The Sean McDowell Show - The “Battle for the Big Bang” Just Got Intense

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Today, I talk with Dr. Stephen Meyer, a Cambridge-trained philosopher of science, about his belief in God about the beginning of the universe and how it points to a Creator. And as Science has progressed it has in fact helped in the case for God. WATCH THE FILM: https://www.fathomentertainment.com/releases/the-story-of-everything/ *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org   Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Life Audio. So it's one thing to make the arguments from science for origin of life and cosmology. But on a cultural level, do you sense a difference now than maybe four decades ago? I think these scientific developments, the spotlighting, enhancing of the case for theism based on the fine-tuning argument, based on the evidence from cosmology, based on the information argument, showing that there was a positive case for God from science, undermine the key plank in Dawkins' scientific argument for atheism. Those things have played a role in this cultural shift that we're seeing. The cultural shift is everywhere.

A new film tells a story of everything through the lens of intelligent design, arguing that the case for an intelligence behind the universe is scientifically stronger than ever. What is the state about the debate of the existence of God? And are we in a new cultural moment of openness to design and the supernatural. Our guest today, Dr. Stephen Meyer, came all the way down from the Discovery Institute to be here in person at Talboskow theology,

Biola University. My audience will know that you were one of the leading proponents of intelligent design. You've written some great books like Return of the God hypothesis. And you're here to kind of catch us up on what's going on, 30,000-foot view in this debate and talk about a new film that I saw an early cut on. And, Stephen, it could be one of the best things

I've seen out of discovery. but we'll come back to that. I'd like to start if it's okay with you, is when I was going back looking at your book, you tell a story that at 14 years old, you thought your life was over. Why did you feel that way? And what happened?

And how did that kind of set you up for what you do today? Well, yeah, the short answer is probably I was a melodramatic teenager. That's fair. Well, I was prone to overthinking everything. and I was having lots of strange questions that I couldn't answer. Questions about the most haunting one was, what's it going to matter in 100 years? Does anything I do today, what does anything I could hope to accomplish?

What will anything that I do have, how will that have any lasting or enduring meaning? And I was also freaked out by time. Just thinking about time, what it is, I would have an event, drop something on the table. I can remember that event taking place, but that event is gone. Where did it go? I was intensely aware of living in a stream of sensory impressions of things that were happening that were evanescent, ephemeral, that were just moving by. I had this sense that there had to be something somewhere

that didn't change or everything that was constantly changing, could not, would not have any lasting meaning. So underlying it was, I think, a kind of quest or worry about meaning, about whether my life or anything had any ultimate or lasting meaning. There's a Harvard study that's been published recently about young people in the 18 to 30 age group. And the study showed that 56% of people in that age group currently acknowledge having doubts

about whether their lives have any lasting or enduring meaning. And I think this was fundamentally what was bothering me. Later I, what happened to me was there was one day when it occurred to me. me that maybe these thoughts I was having meant there was something wrong with me. And I remember having a particular thought, which was, maybe this is what it means to be insane. And 14, I'd heard the term insane. And then I remember a kind of shock of a surge of adrenaline. I think I had a panic attack. And for roughly six months after that, I was acutely aware of these thoughts, terrified of having them, because it might mean that there was something wrong with me. And so I

got into a kind of maelstrom, a downward spiral of thinking about thinking that led nowhere good other than a sense of kind of a dark cloud following me around. At the same time, I was in a full-length, full-length leg cast. I had broken my leg in a skiing accident, and I was kind of hyperactive anyway, and so I was sort of trapped in my mind. And eventually, I have a happy-go-lucky little brother, who's my alter ego. And he kind of drew me out of some of this, I got back into school in the fall. But I'd have these things recur,

and these thoughts recur. And eventually, for me, some of this started to resolve as I began to read the big, fat, white, Catholic family Bible on my own and found that there were things in the biblical text that seemed to address some of my metaphysical angst. And when I got to college, taking philosophy classes,

I remember encountering that I was in a course on atheistic existentialism. I counted the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, who said, paraphrasing, without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. And I almost jumped out of my chair when I encountered that. I thought that's what was bothering me. I remember talking to my philosophy professor, and I told him a bit about my background with all of this. I said, maybe I wasn't insane. maybe I was just a philosopher.

He said to me, well, you have to be careful, he said, because there's a fine line between philosophy and insanity. That's a good word. Anyway, I did eventually pull out of it, and exposure to biblical answers to some of those questions were very helpful. Genesis or Exodus 3 when Moses was asking who he should tell Pharaoh. to whom who had sent him, God answered, I am that I am, the eternal self-existent one in the book of Hebrews.

It said that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And so there were, this nagging thought I had that there must be something that doesn't change was addressed in the biblical text. And so I began to find, I think, what I would now call

answers to worldview questions in biblical revelation. And then that started to my mind some structures and other kids I knew in high school were having these dramatic Christian conversion experiences. And as I began to be exposed to the biblical text and worldview, it started to answer questions that had the effect of making me feel normal for the first time. No great ecstatic Damascus Road thing, but just started to give my mind structures that made help me make sense of reality.

Thank you for sharing that and bringing us back. You gave even more depth than I've read in some of your books, how you made sense of that and how it affected you. There's another event in your life that I probably heard you share. Maybe it's in the case for a creator for like 2004, but I've always been intrigued by this story. I think you're 27 years old, 1985, and it regards... Don't tell people that they're going to think I'm old, Sean.

I was once with my grandfather. who was taking a 1930s typewriter to get serviced in a little shop. Amazing. And they didn't have the ribbon anymore on us. And I said, I said, Grams, they probably haven't had that for it. He says, don't call me. Gramps, they're going to think I'm old. He says, holding.

With a 1930 typewriter. I love that. That's awesome. Well, we won't date anything here. But correct me from among, you were 27. 27 years old. 1985, people can do the math. February.

