The Eric Metaxas Show - Stephen Meyer (continued)

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Stephen Meyer continues discussing ideas from several of his books, including, "Return of the God Hypothesis," "Signature in the Cell," and "Darwin's Doubt."

Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Folks, this is hour two. I'm talking to Dr. Stephen Meyer, whose brand new book is called The Return of the God Hypothesis. Stephen, this is big news. You are saying that the preponderance of evidence has led us to a place where we have to scientifically talk about God. In other words, we might have ignored it. We have ignored it. Lots of people have ignored it. But it's become impossible. And you say there are three reasons, the Big Bang, evidence of intelligent design and the complexity of a single cell. We didn't know these things in the way that we do now. Do you think people will take this book seriously who wouldn't have taken this ID seriously? Do you have any indications that folks out there who are not on the same page as you are would be open to this thesis? Well, we've sent the book out for pre-review and possible endorsement to a wide variety of scientists. We've gotten some very nice endorsements, including one from a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Merida's professor of physics at Cambridge University.

So I think the argument's getting some traction. These three evidences, the universe had a beginning, the fine-tuning of the universe from the beginning, and then the big bursts of digital information into our biosphere over time. time have, I think in each case, put the materialist on the defensive in trying to explain these things. And so I think we will get some traction with this argument. Well, folks like Francis Collins and others with the Biologos Foundation, they have a different view on a number of these things, obviously not the Big Bang, but with regard to the fine-tuning and with regard to the DNA, this explosion of evidence, I guess.

Where are they? Well, actually, they mainly disagree with me and the proponents of intelligent design in biology about biology. They still want to hold to some sort of evolutionary model. Interestingly, mainstream evolutionary biologists are now rejecting neo-Darwinism because the mutation selection mechanism in their own view, in the view of leading evolutionary biologist lacks creative power. I attended a conference in London convened by the Royal Society in 2016 that was designed to explore new theories of evolution, to formulate new theories of evolution because of the recognized inadequacy of the standard Neo-Darwinian view. Our friends at Viologos

want to hold on to a mainstream evolutionary model of some kind and merge that with theism. But they do accept that the fine-tuning is evidence of design at the very beginning of the universe. And that turns out to be a very important piece of evidence in my argument, because after I wrote signature in the cell in Darwin's doubt, a number of people asked me the question, well, who do you think the designer is and what can science tell us about it? Is it a being within the cosmos and space alien and imminent intelligence of some kind? Or is it a transcendent intelligence? And I think the fine-tuning evidence shows that the intelligent agent responsible for life could not have been an imminent intelligence within the cosmos because no being

within the cosmos could be responsible for the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics at the very beginning of the universe that make its own life later possible. So now that's some things are so dumb. You don't need to be a scientist to see how dumb they are. I mean, to me, that's like a joke. That's like when people talk about, I mean, when people talk about panspermia, we've got That's the fancy name for the idea, right. Okay, so let's break this down because now we're talking about the origin of life.

So you and I know that about four billion years ago, life appeared in the form of single cells on planet Earth. Now, how simple were those cells? The simplest cell imaginable is what? I mean, what are we postulating? Geneticists have done what are called minimal complexity experiments. knocking out genes to see how low they can go, how simple can they make the genome. And they still end up with the need for on the order of 200 to 400 proteins in the corresponding genes.

That's an immense amount of genetic information. So the very simplest living cell is far beyond the reach of what ordinary undirected chemical reactions can produce. They don't tend to, yeah. So this is a big problem. And because of that, many scientists have acknowledged. that maybe the conditions weren't right here on planet Earth to produce life. So they've suggested that maybe life arose somewhere else, evolved on some other planet,

some higher intelligence, then ceded like. It's sort of like saying, it's sort of like saying, hey, where did you get that watch? It's obvious someone designed that watch. It didn't just emerge in the desert. When you found it, it shows evidence of design. And you don't know who designed it. You don't know what happened. he'd say, well, somebody gave it to me.

Somebody put it there. Well, you still want to know, okay, let's get that somebody and find out how that person designed to watch. Right, right. Any being within the cosmos that evolved by undirected material processes would still have to have an initial origin. There would still need to be information arising somehow to get that evolutionary process going.

