#2008 - Stephen C. Meyer

You sort of started to believe upon the preponderance of evidence. It was more the latter, but I had, by the time I first encountered it, a philosophical framework that made me open to it. I had a long protracted religious conversion from late high school all the way through college. It took, it was the last thing from a Damascus Road experience. And- How did it happen? It was a process of philosophical deliberation. It was not really based on science initially. I started having weird existential questions when I was 14 years old after I'd broken my leg in a skiing accident. And questions like, well, what's it gonna matter in 100 years? There's this great quote from Bertrand Russell where he says, you know, that all the noonday genius of human achievement is destined for extinction and the vast heat death of the solar system. I had never encountered Bertrand Russell as a 14 year old, but I later encountered that quote and I thought that was what was bothering me. That dude was a scorcher. Yeah, yeah. Well, I read in the hospital after I had this accident, I was reading a book about the history of baseball and I was totally into baseball at the time. I couldn't think of a better, a higher form of human achievement than to play for the New York Yankees. And yet all the stories of the great baseball guys ended the same. They were recruited by scouts who saw their talent. They came up to the big leagues, they amassed records, they won certain number of World Series. And then, if they were really great, they go to the Hall of Fame and retire at 38 and then what? And then I got to thinking, well, but then what for any of us? And so I was, this question of meaning kind of haunted me. What could I possibly do that would have any lasting or enduring meaning? And I ended up taking, I did a physics major and a geology major in college, but I took as many philosophy classes as I could along the way and I encountered these existentialist writers who were asking these same types of questions and realized, oh, as a 14 year old, I thought I must be insane to be having these questions. And I worried that I was insane. I was a real, I mean, it was a real funk I was in for six or eight months. And then later I realized, no, these were philosophical questions. And for me, the religious conversion I had started to address and answer those questions. So I was, by the time I got out of college, I was a convinced theist for philosophical reasons, but I had, at that point, I was completely comfortable with the evolutionary explanation of everything. And then at a conference in my, that I attended while I was working as a geophysicist, it was a conference about the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness. And it was divided on each panel between theists and philosophical materialists who were debating these big questions at the intersection of science and philosophy. And I was kind of stunned to learn, or to perceive at least, that the theist seemed to have the intellectual initiative in each of these big discussions, that materialism was a philosophy that was a spent force. It was not explaining where life first came from or the universe came from, let alone consciousness. And so I began, in a sense, on a kind of intellectual journey to see where these new evidences, the evidence for the beginning of the universe, or the fine tuning of the universe, or the thing that really intrigued me was the discovery that at the foundation of life, and even the very simplest cells, we have this amazingly complex code. The DNA we all learned about in high school, we think that, we all learned about the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. But that's not the most important thing about it. It's that within that double helix, there is literally a code, digital information that is directing the construction of the important proteins and protein machines that every cell needs to stay alive. Bill Gates has said it's like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. And I was doing at the time, for the work as a geophysicist for an oil company, I was doing seismic digital signal processing, which was an early form of information technology. And I got fascinated with the idea that there was this, first of all, an impasse in evolutionary explanations of the origin of life. Nobody knew how we got from the chemistry, in the prebiotic soup, to the code in an actual living cell. But it was fascinating that the impasse was created by the mystery surrounding the origin of information. Where did that come from? And so a year later, I was off to grad school in England, I ended up doing a PhD in origin of life biology within a history and philosophy of science department in Cambridge. And so that's kind of my, a sketch of my journey and how I got interested in this. I saw in one of your previous interviews, you said that you were very interested in origin stories. Me too, that was the- What's always interesting when you see someone who's kind of dedicated their life to a very specific thing, like where, what's the root of this? Where did it come from? So for you, you went through this funk and did you find comfort in religion? Is that what it helped you? Did you find structure in it? I found answers to basic worldview questions that I thought were, as a 14 year old, I thought nobody, there must be something wrong with me. Nobody else is having these questions. I'm not talking to anyone at school who's worried about- I think you're just smart. I remember one day I'm in just total, well, okay, for example, I was in this big leg cast and I would crutch my way up to the, up our driveway, get the newspaper, bring back the box scores to read about the baseball games the night before. And every day, it's a new date. And I do this and a new date and a new date. And I started thinking time is a really freaky thing. I can imagine an event and I'm gonna lift this cup, gonna drop it, put it over there. Now that event just took place, but it's already gone. We're not experiencing it anymore. We have a memory of it. But what does that actually mean? Where did there was this flow of sensory experience? But there didn't seem to be anything rooting