Oh, February. Tell us the story. Yeah. Well, I'm working as a geophysicist for the Atlantic Richfield Company doing digital signal processing, which is seismic digital signal processing, which was an early form of applied information technology. And I hear about a talk at Southern Methodist University given by a Harvard historian of science and astrophicist named Owen Gingrich. I tend to talk, and I hear that night about a conference the next day at the Dallas Hilton called Christianity Challenges the University and International Conference of Atheists and Theists. It sounded fascinating. I was deeply interested, as I've kind of already revealed in deep worldview questions, and especially interested in how they intersected with the sciences, because I did a double major in college in physics and geology, and would sneak across campus whenever I could to take philosophy. courses. So I just came in off the street, paid my money, sat down and listened. And in the first,

and the conference was structured in a really interesting way. It was going to address three big questions. The origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness, the mind-body question, for lack of a better term. And it was, each session was divided between theistic and materialist or atheistic agnostic presenters. And there were panels with the same. And in the first session, a very prominent, well-known agnostic materialist, cosmologist, astronomer Alan Sandage, rose to the podium and shocked many people in the audience by sitting down with the theists.

and this was unexpected. He then proceeded to give his talk, which was about the evidence from observational astronomy and theoretical physics for a beginning of the universe. And at one point in this talk, he said, here is evidence

for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There's no way this could have been predicted within the framework of physics as we know it. And he was talking about what we call the Big Bang. or the singularity.

And he then went on to explain how this evidence, as well as the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe from the very beginning, had really rocked his world as a scientific materialist. And that this challenged his worldview, but what really challenged him, he said, was his own self-reflection, realizing that not only was this evidence,

but that he did not want it to be true. And that he realized that there was something in him that did not want to follow this evidence where it led. And he prided himself as a scientist on doing exactly that. It was incredibly poignant, in a kind of grave, there was a sort of a gravity about him. Yeah. That this was something he had come to reluctantly.

His theistic belief was something he had come to. to reluctantly after much wrestling, soul searching, and scientific evaluation. I was blown away. And in this new film we have that you mentioned, the story of everything, we were actually able to track down that footage. I was stunned when I saw it. I was too. We had tried many times, couldn't find it.

And through a very weird serendipity, one of our staff writers wrote an article about Charles Thaxton's new book. And that elicited a response from someone who had been at the conference who was on the media team who had filmed this. And through that lead, we were able to find the footage of Sandage. And that footage is now in the trailer to the film as well as the film where he's saying, and that was one of the things that I vividly remembered from sitting there. Oh, yeah.

This senior, very seasoned scientific figure staring into the camera saying, here is evidence for what can only be described as a super natural event. and there was a kind of beat between super and natural. It was obviously supernatural because you can't invoke nature to explain the origin of nature. You can't explain physics to explain the origin of physics before there is any physics. There has to be something outside the universe to explain where the universe had come from, had come from, if it in fact originated a finite time ago where at that point we get matter, space, time, and energy coming into existence. So from age 14, at least, you're interested in these big questions in life and something infinite.

But at 27, even though you were working as a scientist and had training in it, you weren't trying to become an apologist or an advocate of intelligent design. You're just living your life, if I understand correctly. And this kind of lit a fire in the trajectory of your life? I had come to Christian faith ultimately through philosophical arguments that persuaded me. I had an extended period where I was convinced that Christianity was true, and like Sandage, did not want it to be true. It imposed certain restrictions on lifestyle, and I was not in favor of that. And I was just, I was a constant battle. So many of my friends had these really dramatic conversions.

And for me, it was a protracted experience from late adolescence. it wasn't until the first year out of college that I really settled. And it was soon after that that I realized that I began to pray that God would use me in a specific way to do something. I thought it had something to do with my philosophical interest. I was very taken by the kind of approach that the people at LaBrie, in particular, Oz Guinness, Frances Schaefer had taken. I met them at a conference in 1983, a couple years before this 85 conference.

And so I was thinking I wanted to go back to grad school in something related to science and philosophy, and so I ended up going back in the philosophy of science, history and philosophy of science. But it was after I had been exposed to these early proponents of intelligent design. And at the conference, the other thing that was just world-rocking, if you will,

was the panel on the origin of life. It was the next one up. And there, a similar thing happened where a very well-known proponent of chemical evolutionary theory, which is essentially the materialistic account of how life arose from simpler chemicals in a prebiotic soup or environment, the first life. We're talking about the origin of the origin of the simplest, first simplest life. One of the proponents of that theory named Dean Kenyon announced at this conference in his talk that he was...

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Head to crosswalk.com and explore the spring gift guide today, because the best gifts point people back to faith. Now persuaded that some sort of intelligent cause or design was necessary to explain the origin of life, and he refudiated his own very popular theory, of chemical evolution, which was at that time expressed in a best-selling graduate-level text on what's called Chemical Evolutionary Theory. His book was called Biochemical Predestination. And this was equally compelling testimony. We found that footage as well, where Kenyon is saying, I don't think you have to fall off the edge of the rational universe to embrace a frankly

theistic understanding of the origin of life. And in the talk, he said, because of of the information-bearing properties of DNA, it was now, in his opinion, time for the philosophers to reopen the natural theological question, the question of whether or not nature is pointing to the existence of God. This was stunning, coming right on the heels of the testimony that morning of Alan Sandage.

And so I was really struck by the import, the sense of the whole conference that the the intellectual initiative, in these conversations was on the side of the theistic scientists. And the theistic philosophers as well, it's the first place I encountered William and Craig and Alvin Planniga, who were on the afternoon. Amazing.