That's the very question that has been, that scientists have been able to solve on planet at Earth, pushing it out into space doesn't solve it either. It's just an unbelievable cop-out. I still can't believe that people like Francis Crick and Fred Hoyle, that they would- Dawkins himself floated this idea at the end of a film where he was interviewed by Ben Stein saying that, yeah, there might be a signature of intelligence, but if so, it would have had to have evolved by natural processes someplace else. Richard Dawkins, the atheist, yes, right, right.

But again, there's an even deeper problem with this if you're thinking about panspermia as an ultimate explanation for these three big facts that I'm discussing in the book. And that is that there's no way that an imminent intelligence within the cosmos, the product of some kind of evolution over time, could explain the origin of the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics, the initial conditions of the universe that make such evolution possible. It's so preposterous that I find it funny, even talking about it, like saying, yeah, there's someone within the universe who's so smart that they figured out a way to make the big bang happen and to create the laws of physics so that every atom in the universe is governed by forces that somebody put it. I mean, if that's not God, why are we even having the conversation? It's just insane. But let's just go back to this idea. of what our friend James Tour says. He says that, okay, so life begins. We now know that the idea that it just happened by natural processes is too much to believe. We know so much about the most

simple life that the idea that it just kind of floated together somehow, it doesn't seem possible. We've had 70 years to look at this. So what are people who still believe that things came together randomly in the primordial soup. How do they think this is possible? Because most of us right now, myself included, we don't know how life was built. So we talk, first of all, about proteins, amino acids. Tell us the steps, if you could, about what is necessary for the simplest cell to emerge. Well, one of my PhD supervisors said that the question of the nature of life and the origin of life, or inextricably linked. To know, in order to explain the origin of life, we need to know what it is we're trying to explain the origin of. And in the 1930s,

when Alexander O'Parran, the Russian scientist formulated the first detailed model of chemical evolutionary theory, we didn't know about the structure of DNA. We didn't know that it contained digital information. We didn't know that the information in the DNA directed the construction of proteins. We didn't know that there was a complex, almost factory-like system for putting together those proteins from the digital code. We didn't know about the complexity of the cell membrane. And every new layer of discovery has, in a sense, raised the bar as to what needs to be explained. And the very first ideas about the origin of life were formulated right after Darwin. And at the time they thought the cell, Thomas Huxley said the cell was a simple, homogenous globule of plasm.

So in order to explain the origin of life, we have to explain what we now find life, how we now find life in all its complexity. When we come back, I want to break this down with you. This is fascinating. Folks, the book is The Return of the God Hypothesis. Stephen Meyer, don't go away. Hey there, folks. How many years have I been telling you about relief factor? What, like four?

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Stephen, we're talking about three things. We have the Big Bang, we have fine-tuning, and then we have Origin of Life, and the complexity of the simplest life. So tell us, what do we know now that we didn't know, in 1952 with the Miller-Yuri experiment. What do we know now about what the simplest life is composed of and how processes would need to, you know, happen one after the other, after the other, after the other, all randomly, all naturally. We know it couldn't have happened.

But what do people say who believe that this happened randomly? How did it happen, according to them? Well, let's first talk about what we know and then talk about some of the most current explanations as they're being formulated, 1953, Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule. In 57, Crick posits something called the sequence hypothesis in which he proposes that the chemical subunits that run along the spine along the interior of the molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or, we would say today,

like the digital characters, the zeros and ones in a section of software. Bill Gates has said DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. By the mid-60s, the Crick's hypothesis had been confirmed, and what was then elucidated was a whole complex information storage and processing system where the scientists were able, the molecular biologists were able to determine that the code in the DNA or the information in the DNA was directing the construction of proteins, the hugely important molecules that perform all the important jobs in the cell. the enzymes, the parts of molecular machines and so forth. Subsequent to that, we've been able to make huge advances in the fields of genomics and bioinformatics, the Human Genome Project is one example of that, where we've actually been able to sequence all those millions and billions of digital characters and figure out what they're doing.