it that gave it an enduring reality. And I had this sense there must be something that doesn't change or else everything else that does change is passing ephemeral and ultimately of no account. And so, you know, you read, I ended up reading the big fat family Bible that I'd never cracked and found that when God revealed his name to Moses, it was the I am that I am, this timeless eternal person. And you found the same thing in the New Testament, the way Jesus Christ was referred to. And so I thought, I wonder if there is something that doesn't change. And so the kind of philosophical questions I was having made me want to explore whether or not a revealed religion might in fact be true. Can I ask you to expand on that? What do you mean by something that does not change? Some eternal self-existent reality, I guess, it was not something as a 14 year old I had worked out. It was a kind of an intuition that there, all like it was the experience of having the constant flux of changing sense perceptions left me with a sense that there was nothing solid to hold onto in reality. And so this is not a great, this is not the argument for the existence of God that I would repose in which I would repose great trust. I'm not trying to persuade anyone by this. I'm just telling what my experience was at this point. I later found what I think are very, very persuasive arguments, both philosophically and scientifically. The thing that really convinced me as a university student doing studying philosophy was an argument known as the argument from epistemological necessity. The fundamental question in modern philosophy that has really just been a stumper and has led to this whole postmodern turn where people don't think there's no objective basis for any reality is the question of the reliability of the human mind. On what basis can we trust the way our minds process all that sensory information? This goes back to Hume and Kant and some of the philosophers in the Enlightenment period. And from that point forward, there was a great doubt. Maybe we can't trust our minds. Maybe we can't trust, we have all these things we assume about reality in order to make sense about reality, that every cause has an effect, for example. But we can't prove those things. We have to use those assumptions in order to know anything at all. And I encountered this argument that suggested, well, if we try to justify our ability to know the world around us by empirical data, by things we observe, this was Hume's argument. You can't do it. He was a radical empiricist and found that in order to make any sense of the sense of presence he had, he had to presuppose the uniformity of nature. But to prove the uniformity of nature, he had to make reference to sensory observations. And so he was arguing in a circle. And so it came down, you couldn't justify the reliability of assumptions we make in our minds by observing the world. You had to use those assumptions to make sense of the observations. But if you presupposed that our minds were made by a benevolent creator who gave us those assumptions in order to make sense of the world that he also made, then there was a principle of correspondence between the way the mind worked and the way the world worked, in which case we could trust the basic reliability of the mind. And this turns out to be one of the key foundational assumptions that gave rise to modern science. It was called the idea of intelligibility. Newton, Boyle, Kepler, the great founders of modern science thought that nature had secrets to reveal, there were patterns there to be revealed, that we could understand because our minds had been made in the image of the same rational creator who had built rationality and design and pattern and lawful order into the world. Do you believe in evolution? I believe in, well, that's a, I believe in microevolution. I believe that there are real evolutionary processes. I'm skeptical about what's called universal common descent, the idea that all living forms have evolved from one single common ancestor. I'm profoundly skeptical, skeptical about chemical evolution, the idea that the non-living chemicals in a prebiotic ocean or prebiotic soup arranged themselves to form the first living cell. And I'm also skeptical about the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism, which as it happens, so are many leading evolutionary biologists today. I attended a conference in 2016 convened by the Royal Society in London, Royal Society being the oldest and most august scientific body in the world. And it was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who were essentially dissatisfied with neo-Darwinism, the standard textbook theory that we learn in, in all high school and college textbooks. And many of them were saying we need a new theory of evolution. The first talk at that conference was given by Gerd Muller, a prominent Austrian evolutionary biologist. And he simply enumerated the five major, what he called explanatory deficits of neo-Darwinism. And his basic perspective was, the mutation selection mechanism does a good job of optimizing or modifying pre-existing forms. It can generate small scale variation, but it does a very poor job of explaining the origin of those forms. Think about, for example, Darwin's Finch Beaks. Great job of explaining how variations in weather patterns result in changes in the shape and structure of the Finch Beaks. But that mechanism turns out not to do a good job of explaining the origin of birds or other major animal groups in the first place. So modification, yes, innovation, no. So the modification over massive amounts of time, don't you think that would eventually lead to new groups? Because a lot of new groups have, they have similar origins, or at least origins from one ancestor. Well, time was always the hero of the plot. But let me just run a couple of arguments by, and let's see what you think, okay? And I developed these in a lot of detail in my book, Darwin's Doubt. If we now know, thanks to the genetic revolution, the molecular biological revolution, that if you wanna build a new form of life, you have at least, you have to have new code. Because all new forms of life depend upon new anatomical, a