Does Science Point to God? Eric Metaxas and Stephen Meyer Discuss

[Music] thank you so much my goodness I just want to uh just say a few words briefly about what Socrates in the city is uh and then I want to introduce um my guest our guest tonight Dr Steven Meyer so some of you already know what Socrates in the city is and if you do how many of you are familiar with Socrates in the city ra okay you guys can go out take your cigaret break if you uh if you want Tok you um that's great Socrates in the city some of you know that Socrates

uh said the unexamined life is not worth living and then he blew his brains out in an alley all right you knew that was a joke all right great great great uh uh he said the unexamined life is not worth living and I think um I live in Manhattan you know cultural capital of the world and the cultural capitals of the world they don't talk about the big questions have you ever noticed that yeah you don't bring those things up at cocktail parties you know what a cocktail party is you know 2 hours out of

the city I'm taking nothing for granted okay uh how many of you own chickens raise your hands come on yeah I know I know you think I'm stupid yeah I know I know how many of you churn butter come on how many of you wear long jean skirts no that's a bridge too far all right um so I thought who can we get for this Pennsylvania event and uh I thought what about a former geophysicist um can we get him some of you know the story uh of of Steven Meyer maybe he'll tell a little

bit um he has his PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge uh and I I cannot really introduce him at this point without saying that he's been really instrumental in my own Journey my book which uh I'm happy to say I'm not here to talk about tonight uh it's called is atheism dead and I deal with some of the things on a on a different level than than Stephen but I I deal with some of these issues uh I don't call it the god hypothesis which he does but ultimately that's what it is and and

Steve has been uh Central in in helping me think some of this through um and tonight uh I'm going to be talking to him about his new book The Return of the god hypothesis some of you know his previous books Darwin's doubt uh and signature in the cell anybody familiar with with with any of those books who are you people why are you here uh it's my privilege in any case to to introduce now my friend to ask him to come up Dr step Meyer Stephen please come on up thank you have a seat here

we're uh we're both miked up so be careful what you say um and uh I'm not kidding I really did interview Mel Gibson today and I'm slightly less intimidated now in talking to you but only slightly um I sat next to the person who was doing the turning the turning the butter yeah yeah I think you've insulted pretty much everyone already that's my goal that's my goal the fact of the matter is that um I I'm thrilled thrilled to be here and thrilled for the whole conference and I was really thrilled that we got to

to do with Socrates in the city event as we're calling this um at the beginning of the conference because it is true you uh and this book have really helped me think things through so I I was trying to think where to start I I interviewed you before way before the book came out in Dallas uh at a conference similar to this one and now the book has been out and uh I'm I think I said it way back then I'm excited at the idea this is maybe where to start start that science is inescapably

and I want to say that loudly and in italic bold underscored inescapably pointing to God uh you call it the return of the god hypothesis so maybe we can start with how what has the reaction been to the book because you are somebody that you you you speak and live in the academy you you get to hear from people that uh uh don't share our views so what has some of the response been to this book I think there's a big story here the story that I tell in the book is um connects to conversations

that are going on right now um the the story of the book is that in the period we call the Scientific Revolution that belief in God played a huge role in the rise of modern science there were theological understandings about the nature of of the natural world about the orderliness and design of the natural world that made science possible that made the natural world intelligible to the human intellect our minds having been made in the image of the same Creator who made the rationality and design and Order of the world we lost that view in

the 19th century and it's begun to come back and it's coming back not in spite of science but because of Science and so when you explain the that that's your story that's the argument of the book uh it inevitably connects to people who are wrestling with those exact same questions and what I found is that um we had you know had a lot of nice endorsements of the book um there were seven or eight titled professors of science at major universities who endorsed I even got an endorsement from a Nobel laurate but what was what's

been most interesting is the private conversations that have ensued as the as the result of the book sometimes with young people sometimes with colleagues who thought they would never be interested in the big questions but were never really satisfied with the materialistic answer that they were getting the idea that in the beginning or from from eternity past were the particles and the particles arranged themselves into the more complex chemicals and they arranged themselves by undirected Dar darwinian means into all the forms of life we see today and then us and thenation to us and there's

always been something I think for lot of people that's been missing in that conversation and so writing a book like this creates the opportunity for those and I've had I've been on uh some a really wide variety of shows one called the Eric matxa show was a little odd but um that's the first time I got to make a joke your expense this hasn't happened before this is well this is the good thing is that I I'm I'm bold enough to be foolish enough so it kind of makes people feel comfortable with being foolish and

you know sort of insulting in the way that you just were so I just want to say God is using me so um some of the interview that stand out I had one with Michael shurmer the the editor of skeptic magazine I thought it would be a you know half hour an hour it went two hours it was a really in-depth very mutually respectful conversation see now that's very interesting because I don't know a lot of these figures in the world of you know the they're they're known atheists they're known Skeptics but the idea that

you would have a civil conversation not that you but that he would want to have a civil conversation about this and would that's actually in the world in which we live that's a big deal yeah like that that that he would be respectful of I think there's something shifting in the intellectual world around 2006 2007 we had the first uh Spate of these books that were titled uh under the genre of the new atheism Richard Dawkins his book The God Delusion the sort of iny yourface a face atheism that was expressing not only the idea

that science properly understood undermines belief in God but gee that's also a good thing we we got to get rid of this God idea from the culture I think fast forward about 15 years and here we are we have a lot of what i' I I did a a piece in the Jerusalem Post last summer about the passing of Steven Weinberg who was one of those aggressive scientific atheist he was famous for saying the more the universe seems comprehensible meaning to our science the more it seems pointless that kind of point of view I think

is on the Wayne and there are a lot of people who are intellectuals who are still non-believers but who are lamenting the loss of a religious Mooring for our culture I think about people like Jordan Peterson who's so interesting to listen to as he wrestles with these questions so authentically or uh Tom Holland the British historian uh or he wrote the book Dominion Dominion yeah very interesting book it's it's a it's I mean I'm probably speaking for most people here that if you're familiar with Jordan Peterson or Tom Holland you you kind of find it

hard to believe that they're not Christians how could they not be knowing what they know yeah you get the sense they're teetering but there there's a whole class of intellectuals who I think would like to believe but can't quite get themselves over the line and yet I think unbelief in our culture arose as a per vasive phenomenon in the late 19th century with the rise of figures like Darwin and Marx and Freud and I think those intellectual influences are something of a spent Force now that's the that's the the argument of the book is that

