Can This Man PROVE That God Exists? Piers Morgan vs Stephen Meyer

The Big Bang Theory why would that lend support to a theory of a God the picture of the universe that has emerged is a universe that had a definite beginning and therefore requires some sort of external Creator or cause and that comes back to the idea of a designer of all this are you prepared to accept you could just be completely wrong about this one of the scientists who first discovered these fine tuning parameters was uh Fred Hy later quoted as saying that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible

I would say I love the way the monkeys always make it into the origins discussion even if it's in physics always goes back to monkeys is your belief that the Darwin Theory actually fails I think it does fail the idea of natural selection acting on random mutations and variations is now understood to lack the creative power to generate major changes in the history of Life Bill Gates said that DNA is like a software program but much more complex than any we've ever devised if you could get the answer to any of life's great Mysteries that

no one's ever worked out what would they be when you look at what's happened in Israel and then Gaza in the last 6 months why would a God that has the universal creative superpower allow such misery and hell have you thought about that well of course popular wisdom has it the scientific understanding has challenged or even replaced the notion of God my next guest has become one of the most controversial philosophical Minds on the planet by arguing pretty much the opposite but Steven C Meer says Humanity's greatest scientific discoveries prove there is an intelligent mind

behind the universe he's a New York Times bestselling author who's tested his ideas on some of the world's biggest debate stages and Stephen cire I'm delighted to say it's here in London Delight joining me on sens absolutely I mean you got an amazing pedigree to discuss all this got a PhD in a philosophy of science from Cambridge you're a former geop physicist you now direct The Discovery Institute Center for Science and culture in Seattle you've had New York Times bestsellers signature of Mel Darwin's doubt Return of the god hypothesis and you've been on all the

biggest podcast in the world Joe Rogan Ben Shir and now I'm glad to say uh uncensored this all blew up last week because Tucker Carlson went on Joe Rogan and I don't know if you saw this but he said this about this very issue take a look if evolution is real and if there is this constant I don't know but it's it's it's visible like you can measure it in certain animals you can measure adaptation yeah but there's no evidence that EV in fact I think we've kind of given up on the idea of evolution

the theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin is like kind of not true in what in what sense well in the most basic sense the idea that you know all life emerg from a single cell organism and over time and there would be a fossil record of that and there's not your response well uh I don't know what Tucker knows about all this but uh probably not as qualified as you but he's he's you know he likes to start with something that happened here in London a few years ago 2016 major conference convened by the

Royal Society arguably the world's most August and prestigious scientific body was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who uh are dissatisfied with the standard Neo darwinian theory of evolution and many of the the conveners are calling for a new Theory because the primary mechanism of biological change articulated by Darwin and his subsequent followers now called the Neo darwinists the idea of natural selection acting on random mutations and variations is now understood to lack the creative power to generate major changes in the history of life and is is the the at the Crux of this

debate is it as Tucker was getting at there is it that if you actually start from where Darwin's theory Begins the creation of the human being was so complicated the body The Way We Exist is so complicated it doesn't make any rational sense there's two issues really there's how do you get to the first life from the simpler non-living chemicals that's sometimes called chemical evolutionary theory and that's a complete mess it's in it's a state of impass and almost everyone even your recent guest Richard Dawkins acknowledges we have no chemical evolutionary theory that accounts for

the origin of the first life and many people don't know that Darwin didn't attempt to explain the origin of the first life rather it he presumed one or very few simple organisms which we now know are not were not simple and then proposed a mechanism by which you could generate all the new forms of life we see on the planet today but even that now is being challenged because the main mechanism of evolutionary change does a nice job of explaining small scale variation what Tucker was referring to I think as adaptation this would be examples

like Darwin's finches where the beaks get little bigger a little smaller in response to varing weather patterns but it does a very poor job of explaining the major Innovations in the history of life such as the origin of birds or mammals or animals in the first place and there in the fossil record we do see very abrupt many uh instances of very abrupt appearance without the trans transitional intermediates that you'd expect on the basis of the darwinian picture of the the tree of life so is your belief that the Darwin Theory actually fails then I

