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

Key Takeaway

The universe's fundamental parameters—from gravitational force to the mass of elementary particles—are so precisely calibrated that altering them even slightly would make life impossible. This 'fine-tuning' is so exquisite that the cosmological constant alone is calibrated to one part in 10 to the 90th power—like a blindfolded person finding one specific particle among 10 billion universes. Rather than being random chance, this precision points to intentional design, suggesting a mind behind the cosmos.

Episode Overview

Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, discusses how modern scientific discoveries—particularly in cosmology and biology—point toward intelligent design rather than random materialistic processes. He explains how the scientific revolution emerged from Judeo-Christian thinking, how discoveries like the Big Bang and cosmic fine-tuning challenged atheistic scientists like Einstein, and why features like DNA's digital code suggest a master programmer behind life.

Full Transcript

Transcript of DNA Is More Complex Than Any Software Ever Written. So Who Wrote It? Stephen Meyer | Mind Pump 2847 from Mind Pump Show. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Today's episode is a special one. We have Stephen Meyer on the podcast uh where he talks about how everything started. This is like a big debate, right? Was there a creator or everything just appear? He is the main person when it comes to arguing the position of intelligent design. He's a director of the center of for science and culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington. He's a New York Times best-selling author. He's a very intelligent man. Loves to debate this. And this in this episode, he makes the case and it's such a compelling case as to why there probably is a designer behind the universe, behind life, behind everything.

By the way, he has a documentary coming out tomorrow. If you're listening to this when it drops, it's coming out tomorrow. It's called The Story of Everything. It's based on his book, Return of the God Hypothesis. This This is going to be shown in theaters across the country. You got to go watch it. If you like this episode, definitely go watch it in theaters. Okay, Okay, Okay, Stephen, welcome to the show. It's awesome to be here. Yes, it's such an honor. Uh love what you do.

But for our audience who might not be familiar with with you, tell us a bit about your background and uh kind of what you do. Yeah. Well, I currently direct a research center at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and have uh founded a similar institute in Cambridge, England. Cambridge, England. Cambridge, England. The focus of both institutes is examining the scientific evidence that points to not undirected materialistic processes, but to some kind of intelligent design behind the universe, a mind behind the universe and in life. So we're it's a there's a term in in uh British intellectual history called natural theology.

The idea that nature is pointing to God and we're we're is in in essence reviving that tradition. It goes back to figures like Robert Bole and Sir Isaac Newton and one of Newton's mentors named John Ray and um who was a founder of mo of botany. So the early scientists all believe that they were studying nature u as one one one book title put it for the glory of god. There's a famous book by a historian who pub a historian of science who published a book at Princeton press called for the glory of god about the scientific revolution.

And so there's there's been kind of a rise fall rise story in the in the history of science that initially science came out of a of a Judeo-Christian millu for very almost biblical reasons. People believe that they could study nature and understand its secrets that it was intelligible was their word because it had been made in the image of the same rational creator who gave us rationality. So we had rationality that had come from the creator that enabled us to understand the the creation the the order and design that the creator built into it.

So uh our institute in Seattle uh has a program called the center for science and culture and we're challenging what we call scientific materialism. The idea that there's no mind no intelligence behind behind everything and is instead affirming this idea of intelligent design that there is a a mind or creator behind the the physical and biological world that we study. And it's a a venerable tradition in science and we're reviving it. reviving it. reviving it. Yeah, that's great. When when did that separation start to happen?

because you said a few things that I wasn't even aware of uh not that long ago. Um I wasn't aware that the early like the scientific method, the scientific process came out of um essentially the church. They were the ones that were um putting this forward, funding it to learn um essentially the the order and the design of the such a big a different idea today that you know science is opposed to to faith. I guess that's part of your story. you were, you know, pretty hard hard-nosed atheist and you and you placed your faith in science as opposed to belief in God.

But people don't realize that the scientific what we call the scientific revolution, which is differently dated by historians, but um pretty much all agree something really big happened between about 1500 and 1700 in Western Europe in a decidedly Christian uh context or Millu as the as the scholars call it. But uh as you study that it goes back even further into about the the late medieval period. So there's it's an interesting there's a Jewish contribution to this from the Hebrew Bible. There is a Catholic contribution to this.

The Catholic philosophers in the medieval universities were developing methods of studying nature isolating variables. The kind of things that we we learn about in science class those were coming out of out of places like Oxford and the University of Paris. And then there's a contribution from the reformers uh the reformed Protestant perspective. They they especially were uh emphasized the the the both that we were made in God's image number one and therefore we had that rationality that enabled us to understand the world but we were also fallen and that affected our mind.

So we had to guard against um against uh flights of fancy uh expressing biases. We always had to test our ideas against the evidence. So you had a uh and and in the Hebrew Bible, you got the idea of these this these this kind of order that God had built into nature. The the concept of the laws of nature arguably comes out of of the Hebrew Bible. So it's there's a kind of a interesting uh ecumenical Judeo-Christian uh contribution to the rise of modern science. And it happens, I think, in the west really decidedly between about 1300 and 1700.

And then especially those two centuries of the the uh the 16th and 17th centuries are really really dramatic. And so we don't really lose that perspective that that theistic perspective on what's going on in science until the late 19th century with figures like Darwin, Marx, Freud, Thomas Henry, Huxley. These are staunch materialist figures, the great materialists who um want to answer all the big questions that religion had answered before. So Darwin tells us where we came from. Markx has a utopian vision of the future. Freud tells us what to do about the human condition and about our guilt.

Huxley takes Darwin's ideas about the origin of new forms of life and applies it even to the very first life and tries to explain the origin of the first cell from simple non-living chemicals. So you get this kind of materialist synthesis at the end of the 19th century and that becomes the default way of thinking in the 20th century. It affects uh it affects figures like uh um the uh uh Lenin and and and the the the early Marxists in the Soviet Union. They have a materialistic worldview that they express in a Marxist way.

Uh the Nazis are very influenced by evolutionary thinking and that's that's a a re a really kind of grizzly story to tell. And in the west too, we've been affected by uh a more generic scientific materialism that has kind of I think undermined people's sense of of meaning and purpose. So um that the shift takes place late 19th century early 20th century we kind of get a default worldview of materialism. But the argument of my book uh my most recent book return of the god hypothesis is that the god hypothesis the awareness of a mind behind the universe of a creator is coming back not in spite of but because of new discoveries in science.

Can you explain some of those new discoveries that are bringing people back to the possibility that there's a there's a designer? Yeah, absolutely. That's the kind of the story of my book Return of the God Hypothesis and our new film uh the story of everything. And in the film, we tell the story of very prominent figures in science who have had the same kind of worldview shift that you had as they begin to to uh reflect on the on the discoveries that have been made and most of them have to do with biological and cosmological origins.

Where did everything come from? And the first big shift takes place in cosmology. It actually happens starts to happen about a century ago. Um, and it's it's part partly a California story because they in Southern California at Mount Wilson at the observatory, they start building these great big dome telescopes. And because of that, they're able to to uh to resolve tiny points of light deep into into the night sky. And in the 1920s, there was still a debate about whether or not there were any any galaxies beyond our own Milky Way.

there were these little smudges that they could see on on their photographic plates. But as they got better and better uh resolution, better photographic uh uh technology, they realized the little smudges were galaxies, represented galaxies in their own right. And one of the key figures there was Edwin Hubble uh who uh was able we I in a number of my PowerPoint presentations I actually have have his black and white uh uh photographic images of the of this the different galaxies the spiral nebula and so forth and uh so the first thing they discover is there we're not alone there at least there are other galaxies besides ours but then they discovered that the light coming from those distant galaxies is is being stretched out which is was indicated by the redness in the color and uh they realized that it's if it's being stretched out that must mean that the galaxies are moving away so that the wavelengths are are are stretching out like um you probably remember from high school science class the Doppler effect.

You know if a train is moving away the pitch of the whistle goes drops and so the light similarly uh lowers in in in or lengthens in in wavelength and lowers in frequency. And so this was an indicator that the galaxies in every sector of the night sky were moving away from us, suggesting a universe that's actually expanding. actually expanding. actually expanding. And then when when that was coupled with Einstein's new ideas about gravity, uh they became aware that it wasn't just that the that the the galaxies were moving away from us, but that space was expanding as the as the galaxies moved away, that it was the expansion of space that was carrying the galaxies away.

And so that we had literally a picture of an expanding universe outward from a beginning point and that suggested a creation event. creation event. creation event. Now, now I I I just learned this recently actually. It was from one of your talks. I did not know that there were scientists that really struggled initially with the idea that cuz a lot of the belief was that the universe was eternal, right? That it had always been there, right? Therefore, Genesis would be wrong that there would be a beginning point.

And then they discover everything's expanding out which means oh my gosh if we rewind time everything started in one point and and scientists a lot of them were disturbed by this because it kind of pointed back to yeah one one guy with really bad hair who failed to match his socks in in particular did not like this you know Albert Einstein and and he had this awesome new theory of gravity and it's it's been borne out in so many tests it's called general relativity and the idea of general relativity is that massive bodies massive bodies massive bodies um in some strange but literal way curve the space around them such that if you pass light by them you'll see the light take a cur take a curved trajectory and um but Einstein realized that if his his uh idea about gravity was true if if massive bodies are literally curving space then if that was the only force at work in the universe in the big in the vast cosmos then we should essentially Well, we we should be in a black hole that that every massive body would congeal the space around it which would con and every other massive body would do the same and eventually that space would get drawn in and everything would get drawn into one big glump and there should be no empty space in the universe.

universe. universe. But but he realized we don't live in a universe like that. We live in a universe where there's empty space. So there must be some sort of anti-gravity force, some outward pushing force that's counteracting the inward pull of gravity. And he called that the cosmological constant, the constantly pushing outward force that's responsible for the growth of the cosmos. But then as he got began thinking about that, he realized that implies a dynamic universe, one that's expanding outward, which again implies uh expanding outward from what?