We now know also that the DNA is controlled by other information in the cell. So there's a hierarchical information processing system that reminds us very is reminiscent of the kind of operating systems that we have in digital computing that control other informational modules that are expressed at different times and the right times, the right place. So it's not just that there's digital code. It's that there's a whole complex, hierarchically organized information processing system. Okay. And even the simplest living cells. All right. So this is insanely complex.

But you're telling me that there are people who still believe that this insane. complexity somehow came about randomly. I mean, is that... Well, randomly or materialistically, but again, that's an axiom that because many scientists believe it's their obligation to explain everything by reference to completely materialistic processes. But our argument is not just that that's implausible, but rather that these things that we're finding are based on our uniform and repeated experience in indicators of the

activity of a designing intelligence. We know of only one cause for the origin of information, whether we find. it in a software program or in an alphabetic text or embedded in a radio signal or a hieroglyphic inscription, information in our experience always comes from a mind. So when we find information at the foundation of life, it is a rational and fully justified scientific inference to conclude that an intelligence played a role. One of the great information scientists of the 20th century, Henry Quasler, said that the creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity. It's just staggering to me that there are people who somehow believe that a cell, which we now know to be just preposterously complex, could have emerged through natural processes.

But you're telling me that somehow they believe it happened. Well, just to get a sense of how desperate people are for a materialistic explanation for the origin of life, there have actually been some scientists who have proposed that the, ultimate explanation for the origin of life is the multiverse, that yes, the origin of life is so improbable on planet Earth. It's incredibly improbable on planet Earth. The correct configuration of the physical parameters that we refer to as the fine tuning is also incredibly improbable. But if we conceive of billions and billions and billions of other universes out there, we can we can explain all of that because eventually the right universe with the right physical parameters, is the perfectly finely tuned for the possibility of life and the right conditions on

on some planet would have had to arise. And we just happen to be the lucky ones. So the multiverse hypothesis, which is in thinking of many physicists, improbable or implausible as an explanation for the fine tuning is now also being invoked as an explanation for the origin of life in some quarters. Okay. And the reason it seems to me is that they ran out of time. So they simply said, well, we'll just take the time we have here.

and multiply at times infinity with the various universes we need. Right. It's so desperate and kind of pathetic. I'm just fascinated that there are people clinging to this kind of thing. Well, beyond, you know, characterizing it as desperate, there's also a very powerful counter argument to the multiverse hypothesis. A lot of physicists will acknowledge that the multiverse hypothesis is essentially metaphysical because you're positing something that is completely unobservable

and beyond even the possibility of observation. But they say the God hypothesis is also unobservable. And that's right, because very often times that's the way science, especially historical science works. You posit something you can't see to explain what you can see. So why should we favor one over the other? Well, here's the reason you should to favor the God hypothesis over the multiverse. Turns out that if you have all these other universes,

that they are caused, then by definition, definition causally disconnected from our own universe. That's what it means to be a universe, a causally enclosed system. So if the other universes don't affect our universe, then they don't affect any events within our universe, including the origin of life and including whatever it is that set up the fine-tuning parameters, just right. So I'm just going to say that if you're talking about different universes, you can't get from those universes to this universe or from this universe to those universes. Right.

That's a big problem. Only one universe. Yeah. Right. And so to make this whole idea of a cosmic lottery work, what the multiverse advocates proposes that there's a common cause for all the universes. There must be some kind of universe generating mechanism that produces universes with different combinations of fine-tuning parameters such that our universe just happened to be

the lucky one in a great cosmic lottery. But here's the rub. Even in theory, those universe-generating. mechanisms that have been proposed, some based on something called string theory, others based on something called inflationary cosmology. Those other universe generating mechanisms themselves require prior fine-tuning, prior unexplained fine-tuning. So the fine-tuning of our universe hasn't been explained by positing a multiverse. It's just been pushed back one generation. It's been left unexplained. And yet there is one thing we know of that explains fine-tuning, whether we see

fine tuning of a beautiful French recipe and cuisine or a fine tuning of an internal combustion engine. What we mean by fine tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that work together to perform a discernible function or outcome. And when we see systems that are finely tuned like that, invariably they too are the product of intelligent agency. So we do have an ultimate explanation for fine tuning. It's intelligence. The multiverse does not circumvent it. It just pushes the need for such an explanation back one generation. It's comedic. Let's go to something simple.