think it does fail uh I think it it captures an element of the truth there's a the the small scale microevolutionary variation is certainly a real process and no one uh disputes that natural selection is a real process but what's what's at issue now is the degree to which it has genuine creative power and I think at this 2016 conference the opening talk was given by a prominent Austrian evolutionary biologist not an American talk show host and uh uh he enumerated five major explanatory deficits of Neo Darwinism many of them surrounding this problem that the

mechanism lacks the the generative or creative power necessary to account for for the major Innovations in the history of life well your bestselling book uh new book Return of the god hypothesis you argue there are three big scientific discoveries that point to the existence of God I want to go through these one The Big Bang Theory so why would that lend support to a theory of a God or God right let maybe just a little framing uh before I dive into the evidence um uh Professor Dawkins at Oxford has said that the Universe has precisely

the properties that we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose no design Nothing But Blind pitiless indifference and though I'm on the opposite side of this science V God issue with with the good professor I think he does a marvelous job of framing key issues and this is one of those great framing quotations because what he's saying is that that whether we think of it as a scientific question or a philosophical question or both if we have a hypothesis about reality the way we test that is by looking at the world around us

and seeing if what we see comports with what we would expect to see if our hypothesis were true and his hypothesis is that of blind piess indifference which is a a shorthand way of saying that everything came about by strictly undirected material processes and what the materialists expected coming into the early 20th century was evidence of an eternal self-existent Universe one that had been here for an infinitely long time and therefore did not need an external Creator what in fact the astrophysicists the cosmologists the astronomers found was evidence of a universe that had a definite

beginning and therefore one that could not have created itself because before the matter of the universe came into existence there was no matter there to do the causing and so the the picture of the universe that has emerged starting from the 1920s all the way to the present both from observational astronomy and from theoretical physics is a universe that had a definite beginning and therefore requires some sort of external Creator or cause Dawkins is obviously one of the world's most famous atheists are you a a believer in God yourself I do believe in God yes

okay so let's play a clip from Dawkins on this show so why is it not possible that there is a superior being power which many people believe in in different ways possible are at the bottom of the garden all sorts of things are possible you can't deny that well except I've never seen fairies in the garden no you've never seen God either no but you don't know for sure that either doesn't exist no I don't know that fairies don't exist fairies may may be leprechauns for all I know you know my big question for all

atheists well is okay you don't believe in God but what was there before the Big Bang before this all started what in other words what was there before supposedly nothing what is nothing nothing to me seems to be a totally in congruous word what is nothingness and if you can't explain it it to me and I believe in God but to me it suggest there must be a a power bigger than the human mind the start of all this that was able to comprehend what may have happened because we can't right docet wants to portray

theistic belief as if it's uh equivalent to belief in fairies and and he'll concede that well it's possible but I think there's a stronger argument for the the the theistic case and that is that when scientists and philosophers reason from evidence they typically use a method of reasoning that has a technical name it's called inferring to the best explanation where the best explanation is one that where you're invoking a cause which has the kind of powers that would be required to explain the phenomenon of interest and you correctly pointed out in your conversation with him

that when you get back to that what physicists of often call The Singularity the point where matter space time and energy begin to exist the materialist is really up against a huge conundrum because prior to the origin of matter there is no matter to do the causing that's what we mean by the origin of matter that that's where it starts and so if you want to invoke a cause which is sufficient to explain the origin of matter you can't invoke matter it's in principle materialistic explanations are in principle insufficient so you need to invoke something

which is external to the material universe and is not bounded by time and space as well and that starts to paint a picture of the kind of cause you would need that has the the sort of attributes the traditional the traditionally associated with God God is a a Timeless uh God is outside of time and space has causal Powers is is an agent with volition and therefore can initiate a change of state from in this case nothing dis and do you believe that God uh created this original single cell that from which everything flows to

