my favorite current theory is the simulation theory, which, which, Which is like, aren't you kind of saying the same thing? Aren't you kind of saying the same thing?

Starting point is 01:30:21 Yeah, it's the same thing. It's just, yeah, artificial version. It is obviously a design hypothesis, right? Yeah, exactly. We're seeing all this evidence of information, information processing. This looks like almost like a computer world in a living setting. There must, maybe, maybe there's a master programmer behind everything. And we're just a simulation.

Starting point is 01:30:45 And that's where it gets a little wonky. I mean, why say you could infer to a master programmer, but why say that our experience is just a simulation? It goes back to the old Descartes argument about the evil demon persuading us that we exist when we really don't. If the evil demon is, the evil demon then is too clever by half because if he's persuaded us that we exist and we're aware of our existence, which is a necessary condition of being persuaded that we do exist, then we do exist because we're aware. You know, so, you know, the simulation hypothesis, I think, is subject to the same problem. It's, we're not a simulation in someone else's reality. If we're aware ourselves of having conscious experiences, then we have a reality, too. But what's interesting about the simulation is, it seems to imply that there's a mind behind everything.

Starting point is 01:31:35 That's right. You referenced Genesis a couple of times. What's your belief on the six days of creation on how long that actually was? Very, very, very contentious question within the Christian world, I guess, right? As I mentioned, I don't have any problem with the basic accuracy of the radiometric dating methods. I think they're pretty good. You can have, always have contamination of samples. So I accept that the universe is, that the Earth is very old, that the universe is very old.

Starting point is 01:32:08 I think the evidence we have of light coming from distant objects in space, etc., provides pretty compelling evidence for a very ancient universe, but one that's still finite. And if you set that finite date at whatever you like, 13.8 billion, it's not enough time to explain the origin of the fine-tuning by chance alone, or to explain the origin of proteins on planet Earth. Same thing. People think that that amount of time gives you the probabilistic resources that you need to explain life in the universe. It doesn't, because life is so immensely complex, and the probabilities are so small, even in relation to those kind of big numbers. It happens, though, I have a bit of a hybrid view. Oh, well, the other thing is I don't think the Genesis account teaches a young earth. That's the,

Starting point is 01:32:55 that's the shocking thing to a lot of my Christian friends. I'm a Bible-believing Christian, so not all proponents, I should say, not all proponents of intelligent design are, and because it's a evidence-based argument. Not everyone comes to the same conclusions about religious stuff, But I am a Bible, believe in Christian, but I don't think the Bible teaches the Young Earth. And one of several reasons I have for thinking that is that if you do really careful exegesis on the Genesis 1 text, get to day four. And in day four, it says that God either created or caused to appear. There's a Hebrew verb, haya, that has either meaning. It doesn't really matter, though, because what the text says is that he either created or caused to appear the sun and the moon.

Starting point is 01:33:42 and he gave them as markers of the seasons and the days in the years, the days of the years and the seasons. So they're time markers. But wait, we're in day four already. We've already had the days of creation established. We've had three yomes of creation already. So it's hard to, so it's almost like a little signal. Be careful not to impute your method of timekeeping to the timekeeping that's going on in the Genesis account.

Starting point is 01:34:09 Because we mark time. as the result of the movement of the sun across the ecliptic, okay, across the arc of the sky. And we have more sophisticated ways of doing that now, but we have always, in human history, had solar denominated days, right? So if the sun is not around to be marking time, if it's either not visible because it hasn't yet appeared, or it's not been, or it's not there because it hasn't been created, either way, we do not have time markers available to us to, until day four. So whatever was going on in day one, day two, day three, and arguably in the rest of the days of creation, because they're also linguistically linked to yomes, you know,

Starting point is 01:34:52 biblical Hebrew days, we can't at least know that they were 24-hour periods. Right. So theoretically, there could be a million years between each day. Arguably, yeah. And so I think we have to look to the science, to the evidence of the natural world, to date the universe in which and the planet in which we live. It happens, I think that the sequence of events that are recorded in the Genesis days align remarkably with what we know about natural history. And there's the whole thing we could do on that. But to me, it's quite remarkable.

