The Eric Metaxas Show - Stephen Meyer (Encore)

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Stephen Meyer, author of “Darwin’s Doubt,” “Signature in the Cell,” and other heady scientific tomes, joins Eric in the bunker to reveal more about “The Mystery of Life’s Origins,” from his new book.

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show. I shouldn't tell you this, but Eric hired someone who sounds just like him to host today's show. But since I'm the announcer, they told me, so I'm telling you, don't be free. fold the real erics in jail ladies and gentlemen it's Tuesday June 10th they tell me I'm on a boat in the Mediterranean so I cannot interview people from my or my radio program but what I can do is air conversations that I've already had uh now today it's a special treat very special uh my first guest in a moment is Dr. Stephen Meyer you know him I've interviewed him many times

and an hour to another friend, Dr. James Tour. I talk about both of them extensively in my book Is Atheism Dead, which I recommend strongly Stephen Meyer, who's my guest in Hour 1 and James Tour in Hour 2. Both of them are featured in my book, Is Atheism Dead? So they are a treat to talk to. Here's my conversation with Stephen Meyer. Stephen, welcome to the program.

That's great to be with you, Eric. cross coasts here in these strange circumstances. It's crazy. My audience has to get to know who you are. You're one of those people that I just insist that my audience know Dr. Stephen Meyer is, and I'm putting my audience on notice right now. Please pay attention, take notes. Now, look, you and I can talk about a lot of things. We do talk about a lot of things, but I want to talk to you today because a book has been reissued. It's called The Mystery of Life's Origin. This is one of the most fascinating conversations out there.

I spoke recently to Dr. James Tour. He's got a chapter in this new edition of the book, The Mystery of Life's Origin. So for my audience, would you frame what are we talking about? Because it gets complicated, right? We're not talking about evolution. Evolution has to do with life. You know, how we get from this life to this life, this life,

and we can argue about that all day long. We're not talking about that today. The mystery of life's origin deals with something else. What does that deal with? Well, there's two branches of evolutionary theory. One is called biological evolution, and that's the theory that attempts to explain how we get from the first living cell

to all the new forms of life that we see on the planet that have arisen from that time. Another form of evolutionary theory is called chemical evolutionary theory, and it attempts to explain how we got from simple chemicals to the first living cell on Earth, how we got from the chemicals to the first one-celled organism. And in the mid-1980s, the field of chemical evolutionary theory

came to a kind of an impasse, in particular because scientists couldn't explain where the first information came from that's encoded in the DNA molecule. If you think about your computer program or a computer, If you want to give your computer a new function, you have to provide new code, new software. And the same thing is true in life. If you want to build a living cell or you want to build a new form of life from a pre-existing cell,

you've got to provide new information in the form of the instructions in DNA that tell the cells how to build all the proteins and protein parts that are needed to keep cells alive. So as scientists began to think about where life first came from, they realized that they didn't have an answer to the question of where the code came from in the DNA molecule, Getting from chemistry to code turned out to be a very big problem. And the mystery of life origin was... Yeah. Before we get into that, I just want to make sure that people are tracking.

In other words, you just said that there are two kinds of evolution. One has to do with the evolution of life. So, you know, supposedly starting with a single cell, which is alive. You know, now if you believe in that kind of evolution, the mechanism that Darwin proposed is what is called natural selection, survival of the fittest, which makes some kind of sense on a micro-evolutionary level. I think we would debate robustly whether that actually occurs on a macro-evolutionary level. But when you're talking about, quote-unquote, chemical evolution, what you just said,

in other words, before you have a single cell, all you have is a bunch of chemicals floating in what they purported was the prebiotic soup. This is chemicals. Prebiotic soup, yeah, yeah. Okay. But the point is to use the term evolution at that point, it seems like a weasel word. It doesn't seem, it seems ridiculous.

