The Eric Metaxas Show - Eric Hedin

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Scientist Eric Hedin speaks from personal experience about the destructive force of the ever-expanding cancel culture with insights outlined in his new book, "Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don't Want You to See."

to the Eric Metaxus show with your host, Eric Metaxus. Hey there, folks. Many of you have followed this program know that I love science. You don't have to be a scientist to love science. But I have to say, loving science means you read books by scientists who are actually scientists. And one of the things that I love is to read books, usually by folks from the Discovery Institute up in Seattle, tremendous, tremendous evidence of God from science. In the book that's coming out in the fall that I've written called Is Atheism Dead?

There's a ton of that stuff about the fine-tuned universe. It's just astounding, and so many people don't know about it. There is a new book out on this subject. It's called Canceled Science, What Some Atheists Don't Want You to See. Eric Hedin, I think is how you pronounce it. Eric Hedin, welcome the program. Thank you very much, Eric. Glad to be with you.

Are you sure it's Hedin? Yes, I'm quite sure about that. Hedin. Not Hedini, just Hedin. Just Hedin. What kind of a name is Hadeen? It's a Swedish background. Swedish.

So that means you're part Swedish. Yeah, about three fourths. You're willing to admit that on this program. I'm fascinated. Okay. Eric, Hedin, seriously, I've been looking through your book. This is the kind of stuff that I love. I really love this stuff.

And most people don't know anything about it. That's why I'm putting it in my forthcoming book. Most people simply don't know that there is astounding scientific evidence for God. Most people just can't even imagine that because we live in a time where people talk about the God of the gaps that science is pushing God out. Just the opposite. Science is pushing God in. And your book, you talk about that. Let's start with your story of what happened at Ball State.

You, well, tell your story because you tell it in the book. All right, thank you. I had been teaching physics and astronomy at Ball State University in Indiana, and I developed a course called The Boundaries of Science. And I taught it to within the Honors College there, Ball State, for about six years. It was an elective science course. It was based on information I had gathered from students over the years when I was teaching physics and astronomy. And in that information, mostly acquired through responses to questions I put in classes.

I found out that students really had a deep interest in questions that were more than just trivial, questions about the meaning of life, where we came from, and what happens after you die. what are the boundaries of science? Can science explain everything? Or will it be able to explain everything in the future? And so I put together this course to be a science course, mostly cosmology and astronomy and physics, but also to give room to explore these big questions that I found that most students actually were really interested in. And so I had been teaching that for a number of years. It was going well when And outside, meaning outside the university, outside the state, and outside atheists began to accuse the university of allowing a science course to go on, which was pushing religion in the classroom.

And the accusation came about because this atheist had gotten a hold of the course syllabus and had noted that there were some books on the syllabus, not even required books. just mentioned, that were written by scientists who are Christians, perhaps some of the ones that you referred to when you mentioned the Discovery Institute in Seattle. And looking at evidence that pointed to intelligent design. So this led to a massive, ongoing investigation, I guess, is the euphemism for it, where the university put together a panel composed primarily of atheists and Darwinists. What did you say? It was an investigation. Is that what you called it?

Yes, that's what the university referred to it. Yeah, the real term, just so you understand, I'm a writer. It's witch trial, which trial, or if you prefer kangaroo court, you can also use that. So they decided that even going near the possibility of God, was out of bounds, was an offense. I mean, this is typical. This is the materialistic, naturalistic lunacy in which we live, that they don't, you know, it's kind of like a baker deciding if you talk about anything besides baking, I'm going to leave.

I will not countenance anything outside of the realm of baking. It's completely arbitrary. It's madness. It's like saying science is all there is. Even though science can't tell us that, we have just arbitrarily philosophical. philosophically said, science is all there is. It's the only way we can know anything. And if you even talk about anything beyond that, it's scandalous. It sounds like that's what you're subjected to at Ball State. Yes, that's the way it was played out. They decided that, well, they

decided to cancel the course based on an accusation that I was violating academic integrity, as they called it. Yeah, which is nonsense, but go ahead. Well, the idea behind that was that I, in making any mention of any evidence from science that pointed to something beyond nature, that I was actually going beyond the boundaries of science and that that was disallowed. Obviously talking about the Big Bang, which is a scientific idea, even talking about that or any singularity, is talking about the boundary of science. Science can't go past the Big Bang. There is no, there's no laws of physics, you know, beyond.

the Big Bang, but they let you talk about that theoretically. Yes, of course, Big Bang is entered science, but I was allowing my students to raise the question of what gave rise to the Big Bang? And could there have been something metaphysical, beyond the physical, that gave rise to it? And of course, just logic says the universe can't create itself. And so it was a bit of an example of evidence that pointed to perhaps a creator, a god. And other origins topics were brought up. The origin of life was examined. And can natural processes give rise to the first living cell?