the new discoveries of science about the universe having a beginning or about the fine-tuning that makes life possible or about the discovery of digital code and complex information storage transmission and processing system inside the cell these sort of things were not expected from the point of view of good old-fashioned 19th century scientific materialism or expected by people like Dawkins who framed the issues very helpfully Dawan said the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there's no purpose no design Nothing But Blind pitiless indifference and in in the book I

take him at his word and say is that really is that really the case did materialism did blind pitiless forces expect a a beginning to the universe or the Exquisite fun that makes life possible or the Exquisite complexity of the cell I don't think so I don't think it did well I I mean when you're talking about these different figures as you know because we've talked about this but when I finally dared to to read some of what Dawkins or Hitchens wrote I was mystified at the level of what I saw as nothing less than

intellectual dishonesty incredible sloppiness I really was astonished I expected better in a way and I thought that they must know that they're playing a game there are people that I can take seriously who are wrestling and I honor them as they wrestle but but the the so-called new atheists seem to me to be dramatically out of their depth when it came to philosophizing about these things and what amazes me in a way is that they got away with it it's it's like they were looking for undergraduate Applause like that was the bar that they were

setting and they really didn't care if smart people could see that there's nothing to this I've always really appreciated uh several of the new atheist Dawkins in particular for the for his talent for framing issues in fact the quote I just use is a beautiful framing device because it really it allows you to answer a really fundamental question if the question is posed right he says basically the question is does the universe look as it should if it's the product of blind undirected pitiless processes or also known as scientific materialism the worldview thereof or does

it look as you'd expect if there was a purposeful intelligence behind it all and I think that framing is incredibly productive for the conversation I just think he's completely wrong okay Le let's and let's start with why in in the book the three main issues that you bring up in in the return of the guy God hypothesis if I remember correctly because it's been a while yeah it's the big bang the Big Bang or the the the big bang is the theory that synthesizes evidence from observational astronomy and developments in theoretical physics and the two

together point to sometimes called the singularity or a beginning to the universe and that's was incredibly surprising discovery of TW of of 20th century science right okay so so let's start with that how can someone like Richard Dawkins make the statement that that he made which you just quoted given what we now know um you know that that uh in the in the first millionth of a second after the big bang and it's always funny when you're talking about the first million of a second after the big bang like there's not enough time for after

is there but um but that within no time almost we know the four fundamental forces in physics were established forever how can somebody like a Dawkins who is a scientist imagine that that happened without a designer what what what could get him to say if thing that's where I I I agree with you that's where I think the BL comes in okay the the issues framed beautifully but the key evidence that helps adjudicate the question is not really taken head on Dawkins doesn't really address this question of cosmic Beginnings but it's a crucially um challenging

piece of data for his point of view uh Carl Sean in his famous Cosmos series was quoted as saying the universe is all there is all there ever was all there ever will be the materialistic or natural Credo is the idea that matter and energy are the Eternal self-existent things and that they play the role of what philosophers sometimes called the prime reality the thing from which everything else comes in the same way that God plays that role in a in in a theistic worldview or theistic framework but the evidence of cosmology the evidence of

astronomy and astrophysics is not pointing to a material universe that has been here from eternity past but rather a universe that had a definite beginning and as Robert dicki the famous Princeton physicist said an infinitely old Universe would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past but a finite un sequel to that is but a finite Universe does not relieve us of that necessity and the problem for materialists is that if the physical world of matter space time and energy have a beginning then before that

or prior to that causally there was no matter to do the causing so and that's the problem and this funny so when somebody says there's matter uh and that's all there is and all there ever has been you think where are you getting that from that is a decidedly unscientific statement made by somebody speaking in the name of science so it just feels to me like there's been like tons of Bluster uh and that they have they've painted themselves into uncomfortable Corner because if you follow the science the science has increasingly been pointing to God

and now I don't know how you see it as anything but open and shut I mean in in your book you talk about that you talk about uh I'm trying to remember you talk about abog Genesis in the middle yep absolutely and then the and then the DN n coding right what do folks on that side say I mean let's talk a little bit about abiogenesis I mean tell tell us what that is because I imagine there's some people here who who aren't familiar with that but that to me is just outrageously compelling yeah there

are three big big discoveries that I address in the book the origin of the universe itself it's fin the origin of its finely tuned structure you're talking about those four laws of physics that were set from the very beginning and those parameters were set Against All Odds within very narrow tolerances to make life possible possible and that's the fine tuning problem we come back to that and then the third is this question of getting life from non-life or a biogenesis and this is this was the field of my my PhD dissertation I Did It On

origin of Life biology and it was clear by the late 80s when I was working that the field had come to a place of complete impass in fact my one of my Cambridge supervisors said every Everybody when she she said when we go to these origin of Society meetings every our she said our field is becoming dominated by by quacks she said because everybody in the field knows that everybody else's idea won't work but they won't admit it about their own and so it's the big question is how do you get from brute chemistry in

a Prebiotic soup or a favorable ocean environment or a hydrothermal vent or whatever to a living cell with all the intricacies that we now observe including the digital code that's stored in the DNA that directs the construction of the proteins and the protein machines that are needed to keep cells alive the more complex the more we've learned about the complexity of Life the harder it is to explain by reference to sim simple chemistry and that gap between code or between chemistry and code in our experience is only bridged by one and only one type of

cause and that's programmers intelligent agents so the discovery I think of digital code the foundation of life is a powerful indicator of the activity of Designing intelligence in the history of life in the origin of life and that's i i in the book argue that as an inference to the best explanation but I was having a conversation with a colleague today saying on that on that topic we stand in no risk of contradiction because there is no better explanation being offered by those who are formulating chemical evolutionary theories of a biogenesis the field is in

a complete disarray well Ju Just to break it down again because I don't know uh what people here know or don't know but I mean I I dealt with this in in my book so I can at least understand this it's not like I I say I know nothing and explain it to me but but break it down for folks here talk about Miller Yuri and you know what people were thinking let's say 70 years ago if we go back 70 years and somebody says I believe in science and I think science can tell us

how the universe through random processes produced life so where were we in 1952 and how complex did we think the simplest life was I mean if we go back just to give them the benefit of the doubt of why they believed that this could just happen randomly yeah there there's a huge historical irony here because in 1953 Watson and Crick elucidate the double helical structure of the DNA molecule in the same year Miller Yuri are able to synthesize couple of the protein forming amino acids and the one Discovery the two thing at the time people

think oh science is making this great progress even on these these deep and fundamental questions about the origin of life but what Watson and Crick discovered and what was discovered subsequent to their first discovery made the made theories of the chemical evolutionary origin of Life increasingly implausible implausible in the extreme what Miller and Yuri were able to do is build what are called two little building blocks of proteins proteins are the large molecules and cells that form um intricate three-dimensional shapes and in virtue of those three-dimensional shapes they're able to perform all kinds of interesting