I want to be really clear that we're talking about chemicals that are not alive floating around in the prebiotic soup on the very, very early earth. and when people talk about these things magically coming together to create ultimately life, to create a single cell, they are calling that chemical evolution. That just seems crazy to me. Well, the idea is if you think of evolution in its most basic meaning of change over time, the idea is that the chemicals are changing in composition,

reacting with one another, getting gradually more complex and more and more lifelike. at least that was the idea. The problem is, you know since you've talked a lot to James Tuer recently, is that the chemistry of the prebiotic chemistry, the inorganic chemistry, doesn't want to go in a life-friendly direction. The reactions lead in ways that are not really relevant to life. And so there were scenarios that were hatched in the 1920s and 30s, one by a Marxist chemist named Alexander O.

He was a Soviet chemist in the 1930s, and he thought that chemical evolution actually kind of illustrated Marxist doctrine that you could have a small quantitative change, making a huge qualitative difference over time. And so he was envisioning a series of chemical reactions where you went from simple to complex. And the problem is there were multiple problems with this. One is that the chemistry doesn't seem to want to go in that direction. But secondly, getting from the chemistry to an information encoding molecule like DNA has proved prohibitively difficult. Okay, so again, I want so that my audience can properly enjoy this conversation, I want them really to understand exactly what we're talking about. And it's kind of funny because people don't normally talk about this. People normally talk about, you know, evolution.

This life form evolves into this life. form and this life form evolves. And we debate that a hundred different ways. There are all these different views on it. But people never talk about this thing called abiogenesis or abiogenesis. The idea that there once was no life and suddenly according to, you know, science, there was life. And how we go from no life to life is completely unknown. Absolutely. And many people don't realize that Darwin didn't address that question in the origin of species. He started, he presupposed one or very few simple forms, as he put it, in the origin. He later speculated in a letter to a friend named Joseph Hooker that there might have been some sort of chemical interactions going on in what he called a warm little pond that might have gotten things going. But the letter was about a half a page, and he really didn't solve the problem. And it hasn't been solved. since, and even leading proponents of not only Neo-Darwinism, but the whole evolutionary worldview, like Richard Dawkins, have acknowledged that no one knows how life began through

simple chemical interactions. So this is a completely unsolved problem from the standpoint of standard materialistic evolutionary theory. It's often also funny to me to think that how someone's inadvertent phraseology in a letter that they are ignorant will ever become part of history becomes a famous phrase. I mean, you know, whether it's Bonhoffer writing about religionless Christianity or whether it's, you know, Thomas Jefferson writing about, you know, there's a wall separating church and state, the idea that Darwin writes warm upon, and that somehow this is seized upon and people think, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. prebiotic soup, their ponds, life evolves out of the ponds. I mean, I just find that historically kind of comical. It is kind of comical in a way when we, especially now that we understand just how complex living cells are, even the simplest living cell, is chockful of information and DNA.

It has complex molecular machines and circuits and a complex information processing system. And Darwin knew nothing about this. And so what seemed plausible in the, 1920s and 30s in the kind of not the immediate wake of the Darwinian revolution, but within 50 or 60 years of it seems completely implausible now in the wake of, for example, the discoveries of the 1950s and 60s. Exactly. Let me cut you off. We're going to go to a break.

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Hey folks, welcome back. It's the Eric Metaxus show. I got to tell you, I love talking about science with people who can explain it to me. I'm talking right now to Dr. Stephen Meyer. And Stephen, since we're friends, I'll call you Stephen. But I have to say that I'm excited about all of your books. But I'm really excited right now about the reissue of this book, The Mystery of Life's Origins. Tell us about when that book initially came out, because it deals with every single. we're talking about. Yeah, we just made a 35-year anniversary issue of the book. I'll show it for your audience just for fun here. It's called The Mystery of Life's Origin. And it was written by three scientists, Walter Bradley, Charles Thaxton, and Roger Olson. And I happened to intersect with them at a conference in 1985. And that's what got me into this whole idea of intelligent design. And Charles Thaxton, who was the lead author on the book, had an epilogue to the book. The book basically documented in 10 chapters all the difficult problems of getting from chemistry to code, getting from the first life to the first simple, or getting from the chemistry in the alleged prebiotic