And based on my understanding of physics, the answer is no. I mean, the answer, based on chemistry and biology, the answer is no. But what I find funny, Eric, is that we wouldn't have known this. We couldn't have known this 70 years ago. When Miller-Yuri did their experiment at the University of Chicago, there was enough ignorance that you could make a claim. But now, because of science, we don't have the ability to make those claims. Now the evidence is overwhelming and disturbing, but people continue to make these claims nonetheless.

You're right on track with that. And that's the way I tried to approach it in the class and in the book. I kind of draw this out that it's our advancing understanding of science that has shown us that nature cannot just accomplish anything, such as the order of life, the origin of consciousness, of human soul, that there's something beyond nature that must be behind it all. It's astounding. By the way, folks, if you're just tuning in, canceled science is the title of the book, what some atheists don't want you to see. Eric Hedine, it's Hedine. I want to make sure I get this right. H-E-D-I-N. Eric H-D-D-I-N. Eric H-D-D-N. You know and I know that science is pushing more and more and more in the direction that says there is no way the universe could have come into being as it did in a way that was random. It doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense that life came into being via random processes over time. There's not enough time. You'd need trillions and trillions of years. Even that wouldn't suffice. It just would never happen. Science is telling us this. And that's to me the irony is it's because of what we learn from science that it's becoming impossible to believe life arose out of non-life.

Science is what is helping us understand that. When we come back, folks, I'm going to talk more about the details in the book canceled scientists, canceled science what some atheists don't want you to see. Eric Adina is my guest. Don't go away. Everybody knows they have to give back. But you always wonder, where do I go? Who do I give to? How do I get? Folks, food for the poor.

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Let me say it again. Squadpod.com slash Eric. Check it out. Folks, I'm talking to Eric Heddin. H-E-D-I-N. The book is canceled science. What some atheists don't want you to see. Eric,

you in the book, you know, you write about how disturbing it is for atheists. In other words, they're evidently offended by the truth and by science. This is the irony. And they want to, they want to shut voices down that are simply saying what they see. You're simply reporting on what you see. You're not adding your philosophical spin to it. I think atheists are scared to death because they could get away with a lot 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. They have less wiggle room today. Yes, I believe you're right. As we learn more about what nature can and perhaps more importantly what it cannot do,

there is mounting evidence from science that shows that the, for example, the typical Darwinian view of life arising from non-life through natural processes is simply unobtainable by natural processes. It's actually false to promote that viewpoint, or even that our place in the universe is just random or that the Earth is just like any other planet. All of these ideas are actually being exposed as not true, not simply because somebody doesn't like them, but because of increasing scientific evidence. Well, I just find it funny that you keep hearing endlessly about, oh, we've just found an exoplanes. planet. We've just found another planet that might have life. And you think, no, my understanding is that there shouldn't be life anywhere in the universe, much less on other planets. There shouldn't

be life on Earth. There should not logically be any life. The only possible explanation is that some intelligent mind created perfect circumstances. But the perfection of the circumstances is what I find so chilling. In other words, it's not like, hey, you know, it's possible if we just have this, this, this, this and this. It really is, the more you look into it, the more astounding it is. Do you go into some of the arcana of, I mean, for an audience like mine that would understand it, but of what is necessary to create an environment for life? Because I just find it more and more unbelievable that there is life anywhere in the universe. Yes. In the book, I start with a theory of the development of the universe and how all the fine-tuning of the laws of physics

allowed there to be stars and planets to form in the first place. And then we look at the formation of our own sun and the formation of planet Earth. And literally could write a few books just on planet Earth and how remarkable this place is that we live upon for it to sustain life over the long run. And then just having the right planet and the right environmental conditions is by no means enough to allow life to arise. And this has been a popularized idea that is completely unscientific. It's completely false scientifically to say that if you just have the right conditions, life will happen. because the complexity of life