On consciousness. So, yeah, it kind of lit a fire in me. I met Faxton, one of the key scientific authors on the Origin of Life panel. He began to mentor me. And a year later, I was off to grad school in Cambridge, thinking that I would like to do something on the origin of life panel. life question, not yet fully convinced of their argument for intelligent, they called it an argument for intelligent cause. They hadn't coined the term intelligent design yet, but I left

with kind of a burning question, could this, could the evidence from DNA, the evidence of the information-bearing properties of DNA, in fact, provide the basis of a rigorous scientific reformulation of the design argument? And that was, I was chewing on that all through my four years in Cambridge. It's amazing. You have the footage from Sandage and from Kenyon in this 1985 conference because it's easier for us today to miss how significant that was because we have so many streams of information to get things out. This was like a big conference. People came together. Huge announcements that in many ways was kind of signaling what was yet to come in the intelligent design movement and beyond. I want to get to this film, but I think it might be

interesting for people. If we first start with, because in the three people you mentioned, with Kenyon, with yourself, and with Sandage, there was kind of a recognition that there's evidence pointing towards God or design, but a resistance to it. So if we go back to kind of say the beginning of maybe in the 20th century, what was the standard view about the universe and why is this discovery of information in the cell and the universe having to be? And the universe having a beginning, so unexpected and so surprising. That's a very good question. Yeah, in the late 19th century, well, here's the way I tell the story in the return of the

God hypothesis. It's a rise-fall, rise plot structure, if you will. Science, modern science, begins in a decidedly Judeo-Christian milieu in Western Europe. And you have influences on the early scientists that come directly from the Hebrew Bible. the notion of a law-governed physical realm, the notion of physical laws being something that's implicit in many of the biblical texts in the Old Testament that the early scientists were drawing on.

You have the idea of the intelligibility of nature that we humans can understand the order and the design built into nature because our minds were made in the image of the same rational creator who built design and rationality and lawful order into the world. You have the idea that the order is contingent. It's contingent on the choice that the creator made.

So we can't just simply deduce what the order is. We have to go out and investigate it for ourselves and look and see how God did it. To have this combination of presuppositions about the relationship between God and the natural world that give rise to a fruitful, mathematically guided empirical science that we call the scientific revolution. It's a fascinating story.

And the early figures in modern science, Robert Boyle, John Ray, Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, Galileo for all his problems with the Catholic Church, Kepler, all of these figures are deeply Christian and they are doing science for discernibly Christian reasons. Judeo-Christian reasons. Some of those influences come out of the late medieval Catholic, the medieval period with Catholic philosophers who are developing methods of isolating variables and ways of investigating nature. Some of them have to do with assumptions that come out of the Reformation. For example, not only the intelligibility of nature and are being made in the image of God, but also the depravity of man that our minds can lead us astray. We're prone to

jumping to conclusions, and so we have to test our ideas against nature. So there are these, I think, three great theological strains that lead to the scientific revolution, a Judaic strain, Catholic strain, and a reformed Protestant strain. But in any case, it's a Judeo-Christian milieu. And not only do the early scientists start doing science for decidedly Judeo-Christian biblical reasons, they are discovering things that reinforce that conclusion. In particular, they are discovering evidences of design. And you have Newton making design arguments based on the fine tuning of the planetary orbits.

He has an elegant design argument based on not only the structure and design of the eye, but the way in which the eye seems to be designed with knowledge of the way light works. and there's a correspondence between the two that strikes him with great impact. Boyle has design arguments. Robert Boyle, the great chemist, and these design arguments continue right up into the 19th century

with figures like William Hewell and the Bridgewater treatises and with even the great James Clark Maxwell. But in the late 19th century, there's a shift that's beginning to take place. And you get figures like Darwin and Marx. and then in the early 20th century, Freud, and you have a kind of gradual shift

in the worldview orientation of science away from its original Judeo-Christian founding into a more materialistic framework. Lots of figures, Huxley, Verschow, in Germany, Heckel. So you get this rise of scientific materialism, and the default way of thinking in the early part of the 20th century is one in which, first of all, from the standpoint of scientific origins,

we can explain pretty much everything. There's a big scientific, there's a big materialistic story that you can tell. Laplace in the early 19th century comes up with the nebular hypothesis to explain the origin of the solar system as a result of the law of gravity acting on nebular gases alone. You get explanations of the origin of the great geological features. as a result of slow, gradual, and purely naturalistic processes. Darwin comes along with his account of the origin of new forms of life by the natural selection, random variation process,

and that idea is extended with figures like Huxley and Hackel to explain even the origin of the first life. So by the end of the 19th century, you can explain virtually everything as the result of slow, gradual materialistic processes. And then there becomes, as Laplace is as, as, you know, rumored to have said, we don't know if he actually said it's sire, seer, I have no need of that hypothesis, no need of the God hypothesis by the beginning of the 20th century. You can explain the origin of everything as a result of undirected natural process. And that becomes a kind of default way of thinking. And so based on that materialistic worldview, you would expect the universe to be

eternal and self-existent and therefore not exhibiting any need for an external creator. You would expect life to be, as Thomas Henry Huxley and Heckel both said, to be a simple, homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. If life is very simple in its protoplasmic essence, as was thought in the 1860s and 70s, then it becomes very easy to explain its origin as a result of a few simple chemical reactions. People don't remember that Darwin didn't explain the origin of the first life. That was left to to so-called chemical evolutionary theorists. Hickle

and Huxley were the first two such scientists. And they thought this was a no-brainer. It was not going to be hard because they assumed incorrectly that life was in its essence extremely simple. As we learn more about the complexity of life and indeed the

way in which even simple living cells, so called, contain digital nanotechnology, the whole story shifted dramatically. The complexity of the cell, the discovery of digital code in the interior of every cell

of every living organism, including even simple one-celled organisms, was a shocking discovery from the standpoint of what was presupposed by 19th century scientific materialists. And the discovery that the universe had a beginning, likewise, did not comport well with the default assumption

of an eternal self-existent universe, which was also important for sustaining the scientific materialist worldview. That is the best synopsis of that story. I think I have heard, Steve, moving from a Judeo-Christian-oriented worldview with the development of science and assumptions about what we would find as we probe nature, the introduction of this materialistic worldview of what we would expect. And then the 20th century is kind of the story of not finding what the materialist thought that we would expect.

And the argument that you make in this movie, which will come to and you portray is that the evidence is arguably stronger than ever that the the theist got it right. Let's talk about a couple of the surprising things that happened in each one of these. And each of these we could go into depth. You've written a whole book with incredible detail on this. But one of the key – Too much and probably too many footnotes as well, right? No, there's not too many.