jobs all the most important jobs in the cell you can kind of think of of proteins like the tools in your toolbox there's a hammer a wrench a saw and each one has a different function based on its its its form and the proteins catalyze reactions in the cell rates much faster than what ever occur they're called the enzyme proteins they're also proteins that that will build the parts of miniature machines so we have these little rotary engines that you may have seen about that Michael beeh has made famous or little turbines or little walking

robotic motor proteins there's all kinds of intricate nanotechnology in the cell and that's all made of proteins although they didn't know about that in 1952 they didn't know about any of this when Miller Yuri did their famous experiment and they said whoa we got amino acids we're on our way they didn't know a lot of the stuff that you were just talking about so it was very easy for them to say well we'll we'll figure out how to how to get to life we're we're not that far absolutely and one of the things my my

one of my uh dissertation supervisors told me was that the more comp the more we know about the nature of Life the harder it becomes to explain its origin and so if we learn more and more about the complexity of life and the inner workings of the cell so first Watson and Crick hallucinate the DNA that's pretty interesting but then in 1957 Crick has this amazing brainstorm it's called the sequence hypothesis and he proposes that the chemicals along the interior of the Helix they got this helical mod molecule and it's the outside is made of

what's called a sugar phosphate backbone we all knew that tell us something we don't know Steve come on sugar phosphate backbone like and on the inside side the business end there are little bases called nucleotide bases that are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters like the zeros and ones in a section of machine code so what Crick realizes is that DNA is performing a function in virtue of its information carrying CA capability that there's literally chemicals that are functioning like digital characters conveying information from building those proteins I was talking

about a minute ago the pro the the the Big Tool boxes that do all the job in the cell so an analogy that's pretty apt would be like uh the technology that we know about for manufacturing computer uh CAD cam computer assisted design and Manufacturing up in the SE in Seattle where we live the Boeing plant you have an engineer sitting at a console write some code goes down a line a wire it's translated into a machine code that can be read at a manufacturing center that might be used to put rivets on an airplane

wing you have something very like that going on insid the cell where you've got digital directing the construction of these proteins you're telling mein Mach figured this out in 57 he figures this out this is I'm surprised by that because I I just think that that's I can understand if we figured that out more recently but the idea that a few years after the Miller Yuri experiment they see this what do they do at that point what did they do what do you do with that kind of information I don't it was for him it

was a hypothesis he interesting thing about crick's background is absolutely fascinating he wasn't a biologist he was he was he was doing a PhD in physics when he teamed up with Watson in 52 53 and he had been a code breaker in World War II so he had a deep int intuitive understanding of what it took to transmit and store and even encode information and so he realized fairly early on that DNA had all the features that were necessary for it to function as an encryption system a way of TR storing and transmitting information and

so this was a hypothesis in 57 then there was a flurry of activity in French labs in in labs in the UK on the US side and now historians of science call this period the molecular biological Revolution and by about 1965 they had sorted out that Crick was in fact right that's what what he thought DNA was doing was what it was doing it was it was directing the construction of these fascinating protein large protein molecules that do all the important jobs in the cell and then by that time you already start to get real

tension in the field of origin of Life biology what seemed an easy problem to solve in 1953 well we got the amino acids what could be simpler well you have to get all the amino acids there's not just two or three of them there's 20 protein forming amino acids but you also got to get them to link up in the right way and then you have to get them sequenced in the right way as well so they fold into the right threedimensional shapes so that they can do jobs and that's all got to be embedded

in a larger information storage and processing system to actually produce what we now know as the simple cell okay so why when you understand how outrageously complex it is and and it sounds like that happened way before I thought it did I mean it's happening in the 50s and then in the mid-60s they know this how could they possibly have Contin thinking that random processes delivered this complexity how how do you you know tell yourself that when when it's in front of you I I think this is where the story of this is where worldview

inter intersects I think coming out of the 19th century many leading scientists in all Fields were default scientific materialists they believe that matter and energy were the things from which everything else came this is why Einstein was so initially resistant to the Big Bang Theory by the way is that his own his own theory of general relativity was implying that that gravity couldn't be the only force in the universe according to to Einstein gravity curves space and if the only force in the universe is gravity drawing all the other matter together you get one big

glump of space and one infinitely tight curv curvature of space around it and and there would be no room to put anything we'd live in a giant black hole but we don't live in a universe like that so Einstein posited there must be an expansion Force that's operating in opposition in anti-gravity what he called his cosmological constant but that implied a dynamic Universe moving outward from a beginning which to him smack to the doctrine of creation and so he fiddled with his equations to try to to actually this is a good thing this is something

I actually do talk about wherever I go because I find it so funny what we're really talking about here is worldview right we're talking about the idea that there's all this evidence but but people on either side have have decided things that are immovable and so the the the materialists have they they just know that there's no God and we can't talk about that we can't even think about that so we'll just we'll just skip that and we'll just figure out what we need to figure out but we know it's not that and what I

find funny is that the greatest scientist you know since Newton was himself so insecure as a science I mean it's almost funny to me that you think that anybody uh could be guilty of worrying about what others think but not Einstein well I and Einstein was so scared of being tagged as a religious guy because of his his equations point to the idea that the Universe expanded from nothing sounds too much like genesis so he nervously you know creates this fudge Factor I'm not sure if it was in Einstein's case a case of social anxiety

I I think it was just the power of a default way of thinking this was the way people every all thinking people uh thought about things coming out of the 19th century and so it was a more of a reflexive this can't possibly be the answer it's got to be something that doesn't involve a beginning but the part of the interesting story of of that I tell in the book is the story of these reversals Einstein by 1931 goes and Views the evidence for himself at the the Mount Wilson Observatory with Hubble uh he's already

been told about it in advance so he's prepared and he gives an interview to the New York Times two weeks later and says well you know I guess I got this wrong the universe isn't static it is expanding and he later said that that the way he fiddled with his own equations to to try to obscure that fact was the great he said the greatest blunder of my life H did he say it in English like I the reason I'm asking is because I've seen it I've seen it translated uh or I've seen it phrased

as it was the greatest stupidity of my life and others said it's the greatest blunder of my life and I wonder uh if he said it in German or in I I don't know it's a good question Eric I don't know he may have simply said whoopsy da yeah right we don't know but it but it is funny though that it took him uh 15 to 20 years to come to this Reckoning and and to deal with and then you have a very similar story with with Fred ho who's a committed scientific materialist he formulates