completely is beyond the ability of the push or pull forces of nature to create on its own. There's really only four forces of nature, and they all are fairly basic. Gravity does pulls, electric force pushes or pulls, and how much of that do you need to create the complex biochemistry within the cell? It completely goes beyond what we will. would expect in any amount of time within this universe. Did the folks, did Miller and Yuri in 1952 and they did their experiment, did they have any idea of the complexity of a cell? I mean, I always wonder, what did they know? Well, they certainly knew more of the complexity of the cell than, say, Darwin did

back in the mid-1800s. But today we have learned even more. The more we learn about the cell, the more sophisticated we find it to be. It's, for example, with the DNA and the coding for the development of many different kinds of proteins, and then there's epigenetics that goes beyond that, and then there's information stored in the membrane of the cell. It just has become more and more phenomenal. The interior of a cell is more like a metropolis with energy production, centers with information storage and retrieval and there's transportation mechanisms.

It's like a city with all of its infrastructure, all of it functioning. And to say that that all came about by random chances acting on the atoms in a environment of the dirt or the warm little pond or whatever the conditions were, it's really, beyond what science can do. I was going to say, the more you look into it, what always fascinates me, I mean, you're a scientist, but what fascinates me always is that really most people have no idea how crazy this is. Now, there's, when you look at it, it's just, it's breathtaking,

it's frightening, it's chilling when you realize the complexity of a single cell. And yet we're teaching in our schools that, oh, this just happened by, by random forces. There's no way that could have happened by random. In other words, the more we know, the more we know, this is not improbable. This is impossible. Logic would say, this is impossible. And the onus is on people to say, how could it have happened? And they're not doing that. You must be familiar with the work of Dr. James Tour at Rice University in Houston. Yes. Yes. I'm quite familiar with his work. And he's, I mean, he gets angry because he knows so much about what it means to make mollus. in the lab and he says that they're the folks saying that this could happen randomly, you know, in the earliest earth conditions. He says that we're totally clueless. That's the word he uses, clueless, about how any of this could have happened. He's calling for shutting down all abiagenesis research. He's saying we've been barking up the wrong tree for 70 years. It's time we tried to find another tree. Yes, it's almost an offense to the taxpayer in the sense of

Government funding of this is pretty much a waste of money at this point because there are no natural origin of life mechanisms that make any sense scientifically. Your book in some ways is a primer on this stuff. Is that what you set out to do? Because you've got all kinds of stuff in here. It's not just one thing. It's sort of like the soup to nuts on all of this stuff. Yes. I tried to write it in a way that it could be. accessible to non-scientists or scientists who have a specialty in only one field so it covers a wide range of

topics some scientific in cosmology astronomy, physics, others in biology information theory and even some philosophical fields touching on beauty and the evidence of beauty

as pointing to something beyond nature These are actually things that I touch on in my book. It's coming out in the fall because it seems like these are very powerful arguments. And these are arguments that people need to know that there is astounding evidence and astounding arguments for God. There's just no way around it. And logical minds have to conclude at least that it's very impressive. But I think, as you say in the title of your book, people don't really want you to know this stuff because the evidence is,

getting so strong that they don't really want to talk about it. And again, the book is called Canceled Science. Eric H-E-D-I-N is the author. But I want to say to you that I think they are afraid. When you bring up things like the fine-tuned universe, the evidence keeps coming in. There's a guy named, is it Michael Denton? I forget, who's written a couple of books on sunlight and on water, and it is breathtaking. I have to say, it took my breath away. Is there anything you can think of that's something that really a non-scientist would get about what's necessary for us to exist here on Earth that maybe they wouldn't know about?

Well, in terms of the just environmental conditions, oh, there are so many. We are very, in a way, fortunate or blessed, or we could see it as, evidence for design or the creators care for us that the planet Earth has all of the conditions that allow us to exist, to not just have a few species existing for a few years, but for having a million species on the planet and existing for a very long period of time. And we need, for example, just a climate control system. And our planet includes that and is based upon what goes on down on the core of the the planet. It's based on the type of crustal material and the amount of water on the earth.