soup to an actual living organism. And they showed that it was a very, very difficult problem and that no one had really made any progress on it since Alexander Oparin first proposed his theory of chemical evolution or abiogenesis in the 1920s. And oddly, many secular leading figures in the field of origin of life research agreed with these authors that the field was at a state of impasse. And I got to hear a conference or attend a conference in 1985 where Thaxton and his co-authors were discussing the current status of origin of life research with other leading people in the field who were mainstream materialistic evolutionary biologists. And there was a consensus that

really there hadn't been much progress made and that there were really big, serious problems. But Thaxton and his co-authors went further. They suggested that the digital code that was stored in the DNA molecule that had been discovered by Watson and Crick was an indicator that they were essentially barking up the wrong tree, that they were trying to explain the origin of code from strictly materialistic chemical processes, when in fact, we know that whenever you find information, it always comes from an intelligent source. And so they suggested... But when you say information, again, I want my audience to track here, because this is so,

this is so huge and important, what you're saying is that when we look at, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that if we look at a cell, it contains DNA, RNA. Once you know what that is, you recognize that this is so unbelievably complex that whatever you were talking about before that has to go away. Because you're not talking about building a house or something fairly simple. You're talking about something that is just so astronomically complex that it doesn't make any common sense to say that it just happened. I mean, isn't that effectively what happened once Watson and Crick understood what we were dealing with with RNA and DNA? Right. The whole Darwinian idea was that you go from a simple cell to complex form of life that we see today,

from an amoeba-like thing to elephants and giraffes and fish and birds and so forth. But the big discovery of modern molecular biology was that even the simplest one-celled organism is enormously complex. Not complex in the sense of a random mishmash, but complex in the sense of an integrated and informational complexity. So the big discovery of the 1950s was not just the structure of the DNA molecule, what's Washington and Crick discovered in 1953, but also they discovered that inside the DNA molecule, there are four chemicals called bases or nucleotide bases

that are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in this section of machine code, like the zeros and ones that we have in software today. So this was called the sequence hypothesis, and Crick was really the prime mover in that, which is kind of interesting because he was also a code breaker in World War II, and he broke the ultimate code, the genetic code, and determined that there was a genetic text inside the DNA molecule, so much so that Bill Gates now says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.

So that's the big question. Where did the software in the cell come from? A common sense interpretation would suggest that a software would require a master programmer. And that's, in fact, the key argument for intelligent design. So is that what happened to you way back in 1985? You said that if this is true, then it follows logically, has nothing to do with faith. It follows logically that if there's this level of information, then you have to posit at least the plausibility, the probability of some kind of designer.

We don't mean Jehovah God, Yahweh God, Jesus. We don't have to talk about that. But it doesn't make logical sense that you have this complex level of information in the way that we had previously thought it could have come about. Right. Well, in 1985, I met Thaxton at this conference. We started talking over the ensuing year. And then the next year I was off to grad school to Cambridge, and I was not fully convinced of his point of view yet, but I was super intrigued. And I began to wonder whether it was possible to formulate a case for intelligent design, what they called an intelligent cause.