the steady state cosmology ology which is a a variant on Einstein's idea of the static Universe defends it tenaciously but he's very explicit in explaining that he formulated this because the alternative was an overtly theistic View and he was a scientific naturalist as a as a matter of his philosophy and then later he discovers some of the most compelling and interesting and improbable fine-tuning parameters the ones that are necessary to account for the abundance of carbon in the universe which is necessary for life and he later changes his View to a kind of quasy theistic

position and says the the the best data we have concerning the fine tuning uh are what we'd expect if there was a super intellect that monkeyed with physics and chemistry so he comes around I actually had a conversation with him when I was still grad Student in Cambridge and he'd come to talk about the the original life problem and afterwards I chatted with him a bit and told him what that I was working on this idea that DNA seemed to point to design and he said you know come come walk with me and we had

this little walk down to the the College common room and he said yeah if if we could invoke intelligence it would make explaining a lot of things a lot easier when you when you when you when you said that he said you know come walk with me I thought you know you'd end up dead or something like that because he's like we can't have people like you around here um you I mean the the story of hoil maybe you can shed light on this I don't know if you write about it in the book I

don't remember but I found it fascinating that hoil was a de he was dedicated to the idea that uh you know the the right way of thinking is that there is no God and the universe has been here forever and he clung to that long past when others you know accepted the big bang and we should say he coined the term Big Bang he was speaking in a BBC interview in 1949 and speaking derisively he meant it as a Pity yeah like oh yeah that stupid Big Bang thing and it's like whoop the the term

kind of caught on caught on and um but I I as as I read a little bit I I got the impression that he was maybe becoming more honest as the years pass oh no question I mean he was he was pretty much an advocate of the design hypothesis as it applied to the fine-tuning problem which and he was one of the scientists who who formulated or who made those discoveries so early on he was said that religion is but a desperate attempt to give people comfort and no wonder people get upset with people like

me who tell them it's all an illusion but later in his life he he he says uh the best data we have are are what we'd expect if a super intellect monkey with physics and chemistry it was fine tuning suggested to him a fine tuner if if you don't mind my asking you because I I I wrote about it in my book and it's your story you told me the story of um the conference you were at 1985 and what happened because I'm I want folks to hear a little bit of your story how you

got involved in everything that you've been doing in the last uh decades C can you tell a bit about about the story uh with Hubble and and your absolutely um I was um young scientist I was working as a geophysicist for a local Oil Company in Dallas um I had always been interested in the in the big questions as you were saying before that were the intersection between science and philosophy so as an undergrad I used to I I did a double major in physics and geology largely my father's urging to stick with the hard

Sciences but uh I always snuck over and took at least one philosophy class anyway this conference came to Dallas and it was called uh Christianity challenges the University an International Conference of atheists and theists sounded pretty intriguing they had three panels one on the origin of the universe one on the origin of life and one on the origin and nature of human consciousness and the panels were stocked with people who were either self-identified theists in their worldview or self-identified scientific naturalists or materialists and in the very first panel uh one of the most prominent speakers

of the conference Alan Sandage a great cosmologist and astrophysicist I and I meant Sandage not Hubble well he I it's not a he had worked for Hubble he was Hub grad student I so anyway he went on to extend Hubble's research program and he'd been long time well known as an agnostic Jewish scientist and at the conference he announced a religious conversion that he actually become a Christian in 1985 he announces this at the confence and explains that that and then proceeded to give a talk on the evidence of of the new cosmology what we'd

learned from multiple sources the light coming from the distant galaxies the cosmic background radiation all the different key evidences for the Big Bang or the idea that the Universe had a beginning and then I I remember him you know he was not in a way he was not very happy about having this this need to change his worldview thrust upon him but that's where he so sort of very grave sort of figure and he said here is evidence from for what can only be described as a super space natural event there's no way this meaning

the evidence we have at the beginning of the universe could have been explained or or or predicted within the realm of physics as we know it and of course that's same point I was making before you can't explain the origin of the physical world physically because before there was a physical world there wasn't physics to do the explaining and so he he then proceeded to explain that he was really moved to a point of of thinking deeply about religious Faith because whereas the evidence was pointing unequivocally in One Direction he didn't want it to be

so and then he began to he said he explained that he began to think about well what is it about me that doesn't want this to be so I've always prided myself on his on my objectivity very compelling story in the very next panel there was a similar intellectual conversion announced by a leading origin of Life researcher who worked on this problem of a biogenesis named Dean Kenyan and Kenyan announced at in on the panel he also surprised people by sitting on the side with the theists and explained he argued that the the discovery of

the information bearing properties of DNA everything that that Crick had anticipated um suggests that the what do you call the natural theological question should now be reopened by the philosophers in other words we may as scientists be looking at evidence for the existence of God in the inner workings of the cell and so I'm you know 27 years old I'm kind of Blown Away at this it was clear to me that the theist seemed to have the intellectual initiative in the discussion that the people defending chemical evolutionary theory had nothing to offer except promisory notes

that maybe we'll figure it out down the road so I I got it I got really seized with this I was working with uh doing Digital Signal processing of seismic data which was an early form of Information Technology and the thought that the discovery of information inside cells was the Holy Grail of the origin of Life problem just absolutely seized me I got really fascinated with that I met a another scientist who was on the panel that day named Charles Thaxton who had written a recent book called M the mystery of life's origin he happened

to be living in Dallas I started having long conversations with him after work a year later I was off to grad school and realized I want to work on this original life problem well it's I I guess it was uh from in your book and in Faxton and Pier's book that uh I bumped into the idea and and I just find it fascinating the way information travels or doesn't travel I mean something might be true but if nobody knows that it's true what what does it matter that it's true because everybody they haven't you know

they never got the memo and the idea that somehow in the 19th century and obviously into the 20th century people come to came to see Faith as being at odds with science rationality as being at odds with religious faith and this becomes kind of baked into the way people think including Einstein and uh Sandage and everybody seems to know that that's a fact it it's it's the all I call the all reasonable people agree phenomena yeah we have that all over the place in the academic culture exactly but out of the 19th century all reasonable

people seem to agree that science undermines belief in God and supports a kind of materialistic worldview which then becomes the the backdrop the the background assumption that people appropriate in doing science and you may remember that quote from Richard Lenton in the New York Review of Books where he said you know we stand for science in spite of it some of its most uh you know counterintuitive constructs and some of its absurd formulations he's talking about things like probably the Multiverse and things like that but we stand for it because we cannot let a Divine