From some kind of a beginning point. He did not like this idea at all initially and it it it kind of violated a deep metaphysical prejudice he had that the universe must be eternal and self-existent and and static. So what he did is he fiddled with his own equations arbitrarily. He just set a value for that cosmological constant which was precisely opposite the value of the inward pole of gravity. So that the two he could depict the two forces as being perfectly balanced and the universe as being static and having neither beginning nor end.

And then he breathed the sigh of relief and said, "Okay, we've got an eternal universe again." Uh but then some other physicists in particular, a French uh Belgian uh named uh uh Father Lmetre, he was a Catholic priest. he was a Catholic priest. he started working with Einstein's equations and showed that even with his fine-tuning his fiddling the equations weren't stable that the slightest pertibbation in matter this way or that way uh would cause either a recolapse or an expansion and then further Hubble was discovering that the when he looked at the actual evidence that the universe was expanding and so Lmetra and um a a Cambridge physicist named Arthur Edington challenged Einstein on this Edington urged him to get out to California and see what Hubble was seeing.

And so there's some famous news reel footage. We can even get you a little clip of this if you like. It's really It's really awesome where Einstein is going in the telescope with with with Hubble and looking we've got it in the film. It's it's pretty awesome. And they they go up this uh kind of elevator to the telescope and they're looking out and then two weeks later Einstein gives a a u an interview to the New York Times and he says um well that he this is the three hardest words in the English language.

I was wrong. and and he says Hubble and and his colleague HSN had shown that the universe was not static. It was dynamic. Therefore, it had a beginning. And he later said that this was that his fiddling with his own equations to obscure the reality of the beginning was the greatest blunder of his life. Wow. Wow. Wow. I I misqued him in the book. I said it was the greatest blunder of his career. He he was more emphatic. It was the greatest blunder of his life.

He allowed his philosophical prejudice to uh to to to obscure the the evidence. And And And yeah, and the another point uh that I've heard you make is uh that space, time, and matter uh you can't they one of them can't exist without the other two coming into existence uh at the same time. time. time. Now, this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, eight sleep. So, eight is the most advanced sleep system in the world. So, this is a device that goes on your mattress.

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ultra. ultra. This is part of the the Einsteinian uh gravitational idea is that he he he would talk about spacetime, the three dimensions of space and um and the one dimension of time and they're all they're all connected intimately. And this is a to fully unpack that you got to get into relativity. But the basic idea is yeah, if you if you think about collapsing the universe back in time, if you think about back extrapolating at a previous time, previous time, previous time, you have this this from the observational astronomy, the galaxies are moving outward from the Einsteiny idea that space is expanding with the expansion of of the galaxies.

Then if you if you wind that back in the forward direction of time the matter would be getting more and more diffuse. In the reverse direction of time the matter would be getting more and more densely concentrated. And if the matter is more densely concentrated the space gets more tightly curved. And as you go back and back and back you eventually get to a limiting case where you can't go back any further. And that's that marks the the beginning of the expansion and arguably the beginning of the universe itself.

And there's a whole lot of of interesting complicated physics debates around this tiny tiny smidgen of space where you got you have not only Einstein's gravitational effects but quantum uh quantum mechanical effects as well. And what do we make of that? But the I think the uh the most straightforward interpretation is that the universe looks as you would expect it to look if it were expanding outward from the beginning. Yeah. And the and and uh talk a little bit about the just the finetuning of what is required for us to even exist for earth to even be here for us to have water for uh for for life like how precise does it have to be even basic chemistry is is finally to the idea of finetuning is that there are all these fundamental parameters of physics like for example the cosmological constant or the strength of gravity just those two forces are exquisitly finely tuned.

The mass of the universe or the sorry the mass of the elementary particles, the quarks for example, um all these different physical parameters are fine-tuned in the sense that they fall within very narrow tolerances outside of which life and even basic chemistry would not be possible. Stable galaxies would not be possible. And the the the the degree of finetuning is so exquisite that physicists now sometimes talk about are living in a fortunate universe or a goldilocks universe. That's the kind of idea. Um I had a um a super um uh there was a a professor at Cambridge when I was there who came and gave a talk to one of our our groups and um his name is uh Sir John Paul Kinghorn, famous famous British physicist and he used to depict the finetuning by asking you to imagine that you had flown out into space on a spaceship.

You docked it in on a on a spaceship. You go in and there's this big room and it says uh universe creating machine. So you go inside and sure enough there's this console and on the console there's a a dial for the strength of gravitational attraction. There's a a dial for the strength of the electromagnetic attraction. There's a strength for the other fundamental forces of physics. This a slider that sets the speed of light. There's a um a little a little dial that sets the the mass of the elementary particles.

you have all these parameters that make the universe possible and they're all set to very precise values. And then he unpacks his little thought experiment says and so then you make some calculations because you're a physicist of course, right? So you pull out your slide rule or your calculator and you start making some calculations and you realize if I turn that dial one click this way or one click that way, something catastrophic would happen and life would not be possible. So take that cosmological constant, the outward pushing force that we were talking about that Einstein talked about.

talked about. talked about. Turns out that it's fine-tuned an accepted value among physicists is one part in 10 to the 90th power. Wow. Wow. Wow. There's only 10 the 80th elementary particles in the entire universe. So to get that right by chance would be like putting a blindfolded man out in space trying to locate not just one elementary particle in our universe but looking for one elementary one marked elementary particle somewhere in 10 billion universes our size. It's that's the that's the degree of fine-tuning. There's there's another fine-tuning parameter that's even more exquisitly fine-tuned than that and it's called the initial entropy and that has to do with the configuration of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe.

So it it's as if it's all finely tuned from the just from the beginning to to make it possible for there to be to be stable galaxies. So this is this is kind of the one of the first scientists that discovered this was a another Cambridge physicist named Sir Fred Hy and he was um um um investigating trying to trying to explain the abundance of carbon in the universe because he knew carbon was critical for forming life. It it forms longchain like molecules that you need to store information which is necessary to life.

And he finally came up with a process by which it might happen. He got it tested out at Caltech. He made a very specific prediction related to the process that he had in mind. It came bang on and he realized this is probably how it happened. This is probably how carbon was formed in the bellies of stars. But then he realized for that to happen there needed to be this whole series of just right parameters that where where the relationship between gravitation and electromagnetism was just right.

All these parameters were were fell within these very narrow sweet spots again. And and he had been a staunch atheist. He actually gave the Big Bang theory the name. Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow. The Big Bang. Because he wanted to um stigmatize it. He was trying. It was a porative term for him. Haha. The Big Bang. Yeah. No one believes that stuff. Well, he ended up so he and he did that because he was a very much a staunch scientific atheist. scientific atheist. scientific atheist.

And he completely changed his worldview as a result of his own discovery about the fine-tuning. And he was later quoted as saying that that a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry in order to make life possible. So he was uh so he like Einstein Einstein Einstein H oily changed his mind and and we've had in in the film the story of everything that we have coming out uh at the end of April April 30th we tell the story of these discoveries but the also the stories of the scientists who have changed their minds about the big questions in particular the God question as a result of of of some of the discoveries that they themselves have made made made and a lot of this boils down to um these scientists finding that the odds or the prob probability of these perfect uh circumstances.

Uh like you had mentioned earlier, one of the odds you had mentioned was uh greater than the amount of particles in the in the entire observable universe. They're so astronomically impossible that it's essentially impossible. Now what I would hear uh sometimes people say or argue is that well if you give it enough time uh that this could possibly happen. uh explain that for us because they'll say they they give the the term like the god of time essentially that becomes their god. god. god. Yeah. Well, we call this there's a term in um probability reasoning called probabilistic resources.

So if you've got something that's that's super improbable improbable improbable um you can say well that wouldn't happen by chance. Well well you can't say that right away. You have to know how many opportunities there are for it to happen by chance. And if the if the number of opportunities are sufficient um then then something might then something then then something might happen by chance. Simple example uh think of a bike lock. Imagine there's a nice bike locked up outside and you got a thief that comes along and you've got a a four dial lock.

So that's 10,000 possible combinations. If if the thief has uh has five minutes before the security guard's going to come around the corner, uh there's there's uh it's more likely than not that he will fail to open the lock by chance. doesn't have enough opportunities. But if he's committed to staying there um 10,000 hours 10,000 hours 10,000 hours Yeah. Right. I actually did the I think it was 15 hours. I calculated if he did one combination each each 10 seconds then he'd get to more than 5,000 combinations uh within 15 hours at which point it would be more likely than not that he would open the lock by chance.

Okay. So you always have to know the probabilistic resources. But the the the kinds of probabilities that we're dealing with in relation to the resources available remain small remain in in infantes infantessimally small unless in the case of the in the case of the finetuning you invoke something called the multiverse. Yeah. You probably heard of that and I love to talk about that. So I'll queue you up to ask Marvel. Yeah. So tell tell me a little bit about the multiverse. When did that come out?

Good question. Really good question. And what's that what's that all about? Yeah. Well, this is a an attempt to inflate the probabilistic resources to say that the that the thief has an infinite number of opportunities to to crack the uh the the do the crack the to crack the uh the the do the the code on the on the lock. Um and and the idea is that um well, yes, the the the probability of of landing on the correct ensemble of fine-tuning parameters is infantesmally small in our universe.

taking into account elementary particles seconds since the big bang. Um, any factor you want to figure in, it's it's the probabilistic resources within our universe are way too small to expect that that you would settle on those finetuning parameters by chance. But what if there was a gabillion other universes out there? You know, just made up number as big as you up number made up number as big as you want. Big as you want. Okay. And each of those universes has their own set their own combination of fine-tuning parameters.