For example, do you believe it is possible that whales and other marine mammals evolved from earth-based mammals? Well, it's possible, but I think the evidence for that is far less compelling than people think. We have a project we're supporting right now in mathematical biology, where we have paleontologists teaming up with mathematicians who work in a field called population genetics to calculate what are called the waiting times. How long would it take to generate a particular morphological feature in organisms? And they've actually been looking at the whale sequence. It turns out that the distinctive characteristics of aquatic mammals arise in a very brief window of time. And if you do the math using the Darwinian framework of population genetics, which allows you

to calculate how much evolutionary time you should change you should expect in a given amount of time if you know certain factors like the generation times and the population sizes and the mutation rates, it turns out that there's not nearly enough time by Darwinian mechanisms to generate these distinctive characteristics of the aquatic mammals. And so this. This is one of many what are called waiting times problems where the Darwinian math shows that the Darwinian mechanism is implausible because it lacks the amount of time that would be required by reference to Darwinian theory to generate the complexity of the attributes of these organisms that arise in the fossil record very abruptly. Well, it is extraordinary to think that we have so many questions, but your book, again, titled The Return of the God Hypothesis, it's hard to believe at this point knowing what we know that any of this could have happened without God.

I think that's the most basic takeaway is that the more you look at it, you say, well, whatever the details are, the idea that there's no God seems wildly preposterous. It didn't. And the way I'm, in the way. Stephen, we're going to break. We're going to be right back.

And Stephen is going to start and end that sentence. Don't go away. No problem. 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 USA. And for a limited time, Mike Lindell is offering his premium my pillows for the lowest price ever. You can get a standard queen premium my pillow for 2998. It's originally 69.98. That's a $40 savings. Kings are only $5 more. Remember, All MyPillow products come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty. Just go to MyPillow.com, click on the radio listener's square and use promo code Eric. There you'll find not only this amazing offer, but also deep discounts on all MyPillow products,

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If you need me, let me know. Going to be around. Folks, I'm talking to Stephen Meyer, the return of the God hypothesis. Stephen, you were just about to say something, and we had to cut you off. Well, I just was going to explain the way in which I unfold this argument, because in the first two books that I wrote, Signature in the Cell, and Darwin's Doubt, I argued that from the informational properties of living systems, you could infer that an intelligent agent of some kind had played a role. To use the Bill Gates observation, again, DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.

That seems to imply the need for a master programmer for life. But that raised the question as to the identity of the designing intelligence. In this new book, I take that on. Many people ask me, who do you think the designing intelligence was? and what can science tell us about the identity of that agent? Well, by widening our area of inquiry to include not just biology, but physics and cosmology, I think we can get a very solid answer to that question. And that's because we have evidence of design from the very beginning of the universe,

that no being that arises after the universe could be responsible for. And because the universe itself had a definite beginning, suggesting the need for a transcendent cause, a cause beyond matter, space, time, and energy. So when we look at the evidence for the beginning, the fine-tuning from the beginning, and then the evidence that arises long after the beginning, I think we can infer theism as the best explanation and exclude other possible metaphysical systems of belief. For example, deism might explain the evidence of design we have at the beginning, but not evidence that arises long after. A space alien designer might explain the evidence that arises after the beginning of the universe, although I think that's implausible for the reasons we discussed, but it certainly can't explain the origin of the universe itself or the fine-tuning from the beginning of the universe. Let's go back just so folks are tracking. When we talk about fine-tuning, in some ways, you're talking about two different things, right? We can look at the Earth and say that this

planet appears to be fine-tuned for life, and we can go on and on and on, and it's astounding. But what you're talking about, when we talk about the Big Bang, we're talking about the universe itself. In other words, the idea that 13.8 billion years ago, when the Big Bang banged, everything was already set perfectly so that planets could form and stars could form and galaxies could form. Most people don't normally talk about that. So let's talk about that. Let's forget about the Earth. Let's just go all the way back. You say and others say that the very universe in which we live was fine-tuned and had to be fine-tuned.