Their intuition was that information was a mind product. It was something that came from intelligent agents. And so to try to explain it by mere chemistry was just simply to fail to understand the nature of the effect that we were. we're looking at. And so I began to wonder if that intuition couldn't be developed in the form of a scientific argument. And oddly, I encountered another Charles when I got to grad school, and that was Charles Darwin himself. I started reading his origin of species and his letters and his other work and realized that he had formulated a scientific method for investigating events in the remote past. And the method was called the method of multiple competing hypotheses, or sometimes called the

method of inference to the best explanation, where in his view, a best explanation was one which posited a cause which was known in the present to produce the effect in question. And so I began to ask myself a question, what is the cause that we know of that produces digital code that produces information? And I realized by Darwin's own criterion, the best explanation is an intelligent agent, because we know of only one cause that produces information, whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or a information embedded in a radio signal. Whenever we find information and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind,

not a material process. And so I became convinced that Thaxton and his colleagues have been right. And eventually I produced a book of my own called Signature in the Cell, which developed the positive case for intelligent design based on the presence of the digital code based in the DNA molecule. And so in this reissue of mystery of life's origin, we have not only their original book, but essays by five of us who have extended their idea,

James Ture being one of them, Brian Miller, my colleague at Discovery Institute, and then I have an essay at the very end, summarizing my case from signature in the cell, making the positive case for intelligent design based on the presence of that digital code stored at the foundation of life and the DNA molecule. The only chapter that I have read recently from this book is the new chapter by James Tour.

And I thought to myself, as I was reading it, it takes everything that I have to try to follow the argument, because as we know, James Tour is so smart that it's a little frightening. And he's making the case, you know, on a very scientific level. So this is not for the lay reader, but about four or five or six times in the course of this essay, he suddenly brings it down to a popular level. And it is absolutely hilarious. I don't know whether he's intending to be funny, but he tries to explain how ridiculous it is. Once you know, he knows about how chemicals come together to create complex, you know, complex, molecules, it becomes funny because he knows exactly how impossible this is. And he tries with layman's terms a few times to make it clear, like, hey, folks, guess what, this can't happen.

We now know it can't happen. At least I know it can't happen. And let me try and explain to you how we now know, based on science, why this cannot happen, why four very simple molecules cannot randomly bump into each other and create infinitely more complex molecules, which will then create life. I just find it fascinating that science has brought us to the place where we can now see the impossibility of this happening, whereas, you know, in 1950, and when Oprah and was writing and when Darwin was writing, there's no way we could have known. Right. It all seemed very plausible. I'm sorry, we're going to have to go to a break, folks.

I'm talking to Stephen Meyer. This is very important stuff. Do not go away. Why would you? We'll be right back. Picture show. Second was the place we'd meet. Second seat. Go Dutch treat. You were sweet. Dark ashamed of save those lives. Get rhythm.

When you get the blues. Come on, get rhythm. When you get the blues. Get a rock and roll feeling in your bon. But that's on you. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Dr. Stephen Meyer. We're talking about the reissue of an old book called The Mystery of Life's Origins,

35 years ago, it came out, and now there's a new updated version. You were just going to say something about Dr. James Tour. Go ahead. Well, right, his chapter in the book is the most technical one, but also the main point is it can be easily grasped. And in fact, he gave a lecture that's up on YouTube at the Dallas conference where you interviewed me for Socrates in the city. And it was actually, there were some very funny moments in it

because the whole logic of these prebiotic simulation experiments is that you're doing something in the chemistry lab that would simulate what was going on on the early earth. But what TURR points out is that every step of the way, there is an intelligent chemist playing a crucial role. You start with purified chemical reagents that have been produced in some lab, and then you combine them in very specific proportions

at very specific times under very specific conditions of heat and pressure. And then after there's an initial reaction, you reach in and remove some of the products you don't want so that the ensuing reactions don't turn into a chemical sludge that has nothing to do with life. And in every point of the way, the chemist is intervening to prevent what are called interfering cross reactions. And then even so you don't get very far in the whole process.

But the point is that if these simulation experiments, are simulating anything, they seem to be simulating the need for an intelligent agent to do something and to get anywhere in the direction of life. And so the idea that they're somehow showing that what simple chemicals can do on their own is rather comical. And it's the point that the tour makes with compelling force. He's a world-class organic chemist. He's one of the top two or three organic synthesis guys in the world and has done all this extraordinary work on these little tiny nanomachines, which he has been able to design little tiny miniature machines.