So uh different strength of gravity, different arrangement of matter at the beginning of the expansion in those universes, etc. Well, then you would have uh arguably enough uh opportunities for the right sets of dials to dials to dials to align. align. align. Align. Perfect word. Thank you. Um but there's a there's there's a problem with that that leads to an even deeper problem. The first problem is that um uh other universes by definition are separate from ours. We don't know about them. We're positing them. But if if there are other universes that are separate from our universe, what happens in those other universes has no effect on what happens in this universe, including it has those other universes would have no effect on whatever process it was that set the fine-tuning parameters in this universe.

Right? So simply positing other universes doesn't solve the problem. But in virtue of that, multiverse advocates have rec have essentially recognized that and they've proposed instead universe generating mechanisms so that you can you can think of our universe as the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery where there's an underlying process that's spitting out universes. So there's a kind of connection to a common cause. And so that would would potentially work. But the problem there is that those universe generating mechanisms, some based on something called string theory, others based on something called inflationary cosmology, those universe generating mechanisms themselves turn out even in theory to to be uh finely tuned.

Even in theory to have a generate to generate new universes, the universe generating mechanisms have to be finely tuned themselves. tuned themselves. tuned themselves. And so no one has been able to get around this. And so what what it shows is that the the fine-tuning can be explained by positing other universes if you posit an underlying universe generating mechanism, but those mechanisms themselves have to be exquisitly finely tuned. And so you're right back to where you started, which is unexplained fine-tuning. And yet we know in our experience that finely tuned systems, think of a radio dial, think of a French recipe, think of um an internal combustion engine.

finely tuned systems where a lot of parameters have to fall within narrow tolerances to achieve a significant outcome. Those systems always are the product of intelligence of a mind. So since the multiverse hasn't gotten rid of ultimate finetuning, I think you're right back to where you started, which is a very strong indicator of a finetuner of a prior intelligence. Isn't the prior of a prior intelligence. Isn't the very fact that we find laws of the universe that that there even are laws that that that could lead uh or or lead us to believe that there is a designer?

I I find it interesting. I I I posed this question on one of our episodes where let's just say theoretically we we landed on Mars and we found an advanced computer and we could get on the computer and we figured out ways to make it work and it can does these calculations. No scientist would look at that computer and say, "Well, this must have happened by random chance." we would immediately go there were there was alien life here that designed this. Why is it that we look at something uh so many times more complicated uh like life um and and try to explain it away without there being someone that put it together.

together. together. Maps push pull legs ppl you asked for it you got it. By the way, there's two versions of this program. One for men and then one for women. The programming is different. Women have a more higher emphasis on lower body volume, glute training, shoulder volume. Men, it's more traditional. Now, because it's a brand new program, we're launching it right now and it's 40% off. If you go to mapspppl.com, mapspppl.com, mapspppl.com, use the code ppl, you get the price slashed by 40%. Also, if you sign up within the first few days of the launch, you can attend live coaching by one of the Mind Pump coaches.

They're going to do 3 days of coaching breaking down things like nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, really to help you become more consistent and maximize your progress through the program. We also include a supplement schedule guide which will be free with this program. Again, you can get all of that included 40% off mapspl.com. The code is PPPL. Well, there two questions embedded in that and they're both good. Um the first having to do with with natural laws you know that that there's something mysterious about the regularities of nature themselves and Newton and other early scientists thought they were a mode of divine action they were express that God was holding the universe together by what we call the laws of nature and there's there's a whole big literature on that and there's a a theistic argument from natural laws.

The fine-tuning argument is a in a way a kind of wrinkle on that because in addition to just the brute fact of regularities, the regularities have very particular strengths. Gravitation could be stronger, could be weaker, there's no underlying logical or physical reason why it is exa has exactly the strength it does. But if it were just a little different, then you wouldn't get you wouldn't get life or even basic chemistry. So that's back to the fine-tuning argument. So, it's not only the fact of regularities, which some philosophers think point to have have a bet um have theistic implications.

They're better explained by theism, but it's also some of the features of the regularities that also seem to point to God in the sense that they reveal fine-tuning. But then when we when we get to biology, I I love your example, you know, we have a little video now about, you know, about the iPhone, you know, and the complexity of the iPhone. There are are features of design systems that we recognize from our own designs, right, that happen to be present in living systems. And there are two things that actually three things that jump out at me.

One is the the the the digital code that's in the DNA molecule. Okay? And we you we run a we run an iPhone off of code, right? So we know where code comes from. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program but more complex than any we've ever created. Richard Dawkins, the staunch uh formerly Oxford uh scientific atheist, says that the the uh DNA contains machine code. Well, what do we know about the origin of machine code or of of digital code or of software?

It comes it always comes from a programmer. And uh in fact whenever we see information and trace it back to its source whether it's in software or in a paragraph in a book or hieroglyphic inscription or the information that we're transmitting o with acoustic waves right now information always ultimately comes from a mind not a material process and the most fundamental discovery in modern biology post Watson and Crick is that that the DNA molecule and other large uh information bearing structure structures in cells are information bearing.

They contain information. So that suggests that that um that life owes its origin at some level to a mind. There's a master programmer behind life. This was um Francis Crick's big insight. He and Watson elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule. 1953 1957 1957 1957 he realizes what the what the the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA are doing. He realizes they're functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or zeros and ones in a section of software and they're they're providing instructions for building the proteins and protein machines that all cells need to stay alive and this becomes known as the sequence hypothesis.

In other words, we have Bill Gates is right. It's like software program or or like um uh a 3D printer where we take digital code and that we use digital information to to construct a a three-dimensional structure. That's what's going on inside cells. And so that just kind of revolutionizes biology and also raises this huge question, where does the information come from? Because what we know from experience is that information always comes from a mind. And so that's one of one of the key arguments for design is u in my book signature in the cell and also um it's it's the third act in the in the film we have coming out.

Wouldn't the the um wouldn't the presence of DNA in all living things uh couldn't that point to the fact that we all came from some original living thing and evolved out from that? Well, there was an argument for a while that that uh said, well, look, we have a univers there's a universality of the code that all organisms use the same genetic code. They have different they have different text. Yes. Different different instructions, but they're the the text is translated according to the same um genetic code.

That turns out no longer to be the case. There's there's uh I think something like 22 different codes that have been discovered. So the idea that that the universality of the code points to a common ancestor I don't think works. There's other reasons I think to doubt the univers universal common ancestor thesis and that's coming out in a lot of different branches of science. One has to do with another thing that's been discovered in in the in the genome which is these are called orphan genes.

uh and that is that u if you look across the phoggenetic u landscape of all the different kinds of animals and plants there are um on a Darwinian view of things every gene every sequence of AC's G's and T's the genetic letters should have some closely related sequence in some other organism and what we're finding is that in uh across the landscape of different types of plants and animals that that there are these genes that have no known similarity to any other genes. They're discontinuous. They don't.

And so that's not what you'd expect on a Darwinian view of things. The Darwinian view of things, you'd expect everything to be closely related to something else so that you could depict the history of life as a great continuous branching tree. Instead, we have these discontinuous discontinuous discontinuous um representations of gene sequences that do completely unique things in in different phogenetic categories of life. Um but also you have the problem in the fossil record that the the major groups of organisms. of organisms. of organisms. I was just going to ask you about that.

So yeah, because some they'll point to the fossil record say, "Hey, we have fossils that seem to show an intermediary between this uh animal and this animal and looks like this one was like in between them." Very few. And they typically are at what are called the lower taxonomic levels. Okay. That instead the the big story is that the major groups of animals the plants and animals but uh especially in the animal kingdom uh arise abruptly in the fossil record. I wrote a book about one of the big abrupt events called the Cambrian explosion.

And there explain what that is. What is the Cambridge explo? Well, in the ca in the Cambrian is one of the the oldest periods of of life as documented by the sedimentary fossil uh the sedimentary geological record geological record geological record typically dated about 520 or 530 million years ago depending on whom you ask. And in that in a narrow seam of sedimentary rock all around the world, you get um roughly twothirds of the animal body plans that have ever existed on the planet arising in that narrow window.

So suddenly suddenly suddenly suddenly abruptly and um a body plan is a unique arrangement of body parts and tissues. There's a way of a unique way of putting an animal together. So you might have some animals with uh hard exoskeletons like trilobytes or uh the arthropods. You might have some with have an internal noticord or a a spinal cord. Uh the cordates completely different body logic. And so you've got these different types of animals with completely different body logics arising in that narrow window of time.

And as you investigate, as paleontologists have investigated the strata beneath the Cambrian, they they do not find the transitional intermediates, the precursors that you would expect and we've been looking for a long long time. So it's very very abrupt. There are a few precamrian animal forms, but they they are much simpler. they don't connect morphologically to the ones that arise abruptly and the attempts to explain the absence of the of the animals as a result of incomplete sampling or incomplete preservation have failed for various reasons.

So the leading paleontologist saying, "Hey, we we have to recognize this. This is a this is a some what Darwin called assultation, an abrupt appearance of new form." And in um 2017, I wrote an article with the German paleontologist Gunter Beckley about um not only the Cambrian, but we we documented uh I think it was 17 or 19 other major abrupt appearances of of new forms of life throughout the fossil record. It's not only the Cambrian. It also happens at at other other levels at not only the fil but the classes the orders of the the first mammals, the first uh the first the first turtles, the first uh sea reptiles.

Just go down the list of the the major groups of organisms. Uh the first flowering plants. These are in fact the flowering plants arose so so abruptly that that Darwin called it an abominable mystery. So yeah. So yeah. So yeah. Wow. And and I've heard uh evolutionary scientists point to the fact that we uh have uh been able to breed animals and plants and we can show radical changes in them just by our own selective breeding. And then that they they use that as evidence that well evolution must work that way.