It's very readable, by the way. But let's talk about a couple of discoveries. We'll come back to the DNA. but one of the key figures discovering the origin of the universe, of course, is the figure of Einstein, one of the greatest scientists of all time. Talk a little bit about his role in terms of us challenging this materialistic worldview that said there'd be an eternal universe. Yeah, when I lecture and tell this story, I don't reveal his name right away. This important discovery was made by this German scientist with very bad hair.

Everyone knows who I'm talking about. Then they know. So Einstein was known for his theories of relativity, theory special relativity and then general relativity. And the theory of general relativity was a new theory of gravitational attraction. And his idea was that massive bodies actually warp or bend the space or space time associated with them. so the space around them, such that, excuse me, I'm going to get a little water here. No, you're good.

That right there. Yeah, that's better. So the idea is that gravity bends the space around massive bodies such that if you, for example, would pass light by a massive body, it would adopt a certain curvature in response. So you could detect this curvature of space in the trajectory. of radiation or matter passing by a massive body. And that was actually confirmed experimentally by Eddington. And so this creates a kind of upon reflection

an understanding, an implication about the origin of the universe. Because as Einstein is thinking about that, as he realizes that if gravity is the only force operating in the universe, and if it's causing space to bend in around it, then everything would congeal into one great glump that each massive body would cause space to congeal around it and those in turn would create more curvature that would cause those glumps to glump further

and eventually everything would congeal into kind of giant black hole with no empty space in the universe. But we don't live in that kind of a universe. We live in a universe where there's empty space between massive bodies, you and me, for example. And so it followed that there must be a kind of anti-gravity force at work as well. There must be something counteracting gravity to account for the empty space, which means that there must be an outward pushing force in opposition to gravity, which suggests a dynamic universe, which is expanding because there's something pushing.

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your way, the fabric of hope is for you. Find it wherever books are sold. The universe outward. Einstein doesn't like that conclusion very much. And so in positive, this anti-gravity force, which he called the cosmological constant, the constantly pushing outward force which is creating space in the cosmos, that's the name, he decides to tinker a little bit, to gerrymander the equations, and he assigns a value for the cosmological constant that exactly balances the inward pull of gravity so that he can show that the outward push and the inward pull are kind of equi-poised.

They're in perfect balance so that he can portray the universe as being neither expanding outward from a beginning nor inward towards a conclusion, towards a big crunch. And then he has a big sigh of relief and presents to the world a picture of a static universe, a steady state. But a problem arises, and that is two physicists begin to work with his equations, Friedman in Russia, and especially

the French physicist Lemaître. And Lemaître shows that taken on its face, the universe is, even with the fine-tuning, that the cosmological constant and the gravitational constant and the gravitational force do not gravitational attraction do not mean that the universe will stay static. That very small perturbations in matter will result

in a disequilibrium either an expansion or a contraction. But then beyond that, this, now we're entering into the 1920s there's already evidence and Hubble finds

more out in California of expanding universe of the light that's coming from the distant galaxies is suggesting that those galaxies are moving away from us in every quadrant to the night sky. Einstein finally gets put into the picture by Arthur Eddington on a visit to Cambridge University in 1929. Eddington doesn't like the beginning of the universe concept either, but he says, look, you know, you've got to go out to Mount Wilson and look at what Hevel was finding. There's famous newsreel footage, which we have in the film. That's amazing.

You got that as well. Of Einstein peering through Hubble's telescope. It was so fascinating. Two weeks later, he announces to the New York Times in a media interview, he said that Hubble and his colleague Hummison have established that the universe is not static and is expanding and therefore, by implication, had a beginning. He later says his fiddling with the value of the cosmological. constant was the greatest blunder of my life, he said. I misquoted him in the book, by the way. I said, I had the quote as the greatest blunder of my scientific career, but he was actually

more emphatic than that. That's even more dramatic because your life includes your career and relationships and investments, whatever else you want to throw into it. Okay, so in a minute I'm going to have you tell the story of the discovery of information that challenged this notion that Darwin and others thought that it'd be very simple. But maybe catch us up because, again, you go into in your book, you go into the film, there's the oscillating universe and the steady state theory, but there's still a book that came out 2025 called Battle of the Big Bang.

We're a century later, and people are still debating this. They're still trying to pull in Einstein. They're still trying to reformulate. They're trying to accommodate the evidence that seems on its face. to point to a beginning within an infinite universe framework or formulation or model. And one of the things I like to tell people is that there's no evidence for an infinite universe, but there are plenty of models that try to accommodate the evidence for a finite universe within a different framework.

And that's where the cleverness of physicists and mathematicians can come in. But I think it might be helpful too for your... audience to understand why the evidence for a beginning is so troubling from the standpoint of materialism. Because especially within Einstein's physics of general relativity, but also because of other pointers and indicators of the beginning, the sense is not that we have a beginning of an expansion and that you had matter there sitting from eternity past waiting to expand. But rather, I think the best explanation of many lines of evidence is that the universe itself began to exist, that we have an origin of matter, space, time, and energy, before which there, or independent of which, we can't really say before, right, because if time is beginning. That's right.

Independent of which, there's no matter there to do the causing. So on its face, the evidence for a beginning suggests the inability of materialism as an explanatory system to offer an adequate cause. And you need to look for something that transcends the domains of matter, space, time, and energy. So that's the worry. That's the thing that bothers the materialists. And so finding a way to portray our universe as just the latest manifestation of some earlier stage of, of matter and energy in some earlier eon of space and time has been a constant kind of, has presented itself with a constant appeal to people that hold a materialistic worldview.

And the key piece, and you developed this again in your book, is that if there's something beyond matter, space, and time, like the laws of logic or mathematical numbers or principles, they don't have causal power to do anything. That's where a mind comes into play. And I think the interesting thing here is it's not just Christians or theists arguing this. Part of the resistance to accepting the data that we've pointed out in Sandwich, Kenyon, Einstein, yourself, and so many others, is this awareness that if the universe had a beginning, it points towards a cause outside of the universe, which is uncomfortable for our lives and how we live and purpose and all these other big questions. Drawing that home is huge, and you guys make those connections in the film as well. Let me shift if I – oh, were you going to say something?