us oh the Single Cell as opposed to the universe well I guess you you go back to the universe and then you go back to the creation of a single cell that has this incredible complexity that eventually through the process of evolution leads to human beings I do think do you believe that's really the most likely scenario yeah I do think there's incredible evidence of intelligent design at the point of the origin of life because that first simple cell um in the 19th century Thomas Huxley said that the cell is a simple homogeneous globule of

undifferentiated protoplasm and Brilliant PHR wonderful he was one of the great scientists in the 19 century but we know so much more now that he didn't know and that what we now know that is that inside even the simp cell we have digital nanotechnology we have the information stored in the DNA we have an Exquisite system of information trans um storage transmission and processing and and that information is being used to build protein machines and and other even more complex nanom Machinery inside the cell so it's a sort of automated Factory run by digital information

people didn't know about that in the early 19th century do you believe like I said originally there's just one single single solitary cell that's created well right presumably that's where what you think I I I do think there was an original cell that was created because the theory of evolution says the journey from single cell to the full complexity of life on Earth and so on happened by random trial and error but your position I think is that it's so complicated this original single cell so complex for all the reasons youve just articulated that that's

just simply not feasible that it would be just random trial and error it had to be the creation of some Superior right am is that right well again there's two contexts there's how do you get to the first cell and then how do you get from the first cell to everything else let's just take the origin of the first cell you think the creator of the universe is God I do and then out of the universe comes the creation of a single cell which again is God right here's the evidence though that when when we

see information in uh a digital or alphabetic or typographic form and this is what we actually see in the DNA when Francis Crick elucidated what he called the sequence hypothesis in the late 1950s he realized that the four subunits along the interior of the DNA um are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters in a section of software what we know from experience is that whenever we say information of that sort it always comes from a mind Bill Gates our local Hero has said that DNA is like a software program but

much more complex than any we've ever devised Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that it functions like a machine code well what we know is that software comes from a programmer and in fact whenever we see information of that kind whether it's in a software program or a hieroglyphic inscription or paragraph in a book it always arises from a mind not a material process so the the discovery of information at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cell I argue is decisive evidence of the activity of a designing mind in the origin of Life what

is the goldilock Zone another of your big bedrocks of your book well this is something this one way that the physicist refer to something that they call the fine tuning of of the UN I or sometimes they talk about the anthropic fine-tuning the idea is that the most fundamental parameters of physics uh fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances outside of which we have discovered life would not be possible even basic chemistry would not be possible so the force responsible for the expansion of the universe uh called the cosmological constant is uh fine-tuned and accepted

value is to one part in 10 to the 90th power so smidge faster or slower in that expansion and you either get a heat death of the universe or you get a big crunch a great black hole in either case life is not possible that's just one of many parameters that fall within that kind of a sweet spot so sometimes the the physicist do talk about our living in a goldilock universe uh Luke Barnes has written a wonderful book about the fine-tuning a physicist who also did his PhD at Cambridge is written a book called

The fortunate universe so these types of terms are now making their way into physics because physicist did not expect that life would depend upon such an exquisitly and improbably arranged set of of basic parameters but there we have it they did this is what they found but again that comes back to the idea of a designer of all this well one of the one of the scientists who first discovered these fine tuning parameters was uh Fred ho and Hoy was a a pretty aggressive scientific atheist he opposed the big bang and even gave the Big

Bang its name the Big Bang as it kind of pejorative to to to uh to make fun of the the concept but after he discovered some of these fine-tuning parameters he had a shift in in his philosophical perspective in his worldview and he was later quoted as saying that um a common sense interpretation of the data the fine-tuning data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible I would say love the way the monkeys always make it into the origins discussion even if it's in physics oh goes back

to monkeys all monkeys either at a typewriter or something there are other uh scientific itheses that don't use God as an explanation for all this one is the simulation Matrix Theory which Elon Musk talks about or the idea of a Multiverse and when I had Neil degrass Tyson on the astr visist he said this what was there before the beginning of the universe everyone asks this question what's the simple answer oh I I'm delighted I can respond to you we don't know but we got top people working on it okay you know what there may

have been a Multiverse I like that I like the honesty so we genuinely don't know people just don't know right we don't know there might have been a Multiverse that's birthing universes and we're one of them but that just pushes the question one step further before that what was around before the Multiverse so we just don't know it's it's a frontier question right now what is your response I mean you know a lot of astr visists and Elon Musk and others think it's actually about the Multiverse a for those who don't know what is the