Um, I think it's pretty widely recognized that we can produce modest adaptive changes through artificial selection within limits. That very fairly quickly the the uh the genetic variability that's inherent in the genome is exhausted through those types of experiments. You can make dogs only so big or only so small and you can change their form very modestly, but you you can't turn dogs into into felines. You know, that's that's a different a different kind of form. Um now that has not by itself been perceived as a problem for uh sort of a neodyarwinian view because the artificial in selection doesn't induce any mutations and the m mutations are kind of the go-to source for innovation in the neodyarwinian scheme of things but there are other other kinds of problems that I think limit the creative power of the natural selection mutation mechanism.

Explain that. explain that because I've heard people say, "Well, there was there were these random mutations that turned this uh you know uh sea animal into a land animal." Uh what do mutations typically lead to? Um and and is that is that a possibility or is that Yeah, mutations are can sometimes be favorable and they can some and but they're they're more often delterious, but they can sometimes be favorable, but they they typically uh lead to very limited uh biological change and they don't they don't change body plans.

Uh, and let me just there's I'll give you a little bit of a biology lesson, but I think it's it's a fun one. So, there's something that some Caltech scientists have discovered called developmental gene regulatory networks. So the idea is that as um an organism is going through development um a fertilized embryo, fertilized egg and it then will divide and from one cell into two into four into you know geometric expansion and um as the as the as the organism is developing more and more cells come online and the cells have to differentiate themselves one from another.

you have some cells become muscle cells, some cells become nerve cells, some become uh maybe bone uh etc. Uh now Uh now Uh now when the scientists have mapped out what's controlling the expression of the different expression of genetic information in different cells at different times, they map that out and it looks like an integrated circuit. there's this uh integrated control of the expression of information so that so that a a gene will u will produce a gene product uh a regulatory RNA or a protein which will in turn either turn on or turn off some other part of the genome.

So it's all carefully choreographed and integrated. So uh when when they map all this out, it looks like an integrated circuit such that um well and what they found experimentally is if you start to perturb these regulatory networks, uh the animal will will shut down. If you change them very much at all, then the the animal development will just shut down. The animal will die before it reaches full development. So here here's the problem. You have this gene regulatory network. It's absolutely necessary to build an animal body plan to get all the cells in the right place so that everything is differentiated and and is performing its correct function.

So the bones are in the right place and the nerves are in the right place and the muscles are in the right place etc. So you got to have these developmental but uh gene regulatory networks. So you got developmental gene regulatory network A makes animal form A. Now you want to change animal form A into animal form B. But you know you got to have a developmental gene regulatory network, right? But what do we know about developmental gene regulatory networks? You can't change them very much at all without destroying the the the the animal form.

So you got to get from here to here, from one animal form to another. But the underlying thing that makes animal form animal form can't be changed without destroying the process that would produce the animal form in the first place, which would terminate the evolutionary process. M and so get there's a so mutations here are uh if the mutations are big enough to make a change that would produce a body plan they're big enough to destroy the animal the developmental gene regulatory network and you're not going to get from A to B in the underlying architecture that's necessary to make animal form and the scientists who discovered this no friends of uh creationism or the theory of intelligent design but they say that neodyarwinism is a catastrophic mistake because it cannot explain this fundamental need to transform things at a body plan level in the underlying architecture of these developmental gene regulatory networks.

regulatory networks. regulatory networks. So it's it's just it's just one of a legion of problems that that scientists are coming to recognizing that that the mutation natural selection mechanism has very limited creative power. It does a nice job of explaining um smallcale variations, the finch peaks getting bigger and smaller that we all the stuff we learn about. Yeah. the the yeah the antibiotic resistance the the peppered moth changing their coloration superficial stuff is a fine explanation but to extend it beyond that to explain fundamental changes in architecture of animals it it does not have that creative power and and any number of leading evolutionary biologists have pointed this out.

I attended a conference in London in 2016 convened by evolutionary biologists who were calling for a new theory of evolution because they know that that the neodyarwinian theory that we all learn about in our textbooks does not work. It lacks a a mechanism a creative a mechanism with a creative power to generate fundamentally new forms of life. So we we're all we're in need of a major overhaul of what we're being taught at the high school and college level because the people at the at the highest levels of the field know this and it's not percolating yet.

But But But what what about time and and carbon dating and and how accurate that is cuz back to Sal's point earlier that seems to be like the argument to go to is just like if you give it enough time, you know, it's just I mean discovered it yet. yet. yet. How how accurate is our our carbon dating system that we use to depict how old things are? I I think carbon dating is generally accurate. It can you can have contamination of samples. Carbon dating isn't really relevant for these big time scales we're talking about with uh uh the origin of animals or you know on an evolutionary scale.

It's more on the tens of thousands of years old for more relevant for archaeological artifacts. But there other radiometric methods like uh uh potassium argon. I generally think these are pretty accurate methods. But the question is do we h the question of do we have enough time is is still there. It's still a big problem. And in in signature in the cell my first book I calculated the the probability of of generating a functional protein by chance in a prebiotic uh environment prebiotic soup or other environment.

And the pro the probabilities are astronomically small even in relation to the probabilistic resources of the universe. If you took if if every event in the universe had been devoted to searching for a new protein sequence from the big bang till now, call it 13.8 billion years, not nearly enough opportunities to search a space as large as that which corresponds to a protein sequence. So, so the and then uh Jim Tour, James T, the um the very prominent organic chemist at Rice University has recently come out with a paper showing that the processes that degrade biomolelecules in a presumed prebiotic environment happen much faster than the processes that would be required to build bio biologically relevant molecules.

So, time is not your friend, he argues. It's actually the enemy. It degrades. things degrade faster than they get built, which means time is time is working against you, not for you. Okay. A common critique that I've heard is that intelligent design isn't falsifiable or testable. You can't make predictions with it like you can with other scientific methods. Um how do you answer something like that? Are there things that we can use intelligent design uh to test or to make predictions? predictions? predictions? Yeah, absolutely. First thing to say though is that is that many scientific scientific theories are tested in different ways.

Okay. Uh we test theories not only by the predictions they make but also by the by their comparative explanatory power. If you have one model that can explain facts that we already have better than another model, it it that confers support on the model that does the better job of explaining. We know for example that if we're talking about the the digital code in DNA, we know of a cause that produces digital information and that is intelligence or mind. Um the the the alternative causes that have been proposed those based on chance, those based on natural laws, those based on some combination of the two.

Um I go through this in great detail in some of my books. uh these have failed and this is why the um origin of life research as it's called has reached a state of impass is there there are no known materialistic causes or that can explain the origin of digital information. digital information. digital information. Um but we do know of a cause that can do that and that is that is mind. So we have this fact that we already know that DNA contains information in digital form.

We know of only one cause that's sufficient to produce that. Therefore, only one thing that can provide an adequate explanation for the origin of that information. And so that is itself a kind of test. It's an important test. It's the test of of explanatory power. Intelligent design provides a better explanation for the origin of information than other competing I see hypotheses. But it also generates predictions. And one of the predictions that generated was that the so-called junk DNA that scientists were talking about would turn out to be importantly functional.

So, functional. So, functional. So, and are we finding that? Absolutely. We're finding that is it's a confirmed prediction of intelligent design over and against the prediction and expectation of the neodyarwinist when when when the um the non-coding so little background um you have a long stretch of DNA about 2 to 3% of it plus or minus codes for building proteins. Uh but the rest of it was for a long time terra incognita. Incognito. We didn't know what it was doing. They called it junk. It didn't.

They called it junk. It's and and the and the neodyarwinists uh sort of jumped to the conclusion that that the non-oding regions were nonfunctional and that they were the holdovers from the random trial and error process of mutation and selection. It was an accumulation of mutations over time. In other words, evidence that you've had mutations over time just didn't work. Exact. It was a great way to think if you're working in a neodyarwinian framework. This is what we'd expect. We'd expect to see a lot of u one when one scientists called it flopsum and jeepsum, you know, just the the the the genetic garbage accumulating over the o over over the millions and millions of years.

Um and we we looked at that and said uh the ID people starting in the 1990s Dean Kenyon Forest Mims William Demsky any number of ID proponents said well you know that's that that is a a logical prediction of neodyarwinism but our model's different. We think that the int that information that the information in life was designed and that and we would expect we think mutations are a real process. we'd expect to see some mutational accumulation, but we wouldn't expect the signal to be dwarfed by the noise.

And so we're going to predict that that the the over that that those non-coding regions perform very important functions that have yet to be discovered. And 2011, the encode project comes out. uh one of the early uh one of the early scientists uh working on this uh one of the scientists working on this first was a man named Richard Sternberg who was in the early 2000s predicting function for for non-coding regions and was starting to find it but then this massive federally funded project called the encode project published 2011 and it turns out that at least 85% of the the non-coding regions are being transcribed ergo doing something and we now know that the non-coding regions of the genome are not only importantly functional, they're functioning much like an operating system in a in a a computer program that's controlling the timing and regula that's regulating controlling the timing and expression of the excuse me of the coding files.

So there's a there's a deep functional integration of the function in the non-coding and the coding and it means this is a really an awesome system. I started to tell about the the three big things we found in life that are obvious indicators of design. One is the presence of of digital code. The second is an intricate information processing system and the non-coding regions are part of that. And the third is the miniature machines that we're finding. Explain the miniature machines. Yeah. Well, this is a kind of an awesome thing.

Anyone who sees this has to say, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I've seen this. So I've seen like like uh images of uh you know uh u parts of the body or mitochondria moving and they seem to be moving like a machine across a cell a cell a cell kind of it's mind-blowing stuff. We have a whole a whole uh section in the film story of everything about this because the the the producers have have they they went out to some great animators and and depicted these things with some real precision.