foot in the door he said it was very explicit about the idea that science has to presuppose materialism and only invoke materialistic explanations at all costs well that that's that's why I was bringing this up because I thought to myself so that's where we are and it's where we've been you know since the the 19th century but it was in in reading your book and then the book that Thaxton and Nancy piery did about 20 years ago that I was reminded or maybe learned for the first time I can never remember but the idea is

that we have forgotten that it was Christian faith that led to what we call modern science and the Scientific Revolution there's no debating that you don't have to like it it could make you grumpy but it is history there's no way around it and non-christians have written about it you quote them uh Joseph need in your book a North Alfred North Whitehead I mean many of the leading uh historians Herbert Butterfield leading historians and historians of Science of the 20th century really rediscovered this in the wake of that conflict historiography the idea that science and

religion are at odds and um and and they they highlighted a number of factors but there were presuppositions that came out of a judeo-christian worldview in particular um our our friends in the Muslim World also had uh some contributed to science as well but out of the abrah hamic face but particularly in the period of the the scientific revolution ideas coming out of the Hebrew Bible that were being rediscovered by the reformers and and a strain of thought in late medieval Catholicism kind of combined to make this this Scientific Revolution possible what kind of presuppositions

things like the intelligibility of nature that nature can be understood because the same rational intellect that made Nature Made our minds and gave us the gift of rationality that would enable us to understand the reason that was built into the into the world the idea of the order of nature but also the idea that the order of nature is contingent on the will of the creator that it could have been different there's a lot I used to use a paintbrush to illustrate with my students you got 15 different kinds of paint brushes they all do

the same basic job but they all are are different in ways and the one the painter uses is up to the painter's own choice and so Newton discovered that gravity has an inverse Square law but it might have been an inverse Cube law or it may have been a strictly linear relationship or something else so there's an order there but not an order that we can deduce from first principles which is what your the Greeks thought and that right that's what I this is what I find so interesting and again I'm just I'm just familiar

enough with this information to be dangerous with people who don't know more than I do right and so I I so I picked up a lot of this from from you and and put it in my own book because I you almost can't believe it when you see it you think how have I internalized some of this baloney that Faith might be at odds with signs What Not only is that not true the opposite is true we would not have modern science if not for devout Christians being Christian it's not like to the side of

their Christianity their Christian thinking LED them to this and you're getting to the idea now that um you know part of what it means to believe in the god of the Bible is to believe in a personal God Aristotle didn't believe in a personal God and so you get all of these aristotelians in late medieval world who have they have an Aristotelian worldview which pushes against the idea of a quirky personal God and so they insist that the planets you know have to be moving in circles because circles are perfect and we know that but

what if a quirky personal God said no I'm going to I prer thank you very much yeah uh um which he did happed the the the the Greeks had this idea of the logos an impersonal logic and because it pervaded all of nature in their view then whatever was logical uh to seemed logical to us must be the logic that's built into the world so it implied it allowed for a kind of Reliance on armchair philosophizing when what was necessary was empirical investigation Robert Bole was famous for saying it's not the job of the natural

philosopher which was what they called scientist at the time time to ask what God must have done but instead to go and look and see what he actually did do and that was the spirit of the Scientific Revolution Let's go and look and see well and and and the other part of it that brings in the faith is the humility to say that uh we may think we know what it is but we know we're Sinners we know we get stuff wrong we're going to force ourselves to actually look the the great historian of science

uh Peter Harrison is emphasizing this this is a contribution of in particular the Reformation thinkers because by emphasizing the depravity of man ironically they help make science possible and the connection there is that that yes we can understand the order and design and and and uh the rationality built into nature but we're also prone to Flights of Fancy jumping to conclusions that our our our cognition is also affected by the fall and so we have to check our ideas our theoretical ideas against reality and that also gave an Impulse to for empirical investigation and the

whole program of of experimentation right it's called the scientific method and it's kind of funny to me when when I you know discovered this obviously more recently than you but it's astonishing how clear it is and how inextricably intertwined Christian faith is with science so the fact that we're living in this world that pretends like Christians are somehow you know off against science you know not only is that not true but exactly the opposite is true but just to name one example that's to me particularly inspiring is the um the prinkipia that was the book

about universal gravitation by written by Newton and the later theological epilogue called the general scholium that he added to that where he reflected on the the the idea that God was the the Unseen force that enforced this order behind everything but a and the idea that in God all things are held together or consist and also in that epilog he also made um uh uh design arguments uh this most beautiful system of sun planets and comets could only proceed from the council and Dominion of an intelligent and Powerful being that's right in Newton that's right

in the general scholium to the prinkipia arguably the greatest work of physics ever written or one of the top three or four at the very least it's it's incredible How Deeply integrated the theological perspective was into the scientific work so much so that Rodney Stark the historian of science from Baylor who wrote The Great Book uh for the glory of God with Princeton press titled the book for the glory of God for him that he realized that that was the motivation of these early scientists I want to ask you more about the reaction to your

book because uh it's just fascinating to me that that that someone like you you you put these books out there and uh by God's grace enough people see them and read them they don't they're not just out there and nobody sees them so there has been reaction some of it is respectful like you mentioned Michael shurmer but others have been I I think some people ultimately they're just angry because you're the the what you write is very compelling and they they kind of can't bear it so they have to come up with something so what

has the reaction been what are people like Lawrence Krauss or others saying uh or have they bothered to respond well interestingly that kind of angry reaction mainly occurs on my Facebook page I don't know what the it just seems to attract trolls you know so yeah um but um uh well interestingly Krauss and I had a an exchange in uh the journal inference edited by uh David berlinsky about the fine-tuning issue and Krauss actually uh after having we've had some you know spirited debates in the past that have been a little bit a little spicy

but uh he he paid me at least a backhanded compliment saying that my my knowledge of the physics was was uh was laudatory he said uh however he disagreed about some things and one of the things he he argued was that the fine-tuning these this this Exquisite set of this group of parameters that are exquisitely finely tuned to allow for the possibility of Life Against All Odds one just one of them the cosmological constant that that Force it's the outward pushing force of the universe is fine tuned to one part in 10 to the 90th

power that's like an that's so insane that it's almost funny even if you start breaking down what that means so we'll skip that well let me give you I I have a visual illustration I've been holding back to share with you yeah all right so to get the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant right would be equivalent to having a blind person floating in free space looking for one marked elementary particle but not just one in our universe but in 10 billion universes our size that's how lucky particle we're talking a quark or an electron yeah

so there's 10 to the 8th of them so you're looking for one in the universe in this universe but no not this universe we have to include 10 others to get the odds right the ratio how many universes 10 billion 10 billion universes because we got 10 to the 80th Elementary particles in our universe but there's the fine tuning is 10 to the 90th there 10 orders of magnitude more acute than that so that's just one par one param look yeah so there's there there's there's there's lots of these fine-tuning parameters that are independently set