But one of the other things he points out is that the machines he designs pale in comparison by way of complexity to the machines that we find in living systems. And so it takes a lot of human ingenuity to make these little, what he makes these little nanocars, how much more ingenuity would be necessary to make the much more sophisticated machines we find in cell membranes and in living cells themselves. So, yeah, he's very powerful speaker and very interesting in his critique

of chemical evolutionary theory. He basically says from the standpoint of a leading chemist, we know nothing about how this happened from the standpoint of simple chemistry. And what I find funny is how angry he gets because it's like he sees it so clearly and he's trying to explain,

listen, this is not my opinion. I can show you, I can guarantee you. that this cannot simply happen. And it is fascinating to me that it's difficult for him to make the case in the scientific community. It's one thing for somebody like me to barely understand it. But the people who are working in these fields, the animus against the idea of a creator, of a mind, of an intelligence is so strong. Are there any top scientists in your world who are beginning to allow for what you and he have, been saying these years?

Well, there actually are, but it's also been very interesting to watch the interaction between TUR and other chemists who are doing these Origin of Life prebiotic simulation experiments. He is not a welcome presence. He's bad news, because he's calling them out on basic chemistry that they know well, and calling out the wishful thinking and the make-believe that's involved in a lot of this. And he's doing so on the basis of very specific chemical critiques. The molecules don't go in the direction that would be necessary for life to have arisen through these kinds of simple chemical processes.

And many of the chemists know this. And so he's been calling out the role that the investigator has been playing in manipulating the results, if you will. But on the other hand, I think the interest in both the – both skepticism about these both chemical evolutionary theory and standard neo-Darwinian biological evolutionary theory is growing. We have now over a thousand scientists who have signed a PhD scientist who have signed a statement of dissent against Darwinism, and there are many, many top-level scientists who are becoming favorable to the idea of intelligent design.

One recent scientist that has come into our movement is a top German paleontologist named Gunter Beckley, who first approached me in 2009 and sent me an email saying, please don't reply to this email. Could you call me instead at home, not at my office? And he'd become skeptical by reading a number of our books on intelligent design as the curator of a 200-year bicentennial anniversary celebrating Darwin's life and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species. In his exhibition, he had held up books on intelligent design for ridicule.

and characterize the origin of species as the book that outweighs them all. One of his colleagues said, Gunter, if you're going to represent us to the media and make fun of those books on intelligent design, you better read some of them because you're going to get asked questions about them. So he said, that was my mistake. He started reading them and realized that there was actually quite a lot to the case for intelligent design.

And in 2016, after a number of years of very quiet deliberation, he came out in favor of the theory and has been a leading spokesman for intelligent design in Europe. And he's just one of many top-level high-profile scientists who have made that kind of a switch. It's wonderful to hear this. I just want to say that we're going to go to another break. It's wonderful to hear this, Stephen. I want to remind people if they want more of my conversations with you, they can go to Socrates in the city.com. I interviewed you a number of years ago and then about a year ago.

and those conversations we get into all kinds of other stuff at Socrates and the city.com. We'll be right back, folks. It's the Eric Metaxis show. Don't go away. Beyond the sea. Hey, folks. Welcome back. It's the Eric Mataxis show.

I'm talking to my friend, Dr. Stephen Meyer, the author of Darwin's Doubt, the author of Signature in the Cell, the author of a lot of wonderful books. He's been my guest at Socrates in the city. And Stephen, I was just asking you, are there, scientists who are not men and women of faith, but who are just doing the science and coming to something along the lines of similar conclusions to what we're coming to at this point. Well, absolutely. In fact, the intelligent design idea started with Thaxton and Bradley and Olson. And one of the scientists who got on board very soon after they published the