And the formation of the moon early on even came into play in terms of helping to provide the right mixture of materials in the core of the planet. That to me is one of the most amazing things. And almost nobody knows about this because it's fairly new information. When we come back, let's talk about that. Folks, I'm talking to the author of a new book. I recommend it. It's called canceled science. What some atheists don't want you to see. Ain't that the truth? This is the Arctmataxis show. We'll be right back. Hey, folks, you certainly heard me talk about my pillow and how their products have literally changed my life. Now, have you tried the pillow? They don't go flat. You can wash them, dry them as many times as you want, and they maintain their shape. They're made in the

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Use the promo code Eric. Folks, I'm talking to the author of Canceled Science. It's a wonderful book. Subtitles, What Some Atheists Don't Want You to See. Eric Hedin is my guest. in the book you talk about, this is always hard for me to explain. Fred Hoyle, an atheist, he's the one that coins the term Big Bang because he hates the idea of a universe for the beginning. So in 1949, on the BBC, he makes fun of this theory that the universe exploded and he calls it the Big Bang.

And people grabbed on to that and we call it the Big Bang because of that. Here's a guy who didn't want to believe that there's a God, but he over and over in his life, saw spooky evidence. And one of them, it's not easy to explain, I'll let you try, about beryllium. Talk about that. I mean, assuming that my audiences don't understand about the formation of elements in the center of stars, just see if you can tell us about that, because it's just fascinating to me. Well, Fred Hoyle was an astrophysicist, and in his day, scientists were still trying to understand the origin of the elements in the periodic table that you may be seen in a chemistry class. There are many different elements that occur naturally. And one of the key elements

that, of course, is important for life is the element carbon. In the early universe, Hoyle knew that carbon did not exist. The early universe, according to the Big Bang model, produced basically two elements, the lightest two elements. Hydrogen, about 75% in helium, about 25%, with a very tiny fraction of a couple of other elements. So how do you get carbon? Because you got to have carbon if you're going to have living creatures, which are carbon-based organisms. So the idea was that carbon was going to be formed in the cores of stars through a nuclear fusion process. And yet the pathway to forming carbon, which has six protons, six neutrons in its nucleus, you could think, well, it would be simplest if you just took three helium nuclei and combined them together,

and then you would have all the right ingredients for carbon. The problem is that if you take two helium nuclei and fuse them together, you get, an unstable element, an unstable isotope of beryllium, which falls apart almost immediately. So Hoyle hypothesized that because we have carbon, there must be some finely tuned, what he called a nuclear resonance to allow carbon to form. And so he hypothesized this resonance in the carbon nucleus, in the energy levels of the carbon nucleus that would allow the beryllium to then have a third helium nucleus added to it and to form carbon at just the right amounts. Nobody knew about this.

Nobody knew that this resonance existed, but he talked some nuclear physicists into looking for it in the laboratory. Sure enough, they found it. It was just at the right level, and it allowed then the formation of carbon within the cores of stars. So it provided the mechanism, and you could say, well, that was. lucky because if it didn't exist just right in that finely tuned nuclear resonance, then we wouldn't be here because you can't make people and animals or any organism out of hydrogen and helium alone. We need the heavier elements. So that's just one example. But you have to say that, I mean,

it was an astounding prediction. In other words, he just comes up with this number. He says, it doesn't make sense that we have carbon. The only way that carbon could form based on what we know is it would have to be this absurdly perfect resonance. That's the only way. And he just postulates this, and then they find, yes, in fact, that's exactly what it is. And then the question is, how did it get there? Why is it that way? And Hoyle, he really seems to be somebody that was conflicted because he says he's an atheist, but then he has quotes upon quotes upon quotes that make it sound like he suspects something is going on. He's troubled by what he finds as a scientist and as an atheist. Yes, that's right.