but Steve this is what science says in other words science says was it Stephen weer weiner Weinberg Weinberg right he was the one he did a lot of work on these tuning stuff that said these are the odds that that the that the fine- tuning of the the the cosmological constant is this right it's breathtaking so I I'll tell you krauss's K's counter argument to the I'm I'm arguing like Luke Barnes and other pking horn many physicists have argued fine-tuning points to a fine tuner um krauss's response is to say well not so fast uh

instead I it's just as possible that that life could have evolved to match the fine-tuning parameters that were already there instead the fine-tuning parameters being set in advance to make it possible for life okay that sounds like he's totally blowing smoke I mean in honestly it sounds like properous I'll tell you why if if you're talking about small things like we you know life is carbon based or silicon based it's like okay you can have a conversation but when you're talking about the existence of the universe with planets and stars and so on and so

forth you you couldn't have any possibility well that's the rub it's it's a response that could possibly be true it could be that life evolved in accord with the constraints of the fine-tuning parameters but the problem is we can't even get basic chemistry or anything more than a a a a black hole unless some of these parameters are set just right from the very beginning I mean that's what I'm saying so let's say you have no you if things weren't perfect perfectly fine-tuned you do not have stars which are are are creating elements and you

you don't have any of that so world can somebody like like uh Lawrence Krauss make a statement this kind of blind statement he he knows that well I I did press him on this that might might be why I got the backhanded compliment I'm not sure but I mean it's a really it's an interesting question in physics if that cosmological constant isn't fine-tuned just right if the universe is blowing up too fast we get a heat death too slow we get a big crunch if we get either of those cases we don't get the we

don't get rocky planets and galaxies and even basic chemistry going if the if the mass of the Quark isn't fine-tuned within very narrow tolerances it's this this this Goldilocks Universe idea that the physicists are talking about that all these parameters are set just right if they were a little bit different no life in the case of the the mass of the Quark we wouldn't even we wouldn't get any atoms heavier than helium you can't make anything out of hydrogen helium alone you've got to have the more the larger uh the atoms with larger atomic structure

you got to have carbon and oxygen things like that to make anything interesting so the evolution of Life the origin and evolution of life depends on prior fine tuning you can't get to you you got to have chemistry before you can talk about life you got to have a planet where you can put it all those things only happen if you first get fine tuning so I think krauss's argument is clever it could possibly be true in some possible universe but it's not true true and ours I I just have to believe these guys are

too smart to really believe I mean I just you know I don't have the the patience that you do it just sounds so silly that that that they are saying things like this you you um I mean I just think that it's looking so bad for their worldview that they're getting desperate that they're coming up with stuff um what we mentioned uh Francis uh Crick he I I guess it must have been around 19738 80 well first in 73 and then in ' 81 well when he talks about pans directed pans spermia it's so ridiculous

talk a little bit about that now you're asking somebody hey how did life form how did Life come into being and this Super Genius scientist says well we don't know and but then he says but we think maybe it came from someplace else like and just ended up here and you think that's not the question the question is how did it this has been formulated as a somewhat serious proposal by several scientists uh Crick did write about it in a technical paper I think it was 73 and then in his little book life itself it

was published in a journal called Icarus that's exactly right very very aptly named yeah and uh then in in 81 he wrote this little book life itself where he floated this idea that that yet he said getting all the conditions just right on planet Earth are are so improbable that it's almost equivalent to something like a miracle and so then he said so maybe it didn't happen here and maybe it happened somewhere else that life arose in some other Prebiotic soup on some other planet where the the conditions were more favorable and it invol evolved

to a sophisticated intelligent form of life that then seeded life to planet Earth he later kind of regretted that and and and pulled back a little bit and said I'm not g to I'm not because he it was ridiculed a bit and he said I'm not going to speculate on the original life problem anymore Dawkins then did in the film with Ben Stein in 2008 I think he later regreted it as well but he suggested that maybe there was a signature of intelligence in the cell Dawkin or Ben Stein got him to admit that neither

he nor anyone else knew how life had first Arisen from the from the Prebiotic chemical s State um and then he said and then dwan said well what or Stein said what do you think the odds are that intelligent design played some role he said well it could be but it would have to have happened in the following way that there was a an alien intelligence okay so what do we make of all that obviously there's a problem with that in that if you have an alien intelligence seeding life on Earth that that alien intelligence

itself has to evolve which means that someplace along the line you've got to generate genetic information for building the first cell that could get that evolutionary process going so all they they they haven't kicked the the can down the road they've kicked the problem out into space without answering it but but I guess what what fascinates me uh is just it strikes me as just deeply dishonest it's like somebody brings in uh a dessert right and I say wow that's an amazing dessert who made that and they say oh no one made it it just

exists it just kind of came into being and you'd say well that that's ridiculous look at the dessert it's obvious that someone made that and then they would kind of go uh uh uh yeah yeah I think somebody down the road made made it I think somebody down the road that doesn't really answer the question they're just they're just saying we don't know but we don't want to say we don't know so we're just going to say it came from some other place and it it's completely besides the point nobody cares where it came from

We're simply asking how did it happen so if it happened down the hall or in Another Universe how do you get life from non-life and they completely avoid that and I I guess I feel like they have to they have to know that they're avoiding the question well I I I'm reluctant to say it's dishonesty because I again am very sensitive to just how powerful presuppositions are in people's thinking and if you are bound or constrained by a materialistic World Outlook such that you think that everything came about by undirected materialistic processes then something like

the panspermia idea or the Multiverse may be your best option with the Multiverse we have the same kind of problem where the fine-tuning is is incredibly improbable there's no way it would happen by undirected processes in our universe so so serious physicists have posited the existence of other universes and and such a large multiplicity of other universes that eventually a universe like ours would they say have to arise right but then as you dig deeper into this you discover there's a problem and that is that if these other universes were just causally all disconnected from

one another then something that happens in Andromeda universe or Universe X isn't going to affect anything in our universe including the whatever process it was that set the fine tuning so in virtue of that they propose a uh Universe generating mechanisms that underly all the universes that could be spitting out universes here hither and Yan such that they could then portray our universe as a kind of Lucky winner in a giant Cosmic Lottery and that's where it all kind of falls apart because it turns out that even in theory the universe generating mechanisms that have