But um inside living cells today we have found um rotary engines. engines. engines. We have found sliding clamps. We have found turbines. We have found little walking robotic motor proteins that tow large vesicles of materials along tracks that are effectively they're like railroad tracks. I've seen them. They're incredible. incredible. incredible. Yeah. It's called chines motor walking motor proteins. And so we have animations of all of these in the new film because you really got to see them to believe them. And it it it beggars belief, strains credul to think that any of these machines could have arisen through a an undirected mutation selection type process.

The problem is and this is what Michael behe our colleague at Lehigh University showed uh back in 96 in his famous book Darwin's black box is that these machines uh time and time again have a property that he calls irreducible complexity or what an engineer might call functional integration where you need you need a a very large core set of these of these parts that make up the machines to be present in the right configurational order with each other for the machine to make to to have a function at all.

And if you remove one of them, the machine shuts down. So imagine you're gonna you want to build this machine in a gradual step-by-step Darwinian way. And you've got a 30part fleeller motor that's you know it's got a whip-like tail, it's got a rotor, a stator, a drive shaft, it's got bushings. I mean you when you look at these things, it looks like something Mazda designed, right? Okay. So you start removing any of the core parts of that system and the whole thing stops working and it doesn't work.

So how are you going to build that up gradually if if the the natural selection selects for functional advantage? But if there's no functional advantage until you get the whole set of those parts working in close coordination, there's nothing to select. There's nothing that will be preserved and passed on to the next generation. So you effectively have to build the whole thing all at once or not at all. And building the whole thing all at once strains credul because it places an enormous burden on on on purely random processes.

random processes. random processes. Yeah. The probabilities just continue. The probabilities at that point blow out the Yeah. the Yeah. the Yeah. And smaller. Do you find it interesting that because I as you're talking I just think you know uh as um you know the the Christian Bible says we are made in in God's image that the way that we design things, the way that we create things would uh to a a much lesser degree but somewhat mirror what we're finding in nature like these machines that you're describing when we're looking at cells inherent knowledge.

Where did that come from? from? from? Look very much like machines that we create before we even knew that the cells were. It's not like we copied them. know that they exist like somebody's trying to get our attention, right? right? right? Oh, we we've made something like that, you know. I had a uh we had a you know. I had a uh we had a Microsoft uh one of their elite um architect level programmers working in our lab in Redmond. Uh he he granted his time to us for two years, took some time off of Microsoft and he wrote 10,000 lines of code to um help us simulate the what's called the gene expression system.

the way that that or sometimes called the SIS system for protein synthesis, how the digital code in the DNA directs the construction of the proteins and protein machines, the machines that the proteins make. Because each of these like the fleeller motor or the ATP synthes, the little turbine, they're made of proteins that have very specific shapes that fit together with other proteins with very specific shapes. So they're like mechanical parts of a of an integrated system. And so he wrote, you know, 10,000 lines of code to help us simulate and not not remember from civics class how a bill becomes a law.

It's how a gene becomes a protein. How the information in the gene become directs the protein synthesis. And one day he walks into my office and he throws a book down on my table. He's a big tall guy about 6'5. He's got, you know, shock of wild hair, genius type programmer. And he says, "I get an eerie feeling that someone figured this out before us." and he points at the book and the book is called design patterns and it's a standard um manual for computer programmers for writing code for what are called computer design patterns and a computer design pattern he explained to me is a an established method of of processing uh u digital information of of storing or processing digital information and he said he said I'm learning the gene expression system.

I'm recognizing all these established design patterns from computer science. Wow. Wow. Wow. We have um uh automated uh error correction, right? We call it spellch check. There's automated error correction in the transmission of genetic information. If something goes wrong and you get the wrong amino acid in the wrong place, there's a little there's a big protein that comes along, excises it, and put the puts the right one in place. He says we have hierarchical filing. Um, we've got within the within the genome, you've got files within file, you've got files within folders and folders within super folders and you know, and so you have this kind of hierarchical organization of information.

And he just started to tick these things off. And he said, and then he repeated the I get an eerie feeling that someone figured this out before us. It's it's as if we're we're we're stumbling in in our own information age. We're stumbling onto an awareness of a deeper form of information technology that was invented long before us and upon which our very existence depends. existence depends. existence depends. Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow. How often does it happen uh that a a scientist uh uh who starts out atheist or maybe even agnostic and the deeper they get into uh their studies the more they start to go maybe there is a god.

Are do you see that often? Well, this is the story. We tell several of these stories in the story of everything. Um, I Einstein never came to a fully orthodox kind of theistic belief. He believed in some kind of mind behind the universe. He came to recognize that the universe definitely had a beginning. And and the reason he didn't like that was he thought it it smacked too much of the kind of Genesis account or pointed to some sort of immaterial a need for a transcendent and immaterial creator.

Hy was thought the same thing. He he very explicitly said he didn't like the big bang theory because it it it it reminded him too much of the Genesis account. He thought that the scientists who were proposing it were being too influenced by the Genesis 1 one thing which is kind of comical because that's the last thing I think that was happening. But um so you so that you have these kind of conversions away from materialism, sometimes to fully Christian belief, sometimes to some sort of theistic belief, sometimes to a rudimentary awareness of a designing mind behind things.

But there is this shift taking place with a lot of scientists. And in the in the film, we tell the story of of of another sc a great cosmologist and astrophysicist named Alan Sandage. And I I happened to have heard him speak when I was a young scientist at a conference and he gave a a presentation on the evidence for the big bang and then uh announced that in his talk that he was no longer a scientific materialist. he had been a longtime uh Jewish agnostic uh about religious matters and uh he he he now said he had become a Christian and that uh and that his conversion to theism to a belief in God was a consequence of his awareness of the scientific developments.

He became a a god believer because of not in spite of the scientific evidence. And what he described was was the evidence for the beginning of the universe and its finetuning. And there was a memorable line and we we found the footage of this. I saw this myself. This is one of the things that rocked my world as a 27-year-old scientist. A year later I was off to Cambridge to get to start studying these things. And um he's looking into the camera, not too happy about this.

The sense of you know this was he was a reluctant convert to this position, but he said here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural supernatural supernatural event. There's no way this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it. Why? Because the realm of physics as we know it comes into existence at the beginning of the universe in the big bang. Before that, there's no physics to do the explaining. There's no there's no material to explain the origin of matter and and he recognizes this deep problem and and then ultimately comes to belief in God and through soularching uh he ends up having a specifically Christian conversion.

conversion. conversion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What about your what about your own personal story? Did you come from a place of always believing in intelligent design? Like how how did you get so passionate about what you study now? now? now? That that's a that's a great question. I was uh maybe like you guys really in into sports as a as a you know teenager and I broke my leg in a skiing accident. Um and I also I I think I was somewhat neurotic probably not too stable mentally.

I just was my mind was always spinning. And during this period in which I was sort of confined to a full leg cast, my mind was just spinning out of control with all these questions that were I didn't I didn't know to label them as such at the time, but they were kind of existential or philosophical. I had this question about well what's what's going to matter in a hundred years years years and uh it's part of this started because my dad gave me a book about the history of baseball while I was convolesing and I was reading about all the the stories of the greats you know I wanted at that at that stage I was 14 I was really into into baseball and basketball and I the thing I wanted more than anything was to play shortstop for the New York Yankees you know and but all this all the stories of the of the sports heroes ended the same way they would uh they get scouted they'd come up to the majors.

They'd have this amazing career. They'd amass records, maybe, you know, home run records or erra or they'd win World Series. Then they'd retire at 36, 38. Maybe they they play on to 40 and then they'd live out the rest of their lives enjoying the celebrity of a of of of um having been an a great athlete, but then what you know, they passed away at some point. They died. Uh Ted Williams is no longer with us. I think he had the greatest swing ever. I, you know, I I read his book on hitting, but at the end of the day, there's a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper and that's the measure of a person's life.

Or or is it could there be something more? And then I I I raised this with my mother who hated sports and she thought it was this, you know, the grown men chasing a ball around was her thing always. And but so, you know, she said, "Well, that's because you you should be a surgeon. You should like, well, okay, what if what if I'm a surgeon? then I'll save people's lives and they'll live for a while but then they'll die and so what's you know it was like that old Charlie Brown cartoon where you know there Lucy's skipping rope and then suddenly she stops you know it all seems so pointless after a while and I could see this rhythm to life of routine but it didn't seem to be going anywhere and then I had weird thoughts about time which also really freaked me out because you could you could take an event okay I can remember that event it just happened right but it's already gone where did it go and um And I just had this weird feeling.

There had to be something somewhere that didn't change or everything that was constantly changing was of no ultimate significance. And I don't I didn't know how to explain it any better or worse than that. I just had and I could go on, you know, spinning spinning spinning. And uh one day I had this thought, maybe this is what it means to be insane. insane. insane. And then I had I had a panic I had a p a panic attack and a surge because I didn't see anyone at school asking these kinds of questions.

and nobody was talking about this. And so, so then I had about just an extended period of like 6 months, still in the leg cast, can't do anything, overactive mind, and I have it's like this dark thought. I get afraid of the thoughts I'm having because it might mean that I'm insane and then I get afraid of the thoughts that I'm insane and then it's a fear of a fear and it's just a fear of a fear and it's just a downward maelstrom and it's just just utter darkness.