One of the other scientists at this 1985 conference that I attended was Robert Jastro, who at that point recently – I didn't know he was there. A book called God and the Astronomers. And he was an agnostic – like Sandwich, both agnostic Jews in their early careers. Jastro remained agnostic to the end that saw the evidence was pointing to he said we have an interview with him in the film where he's being interviewed by Hugh Downes

of you know ABC News fame from years ago and Hugh Downs puts it to him is there is there you say this has theological implications that there's a the new science that is pointing to a theological conclusion. And he says, is there a way around that?

And jastro pauses, and he says, if there is, I can't see it. That's amazing. And I talk about, you know, you talked about these mathematical, a prior mathematical state is part of the explanation. And there is a popular infinite universe cosmology called quantum cosmology. And it posits a prior mathematical state. an ensemble of possible universes represented quantum mechanically, but essentially it's a mathematical representation of possible states of affairs,

and out of that mathematical representation comes matter, space, time, and energy. Now, that's really weird because as Alexander Valenkin, one of the proponents of quantum cosmology himself has asked, he said, well, if before there was a universe, we and before there were these laws of physics before the universe all we had were these mathematical laws and laws are conceptual are we really saying that before the universe

there was a mind because concepts exist in minds right so even the attempt to get around the beginning of the universe with new models from cosmology this one quantum cosmology have inadvertently and repeatedly reaffirmed and inadvertently affirmed, I think, a theistic conclusion. They affirmed theism on other grounds.

Oh, it's so amazing. I've so many more questions for you in cosmology, but let's shift to tell the story. You focus on fine-tuning also in the film, but the origin of life, especially your work on signature in the cell. You've been one of the most outspoken advocates and a kind of design from the origin of life. Take us to that story akin to like the Einstein story that was so startling. Of course, this is in the 1950s.

What was that like? And what do you think comes out of the discovery of DNA being at the root of life? Einstein, I think, changed his view by the 1930s. And then that change of view for many scientists was confirmed by the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965, which was, the kind of final nail in the coffin of the steady state universe. But then in Origin of Life research, the assumption is that we're going to be able to explain the origin of life pretty easily on essentially Darwinian, on a kind of Darwinian or quasi-Darwinian

basis. And the assumption is that the cell is in the 1870s and 80s, it's a simple homogenous globular plasm. But then as we learn more and more, about the complexity of cell that explaining its origin gets more and more difficult. So in 1957, in the 1950s, you get Watson and Crick, they elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule.

In a parallel track, you've got all these scientists also working at Cambridge University on proteins. They're discovering the complexity of the proteins and all the amazing jobs they do inside the cell. Then they start to put it together, that the information in DNA is providing the instructions for building

these protein machines and create Rick in 1957, having elucidated the structure of DNA with Watson, realizes that the four chemicals along the interior of the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA molecule, the so-called nucleotide bases, are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like digital characters in a section of machine code, like zeros and ones and computer code, that they are literally coding, they're providing instructions to the cell for building the proteins and protein machines that keep every living organism alive. And this, he calls the sequence hypothesis, that DNA isn't just a complex bio-macro molecule. It's not just a chemical system. It's a chemical

system that contains information. And then that starts to percolate into the consciousness of people thinking about biological origins. And they realize that now to explain the origin of life, you've got to explain the origin of what we find inside life, which by the 1960s people are realizing is digital information, nanomachines, and a complex information processing system in which the nanomachines are helping process the information that builds the nanomachines and everything else.

It's amazing. The origin of life problem gets, it's immeasurably more difficult at that point. By the 1980s, there's a lot of people acknowledging this. A very important book gets written called The Mystery of Life's Origin. It's published in 1984. It comes out with a mainstream secular scientific publisher called Philosophical Library, and it gets a lot of really strong reviews from scientists who are working on Origin of Life.

But it's written by three guys, Charles Kenyon, Roger Olson, and Walter Brex. who are early proponents of the idea of intelligent design, even before it has the name intelligent design. Is that Charles Kenyon or Charles Thaxton? I'm so sorry. Charles Thaxton, yeah, my mentor. No, keep going. So anyway, I meet these guys at the 85 conference, and it happens that Thaxton lives in the

same city as I do. And so having heard Kenyon, having heard them speak, I become fascinated with this because, as I mentioned, I was working with an early form of digital information technology in my work in seismic digital processing.

Excuse me. No, you're good. And that's where my interest in the original life germinates. And a year later, I go off to Cambridge and decide I'd like to work on this for my, first my master's degree thesis and then my PhD. I was in an interd

disciplinary program in the history and philosophy of science, and I did my PhD in origin of black biology. Would you say it's fair to say in these two realms that a certain materialistic mindset, we discover really the opposite when we start looking at the scientific evidence in the 20th century? That's true for the universe not being internal, but having a beginning. That's true for life not being simple, but pointing towards intelligence. Today, what we find is increased models still to explain the origin of life without information,

still to explain the origin of the universe without a mind, but are those running out of steam? How would you state where we're at today in the debate on those two issues? There's an interesting work in the history of science on this, on describing the features of a degenerative or a more productive research program. And one of the features of a degenerative research program is the proliferation of models and the inability of the community to settle on anyone. And you're finding this, both in this debate about cosmology, we're getting a proliferation.