Multiverse and what's your response to that sure sure the Multiverse is the idea that yes the universe is incredibly finely tuned Against All Odds to make life possible but the explanation for that is not that there was a cosmic fine- tuner in intelligence who set the universe up so that life would be possible but rather that there's a billion or gillions of other universes out there that have different combinations of these different settings of these different parameters and that ours just happens to be the lucky one and and the reason that we have life in

our universe is not that it designed for life but rather there was a kind of giant Cosmic Lottery that that is responsible and that life must have Arisen somewhere and again we just happen to be in the lucky universe and my response yes yes right well the the the uh anthrop the Multiverse hypothesis is specifically relevant to explaining this this fine tuning but there's a problem with it and that is that and that if you have all these other universes out there the very existence of these other universes does not explain the fine tuning in

our universe and here's why um if those other universes are separate from our own then there's no causal connection between them so whatever happens in those other universes has no effect on our universe including it has no effect on whatever process was responsible for setting the fine-tuning so in virtue of that Multiverse proponents have had to propose a kind of common cause of all the universes a universe generating machine of some kind that could allow them to portray our universe as uh the lucky winner of a giant Cosmic Lottery and that's where the the rub

comes in but is that possible well yeah there's a problem with it and that is that all of the different Universe generating mechanisms that have been proposed some based on something called String Theory others based on something called inflationary cosmology themselves require prior fine-tuning in the universe generating mechanisms and so you explain the the fine tuning in this universe by invoking a universe generating mechanism but that mechanism in turn has to be finely tuned and so you're right back to where you started without an ultimate explanation for fine tuning and yet we know from our

experience that when we find something that's finely tuned think of a French recipe or an internal combustion engine or a radio dial fine tuning always requires in our uniform and repeated experience which is the basis of all scientific reasoning it always requires a fine tuner and intelligence so given that the Multiverse hasn't explained given an ultimate explanation for fine tuning the best explanation for fine tuning is still intelligent design you have a a gigantic brain that's clear and you obviously know all about this stuff but are you prepared to accept you could just be completely

wrong about this oh of course science is inherently PR would you Mo I mean if you could I asked Neil to Grass Tyson this but if you could get the answer to any of life's great Mysteries if I said to you come on the two two or three things you'd most like to know the answer to that no one's ever worked out what would they be I think it's the uh well I just lost my mother and and I think I think the U the the deepest and hardest questions in life are not actually these

big metaphysical questions I think if you think carefully about them there's a pretty clear answer but I think it's the the questions that come up because of the the the events in your own life and sometimes suffering sometimes Joys why things went this way rather than that way those are those are the questions I think are the hardest ones the existential questions of one's own personal experience I'm very sorry about your mother I should have introduced a personal element like that but no no I'm glad do because actually it does play into what you just

just said Has that did it did that whole experience of losing your mother did it change any of your thinking about any of this uh I think the experience of grief was something that was um was unexpected and how intense it was she had dementia and had been in Decline for several years you think you're prepared when you're losing someone by degrees but there's a finality of death that I think overtakes all of us in that moment of grief and there's something about the grief experience that it seems to make everything else pale to insignificance

in that moment and I think it's kind of my own view of it is just kind of a signal uh like your conscience tells you what's right and wrong I think grief is telling you about what's really important and that in that instance what was important is that we had lost a person of Eternal value and so um yeah I think it it it was uh you're never really prepared for the loss of a parent and I I thought I was but I wasn't do you take comfort because of your religious conviction that you'll see

your mother again in an off life I I absolutely do yeah and I think um when I was on the Rogan uh program he was probing about both the objective evidence for belief in God and my subjective experience and I would never base an argument to another scientist or philosopher on my subjective experience but I think belief in God has um I I think legitimate objective and subjective basis and I think that that mysterious moment when you see a loved one passing when the body is there but the person is gone it raises some profound