And I remember staring at, you know, some some pattern on my window sill thinking, "My life is over. This just nothing makes sense." And um so I have a happy golucky brother who's my alter ego. I'm a philosopher. He's an entrepreneur, you know, just and he he kind of started to pull me out of this is the school started up again in the fall. I got out of the cast, but I'd have these recurrent bouts of this kind of metaphysical panic. And I didn't know what it was until I got to college and I had had a a philosophy professor and we were dis he was teaching the work of the atheistic existentialists Jean Paul Sartra and the depressing French philosophers and one of them Sartra had this quote he said without an infinite reference point nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning and I thought oh that's what was bothering me and I rushed up to after class to talk to the professor and I said because I told told him about some of this stuff that had gone on with me as a teenager.

And I said, "I wasn't insane. I was just a philosopher." And uh he said, he said, "Well, but there's a fine line between philosophy and insanity, you know, but what what happened for me is you mentioned, you know, the biblical worldview." So, I started started started I don't know, I was maybe a sophomore in high school. A couple years later, I picked up the big white fat Catholic family Bible. We were sort of lapsed Catholics, nominal. And I opened it and it fell open to the a page between the two testaments.

You know, the picture not of, you know, Jesus with lipstick on, you know, the kind of sometimes you'd see the in some sacred art, but it was no, it was a manly, muscular uh carpenter, and it had the the verse underneath from uh Matthew 11:28. Come unto me all ye who labor and are burdened and heavy ladened, and I will give you rest. And I thought that sounded pretty good. And I just started reading the next page, which was the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew.

And I I couldn't get more through more than a a chapter a night, but I had to read a chapter a night because it was settling something inside me. And as I read further, oh, then I, you know, all kinds of new questions. I remember sometime in my middle my junior year, I I resolved, I'm going to stop thinking about Christianity. I'm going to stop thinking about Christianity. I have to stop. But I couldn't. I couldn't. But what I found was there were things that I encountered in the sort of the general call it the worldview of this of the scripture that were addressing these these questions I was having about time.

For example, I got to passage in the book of Hebrews. It said and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. And then I found in the Exodus that when Moses wanted to know the the the name of the the voice from the burning bush who was sending them and the and the and the voice says tell them that I am has sent you. I'm that I am has sent you. I'm the eternal self-existent one. And so there were oh I sense there had to be something that didn't change or else everything that did would have no meaning.

Well maybe there is something that doesn't change. And so I began this sort of exploration and uh So I I ultimately through college I took a lot of I I did I did a double major in science but I was always sneaking over and taking philosophy classes and I had this great uh Christian philosophy professor who kind of helped me start to make sense of all this stuff. And so I became convinced that Christianity was true in the middle of college but I wasn't quite ready to I didn't want it to be true quite yet.

I didn't really settle till my first year out of out of university in my first job. And then soon after that I attended this conference where Alan Sandage was where Dean Kenyon, one of the origin of life scientists who also changed his mind from being a chemical evolutionary theorist to a proponent of intelligent design. I started to encounter some of these early proponents of the of the idea of intelligent design. And then and I I just got seized with this. So I had my my reasons for conversion were mainly philosophical philosophical philosophical uh and somewhat biblical and then um and but then I found that it was this scientific support for the the basic worldview of of biblical theism as well and that's what that's what re then I then I just got uh I I got lit you know I got ignited and and and u you know I went back to this old professor after I had been at this conference and told him about in particular the DNA argument the idea that the the the digital code in DNA was pointing to a a pre-existing intelligence and and he said this is he said you get in the middle of this stuff as fast as you can.

He said this is the most significant thing to have happened in philosophy in 300 years. This is about what what you're talking about is the is the reformulation of of the of the design argument. And if there is validity to that, that changes everything in philosophy and and in our whole western culture because that's where we lost the the conviction that there was public evidence of God. And if if that comes back, that's going to change everything, he said. So, wow. Do you do you think breaking your leg was a blessing in the end?

I do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Boy, it was a miserable time though. I mean, you know, cuz I had I had no no structures to make sense of anything and Yeah. But yeah, I think back on that and I still have the book. My dad wrote me a a very moving inscription in the in the baseball book, you know, about about the the experience of the broken leg. I lost him. Uh he he died a year ago. Um came to faith late in life in some significant measure because of reading he read a book by Lee Strobble called Case for Creator and the the Strobble book had two chapters in it about about his kid about me.

So he had to read it and that he was an engineer and then this the intelligent design stuff started to make sense to him and one of one of his best friends became a believer u having uh attended one of my talks and seen the animation of how the how the digital code in the DNA directs the construction of the protein machines. He walked out of the talk turned to my dad fellow engineer they'd been they'd been buddies and and co-workers uh at Boeing and other aerospace comp companies for like 50 years.

He walks out and turns to my dad and says, "Chuck, did you see that animation of of of the interior of the cell?" And my dad nods and he says, he said, "Chuck, there's got to be a god." You know, and uh and so these two old codgers in their 80s start taking themselves to church without the wives prompting them. prompting them. prompting them. That's great. So, one of the first things that I I that, you know, moments I had uh reading the Bible where I was just it just hit me.

And it sounds silly, but for me it was such a big deal was in Genesis. It was the first time I had ever read from beginning to end or actually any of the Bible and it was literally in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and I said time space and matter have to exist at the same time literally right here in Genesis and it completely there's an astrophysicist in our film named Sarah Salviander who has some very interesting videos about how just the first couple verses of Genesis comport so beautifully with our modern cosmological understanding of the origin of the universe.

It's definitely worth a a look and she's in the film. She's awesome. So, awesome. So, awesome. So, has it has anyone made uh that I know you've had the opportunity to debate other people on the other other side. Has anyone made a good argument that's made you go back and like check and research and feel like, "Oh, wow. That's a good argument there." Well, um can I can I make one one more comment about Sal and then come back to your question? The other thing in the Genesis account and also in the in the what what's called the John 9 prologue, the first chapter of the book of John, you get this connection between between God creating and information.

In the beginning, God said in Genesis, okay? And then in in John 1, it's in the beginning was the word. And one of the scientists that I heard at this initial this initial this initial conference where I also heard Sandage, a man named Dean Kenyon, um was he was a leading chemical evolutionary theorist who repudiated his own theory because he realized it couldn't explain the origin of the information in DNA. And so he had this this kind of interesting multi-phase con intellectual first intellectual conversion where he shifted from chemical evolutionary theory to to saying at this conference it's time for the theologians and the philosophers to reopen the natural theological question.

In other words, is nature pointing to God? and because of the information in DNA and so he first shifted from being a chemical evolutionary theorist to being a proponent of intelligent design and then he came across the scriptural passages also in one of the letters of uh the epistles of John it talks about um about Jesus Christ being the word of life yes and this this recurrent idea that the word is necessary to creation and you realize that's what we're seeing in biology that's you can't build life you can't build biological form without biological information.

So he ended up having a a a a fullon religious conversion as well as a scientific conversion and it was predicated by some of these insights that he w was having scientifically scientifically scientifically in which he was also finding an echo in in the biblical text. So um and now so yes many debates lots of uh some really great interlocators. Um, one just hat tip to a a gentleman I like very much who passed away last year, Michael Ruse. We were we were frequent, friendly debating partners going back to my first year out of grad school.

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he was he was very kind to me, offered even though we were on the opposite sides of the issue, he offered to help me u uh get established in my career in the philosophy of science. And so I always appreciated him very much. And we have a book coming out with in the Cambridge University Press next year that's co-edited by my colleague William Demsky, a a leading proponent of intelligent design and Michael Ruse who passed away before the book could come out.

So it's aostumously edited book by Ruse. So I just give him a hat tip. Um we um there there's an interesting debate going on right now about the origin of the universe. There are leading uh physicists and cosmologists who are still uncomfortable with the idea of a beginning. And there has been a proliferation in recent years of new cosmological models that attempt to restore the idea of an infinite universe. U they're infinite universe cosmologies. And I had a debate in Oxford Oxford Oxford um in October with a a science writer journalist uh named Phil Halper who's worked closely with a lot of these uh cosmologists who are formulating these infinite universe cosmologies.

And Halper's argument and the argument of one of his co-authors uh uh uh a Persian uh cosmologist named F. Shorty is that look there are lots of these new models so we can't really say that the universe had a beginning after all. And my counterargument in the debate and this was a really interesting it's it's going to be a very current debate going forward is that yes it's always been possible to model the universe into infinity. Okay, this is what Einstein attempted to do. Remember that he he set the cosmological constant at just the right value so he could portray the outward push and the inward push in kind of an uh an equilibrium.

But it turned out not to be consistent with the evidence. Um and uh and what's going on now is that people are very cleverly reintroducing in for completely different ways in in infinite infinite universe cosmologies. But what we found in studying all of them is that they have a a a high cost uh a high cost in terms of credibility or or evidential support. The the the cost is that number one, most importantly, all of them involve some kind of unexplained fine-tuning. Remember that Einstein's model, he had to fine-tune the cosmological constant to get it to balance the gravitational force in order to depict things as as static.

Well, if you bring fine-tuning in, add new fine-tuning, you're just providing additional support for the theistic argument, but on other grounds. Okay? So, you're not getting around theism by getting rid of the beginning in your modeling. You're just providing additional support for it. A lot of the models have very wonky physics, too. Physics, they invoke physics that violates established physics in order to bring the infinite universe back into into currency. Some of them involve some mathematical slight of hand with some kind of funky things that other physicists are saying, "Wait a minute, you that's not a move you can you can actually make." And lots of them involve postulating purely unobserved ad hoc uh um hypotheses.

So they be they end up violating AAM's razor because they're so convoluted and baroque in all of the the theoretical pure pure theoretical postulates. to invent a a kind of force or a field that doesn't we have of which we have no experience but it helps you reposition the universe as being infinite. So, so yes, you can remodel the universe as being you can model it as being infinite, but the cost of doing so, there's a huge cost to the credibility of the models. And even if you posit these models, you you even if you posit these models, you don't get around theism because you have this unexplained fine-tuning to deal with.