from before the beginning. It didn't have time to write itself or it didn't have any way of writing itself if it wasn't getting it right in the beginning. It had to be fine-tuned from before the beginning so that when exploded into existence, we get the universe we have. So tell us about that. So people are tracking. Right. Sometimes physicists talk about our living in a Goldilocks universe. There are multiple physical parameters as well as the initial arrangement of matter and energy at the beginning that had to be exactly right within very fine tolerances to allow for the possibility of life. I talked in one of the earlier segments about the evidence for the expanding universe. It turns out that the force that drives that expansion called the cosmological

constant is fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 90th power as an accepted estimate of the physicist. Now, to put that number in perspective, there are only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the entire visible universe. So to get the fine tuning right by chance would be equivalent to blindfolding someone, setting them loose in the universe and saying, telling them, go find that one elementary particle, but also you can't just look in our universe, you've got to be looking in 10 billion other universes our size. It's an exquisite degree of fine tuning for just that one parameter. And there are many others, the strength of gravitational attraction, the strength of the electromagnetic attraction, the strength of the other fundamental forces in physics,

the masses of the elementary particles, such as the quarks, all of these different parameters have very precise ranges in which life will be permissible. And not just life, even basic chemistry is to get even basic chemistry going, many of these parameters have to be very finely tuned. And so this is an extraordinary discovery. It started with oddly, Fred Hoyle made some of the first and most important discoveries. He was a profound atheist at the time later shifted his worldview, became very much more open to theism. It was quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible.

So just so we understand, Fred Hoyle was an atheist. He believed in the steady state universe. He made fun of the Big Bang idea. He thought that was stupid. He called the Big Bang. majority. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We've been calling it the Big Bang ever since. But you're saying that as time went on, he became more and more persuaded that there was no way things could just be the way they are. But he's famous, of course, for in the 60s coming up with the carbon. Tell us about the carbon beryllium. Oh, right. It's a fascinating story because he's, he is intrigued, fascinated, perplexed by the abundance of carbon in the universe. He thinks very long and hard about it.

People have talked about maybe life being based on some other type of chemical element like silicon, and he realized it just wasn't plausible. Carbon uniquely had the ability to form these long chain like molecules, which allow it to form molecules capable of carrying information, for example. And so he thought we need to have an explanation for the abundance of carbon. He was doing work in stellar nucleosynthesis, how molecules or the basic elements form within, stars. And he realized that carbon, to explain the abundance of carbon, there was a whole cascade of necessary conditions that had to be just right, one of which was the precise strength of

the gravitational force in relation to the precise strength of electromagnetic attraction. Okay, hang on. We're going to, this is just, I think your great learning has made you mad. We're going to be right back talking to fire. The book is the return of the God hypothesis. Don't go away. Folks, I'm talking to Stephen Meyer. The book is the return of the God hypothesis. Stephen, you're talking about Fred Hoyle who recognized that in order for the carbon in the universe, which is necessary for life, to have been created in the interiors of stars, something needed to be perfectly fine-tuned. And he said, well, we know the carbon is here, therefore it had to be perfectly fine-tuned and he turned out to be right he it was a big puzzle how you

could get the smaller elements to combine to make carbon and he finally came up with a way that he thought it could happen by combining beryllium with helium but that implied a version of carbon with an energy level that was higher than the normal carbon we see and what is an energy level Well, it was called a resonance. It's the amount of energy associated with the molecule and the amount of energy necessary to get the two elements to combine to make a third. And so he got in touch with a Caltech physicist named Willie Fowler and said, look, see if there's a carbon that has a resonance level at 7.65 mega electron volts above normal.

And Fowler initially laughed at him and said, why should I be looking for that? That's too bizarre. But Hoyle persuaded him to do it. He found it and then realized that not only did the energy level need to be finely tuned, but to get a carbon molecule to form with that exact resonance in the interior of stars, there were a whole host of other parameters that had to be just right. And this is what led him to conclude that we lived in a Goldilocks universe. This was the beginning of the discovery of many similar fine-tuning parameters.