book was a man named Dean Kenyon. Kenyon had been one of the very most prominent and leading chemical evolutionary theorist through the 1960s and 70s. He wrote a book called Biochemical Predestination with a co-author that was the leading graduate school textbook on the chemical evolutionary origin of life all through that period of time. I first encountered him at this same conference where I met Thaxton in 1985. He was on the panel and made the first public announcement of his, of repudiating his own theory and explained that he had come to accept the conclusion of Thakson and his co-authors that there must have been some sort of intelligent cause at work to explain the digital code and the DNA molecule. At the end of his talk actually argued that

the the theologians and philosophers needed to reopen the natural theological question, that the evidence of design at the foundation of life and DNA pointed to the need for some kind of intelligence, and it behooved philosophers to begin to think about exactly who that intelligence was. And so Kenyon first had a scientific conversion away from his own theory to agnosticism, then a conversion for that to the idea of intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of life, and then later had a religious conversion. And I've seen that progression in a number of scientists,

and many of the founders of what we now call the modern intelligent design movement, started from a point of religious agnosticism and yet became skeptical about evolutionary theory. Michael Denton, who was at the time an agnostic. religiously wrote the very important book Evolution, Aetherian Crisis, in 1985, and in that book also sketched out a case for an intelligent design in one of the later chapters in the book. I think Denton is now a theist, but I think he's still religiously uncommitted, but very much convinced that the evidence in nature is pointing to a designing intelligence of some kind. And what happens to these people? Do they get exiled to the academic equivalent of Siberia?

I mean, it's just amazing to me that folks like Kenyon and Denton, you know, would have logically migrated to the truth that we are blessed to know. But what happened to them academically? Well, Kenyon's case is very interesting. In fact, it played a big role in the formation of our program at the Discovery Institute. Kenyon was, as I said, a leading figure in this field. I met him again at a conference in 1993. and he was at the time going through a horrific ordeal at his university. He had been teaching a whole slate of both introductory and advanced biology classes

at San Francisco State University. Kenyon was a Stanford Ph.D. He worked at NASA. I mean, he was a top-level guy. And some students had asked him about why he had changed his views on chemical evolutionary theory. He explained, and apparently someone complained about him talking about his new view, and then his biology colleagues censured him and attempted to get him removed from teaching introductory biology. Now, in the department where he was, where there was something like 17 other biologists,

not one of them knew anything like what he knew about the origin of life problem. He was a world-class expert on that field, and yet they were trying to muzzle him and remove him from teaching. teaching. So I ended up having met Kenyon for a second time, learned about his story. I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, where you've written some great op-eds over the years about Kenyon's case. They sat on it for about nine weeks, and then on a Friday afternoon, I got a call from an editor at the journal telling me that they were going to run it the following Monday. And so I called Professor Kenyon to tell him about the update, and he said, that's a question. And he said, That's amazing. I'm going to have my hearing before the academic Senate on Tuesday.

And what happened was extraordinary. He ended up, because of the publicity of the journal article, the university came under a tremendous pressure, and at the hearing, he was exonerated by his colleagues by a 25 to 8 vote. The only people to vote against him were his fellow biologists. Everybody else thought it was an egregious violation of academic freedom. He was reinstated and allowed to teach a graduate level course in which he discussed the information-bearing properties of cells and his ideas about intelligent design. But not all of the stories of opposition have had such happy endings. And a lot of our folks, Gunter Beckley in particular, have been put under enormous pressure. Beckley ended up leaving the museum where he was a longtime curator after he announced his scientific conversion. And we've had other scientists, Richard Sternberg, who was at the Smithsonian,

Doug Axe, who was at Cambridge. Some of our very best scientists are refugees from top-level institutions in the mainstream science establishment. Where was a Beckley at a museum? What city was he in Germany? He was at the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History, which is the largest natural history museum in continental Europe. So he was a very prominent paleontologist. He had a huge write-up.