And so, this was a major focal point in the debate that that he and I just had and it's very very current. He wrote me a nice inscription in his book afterwards that it was the toughest debate he'd ever had. And I have to give a hat tip to him. He was a very good debater too. But I I think the framing that we're we're we're offering here is really gives you a roadmap to all this proliferation. It's not a healthy thing in the history of science to um to have a proliferation of models.

If the community can't settle on something, it's usually because you're trying to put a round hole or a square peg in a round hole. And if you just look at the observational astronomy, you've got an outward expanding universe. The evidence suggests outward expansion in the forward direction of time and a collapse or contraction in the reverse direction of time to a stopping point past which you cannot go any further. There's nothing in what we're observing that suggests a static a static universe from infinite from infinite past.

the the most um what we see is exactly what you you'd expect if what if if if the universe is expanding outward from a beginning point. Yes, you can cleverly model your way out of that, but only at a cost. I wanted to ask you just uh personally this something I've been tripping out on ever since I've read about this and I know quantum physics very complex like the theory of it and everything but the double slit theory and then the observer effect and if you could kind of explain that a bit for me for me for me maybe how that how that kind of weaves into into into and by the way side note quantum physics is one of the first things that made me go wait a minute this is weird yes it's really weird and it doesn't act uh you know according to Yeah, one of my colleagues, George Gilder, likes to say that that quantum physics has shown that the heart of matter at the heart of matter is a mystery.

If if matter can be both spatially extended, if you get if it gets small enough, matter can be both spatially extended and spatially discreet at the same time, what kind of a thing is that? Well, maybe it's not actually a thing. Maybe it's more of a of a well, they call it a wave function. You know, it's it's a more conceptual than it is material. Um, material. Um, material. Um, yeah. So I do explain that nicely in I and I worked hard at this. I got help, you know, retoled with some I did a physics major, but some of this stuff you have to go brush up on before you write on it to make sure you get it right.

And we've got we got a great network of scientists and uh so um so I explain this in chapters I think 17 and 18 of return to the God hypothesis. the the experiments that give you this idea that that matter can it's the double slit experiment that it that it can be um act that uh small bits of matter may act as waves and particles at the same time. time. time. This becomes relevant in the cosmological context for a really interesting reason that relates to what I was just saying.

One of these infinite universe cosmological models, maybe the most popular one is called quantum cosmology. And the idea is that when you go way back in time, you get the universe would be small enough that in addition to whatever's going on with Einsteinian gravity, there would be quantum effects would start to take over. And so when the universe is super super super small, it's um whatever that is is going to act in a quantum way. It's going to be spatially extended and spatially discreet at the same time.

And if it's spatially extended and spatially discreet, can you really say that it's the kind of thing that would cause curvature like like most matter does in in in in larger chunks of matter do in Einsteinian gravitational physics. And so there's this worry, well maybe we can't back extrapolate all the way to the beginning because we just don't know what things would have been doing in that kind of a of of a regime when things are that tiny. And but here's the here's the interesting thing that our best attempt to depict that um is we've applied one of the equations from quantum physics called the Schroinger equation and adapted it to that cosmological context and that new that adapted equation is called the Wheeler Dwit equation.

And when the physicists try to solve that equation, they get a picture of all the different types of universes that could emerge. The different universes with different gravitational gravitational gravitational um uh fields and distributions of matter, different spatial configurations and distribution of matter. And so they depict that the solution, you got a big hairy equation. you if you solve it then you get a what's called a sigh function a wave function that describes an ensemble of possible universes that exist in superp position. So different universes, they're different from each other, but they exist simultaneously, but they don't really exist physically anywhere.

It's more of a mathematical, it's a it's a mathematical expression. It's a a function. Okay? function. Okay? function. Okay? And so out of that, they say the universe comes. universe comes. universe comes. So you have this weird paradox where out of math comes matter, space, time, and energy. Number one. Yeah. And secondly, to get the right math, the right wave function that would include a universe like ours, which would allow the physicist to say that we've explained our universe, you have to solve this big prior hairy equation, but the equation has an infinite number of solutions of solutions of solutions unless you artificially constrain what are called they're called the boundary conditions.

So you've got to restrict the degrees of mathematical freedom of this big hairy equation to get an output that you want that enables you to say well our universe could have come out of that. But what are you doing? You're inputting information into the math to get the output you want which is say you you are modeling the intelligent design of the universe. So this is supposedly a model that gets you around the beginning and around the implication of a creation event. But it just brings in a transcendent a need for transcendent design on other grounds.

So this is what I was talking about. It's unexplained finetuning. It's a kind of finetuning. of finetuning. of finetuning. So I explain this in the in the So there's a big quantum dimension to all of this. But it doesn't it doesn't solve the problem of of the creation of the need for a creator. It it actually reinforces it in a different way. And also what is this thing about matter coming out of math? Math is conceptual. Math is an idea. And one of the great quantum physicists Alexander Valin u has said you know if if before there was matter time and energy if if if if these equations this realm of equations existed before matter space time and energy what what could that be because equations math this is the realm of of of these are conceptual and so are we really saying that the universe came out of a mind right right right he actually poses that rhetorical question at the end of one question at the end of one of his books.

Why why do you think so many uh scientists are uncomfortable with the idea of a designer? Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, there has been a deeply rooted uh default way of thinking for at least a century and a half in science. And I think it's the same reason um Christian people get uncomfortable people if someone challenges their beliefs. You know, it's a human thing. you know, if we have a deeply if we're deeply have a deep conviction about something, we tend not to want to give it up easily.

And um and so there there's a Michael Ruse, the gentleman I mentioned, philosopher of science, uh used to he wrote a book arguing that that neodyarwinism functioned as a kind of religious system of thought for many uh proponent for many people working in evolutionary biology. Why? because it answered one of the great worldview questions. Where does life come from? Where you know the fun most fundamental worldview question is what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes? And evolutionary biology, neodyarwinism in particular, provides a partial answer to that.

It says that life comes from this undirected materialistic process. And so Ruse said, you know, that this is functioning in a quasi religious way for many of his own colleagues who he was a neodyarwinist himself. neodyarwinist himself. neodyarwinist himself. Um and and so I think I think all of us feel, you know, when those kind of deep convictions are challenged, we we react in a human way and we we we don't want to rethink those things and we don't do so readily. But have you ever had anybody uh who's come to your talks or maybe even someone you debate uh change their mind, come to the faith?

uh as a result I get a lot of mail from people who've read my books that have had that kind of experience particularly the last book on return of the god hypothesis some sometimes you know people that have had 30 30 40 year careers in physics or uh in biology or whatever um debates u I have had people make interesting concessions in debates about uh about specific points in fact in the debate I had with Phil Halper at the end he said uh the the moderator asked us each each to you to you to you uh give give the other guy a hat tip on something and say what what what did you did you you know was anything you learned and he he he acknowledged I'll have to think about this point Steve made about these cosmological models invoking unexplained finetuning I haven't thought enough about that yet so um but um I I there there was one debate we had about the bacterial fleeller motor where uh I explained that the the genetic evidence showed that the parts of the fleeller motor um had not uh the the fleeller motor had not evolved from simpler parts but it rather oh no excuse me there's there's the the fleeller motor there's another thing called the type three secretratory system which is a kind of it's it's got the inner workings of the fleeller motor but not all the all the all the accutrima and some people have proposed that the type three secrettory system was the ancestor from which the flegeller motor evolved.

And in the debate, I explained that the genetics showed that it was the other way around that the that the fleeller motor um was the the aboriginal form and the type three sequatory system was a devo a devolutionary byproduct of the system or something that had arisen independently. And after the debate, one of the guys on the other side came up to me and he said, he said, I won't say the name of the other scientist, but some other scientists had given him the argument about the type three being the ancestor.

And I said, I told him it might it might be the opposite, and now you made me look foolish, you know. So So uh anyway, yeah. So you you you have people that do debates that want to win at all cost and you have people that wanted that do debates to want to get to the truth and I've encountered both and I you know I think it's coming on on me and my side our side also to when we get something wrong we got to own up to wrong we got to own up to that.

So, uh, my my favorite, uh, current theory is the simulation theory that which which is like, well, aren't you kind of saying the same brought that up? Aren't you kind of saying the same thing? But it's funny that it's just it is it is obviously a a design hypothesis, right? Saying that, look, there's this we we're seeing all this evidence of information, information processing. This looks like a computer world in a living setting. there must may maybe maybe there's a a master programmer behind everything and we're just a simulation.

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

behind everything. behind everything. That's right. That's right. That's right. You uh you referenced uh Genesis a couple times. Uh what's your belief on the uh the six days of creation and how long that actually was? Yeah. Very very very contentious question within the the Christian world, I guess, right? Um I as I mentioned, I I don't have any problem with the u the basic accuracy of the radiometric dating methods. I think they're they're they're pretty pretty good. they can you can have always have contamination of samples.

So I accept that the universe is uh that the earth is very old that the universe is very old. I think the the evidence we have of light coming from distant objects in space etc provides pretty compelling evidence for a very ancient universe but one that's still finite. And if you set that finite date at whatever you like 13.8 8 billion. It's it's not enough time to um explain the origin of the finetuning by chance alone or to explain the origin of proteins on planet Earth.

Same thing that people think that that amount of time gives you the probabilistic resources that you need to explain life in the universe. It doesn't because life is so immensely complex and the probabilities are so small even in relation to those kind of big numbers. Um the uh it it happens though. I have a bit of a hybrid view. I Oh, well the other thing is I don't think the Genesis account teaches a young earth. That's the that's the shocking thing to a lot of my uh Christian friends.