And that ended up shifting Hoyle's worldview rather dramatically. I had a chance to talk with him when I was a grad student. He came to do a talk, and I stayed after to ask him some questions. He ended up inviting me to walk with him. We talked for about a half an hour, and I told him what I was working on was the idea that the DNA molecule was providing evidence of intelligent design because of the code. And when he heard me say that, he said, walk with me. He said, there's no question that if we could talk about intelligence, that a lot of these

things would be a lot easier to explain. So Hoyle had a very profound shift in his thinking about what science is telling us. us, whether it's pointing to a materialistic worldview or a theistic one. And I would say he was sort of proto-theistic by the end of his career. I mean, you get that impression from the quotes, because I, you know, I've read a number of quotes and I think, wow, this guy definitely came around to thinking that things had to be fine-tuned. And I know that atheistic scientists were troubled by him. They started attacking him, who was this arch atheist at the beginning of his career, sneered at the Big Bang, believed in the steady state hypothesis.

And at the end of his life, he shifted to the point that he was being attacked. Well, and this is a trajectory that I've personally seen many times. We saw it with Alan Sandidge, Dean Kenyon, the leading Origin of Life researcher who at that 1985 conference announced that he had had an intellectual conversion to intelligent design from a strict materialistic account of the origin of life. He later had a religious conversion. We think of a member of our larger team of scientists, now Gunter Bechley, the great German paleontologist, who first rejected Darwinism, then embraced design, and then came around to a theistic worldview. Anthony Flew, the great British philosopher, who was a longtime atheist, who upon encountering many of these arguments for design had the same intellectual transformation.

This is becoming a fairly common occurrence, and I think that's because the scientific evidence is actually very powerful, especially if you stop and think, about what it means by reference for the big worldview questions. What's funny, though, Stephen, is that most people in the world are very unfamiliar with what we're talking about. Anybody who watched the Cosmos TV series with Carl Sagan, you know, in 1980, or watched the recent one with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, they all are being told the opposite of what we're talking about here. So most people are living in a world that's all of these ideas are.

foreign to them. Well, and you asked at the beginning of the interview, why are we, you know, why are we just now talking about the return of the God hypothesis when we've had, when some of these discoveries have been around for a hundred years or so. And part of the reason I think is that we're learning more and more about each of them, but also the attempts to explain the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe or the origin of life in materialistic terms, have failed. The attempts have been exhausted. There have been multiple tries, but there's a point of exhaustion arising within the materialistic scientific community. And I think there are more and more scientists and philosophers doubting the adequacy of materialism as a framework. I tell the story in the

book of an interaction I have with one of my friendly debating partners on the other side. This debating partner always starts by telling about his deconversion experience from Christianity and embracing a sort of scientific atheism. But when we were alone in a car afterwards, driving to the airport, I asked him, well, what was really responsible for this? And he said, well, it was the success of science. I said, what do you mean? Like, he said, well, you know, like the discovery of DNA and the discovery of the Big Bang.

And I said, but you admitted on the podium that you have no explanation for the origin of the information in DNA. And you certainly don't, can't explain the origin of the universe itself. He says, yeah, that's right. And what about the fine tuning? He said, well, there's the multiverse. And I said, but do you really believe that? And he just said, nah.

So some of this is a bit of posturing, I think, and I think honest materialists are encountering not just these three big questions, but other big questions like the reliability of the human mind, a huge problem in epistemology, the origin of consciousness, the problem of objective morality, all of these things are problems from a materialistic point of view explaining how morality works, why the mind is reliable, and where the universe of life came from. I think materialism is a failed philosophy. I think we've just got about a minute and a half left in this long interview.

And Albin and James will correct me if I'm wrong. But Stephen, it's just, you know, those of us who've been following your career, we're just so proud of you for putting it out there because there are many people searching and they simply don't know where to look, whom to listen to. Your book's not easy to read. I mean, the parts about information theory at the end are, it seems more for those who are in that world. But the basic case you make, I don't know how people get past it. I mean, I really think we are at a point where the return of the God hypothesis is happening.

I really have to believe that people are secretly making changes in the way they view things and being open to the idea of God. Well, and in the book, I tell a bit of my own story of searching for answers as well, especially in the final chapter. And I've tried to, you know, tell this as a story. So there's a story woven into the scientific case. And I think you're right. I think the main evidences are things that anyone can understand. And if you reflect upon them, I think they do lead to the question that God is a reality.