Now, having rejected Einstein's cosmological, tinkering, having rejected the steady state model, having rejected the oscillating universe model, having overcome various objections to the Big Bang in the 1990s because of the discovery of some of the features of the cosmic background radiation by George... I'm Kirby Kelly, and in my new book, The Fabric of Hope, I want to walk you through seasons of suffering, uncertainty, and waiting. I remind you of this truth. God is never absent, and he is never far away. When life unravels, hope can feel impossible or out of reach. Maybe today you're feeling like things are falling apart and you're wondering if you can trust

God's good plans for your life. But what if, even here, God is still working to create something beautiful. Through honest stories and encouragement, the fabric of hope invites you to see your story through a new lens, one where your hard seasons have purpose and your waiting isn't empty. If you're longing for hope that will never unravel no matter what comes your way, the fabric of hope is for you. Find it wherever books are sold. Smooth and others having with one after another empirical confirmations of the idea of the Big Bang and a beginning of the universe, we still have cosmologists, theoretical physicists formulating these increasingly convoluted and baroque cosmological models, models with lots of moving parts, lots of ad hoc hypotheses,

lots of purely, pure theoretical postulates that are invented solely for the purpose of making the infinite universe cosmological model work. And so I think there are features of these models that I think suggests that what we're seeing is not a constructive development in cosmological thinking, but more of a degenerate research program. People are groping for something that will preserve the infinite universe. And we've seen, we don't want to traffic in motive mongering, but we shouldn't be naive either about the depth of conviction among many physicists, cosmologists, leading scientists, also in origin of life research, the depth of their scientific materialist convictions.

So there's this need to model. something, anything that will preserve that infinite universe. And the same thing is happening in the debate about the origin of life, where in spite of the inability of undirected materialistic processes to account for the origin of information, the information needed to build life, we still have a proliferation of new models and what are called prebiotic simulation experiments

where people are trying to show that, yes, we can get chemistry on its own, unaided by intelligence to move in a life-friendly direction. And what those experiments invariably show, which is, I think, kind of ironic, is that to the extent that they succeed by producing molecular outcomes that are in some way life-relevant, they only succeed because of extensive intelligent investigator interference, yet the experiments are called simulation experiments. So Jim Tour and I have just written an article for a volume coming out with the Cambridge University Press in which we ask the question,

what exactly are we simulating? That's a great question. Because I think what's being simulated is clearly the need for intelligence to generate information that's necessary to building life. It is interesting. I get asked more frequently now than maybe five years ago. like what if we're just living in some kind of simulation? And of course, if we are, that points towards an intelligent design and a simulator. Of course, the next question is what's the evidence we live in a simulation, which would take us aside from this conversation?

By the way, people watching or listening to this. Yeah, the simulation hypothesis is an ID hypothesis. It's a kind of intelligent design. It's implying a master programmer for life and the universe. That's exactly right. It's amazing how many people... Play the logic out. just rename your master programmer with a word that starts with a G.

And you know, it's all. And you've got it. So we're going to come live on Tuesday, by the way. I think I'll have one of your colleagues from Discovery here. A good chance. It'll be Brian Miller to take tough questions on cosmology. So we're not getting into all of this. But if you're like, what about the oscillating model?

What about the multiverse? There's objections you haven't considered. We're going to come back. Tuesday live, 430 Pacific Standard Time. take your question so write them in here and we'll address them i want to ask you a few questions about the movie you know i've been tracking at least about two decades gosh the book that i co-wrote with dempsky understanding intelligence design was 2008 so almost 20 years ago and so when i saw this film a theory of everything i was familiar with a lot of the arguments but two things well a few

things stood out to me number one is the quality of it really blew me away hence it'll be in theaters Second is the clips that you showed. These are stories I've heard about for years. I was like, wow, they've got live footage of this. And third, it's also updated, kind of telling us right where the debate is at today. So I don't want to steal your thunder, but tell us what's unique about this film. Exactly. And easy slip in the tongue to make because there was a biopic by Hawking about Hawking's life called Theory of Everything.

Our film is the story of everything. Did I say a theory? You did. I did earlier. Oh, my goodness. I wrote it down in my notes, a story of everything. Sorry. Although the wrong film, although the hawking pick is great, and it's fascinating.

Yeah, one of the things that we did in the film, you can't answer, especially in a film, every objection to the main argument that you're making. But we tried in each chapter of the film to address the most common objection to the theistic argument that we were presenting. The film does two things. It tells, it's got a long arc of the story arc about the rediscovery of the scientific evidence that has theistic implications. The film is nothing less than, it does nothing less than tell the story of the scientific rediscovery of God, or at least the evidence pointing to God. And it does, so in three movements or three chapters, it first tells the story of the cosmological evidence that the universe

had a beginning, but it also addresses the objection to that that comes from something like Hawking's idea of quantum cosmology. Now, as you and I have been talking about, there are numerous, there's a proliferation of numerous infinite universe cosmologies, and we couldn't possibly deal with all of them in the film, but we took on the most prominent one and showed that it too had theistic implications. So that's one of the rhetorical moves I make, in return of the God hypothesis is to show that either the, if you accept that the universe is best we can tell how to the beginning, that has a theistic implication.

But if you deny that and model an infinite universe cosmology, the model that you are using to, the model you're advancing, itself invariably will have a theistic implication. Typically, it's unexplained fine-tuning. But what the movie does is it tells these three stories of discovery, the discovery that the universe had a beginning, the story of the universe, that the universe was finally tuned from the beginning.

And that's the story of Fred Hoyle, which is fascinating. Yeah, it's an amazing story. And then the story of the discovery of the inner workings of the cell, in particular the discovery of the digital nanotechnology inside the cell and how that is pointing to intelligent design. And in each one of these movements or stories within the story, story of everything. We tell the story of one or more scientists whose metaphysical world was rocked by these discoveries and who ended up changing, changing his mind about the big questions.

Einstein and Sandage in the discussion of the origin of the universe, Fred Hoyle in the discussion of the fine-tuning, and Dean Kenyon in the discussion of the origin of life. So the film is, it is densely scientific, but it's full of great story. And so we weave the stories and the evidence together to make something that I think is very watchable. Oh, for sure. It totally is. So we started with your story of when you were 14. And then we kind of jumped to when you were 27.

That was 1985. You made a reference to interacting with certain thinkers around 1983. I mean, we're 40 years plus removed from that. Your arc for me. That you've been a part of this intelligent design movement. what do you think if you went back, like if you were able to show a film to yourself in the early 80s, of where the evidence is today and kind of what you're doing and the state of the debate, how do you think you would have reacted at that time?