Starting point is 01:35:28 Well, I'm interested in that. Explain that to me. Well, the sequence of life forms in day five and day six, the you have the waters, day two or day three, you have the waters below and they're all gathered into one place. Well, the corollary of all the waters being gathered into one place is the land is in one place. Well, early on in our geological history, we had this idea about Gondwanaland, one giant continent or pangia. So as you, well, and the text also starts with the most shocking statement of all in the beginning.

Starting point is 01:36:04 This is what cosmology has revealed, that there was a beginning. So as you walk through the days and you go through sequentially, the sequence of events is remarkably accurate to what we know scientifically. I don't think that the days of, I don't think the Genesis account is meant to be a science account, but it's not comprehensive. It doesn't tell us everything we want to know about the history of the planet or the history of life. But what it does tell us is representative and it's accurate. there's a poetic structure in Genesis.

Starting point is 01:36:42 The things that are created on day one are ruled by the things that are created at day four, day two, day five, day three, day six. There's all kinds of things going on in the Genesis account. It's very, very rich. It's full of interesting, it's full of insight about human nature. It's full of insight about metaphysics. In particular, it's the only ancient account in the world that suggests that the universe is not eternal and self-existent, but it's dependent on an external creator,

Starting point is 01:37:07 which I think has more and more and more credibility as we learn things cosmologically. So I think it's just an amazing, amazing passage, but I don't think it teaches a young earth. I think it's really interesting that you would look at that. I think sometimes you take it for granted. I know I did. But when I looked at biblical scripture and I looked at it and said, what human mind would invent this or create this, it became obvious that no person would come up with this idea. It just doesn't make any human sense.

Starting point is 01:37:42 You know, part of, part of that was me realizing that a lot of the ways that we, things that we take for granted, like where we believe that we have protected rights. And where did that come from? Nobody would have invented that. If I looked around, I would never guess that we all have, you know,

Starting point is 01:37:56 that we're all created. Inalienable rights. Yeah, that makes no sense. So we don't look the same. We're not the same intelligence. We're not the same, you know, strength and power. And so to me, it was like, oh, this obviously was not something creative. I'm definitely not the same strength as you guys.

Starting point is 01:38:09 I've been working out, but I got a ways to go. Yeah. No, this is Tom Holland. Tom Holland's point, the British historian has written in the book, Dominion, and he's been in the news. He was for a long time calling himself, he was for a long time calling himself a Christian atheist because he discovered the importance of Christianity to the West, to our culture, to all his civilization. He said, we're swimming in Christian waters and we don't know it. Where do we get this idea of human rights? He said, this is apart from the biblical idea of being made in God's image, this is an utterly exotic concept.

Starting point is 01:38:46 You know, nobody else would come up. No one else has come up with us. It's a Western concept that's come out of Judeo-Christianity. So, yeah, this is a great point. That's a great way to tell you. A Christian atheist. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this makes sense.

Starting point is 01:39:01 Yeah. Well, yeah, Tom, I don't think. Tom is still an atheist. I think he's if not if he's not cross the line, he's close. Are you finding interests around intelligent design growing recently? It seems like there's

Starting point is 01:39:18 there seems to be much more interest and I think it's tied to more scientific discoveries or maybe just people feel like we need a sense of purpose and meaning. I think I was going to say oh my yes. In 2004 and five we were in the media a lot

Starting point is 01:39:34 There was a court trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, where a little school district tried to get a book about intelligent design placed in their library. I remember. And they wanted teachers to tell students about it. And the ACLU, excuse me, reacted as they would. And there was a big court trial. We actually thought that the school board had framed the whole thing in a kind of counterproductive way, urged them to withdraw the policy. They didn't went to trial. And in a

Starting point is 01:40:02 school in a jurisdiction in central Pennsylvania intelligent design was ruled unconstitutional. But it has no, it has no,

Starting point is 01:40:16 that ruling has no applicability beyond that area of central Pennsylvania. But what was interesting was afterwards the kind of scientific atheists