He is quoted as having said after finding, for example, this very finely tuned resonance that allowed carbon to exist, that it appears as if some super intellect has monkeyed with physics. and I would say that, yeah, God designed the laws of physics so that carbon could be made so that people could be made. Right. Well, I mean, but the funny thing is that here you have a guy who doesn't want to believe it, who finds more and more evidence, and it clearly disturbs him. And actually, I know that he ran a foul of people on both sides of this because there were people that didn't like him talking about this. and that he spoke about, for example, he talks about abiogenesis, I think, himself and says it just doesn't make sense. So he says it's so extraordinary that it must have come from someplace else in the universe because it couldn't have happened on Earth. He himself concludes there's no way

that life was formed randomly on Earth. Therefore, the only explanation is God, we have to reject that, or it came from someplace else and he gives it the fancy name, Panspermia, which is, I find it hilarious when people give a scientific name to some outlandish idea, like extraterrestrials brought life to earth. And by the way, how did it form in outer space? Can you tell us that? And he doesn't go into that. So you tell, but you tell the story of Fred Hoyle in your book. Yes. Yeah, that's in the chapter called The Lives of the Stars. The Lives of the Stars. Well, this is what I was saying is that as I've been doing my own research and learning what I never learned or forgot in high school chemistry and stuff, just the idea of

how complex it is just to create the elements in the periodic table. How did it happen? And none of us could be here if it didn't happen. So, folks, I'm talking to the author of Canceled Science. Highly recommended what some atheists don't want you to see. Eric Hedine. We'll be right back. Folks, I'm talking to Eric Hedine, H-E-D-I-N.

The book is Canceled Science. What Some Atheists Don't Want You to See. So were you, are you still at Ball State? No, I actually left Ball State, kind of an early retirement from there a few years ago, and took a professor position at Biola University in Southern California, where I then became chair of the Department of Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering. So you're at Biola, terrific. Ball State is the alma mater, as you know, of David Letterman.

Yes. Did you know that? One of the famous alumni from both. A famous alumni, except he's now got a beard. No one recognizes him. Well, it's an amazing thing to me that at Biola, you're allowed to talk about the implications of what you see. And I just find it funny how scientific scientists,

people who have almost fetishized science and said, you can't know anything beyond science, they are basically saying, we don't want you to talk about what even becomes obvious to scientists. It's out of bounds. And it seems to me totally arbitrary. In other words, if science is leading you to awe and wonder at creation, the idea that we can't talk about this is it's just kind of bizarre. And you must have felt that. Yes, that was one of the things that as a scientist actually was most annoying about the accusations. It was as if they were saying, okay, you can present. this science in the classroom, but you can't draw scientific conclusions from the science. And it was okay to present a completely materialistic, atheistic, naturalistic conclusion. But if the evidence pointed away from that towards a designer, towards God, then that was declared

to be off limits, out of bounds. And in fact, a violation of the First Amendment, according to some of the accusations that came against me. It seems comic. I mean, it's really tragic, but it just seems so ridiculous. It's like something you read about it in a novel. You can't believe it can happen to you. You must have felt that as you went through this. Yes, this was a few years ago now, but I remembered it well.

And the biggest challenge was to not be able to really answer it. even the university counseled against really engaging the media at that time because of how likely it was that anything I said would be twisted and used against what I was really trying to say. But it was a sense that people were saying that I was teaching religion in the class when actually the class was a science class and we were pointing students to the evidence and asking them to seriously consider. consider it and draw their own conclusions. Well, again, I think it's frightening for people who don't like the idea of God to see this evidence. The evidence gets stronger and stronger, and they have to get louder and louder in shouting it down because they don't have the logic on their side. There's very little it can be said anymore. I think it just gets clear and clear. But you write about Ball State and about

that experience in the book. Yes, that's right. And eventually the university administration, after this investigation, decided to cancel the class. Fortunately, they didn't cancel my employment. So I'm thankful for that. I ended up getting tenure at Ball State. And so the freedom to be able to follow the evidence where it leads,

I think is really the only way for science to advance and progress. If there's some sort of a dogmatic barrier or a policeman on the side saying you can't go there in your scientific investigations, then it actually is a hindrance to the advancement of science. It's similar to in the old days, if anyone was trying to understand the solar system and promoted a view that differed from Aristotle in his old geocentric model of the solar system. It was called off limits or out of bounds. That's the irony, right? Is that today we are saying that, you know, if you're Copernicus or Galileo, we're going to shut you down because we've determined that Aristotle and Ptolemy are right.

We don't want to hear anything else. we don't care about your fancy calculations and your observations. It really is hilarious that the scientific establishment has now taken on the role of the oppressor of science. That is a great way to put it. Yes, the scientific establishment has taken on the role of the oppressor of science. And they do that by a majority vote. And I am again just astounded that they think that science, should be controlled by a majority vote.