uh metaphysical questions or maybe an metaphysical awareness that there is something more than the material that is part of all of us so in a way what you went through with your mother may have actually intensified your own belief in your theory about all sure because you you felt it in yeah exactly exactly you see that's that's where whenever I argue with atheist I'm always struck by their refusal to go there into stuff like that and yet they must themselves through their own life experiences have moments and experiences which must test their own conviction that

there is nothing else yeah absolutely I think it's a it's a both hand thing if you're a Believer there's plenty of good solid scientific evidence good philosophical reasons for belief but then there are these experiences too that we have along the way that suggest it's not just matter and motion you know there's more to the world than the the material stuff when you hear someone like um Richard do is when he when he's so emphatic that he's right and you know believing in Gods like believing in fairies and all this kind thing what do you

I mean do you respect that or do you think it's just performative something well I honestly I've never he signed a book for me once in a line you know I've never met him uh but when I see I watched the interview you did with him and I honestly there's something about the guy I love the guy um he's so intense about he was quite rude about me afterwards I don't know why because I really quite enjoyed the interview I thought it was quite like you know it looked like you were having fun yeah I

didn't think it was a problem he clearly thought there was but I I always feel that anyone knows that level of intensity about the big questions in life is someone with whom I I share a a kindred spirit now we're in the opposite we've come to the opposite conclusion but I also think he has this great talent for framing issues you know the the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect that that's a great quote uh if no design no purpose another one he says that biology is the study of complicated things

that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose and yet Dawkins himself acknowledges that he can't explain the origin of the first life right so and and that to me right there is inability to do that is where his whole position to me collapses because if you're going to just make assumptions that another person's view is completely wrong there cannot be a god well okay fine but you've got to be able to explain you got to you got to deliver the goods in the interview with you is so telling when you asked him

what he wished he knew he and could explain he said you he said the origin of the universe the origin of life and the nature of Consciousness yeah well those are the very things that materialism it's not just that science can't explain those a materialistic World fails to explain and actually a belief in God is in you know in a way endorsed by those big questions because the human brain cannot come up with any other logical explanation so a logical explanation based on science and data it doesn't exist and this is not God of the

gaps okay there are gaps there for materialism but the materialists assume that any explanation that doesn't involve a purely material IAL um process is an explanation that is is just filling a mere Gap but the the rules of of explanation are a little different than that a good explanation provides a causally adequate explanation where you infer an entity which if true would would be capable of generating and therefore explaining the thing of Interest we look at the origin of the universe and we understand that matter space time and energy come into existence then prior to

that no there's no matter again to do the causing so M materialistic explanations are inherently inadequate and yet positing an external entity that has volition and agency does fit the bill it if true that would provide a positive explanation so here's a tough question UN about family members whove renounced their faith over the Holocaust for example right right how could a How could a fair just God allow that to happen when you look at what's happened in Israel and then Gaza in the last six months a lot of people might question well what why would

a God that has the universal creative superpower of the kind that you believe God had to create all this why would they allow such misery and hell to also exist on mes of yeah kind you just have you thought about that well of course um there's a traditional U theistic answer goes back to S Augustine and maybe earlier the idea of the sometimes called the Free Will defense if you're in an argument about the so-called problem of evil I actually find it uh persuasive and compelling and it's the idea that that God created us as

free moral agents and understood in creating us that way that he was taking a risk that we could use our agency for good or for ill we could use it to love him and to love the other creatures he's made or we could use it to grandis ourselves and um and we have instances of both on this planet um and the the people saywell why would God do that well I think the answer is that God understood that creating agents with free will opened the possibility of evil but it also opened the possibility of genuine

love um if he had created mere robots we wouldn't really be persons we wouldn't have the the the quality of life that is possible to us so it's in a sense it's a uh an uh evidence of of of a Divine risk that but it was a risk that I think he deemed worth taking and ultimately in the in the Christian tradition which you and I share uh there's a there's a plan for for sorting all that out at the end you know Redemption do you believe in aliens well I'm very skeptical about uh extraterrestrial