I'm a a Bible believing uh Christian. So not all proponents I should say not all proponents of intelligent design are. And uh because it's a evidence-based argument, not everyone comes to the same conclusions about religious stuff. But I am a a Bible believing Christian. But I don't think the Bible teaches a young earth. And one of the re one of several reasons I have for thinking that is that if you do really careful exesus on the Genesis 1 text, you get to day four. And in day four, it says that that God either created or caused to appear.

There's a Hebrew verb haya that has either meaning. um doesn't really matter though because what the text says is that he either created or caused to appear appear the sun and the moon and he gave them as markers of the the seasons and the days and the years the days the years and the seasons. So they're time markers but wait we're in day four already. We've already had the days of creation established. We've had three yoms of creation already. Um, so it's hard to So it's almost like a little signal.

Be careful not to impute your method of timekeeping to the the the timekeeping that's going on in the in the Genesis account because account because account because we mark time as the result of the movement of the sun across the ecliptic, okay? Across the arc of the sky. And we have more sophisticated ways of doing that now, but it's we have always in human history had solar denominated days, right? So if the sun is not around to be marking time, if it's either not visible because it it hasn't yet appeared or it's not been or it's not there because it hasn't been created.

Either way, we do not have time markers available to us to until day four. So whatever was going on in day 1, day two, day three, and arguably in the the rest of the days of creation, because they're also linguistically linked to yoms, you know, day biblical Hebrew days, um it we we can't at least know that they were 24-hour periods, 24-hour periods, 24-hour periods, right? So theoretically, there could be a million years between each day. Yeah, arguably. Yeah. and and so so we we I think we have to look to the science to the to the evidence of the natural world to date the the universe in which and the and the planet in which we live.

Uh it happens I think that the sequence of events that are recorded in the Genesis days align remarkably with what we know about natural history and there's the whole thing we could do on that is but it's to me to to me it's it's quite remarkable. Well, I'm I'm interested in that. Explain that. Explain that to me. What? Well, the the the sequence of life forms in day five and day six. The um the um uh you have you have the waters day two or day three.

You have the waters below and they're all gathered into one place. Well, the the coral area of all the waters being gathered into one place is the land is in one place. Well, what you know early on in our geological history, we had this idea about Gwana land, a one giant continent or pangia, right? So as you as you well and the the text also starts with the most the most shocking statement of all in the beginning. This is what cosmology has revealed that there was a beginning.

So as you walk through the days and you go through sequentially u the the the the sequence of events is um is remarkably accurate to what we know scientifically. Um, I don't think that the days of I don't think the Genesis account is meant to be a science uh account, but the is not comprehensive. It doesn't tell us everything we want to know about the about about the history of the planet or the history of life. But what it does tell us is representative and it's and it's accurate.

it's accurate. it's accurate. Um, there's a poetic structure in Genesis. The things that are created on day one are ruled by the things that are created at day four, day two, day five, day three, day six. There's all kinds of things going on in the Genesis account. It's very very rich. It's full of of of interesting. It's full of insight about human nature. It's full of in insight about metaphysics. In particular, it's the only ancient account in the world that suggests that the universe is not eternal and self-existent, but it's dependent on an external creator, which I think has more and more and more credibility as we learn uh things cosmologically.

So, I think it's it's just it's an amazing amazing passage, but I don't think it teaches a young earth. earth. earth. Yeah. I think it's really interesting that um uh that you would look at that. I think sometimes we take it for granted. I know I did, but when I looked at uh biblical uh scripture um and I looked at it and said, "What human mind would invent this or create this?" It became obvious that no person would come up with this idea. It just doesn't doesn't make any human sense.

Uh, you know, uh, part of part of that was me realizing that a lot of the ways that we things that we take for granted, like where we believe, um, that we have protected rights, where did that come from? Nobody would have invented that. I if I looked around, I would never guess that we all have, uh, you know, that we're all inable rights. rights. rights. Yeah, that makes no sense. We don't look the same. We're not the same intelligence. We're not the same, you know, strength and power.

And so to me, it was like, oh, this this obviously was not something not something not something definitely not the same strength as you guys, you know, been working out. But uh yeah, I got a ways to go. Yeah. No, this is Tom Holland uh Tom Holland's point, the great the British historian has written the book Dominion and he's been in the news. Um he was for a long time calling himself uh he was for a long time calling himself a a Christian atheist because he discovered the importance of Christianity to to to the west to our culture to all civilization.

He said we're we're swimming in Christian waters and we don't know it. You know where do we get this idea of human rights? He said this is apart from the biblical idea of being made in God's image. This is an utterly exotic concept. You know, nobody else would come up with no one else has come up with this. It's a western concept that's come out of out of uh Judeo-Christianity. Judeo-Christianity. Judeo-Christianity. Uh so yeah, that's that's a great point. That's a that's a great way to that's how I would have termed you a Christian atheist.

Yeah, that's how I Well, this makes sense, but yeah, maybe well yeah, Tom I don't think Tom is still an atheist. I think he's he's uh if not if he's not crossed the line he's close you know. So are you finding interest uh around intelligent design growing uh recently? It seems like there there seems to be much more interest and I think it's tied to more scientific discoveries or maybe just people feel like uh we need a sense of purpose and meaning. I I think I was going to say oh my yes you know in 2004 and five we were in the media a lot.

There was a court trial in Dover, Pennsylvania where a little school district tried to get a book about intelligent design placed in their library and they wanted teachers to tell students about it and the ACLU, excuse me, me, me, re reacted as they would and there was a big court trial. We actually thought that the school board had framed the whole thing in a kind of u counterproductive way, urged them to withdraw the policy. They didn't. It went to trial and in a school dis in in a um jurisdiction in central Pennsylvania, it was intelligent design was ruled unconstitutional, but it's had no it has no uh that ruling has no applicability beyond that that area of central Pennsylvania.

But what was interesting was afterwards the kind of scientific atheists atheists atheists uh were were very quick to dance on our graves and say it's over after do that was their mantra. And now we're in and in ' 04 I had published one of the first peer-reviewed scientific articles in a mainstream journal. It was a journal published out of the Smithsonian Institution called the proceedings of the biological society of Washington. And that that caused a huge furore. The editor got got got persecuted and hounded eventually ended up leaving the Smithsonian uh for having allowed the article to go through peerreview and getting published.

getting published. getting published. Now we're 20 years on from that or more and our latest count was 328 peer-reviewed Wow peer-reviewed Wow peer-reviewed Wow articles in in in scientific journals. So uh and lots more almost 300 books uh and and our message is getting out. We're attracting I think we're attracting young people, young scientists much faster than the than the the opposite point of view. We have the energies on our side. But beyond that, I think there's been a shift in the culture. The the new atheists of Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, uh Christopher Hitchens, these guys, I think, massively overplayed their hand.

M um Dawkins is not quite a figure of ridicule in the UK, but you can't use him as a foil anymore because he's it's understood that he overplayed his hand. And Ayan Hersi Ali, one of his sidekicks for many years, has recently announced a conversion to Christianity. She to your point about this. Yeah. to her to your point she's said among other reasons for her becoming Christian is that uh the the Bible and Christianity belief in God answers that fundamental question of meaning and that that scientific atheism that scientific atheism simply can't answer.

Um, I had an interview with Piers Morgan a while back and I we got into a discussion about this whole issue of of of life after death and meaning and and I said, you know, nothing can mean anything to a rock or a planet or a DNA molecule. Things only mean things to persons. This was what was bothering me as a teenager, by the way. Um, and yet we we our persons all die. So unless there's a person whose life persists beyond our graves, there's no possibility of ultimate meaning for human beings ultimately.

You know, what's the point? Yeah. What's the point? And that and and um um um I got into a discussion with about this with Piers Morgan on on air. He he revealed that he'd had a long conversation with Ricky Jerves about this. this. this. And what what Ayan Hersi was saying is that is that scientific materialism has no answer except one in the negative. um to that to that question. And now that's not in a sense strictly speaking a an evidence for belief in God, but in her view it was it was evidence of a failed worldview.

It was a worldview you couldn't live with. And she's since been I know having long conversations with a colleague of mine, John Lennox, and and finding out that in addition to that deep sense she had that that this just won't work is that there's a lot of evidence for for for belief in God as well. Uh but so there's a lot of factors going into this, but there's a there's a Harvard study that came out um of young people showing that something like 56% of young people 18 to in the 18 to 30 range acknowledge having persistent doubts about whether or not their lives have any h have any ultimate meaning or purpose.

And I I think that that's that's a culture that's a civilizational crisis. civilizational crisis. civilizational crisis. Yes. And and and I think as a consequence of that, a lot of people are opening themselves up to the kind of to the kind of journey that you've been on, you know, could there be something more and the journey that I was on, you know, and and and I think the scientific evidence that we're marshalling and citing is a an important can be important to people as they as they realize it's not just that I maybe want this to be true or hope something like this could be true, but there's actually evidence for it.

Yeah. that that that God actually is a reality. reality. reality. Yeah. My big fear um and what I'd just like to encourage uh scientists is that um not there's evidence for this um it does give you a sense of pe of peace, purpose and meaning. But we also need it to be true because science divorced from the objective morality is not good. Uh it turns into scientists not asking if we should but rather can we. Yes. And it turns into all kinds of crazy grizzly crazy grizzly crazy grizzly scary experiments because there is no underlying underlying underlying uh you know moral foundation.

Um, and then it just becomes a question of can we and uh gosh, you know, there's been enough sci-fi movies to demonstrate what that could look like and and our human imagination can't even Well, you know, you just as simple as something as abortion on demand or or, you know, the kinds of experiments that the Nazis did, you know, which just just awful stuff. That was very well said. I should be interviewing you, you know. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. Appreciate. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Well, thank you guys. This has been great. great. great. One of my absolute favorite interviews. I really appreciate you making the the the trip down here. This has been so great. great. great. It's been just delight. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.