Starting point is 01:40:27 were very quick to dance on our graves and say it's over after Dover. That was their mantra. And now we're, and in 2004, I had published one of the first peer-reviewed scientific articles in a mainstream journal. It was a journal published out of the Smithsonian Institution called the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

Starting point is 01:40:51 And that caused a huge furor. The editor got persecuted and hounded. Eventually ended up leaving the Smithsonian for having a lot of. the article to go through peer review and getting published. Now we're 20 years on from that or more, and our latest count was 328 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. So, and lots more, almost 300 books. And our message is getting out. We're attracting, I think we're attracting young people, young scientists, much faster than the opposite point of view. We have the energies on our side. But beyond that, I think there's been a shift in the culture. The new atheists of

Starting point is 01:41:33 Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, these guys, I think, massively overplayed their hand. Dawkins is not quite a figure of ridicule in the UK, but you can't use him as a foil anymore because it's understood that he overplayed his hand. And Ayan Herseali, one of his sidekicks for many years has recently announced a conversion to Christianity. To your point, right about this. Yeah, to her, to your point,

Starting point is 01:42:04 she's said, among other reasons for her becoming Christian, is that the Bible and Christianity, belief in God, answers that fundamental question of meaning and that scientific atheism, that scientific atheism simply can't answer. I had an interview with Piers Morgan a while back, and we got into a discussion about this, whole issue of life after death and meaning. And I said, you know, nothing can mean anything

Starting point is 01:42:32 to a rock or a planet or a DNA molecule. Things only mean things to persons. This was what was bothering me as a teenager, by the way. And yet we, our persons all die. So unless there's a person whose life persists beyond our graves, there's no possibility of ultimate meaning for human beings. Ultimately, what's the point? What's the point? And I got into a discussion about this with Pierce Morgan on air. He revealed that he had a long conversation with Ricky Jervais about this. And what Ayan Hercili was saying is that

Starting point is 01:43:09 scientific materialism has no answer except one in the negative to that question. And now that's not, in a sense, strictly speaking, an evidence for belief in God but in her view, it was evidence of a failed worldview. It was a worldview you couldn't live with. And she's since been, I know having long conversations with a colleague of mine, John Lennox,

Starting point is 01:43:34 and finding out that in addition to that deep sense she had that this just won't work, is that there's a lot of evidence for belief in God as well. But so there's a lot of factors going into this, but there's a Harvard study that came out of young people showing that something like 56% of young people, 18 to in the 18 to 30 range acknowledge having persistent

Starting point is 01:43:56 doubts about whether or not their lives have any have any ultimate meaning or purpose. And I think that's a culture, that's a civilizational crisis. Yes. And I think as a consequence of that, a lot of people are opening themselves up to the kind of journey that you've been on.

Starting point is 01:44:15 Could there be something more? And the journey that I was on, you know. And I think the scientific evidence that we're marshalling and citing is a, an important, can be important to people as they realize, it's not just that I maybe want this to be true or hope something like this could be true, but there's actually evidence for it. Yeah. That God actually is a reality.

Starting point is 01:44:37 Yeah. My big fear, and what I'd just like to encourage scientists is that there's evidence for this. It does give you a sense of peace, purpose, and meaning. but we also need it to be true because science divorced from the subjective morality is not good. It turns into scientists not asking if we should, but rather can we? Yes. And it turns into all kinds of crazy, grisly, scary experiments because there is no underlying, you know, moral foundation. And then it just becomes a question of can we?

Starting point is 01:45:16 And gosh, you know, there's been enough sci-fi movies. to demonstrate what that could look like. And our human imagination can't even... Well, you know, you're just as simple as something as abortion on demand or, you know, the kinds of experiments that the Nazis did, you know, it's just awful stuff. That was very well said. I should be interviewing you. Yeah, that's exactly right.

Starting point is 01:45:37 Appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Well, thank you guys. This is a great conversation. One of my absolute favorite interviews. I really appreciate you making the trip down here. This has been so great. It's been just delight.

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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2847: DNA Is More Complex Than Any Software Ever Written. So Who Wrote It? | Stephen Meyer

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