on Wikipedia until his conversion to intelligent design, and then he was no longer an important scientist, and they erased it, which I thought was quite a compliment. I wish they would erase mine, given how biased the description of our work is, but never mind. We can't control everything Wikipedia does. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's such a fascinating time we're living in, because let's face it, what the church was accused of during the time of, uh, Galileo, you know, they held all the power. And if their power was threatened, they simply wanted to crush dissent. Right now, the scientific, scientific, scientific, materialistic, establishment, utterly secular, they have the cultural power. They want to crush all cultural

dissent. They're behaving precisely as, you know, enlightenment people criticized the church for behaving. there's comedy in it and of course great irony. We're going to be right back. Final segment, folks. I'm talking to Dr. Stephen Meyer. It's the Ericman Taxes Show. Do not go away. I can see it in your eyes that you despise the same old as you heard the night before.

Hey, folks, welcome back. It's the Eric Mataxis show. I'm talking to Dr. Stephen Meyer. There's a new book out or the reissue of an old book. It's called The Mystery of Life's Origins. And we were just talking, Stephen, about how there has become. a lot of atheists who are scientific materialists who really have a creed and a faith. Their atheism is something which they're clinging to despite scientific evidence.

And it's a very strange thing that they're doing precisely what they have accused people of faith of doing for a long time. What do you make of this? I think it's a really interesting phenomenon. and I often get asked, well, why is there such bile associated with us? Why is there so much vitriol and spit and vinegar in these debates? Because they get pretty nasty. And, of course, we've had these careers quashed by people who don't want to brook any dissent from Darwinism. I have a frequent debating partner, Michael Ruse, is a very congenial,

guy, and he's written a book in which he essentially addresses his same question, and he says that many of his colleagues have essentially used Darwinism as a kind of secular religion, or they regard Darwinism as the basis of a sort of secular religion. That is to say it answers the fundamental worldview question that every worldview has to answer, which is what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes. And Darwinism is part of a larger materialistic answer to that question. And so when you challenge Darwinism or chemical evolutionary theory, you're challenging not just a scientific theory,

but an indispensable plank in a broader materialistic, anti-theistic worldview. And so, like many of us, when our fundamental beliefs are challenged, many folks who hold the Darwinian point of view can get quite emotional. And when they're in positions of power, they have often used them to suppress dissent. We were talking about Professor's Moore a few minutes ago. Yeah, yeah, and it is ironic because it's exactly what the church was accused of doing in the Middle Ages. Let me ask you, though, when we're talking about Darwin, okay, the key to Darwin really is natural selection.

He figured out, he thought, how things evolved. Is it fair to say that our friend, Dr. Michael Behe at Lehigh, in the way, the last 20 years using cutting-edge science has effectively disproved natural selection? Well, I think what Behe would say is that natural selection is a real process, but it has very limited creative power. It tends to, and the mechanism is the combination of natural selection and random mutation. And what Behe shows is that mutations are almost invariably degrading, degradive. that mutation and the mutation selection mechanism, therefore, is not a creative process,

but one that at best preserves existing form or preserves modest changes that might confer limited survival value, but in the manner of, he has a great illustration of a retreating army blowing up a bridge behind it to keep the invaders from attacking. He said, the blowing up the bridge may enhance survival, but it isn't a constructive or building process. And so mutation and selection is not a creative process, but a preservative one or one that preserves degradative changes that have limited survival value. I want to remind you of our friends at the Herzog Foundation. If you are thinking, I guess the question is, with all that has happened in the recent years, are you rethinking where you want to send your kid to school or your grandkid?

Are you thinking about home schooling? Does the school to which you send your kids support your values? Now, I always have to say that that's the whole idea of school, right? People forget. They act like, well, I don't have that much power. The government has power, and I send my kids to the school, and they're going to tell my kids, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get to teach your kid whatever you want,

and you get to hire teachers or send the kid to teachers who are going to support what you want to teach your kids. You can go to HerzogFoundation.com. HerzogFoundation.com.