been proposed some based on something called string theory and another one based on something called inflationary cost cosmology these other Universe generating mechanisms themselves depend on prior unexplained fine-tuning and we're right back to where we started without any explanation for where the fine tuning came from and yet in our experience we know that finely tuned French recipes or radio dials or computer code always comes from an intelligent agent as does information so these these features that are that are tripping up the materialists are things that based on our own experience are always generated by Minds

by intelligent agents and that and for that reason I think they give a very strong signal of design I guess I wonder where this is headed in other words you you've written a number of you know I can say important uh well-received books uh you're not the only one uh people are are writing about these things and it strikes me uh as somebody who doesn't have a PhD in science or even the philosophy of science as a Layman it strikes me that the the end of of this uh Monopoly in a sense that that this

ideological Monopoly is is at hand and the only question is what what are folks going to do about it and you're you're talking a little bit about some of them are kind of scrambling and coming up with really really crazy ideas based on let's be honest it's one thing to say uh there are problems with it but but let's let's go before that and let's just say there's also zero scientific evidence for these propositions it's complete Flights of Fancy yeah so there's a desperation so are you seeing is there an openness among some I think

you touched on it earlier who who were who are beginning uh to think think differently like fundamentally differently about these questions I think no question I think you put your finger on something a really interesting intellectual phenomenon which is that scientific atheism which seems such a a juggernaut even 15 years ago with the publication of all those books now uh I think is starting to get really weird because the the the the scientific atheists are forced to hypothesis like the Multiverse or the simulation hypothesis or or the the Universe from nothing idea or or the

alien designer idea this is this is the extent to which people committed to a materialistic worldview must go in order to make some sense of semblance of the data but the theories are getting really convoluted and exotic and transparently uh in some cases transparently absurd but Alan Sandage like literally 40 years ago uh and he was the the the astronomer that you mentioned earlier who who became a Christian but but he was on to this like literally 40 years ago he he was saying that some of these uh hypotheses uh and some of these conversations

they struck him as as ridiculous that they they they were that they were blowing smoke that they were just using kind of you know uh entree new terminology and then again that's that's sort of 40 years ago so I guess I just sometimes call it word salad where you just obscure the fact that you don't know with a lot of jargon well I mean the term Multiverse Theory yeah uh directed pans spermia like it's it's it's like something out of a Dr Seuss book or something it's just kind of you you you come up with

a really crazy Theory and then you give it some name and then you tell everybody well we're g to we're going to talk about this now okay but if you have some common sense you say that that doesn't Mak sense it seems like you're you're really stretching so I guess what I'm wondering is what would it take what we're really talking about Stephen is what what does it take to to to shift a paradigm this is a deep Paradigm a lot of people have everything invested in this careers everything billions of dollars what does it

take I it's not an easy thing well to your earlier question I think we are seeing significant intellectual conversions the story of my book is over the last 100 years a story of many conversions Einstein's away from strict materialism uh hoil to a sort of Quasi theism Dean Kenyan from origin of Life uh leading figure to proponent of intelligent design in recent years uh the the paleontologist Gunter Beckley the very prominent German paleontologist who's embraced the theory of intelligent design um and many other examples I could give but I think in the history of science

you see major Paradigm shifts or shifts in research program and focus coming as a rising generation comes on the scenes and says hey there's some interesting important questions that aren't being addressed by the old guard there's a new way of looking at things and I think I think that's starting to happen we have tremendous uh energy surrounding the the summer programs we put on the network of young scientists that we tend around the world internationally the uh the research projects that we now involved within mainstream universities with young postdocs working under senior mentors who have

come to the intelligent design position uh in biology I think there's a been a lot of interest in the in the the the theistic implications of physics and cosmology for longer time than that so I I think the shift is already taking place I'm I'm bullish I'm not at all uh downtrodden about the prospects and uh so there is an old saw that from Thomas I think the great uh Harvard historian of science who wrote the structure of scientific revolutions says that scientific revolutions occurred her one funeral at a time uh that's a little maob

we're not wishing uh that fate on anyone but it is the idea that the as the younger generation Rises you get you get a turnover as you know if you get new evidence coming online that the older generation isn't taking into account younger people are are sooner or later going to press them on that I think that's happening well um so yeah where do where do we go from here I mean it it it makes a lot of people uncomfortable to to think that uh God is real and because the people seem intuitively and this

almost tells you it it does tell you something that how is it that people intuitively know that if there is a God that means something personal like it it it's it's not just Theory it the reason I don't like it is because it would affect me somehow and I think that's part of you know whenever you're talking about why ideas are accepted or not accepted or whatever that that is nature as we have to take human motivation into account for sure um well obviously I think the the god question is one of intense interest for

most thinking people does my life have a purpose Beyond this short time on Earth the answer to that depends upon whether or not there's someone else there who created us and who can live beyond the time that we're here on Earth and uh there was this popular book years ago the a Purpose Driven Life you know I used to say you can't have a purpose-driven life unless there is a purpose-driven Creator behind it all that there's an ultimate purpose to our lives beyond that point at which we expire on this planet so I I think

these are deep existential questions that we all ask um you know Victor Frankle had that amazing title you know man search for meaning I think we all search for that in a on a parallel track I think recovering the notion that God is responsible for he's the Creator the the designer of the of the of the beautiful physical and biological worlds in which we live I think can help reignite interest in science if you go back to figures like Kepler and Bole and Newton uh William Harvey whose statue I saw last week in Cambridge who

invented the Circ or discovered the circulation of the blood all these people were deeply motivated to learn how the world worked and where it came from because they believed that it had been created by God and so belief in God wasn't a science stopper as we sometimes hear people with all these worries about God of the gaps Newton invented the calculus the binomial theorem he did original work in Optics he invented the laws of he developed the laws of motion he developed the first universal theory of gravitation and so much more and he was clearly

motivated by his desire to give glory to God by revealing the as his title said the principles of of nature that was were were built into it so I think in addition to this the scientific rediscovery of God I think can open up the possibility of finding ultimate personal meaning for each of us as we seek to know that our creator the person who made us in all things but it also I think can Inspire us to do better science it's a both and not an either or good uh uh we we don't have a

ton of time left uh I I want wanted to ask you I don't know if you can sum these up but uh the philosopher and humanist James Croft uh offered what you describe as an aggressive critique of your book on philosophical grounds I'm just curious what was that oh it was an interesting debate because um I was actually on uh vacation at a little cabin and people in Britain that I knew told me they'd set up an interesting conversation about my book with with a philosopher who was interested and I saw I well by Zoom