I was thinking about this yesterday, actually. Really? Because every day there are challenges with this work, and some of them are involved having to thread needles, and it can be very tough. but I was encouraging myself by thinking, if I had thought, you know, 40 years ago that we would be to the place where we are now, I don't think I'd have believed it.

And I had no, I just was taking, you know, taking the next step at every point. I wanted to do this kind of work. I was, I'd like the work I did as a practicing scientist, but I was always interested in the questions at the intersection between science philosophy. So doing a PhD in the history and philosophy of science was perfect for me, doing it on a big question like the origin of life was even better, and then meeting people

like Doug Axe and Phil Densky and Paul Nelson early in my career, Philip Johnson, early on, kind of a group of like-minded people kind of congealed and connected. Jonathan Wells was part of that. Right. And then one thing just seemed to lead to another. And now our data, of friendly ID scientists at the Discovery Institute numbers about 3,000. And there's just incredible momentum. We're attracting amazing talent. We have a theatrical release film telling the stories of these great scientific discoveries and many of our key figures.

We've published over 275 books. And our count of peer-reviewed scientific articles, is now over 330. I published one of the first in 2004 and got one of our now colleagues, Richard Sternberg, in a huge amount of hot water. He was the editor of the journal at the Smithsonian Institution. And since then, the number of peer-reviewed articles advancing the theory of intelligent design has just grown exponentially year by year.

So this is a growing research program, and there's growing cultural awareness of the scientific case for the existence of a designing intelligence of some kind, and even as I have argued, a designing intelligence who has the attributes that Jews and Christians, for example, have traditionally assigned to God, the return of a God hypothesis. And we have many, many figures in the culture now that are getting wind of this. We're citing our work as a factor in their conversions or in their consideration of a God question. That's pretty remarkable. I read the book, Mine and Cosmos now, I think, 15 years ago, that Nagel,

would cite intelligent design. That was 15 years ago. But when you were coming in, we were chatting about how we both have different public ministries and occasionally people will just recognize us. But of course, you've been on Rogan and somebody, people recognize you from that pretty consistently. What gives you confidence of how this from a cultural level? So it's one thing to make the arguments from science for origin of life and cosmology.

But on a cultural level, do you say? sense a difference now than maybe four decades ago and an interest in these questions. It's undeniable. It's a shift that's taking place. Just go back two decades. We had a court trial in 2005. I say we. It wasn't really ours. It was a small school district in Dover, Pennsylvania, but the good people of the small school district wanted students to be exposed to the theory of intelligent design and wanted teachers to read a statement about a book that was in the library. we told them this probably wasn't the right way to go. We asked not to be included in the court in the trial.

We weren't. But it went against the school district, and people on the other side of the Darwin ID argument were saying it's over after Dover. Meanwhile, the new atheists were in their heyday. They had plastered across London buses, slogans like, God probably does not exist. so relax and enjoy your life. It may be quite as reassuring as they wanted it to be

with the proviso of probably there. But the new atheists predicated their argument for the non-existence of God or the likely non-existence of God on science. And I think they massively overplayed their hand. And I think many of the evidences that I cite in the return of the God hypothesis were already well in circulation,

but they were fairly effectively ignored in books like the God delusion by Richard Dawkins. And Dawkins also very strongly predicated his argument for God's non-existence on the success of Darwinian theory, or neo-Darwinian theory. He's famous for saying that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. In 2016, I attended a conference convened by the Royal Society, arguably the world's most venerable and august scientific body, convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who were completely dissatisfied with the contemporary textbook theory of evolution known as neo-Darwinism.

They were looking for a new theory of evolution, that would affirm some mechanism that could compensate for the perceived lack of creative power associated with the mutation selection, natural selection mechanism that we all learn about when we learn about evolution in our high school and college classes. That standard Neo-Darwinian theory is the theory that Richard Dawkins has long affirms, going all the way back to his book, The Blind Watchmaker. So he predicates his case for atheism on a failing theory of evolution that even people in evolutionary biology are increasingly rejecting. And so I think these scientific developments, the spotlighting, highlighting and enhancing of the case for theism based on the fine-tuning argument, based on the evidence from cosmology, based on the information argument,

played a role in showing that there was a positive case for God from science, and the refutation or increasing skepticism, even among people in evolutionary biology, about the creative power of the Neo-Darwinian mechanism, undermined the key plank in Dawkins' scientific argument for atheism. So I think those things have played a role in this cultural, shift that we're seeing, the cultural shift is everywhere. You're seeing really unexpected figures who are at least raising and surfacing the God question. You think of Jordan Peterson.

And he isn't saying publicly whether he is or is not a joiner, but he's increasingly highlighting the psychological wisdom of the biblical text. And you have the shift in the thinking of a figure like Joe Rogan, who's investigating the deep questions. You think about Larry Sanger, who's the founder of which spring is full of special days. Easter, Mother's Day, graduation and Father's Day, and Crosswalk has made it easier than ever to find the perfect faith-filled gift for every one of them. The Crosswalk's Spring Gift Guide is your one-stop destination for meaningful gifts your loved ones will treasure from Bibles and Devils. to books that inspire. It's all right there at crosswalk.com. Visit crosswalk.com today and find a gift

that speaks to the heart. Wikipedia. It's had a public Christian conversion and in his memoirs cites some of the works of people in the ID movement is influencing him. Charles Murray, the social scientists, the same thing. In that case, my phone blew up the day he had an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about his new book, taking religion, seriously because apparently he quoted return of the God hypothesis several times. And on and on I could go. In the UK, figures who were part of the new atheist movement, like Ayan Hersey Ali, who have now become very prominent outspoken Christians. So there's a cultural shift taking place. I think this whole question of meaning that we were

talking about earlier is also a driver for this, that young people and serious senior intellectuals this is one of Ion's arguments. He said that atheism for her is a failed worldview. It cannot answer these basic human questions about the meaning of life. It offers no satisfactory answer there. So yes, I think there's a shift coming. I think our film is beautifully positioned to raise and perhaps even answer some of those deep questions about where everything came from and whether or not there is evidence for a person such as God to use the Nagel phrasing. And so I'm very excited to see what the reaction to it might be, given the cultural moment that we're in. Let's take a look at a clip from the film that I have one last question for you.