intelligence it used to be isn't it isn't it more likely the not that there are alens that's that's a very good question Pi it used to be thought among physicists and astrophysicists that the answer to that question was yes because there's so many galaxies and this is part of the you know the cosmological question that's so fascinating we I wrote in in Return of the god hypothesis that there were 200 billion galaxies I've since been corrected by an astrophysics uh colleague who says probably closer to to two trillion now another insane number insane number of

so how can we say with any real conviction that we're the only things like this a couple books that came out in the early 2000s one one called Rare Earth by two uh astronomers at University of Washington another uh called privileged planet and the the yes there's a lot of galaxies out there but it turns out that the the number of parameters that have to be finally tuned in a just right way to make not just a a universe a condu or consistent with life but a a life-friendly solar system a life-friendly planet the the

the number and improbability of getting all those parameters right may actually dwarf the the number of of galaxies and planets out there it's an open question but it you it used to be thought a slam dunk there must be life elsewhere now I think there's an argument both ways among the the as physicist but the truth is nobody knows nobody knows we haven't found anything like it final question what's the meaning of life well I think It ultimately is um to come into a relationship with the Creator who made the Universe um I in in

the in the closing chapter of my book I talk about uh Victor Frankle and the man's search for meaning and how Universal that is and that nothing can mean anything to a rock or to an atom or to a planet things only mean things to persons so if there is to be meaning in life there must be genuine persons who to whom we can mean something and and U and who can mean something to us and yet we all die and so I think if there is a God it reopens that question of ultimate meaning

the French existentialists used to say SRA without an infinite reference point nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning right but if there is an infinite reference point and that infinite reference point is personal that is to say if the universe was created by a personal agent who wants to know us then the then the possibility of enduring meaning is again on the table yeah I mean if you I've had this conversation with Ricky jaice it's like well if everything if you only believe that what happens in your existence here is that's it how sort

of pointless transitory and vacuous it must all be to you whereas if you believe in the concept of of in infinite life all bit in a different way that's great that's the question that haunted me as a teenager you I used yeah it was what's it going to matter in 100 years no matter what I worked on no matter what I achieved no matter what goal I I set I I thought I couldn't what what was the point and um I one time came across the quote from Bertrand Russell where he talks about all the

all the great labors of of the human race and the the Noonday the the brightness of human uh achievement Noonday human achievement will is destined for extinction and the vast death of the solar system I wasn't much fun at parties as dream but those sorts of you at a certain point in life whether it's when you're very young or often when you're nearing the end those sorts of questions perc particularly I think when you get near the end when you're really questioning am I right is this it just seems to me completely in the same

way that when atheists can't explain what happened before the Big Bang uh and when they can't say that and when they say nothing happens when you die and stuff that's where my belief in God gets in massively increased well it's one of the main reasons I think it must there must be a god is that actually none of that would make sense that we just started one day and there was this weird thing called Nothing before there which no one can really explain to me what that is and at the end of it it just

ends and then that's the end of that that doesn't make any sense that someone would create something so extraordinary that's led to us the human being and then at the end that's it and that's the other thing about the grief emotion is that it it seems to be telling us there's something profoundly unnatural not intended by death but then on the flip side in that realm of objective scientific evidence and this is you know the message of my book to me when I look inside the cell and see the evidence of that digital storage transmission

and processing system Richard Dawkins himself said was upon seeing an animation of this recently that he was knock sideways with Wonder at the the intricacy and complexity of the digital information processing that's going on inside sales this is extraordinary it's like it's like a a a 3D printer you've got digital code directing the construction threedimensional structures and machines all inside the tiniest recesses of the cell there is no materialistic chemical evolutionary or other account of that but we see features inside the cell that are reminiscent of our own high-tech information and digital technology this seems

to be pointing obviously to a Transcendent mind fascinating stuff Return of the God of this what a great book great to see you wonderful thank you very much really enjoyed it thank you very much