It's amazing. Folks, the book is The Return of the God Hypothesis. Big book, important book. Stephen Meyer, congratulations. And to be continued. Always, Eric. Really fun to talk. Hey, folks. Listen, I know it's my show, and I know I talk too much. I know. I'm bad. I can't help it. But Albin, now, because we're going into the Easter weekend, I thought, you need to shine. So shine on, my friend. Go ahead and shine. Okay. The last year that my dad was alive back in 2000, I was taking care of him for like 10 months. And he was, unfortunately, he was going downhill. But greatest guy in the whole.

This is an Easter anecdote because people might not remember. So this is your Easter anecdote. Go ahead. It was Easter time. And it was the last time I was going to be able to take him to this annual Easter live theatrical event in Pittsburgh. Okay. So I took him there and were watching it. And I wasn't sure if he was totally with it and paying attention because most of the time he was with it.

He had a lot of pain medication because he had cancer and it was helping him, you know. But I was able to take him to events and he was entertained, et cetera. So at the point where Jesus rises from the dead, okay, the stone is rolled back and there's a bright light and you hear a big bang sound. And I turned to my dad and I said, dad, did you understand what happened? And he said, yeah, they shot him. Well, now, hold on. Did your father, was he joking or at that point he was not joking? No, I don't know because my dad did joke.

But he wasn't totally himself because the pain medication. changed his personality, unfortunately. So he could joke and all that, but you didn't know when he was joking and when he wasn't. Because there was one time I had brought a hospital bed in for him and the next morning. He's lying on the floor. And I said, Dad, Dad, what are you doing on the floor?

And he said, it didn't work. But he was, you know, I'm starting to understand where you and your brother got your sense of humor from. That is hilarious. Like, seriously, he did that? Yeah, yeah. And I'd be sleeping out of the room. And he'd call me at four in the morning.

He'd be gone, Elbin, Elbin. I go running in. Dad, Dad, Dad, what isn't? He says, get me a bowl of them nutty nuts. I didn't even know what he was talking about. It's like some cereal that he called nutty nuts. And so it's like, and then I said, you're a nut, you know? It's four in the morning. What do you want nutty nuts for? Joking like that. Oh, my gosh. Well, I don't know if I ever saw the Easter show at Radio City. I might have when I was very little. Well, anyway, we, this is a, you know, it's funny. this is a solemn weekend in many ways, and it's appropriate to be solemn as long as you don't forget

the joy on Sunday morning. And it's funny because I think that some people in their personalities, they're tempted to be dower, and they want to focus on the negative stuff. They think it's more pious. And then there are other people that can't deal with that. And so they really don't want to deal with Good Friday. They only want to deal with Sunday. Somehow we need to find a way to do both. but anyway, I just, I am thrilled to have this program. I thank God for it. I thank God that we can speak our mind. There are many people in media, conservative media,

they're not free to speak their mind. They would never have on somebody like Mike Lindell. They're afraid of getting sued. I'm already being sued, so, hey, you know what? This is a good time. If you're dying to get like Easter presents, may we suggest our sponsor, Mike Lindell? He has a new corporation.

It's called Mypillow.com. They sell pillows and other things. You have to use the code Eric to get our big discount. You can get My Books at MyStore.com if you use the code Eric. You guys do anything special tonight? You're watching site and sound theater, site hyphen sound.com. Jesus. We are probably going to check that one out.

And there's also, oh, church people is something else that we might check out on Salem now.com. So there's a lot of good entertainment tonight. SalemNow.com. Yeah, we're also going to watch it too and have the kids watch it and then pour them all bowls of nutty nuts. I think that's how we'll celebrate it. It was honey nut. Honey nut churrios is I think what he was referring to, honey nut churios. But he just called it a bowl of nutty nuts.

I like that better. I like it. You knew what he meant. Oh, my gosh. That's a, he was a dear sweet. He was going to say bye bye. I see a Sunday. We hope you will.

enjoy Stephen Meyer or, you know, I want to say before we go, send these videos to your friends, folks, because a lot of people simply don't know about the program and we want to get the word out. Thank you. God bless you. Have a good weekend.