everything was zoom in the you know the co days so I got on and I was in a a rustic old sweatshirt and jacket and thought it was just an informal well this philosopher had come loaded forbear with uh who are friends that set this up yeah right right and uh it was a lets you and him fight conversation so anyway he had a number of technical objections the main one was the idea that you couldn't really infer the activity of a designing intelligence in the past unless you had knowledge that there was such a

being you already had knowledge that there was such a being there okay and there is a sensible there there's something sensible behind that objection because when we infer or when we uh retrodict a the action of a cause in the past it's helpful if we know both that the cause in question has the power to to produce the effect we're trying to explain but that we have independent knowledge that the ca that the the cause the causal agent or entity was actually present we have both those things that we can feel very solid that would

be nice but you don't trying to figure it out but there's also a way to circumvent this and this happened to be what one of the key elements of my my PhD is that in the case that you know that there's only one known cause of a given effect if it's true that where when there's smoke there's always fire you can infer fire definitively even if you don't have independent knowledge of the fire if you just see the smoke wafting up over the hillside okay so when the when the the cause that you're trying to

infer is a necessary cause it's the only known cause of the effect you can make very definitive retrodictive inferences from effect back to cause and so he posed this as an objection to the argument from information in DNA and said well you don't have independent knowledge of a designer I said we don't need to because in this case there's only one known cause of the production of large amounts of digital information and that is an intelligent mind and then I use a little illustration to get the point across I said imagine you went to Antarctica

and you were assuming like all other archaeologists that there never been life there had never been any life on the planet or on that continent but then you know you you got deep into an ice cave and got got deeper in and there was you know you got all the way to the Rock and lo and behold there were inscriptions on on there dating from you know uh 2 million years ago what would you now infer well you didn't have any independent knowledge that there were that Antarctica had ever been inhabited but if you have

in informational inscriptions uh carved into the Rock you're going to have to change your opinion so why because information is a distinctive diagnostic of intelligent activity there's only one known cause of the production of information so that's what our little argument was about and I had to sort of Suddenly It's just vacation what everybody sort of yeah and uh I you know I I think we all know what you just said intuitively even if we've never heard the term retrodictive before um but when you're talking to a philosopher like that you know like this you

have to you have to resort to those words to explain what most people know James James was an interesting guy he was a secular humanist clergyman at a congregation in I think St Louis he' done a Harvard PhD in philosophy British born so we had a lot in common except that we were on opposite sides of the issue right um I'm not a secular humanist clergyman but he was you know interested enough in religion to be a clergyman although a different kind of religion yeah you you also mentioned um Roger Roger penrose's new cosmological model

uh and some people have been posing it as a challenge to the cosmological argument for the existence of God can you explain what I just said it's it's been one it's uh one of the things that was raised in opposition to the argument of the book is that there are some newer cosmological models than the ones that I addressed in the book I addressed the Big Bang the steady state the oscillating model and the probably the hottest Topic in theoretical physics and cosmology is this idea of quantum cosmology and I had three chapters on that

at the end it's the kuss Universe came from nothing idea and um let's not get into it it's heavy but the the newer thing that came up was um something from Sir Roger Penrose called the cyclical conformal cosmology big big words um but it's it's a variant off of the earlier oscillating Universe idea the oscillating Universe had the universe expanding in the present time in the forward direction of time but eventually Rec collapsing right and then bouncing and recaping and bounc bouncing an infinite number of times so it was a way of explaining the observation

that the universe is currently expanding without but still holding on to an infinite Universe okay and the problem with that idea was Expos number of problems one is there's not enough matter to cause a recollapse but number two even if there were boun subsequent bounces with each ex each time the universe expands the energy of expansion is sort of creating greater entropy or disorder in the universe and so with each cycle there's less energy available to do work and so it'd be like a bouncing ball eventually even if you had an a cycle of expansions

and contractions the ball would eventually damp out and you'd run out of steam and since we don't live in a universe like that you can infer that the Universe hasn't been around in an infinitely long time um Penrose has offered a modification of that idea instead of having a infinite number of of expansions and contractions he envisions the universe expanding outward and then through an unknown Force he calls the F or unknown field called a phantom field he imagines that a new universe would bust out of a little patch of that universe and would and

at that point this Phantom field would spontaneously um uh decrease entropy so there' be more order and more energy available to to do work but only at the place where the UN where the universe was was new universe was sprouting from now some one of his colleagues at Oxford has actually critiqued this idea because he said there's no physical field that has the attributes of a Penrose Phantom field uh because what the Phantom field does is it spontaneously creates order out of disorder in just the right place at just the right time and causes an

Abrupt change of state literally a creation event of a new universe so you can get around the god hypothesis but only by positing a physical field that has the powers of agency that has god-like powers so that's the trick that's that this is what I I I mean ultimately uh this is fun at least for me because I I you see um in a way you see these patterns right you you you see people desperately looking for ways around what you can't get around and they are very uh intelligent and creative um but at the

end of the day you've got this problem album called reality created by you know the Lord of hosts and you just keep bumping up against it so it's sort of funny to see where where we are now and and who is willing to kind of face it and and who isn't but I'm not as literary as you are Eric but I did have one line in my book that that I thought well that's pretty literary uh where I was telling the story about Einstein and um his fiddling with the cosmological constant to portray the universe

as static and then I said but the heavens talked back and the evidence became what determined the outcome of of the theorizing and I think in a sense the the heavens the digital code the fine tuning of the universe the planetary fine-tuning the all the anthropic biological parameters that our our colleague Michael Denton is writing about I mean there's so much evidence that's pointing towards a purposive um universe that was designed and created by a p purpose of intelligence it does get hard to to to ignore it so say that again the heavens the heavens

talked back I said talk back and that's original with you well well done Sten Meer come on come on everybody says he's dumb he's not dumb uh you it's such a joy most of my sentences are a lot longer than that so yeah we got that one out in Polish A's razor you got to get him down got to get him down nice and elegant my wife edited my last book and she had a little a little acronym hls which was hellishly long sentence but uh well Ste Stephen I just want to say honestly um

how uh important your writing and and your your friendship and these conversations have been to me um in my own path as I said at the beginning of of this because I really do think that um God is is is using you in some extraordinary ways and and writing these books is just part of it uh before we go let me just ask you briefly um are there any plans to you know get this information out there uh films or or anything like that oh thank you our producers would actually want me to give a

plug we are working on a featurelength documentary based roughly on the story of the book though it will be titled something different probably uh something like the story of everything how about the heavens talk back well we could we could work on that you better you better use it for something because I or I'll steal it because it's very good it's very good uh folks join me uh in thanking The Discovery Institute and Steven Meyer in particular for what at least for me has been a lot of fun and more than fun thank you Stephen

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