Why not let it be controlled by the evidence from the laboratory, from observations and scientific theories? Well, I'm just thrilled, really, that Discovery Institute has published this book. They are heroes there, and I'm thrilled that it's out. And it really is a great primer, as I said earlier, because you've got everything in here,

you know, in a way that people can read about it. most people are really not familiar with this stuff. And so I think everyone has to get familiar with it because the evidence is just becoming more and more overwhelming to the point that there's simply no denying it. I mean, the story of what Jim Tour talks about with abiogenesis, the fine tuning. We know more and more, not less and less. And I really think at some point, something's got a crack. And it'll be funny to see. I mean, I think the crack up has already begun. Folks like you were speaking out, I'm so grateful that you're at Biola, great university, and that there's a generation of kids getting to know what is really happening. We've just got about a minute left. What else can we talk about in terms of fine-tuning or something that maybe we wouldn't know, whether my audience wouldn't know? Well, there's an enormous amount of fine-tuning for the conditions of life,

but then I think what's more important, even more unlikely, is for life itself to arise by chance. So I discuss information theory in the book and how the information that is resident within a cell or even a portion of the cell like a single protein is so far beyond the information content of the universe and you can look at how information changes in time according to natural processes. Actually, let's put a pin in it there.

We'll be right back, folks. I'm talking to the author of Canceled Science. We'll be right back. Folks, the book is Canceled Science. What Some Atheists Don't Want You to See. The author, Erica Dean, is with me right now. You were just saying about information theory. I know that my friend Stephen Meyer talks about it in his new book, The Return of the God hypothesis. Tell us a little bit more about this idea that cells have so much information in them. That's what kind of proves to us that it's just not. possible for this to have arisen randomly because we didn't use to know how much information is crammed in it.

It's kind of like saying, I found an encyclopedia. Oh, and it's just random. It just ended up being here. I mean, we're talking about something that's on that kind of a level of information. Is it not? Yes, there's two prongs to this idea. One is our understanding of information itself and how information changes with time or is transmitted. That's information theory. And then there's the study of the cell itself or the organisms of biochemistry within the cell. And we found vast amounts of information there far beyond what we used to think, say 100 years ago or more. Even in the time of Darwin, the cell was thought to be very simple. But now we know it's this vast, complex metropolis, highly information-rich. And whenever we see information-rich systems, there's only ever one

source of that information, and that is an intelligent mind. Nature is never the source of information-rich systems, giving rise to functional processes or machines that do things or computer programs. Just try to tell a computer programmer that the way to improve their program is to just let it be randomly mutated by natural forces, and of course they would laugh at you. So you cannot allow natural systems or you cannot expect natural processes to ratchet up information by any natural means. Well, I mean, Michael Behe in his last book, Darwin Devolves, I think is the title. He talks about this. He says that we now can see that any time there's a mutation, almost every time there's a mutation, it does not improve the,

the species or does not improve the situation, it makes it worse. And we didn't know that. And again, it's only in the last 20 or so years that he's been doing his research. Now we can see that that's the case. And so we keep getting more and more evidence. And voices like Michael Behees and yours, they tend to get shut down by the secular academy. The academy is just frightened by this for some reason and they don't want to hear about it. Well, we don't want to suggest that science itself is to be replaced with just an appeal to some higher power, God, or activity of the divine. Science does a good job, all on its own, but there are limits.

And we have to recognize where those limits are and not to postulate natural processes as the source of, say, information or origin of the universe or the origin of life. It would be braver simply to say we don't know. And I think that's the problem is that they don't have the courage to say we don't know. They pretend that we know. They pretend that we have ideas about how nature could get us there when, in fact, they don't. Yes. And in fact, we do know enough from study in nature.

The advancement of science has brought us to the point where we can see. say, I'm sorry, nature can't do this. Right. Not possible. We're out of time, but I've really enjoyed having you on, Eric Hedin. The book is canceled science. What Some Atheist Don't Want You to See. That is just the truth, folks.

Eric, congratulations on the book. Thank you. I hope many, many people get to read it. Thanks for writing it, and thanks for being my guest. Thank you.