Absolutely. Thank you. Bill Gates says the DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than any we've ever created. What do we know about the origin of software? It always comes from a mind, from a programmer. In fact, whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we're looking at a section of software code or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book

or information embedded in a radio signal, if we trace the information back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. So the discovery of information in a digital or alphabetic form at the foundation of life in molecules like DNA and RNA is a powerful indicator of a design, intelligence playing a role in the origin of that information and therefore in the origin of life itself. So what's your hope for how people will use this film?

Well, it often said that you don't want to just preach to the choir, right? And so, but I think the choir in this case, people of theistic leanings, people that are God believing, that maybe is still 70% of the American public, I think we'll find this film very reassuring and confidence building. One of the things that I've told my students is that it's okay to have just a little bit of swagger. We've had this cultural insecurity

among Christians and other believers in God, the scientific materialism and the assumption that all the smart people are atheists or agnostics or materialists, I think has made people who believe in God very culturally, intellectually first and culturally insecure. And I think the case for God is extremely strong. I agree. And I think it's okay to have a little spring in your step and to feel a little confident intellectually in what you believe. And therefore, culturally, in asserting the reality of God is something that we need to reckon with.

We're not talking about a theocracy, but I think our theistic beliefs have played such an important role. In the founding of our country, we're celebrating that this 250th year. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. This whole notion of intrinsic human dignity that was crucial to the notion of human rights was derivative of a Judeo-Christian worldview that affirmed the reality of God. It's okay to get back to that and to re-embrace that. It's a great year to re-embrace that is we're celebrating the importance of that belief in our own understanding of our human dignity being made in God's image and the rights that flow from that, which are essential to our system.

So I think that's one take home. So I want the choir to be encouraged. Good. But I also, I think this is a film you can take your skeptical, non-believing, non-theistic, non-Christian friends to you will not be embarrassed, and it will give people a lot of food for thought. We get a lot of mail from people who encounter our work, who have had a profound shift in worldview. I've gotten a lot of mail around Return of the God hypothesis from long-time agnostic physicists or deeply skeptical of religion biologists who have changed their thinking. I will tell you that the information argument is the one that time and time again just makes people stop and think. Really?

That's interesting. Bill Gates says DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. Richard Dawkins is acknowledged that DNA is like a machine code. Well, what do we know about machine code and software? It comes from a mind. In fact, whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, we always come to a mind, not an undirected material process.

the discovery that at the foundation of life there is code, there is information, really should make you stop and think. And that's one of the key – it's the final of the three key arguments and discoveries that we address in the film. Well, there's a lot of good films on intelligent design making this case, but I can't think of one that is better than this one or probably matches it in terms of the quality, the interviews of people you got. John Lennox is in there. I mean, all the experts. tours in there. Tours in there. We have interviews with people who don't necessarily affirm intelligent design,

but just have some great scientific expertise to offer, like the University of California, San Diego, astrophysicist Brian Keating, who's a friend I've met at several conferences. I've been on his podcast, and he gives some great testimony about some of the details of discoveries in cosmology, particularly about the steady state universe and why it was rejected. So, yeah, some really great figures. There's, I think, 22 different sociophers who make an appearance in the film.

We tell the story without a narrator and without a host. That's true. More in the manner of the film, the Big Short, if you ever saw the financial crisis. There you had the principles in the... the story telling the story of what happened. Now, in that case, it was told by actors because it was a theatrical reenactment of what happened. In this case, it's scientists who have played a role in the scientific discussions in one

way or another. So we let them tell the story, and it creates a little faster pace, and I think people will find it engaging. Well, I love this so much that we're doing a three-part series here on the podcast, on the YouTube channel. Have you talking about cosmology? And we hit on the information argument a little bit. have Doug Axe, who of course is one of my colleagues here.

He's one of the experts in the world on the possibility that time and chance could make something as complex as a protein. And Jay Richards to come on and talk about fine-tuning. And after each of these interviews, so we're posting this one on a Friday, Tuesday, we will go live here in studio, 430 Pacific Standard Time, to take the toughest questions that people write in with an expert. So Doug will be here live. We have some, the other week's experts from discovery like Brian Miller coming on. Might bring another Talbot professor on. But believer or skeptic, if you've heard this, you have questions about cosmology for this one in particular. And whether or not the evidence points towards the universe having a beginning as we've hit on here.

For example, we didn't even go into the multiverse. Put your questions below. I'd so like to talk about the multiverse, Sean. Maybe we're out of time. You and I did a full deep dive on that. We could link to that a full hour, but we'll have folks come back. We'll make a point to talk about that on Tuesday. But do two things.

Number one, see the film, share it with a friend. And I would echo that definitely with unbelievers who are open will not be offended, will not be put off, will be intrigued to think about these things in a new way. It is. It is. It's not a sermon on tape. And we address these common objectives. to the design or theistic arguments,

we have a little section on the multiverse. You do? The multiverse is offered as a response to the fine-tuning argument, and we show in the film that the multiverse, the formulations of the multiverse themselves presupposed prior unexplained fine-tuning, so you never quite get away from it. But we do take that objection seriously and take it head on. Well, friends, check out the story of everything.

Join us Tuesday Live 430 Pacific Standard Time to take questions and challenges from this interview and make sure you hit subscribe while you're at it. Dr. Stephen Meyer, thanks for coming all the way down from Discovery up in Seattle to be here with us at Talos School Theology, Bio University. Thanks for spearhead in a great film and just love your work and appreciate your friendship. I appreciate yours and I appreciate the invitation and the conversation, so thank you. Hey, friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button. on your podcast app.

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