fundamentally new type of animal, for example. So you need new anatomical structures from, but the new anatomical structures require new cell types, new types of, if you got animals that first come on the line and they have a digestive system, they have a gut. Well, you gotta have enzymes that can service a gut, that can process food. So enzymes are types of proteins, proteins are built from the informational code and DNA. So anytime you wanna get a new, it's just like in the computer world. If you wanna give your computer a new function, you've gotta provide new code. So we have these long digital bit strings, A, Cs, Gs and Ts, not zeros and ones, but A, Cs, Gs and Ts in a digital string. And we call that a gene. And if you have a section of DNA for building a protein, that's great, it all works. Now, but if you wanna build a fundamentally new form of life, you gotta have new proteins to service the new cell types, to build the new anatomical structures. In our computer world, we know that if you start randomly changing the zeros and ones in a section of digital code, you're gonna degrade the function of that code long before you come up with a new string for making a new program or operating system. That the functional sequences are what are, they're highly isolated in what's called sequence space. You can change a few things and still retain function, but after a very few number of changes, you're gonna degrade the function and long before you come up with a new function. Now, the Darwinian mechanism starts with the idea that there are random changes in those digital bit strings, those sequences of A, Cs, Gs and Ts. And based on our experience in the computer world, we would expect that random changes are gonna, again, degrade those strings long before they're capable of building a new protein. And there's now very compelling experimental evidence that that's true. There's an Israeli molecular biologist, Dan Tophak, unfortunately, he died fairly recently in a tragic accident, but he was doing mutagenesis experiments on sequences of code for building specific proteins that folded into stable structures. They're actually called protein folds. And he found that between three and 15 mutations was enough to degrade the thermodynamic stability of the protein structure that the gene was making. And once you lose that thermodynamic stability, you have no functional possibilities. Is there possibly an undiscovered mechanism for protecting against that, that we're not aware of yet? Possibly, but there's numerous lines of evidence suggesting that mutations are within limits. You can modify again, you can optimize an existing protein structure called a fold, but if you allow too many of those mutations, you're gonna degrade. And long before you would get a fundamentally new protein structure, another protein fold. So that's just one of many, I wanna run one other argument by you that I think is very intuitive. If you wanna build, it turns out that there are structures or systems that are very important for building new animal body plants. And they're called developmental gene regulatory networks. They were discovered at Caltech by Eric Davidson and colleagues. Eric Davidson has also unfortunately recently passed away in the last few years. What they discovered is that you not only have genes for building proteins, you have genes that are building, that for constructing molecules that send signals, that tell the genome when to express other parts of itself. So you've got, they're signaling molecules that are telling the genome when to turn this part or that part on in order to build the right proteins at the right time as new cells are going through cell division in the process of animal development. So if you go from one cell to two to four to eight to 16, et cetera, you've got to, and as you have a developing animal form, there are points in that trajectory where it's important to differentiate one type of cell from another and for certain types of cells, muscle cells as opposed to nerve cells or bone cells to start to be constructed. And all of this is closely choreographed by these signaling molecules. So you get a DNA that builds regulatory RNA that turns on another part of the DNA that then turns on, that builds a protein for servicing a particular type of cell at the right time and not at another time. And as Davidson and his colleagues mapped this out, they discovered that the functional relationships that were involved looked like an integrated circuit. It was, and they call them developmental gene regulatory networks. And the point is you can't build a completely developed animal form unless you have this choreography taking place that is expressed through these developmental gene regulatory networks. But they discovered something else about them. And that is that they cannot be altered significantly. If you alter any of the core elements of these developmental gene regulatory networks, animal development shuts down. This makes perfect sense to anyone with a background in say electrical engineering because there's a principle of engineering that says the more tightly integrated a functional system and the more difficult it is to perturb any part of the system without defect of the whole. It's a constraints principle. And this turned out to be true in spades of these effectively integrated circuits. Now they weren't controlling the flow of electricity but more the flow of information in the developing organism. So here's the argument. You need a developmental gene regulatory network to make an animal body plan. But if you wanna turn one animal body plan into another animal body plan, you're gonna have to change developmental gene regulatory network A into a completely novel developmental gene regulatory network to build that novel animal form. But the one thing we know experimentally is these things cannot be altered without the destruction of the first, of the initial form. And once that form is destroyed, there's no more evolutionary development possible. Now it turns out that not only neo Darwinism, the kind of standard textbook form of evolutionary theory has no answer for this. And Davidson was quite explicit about this. He was by the way, no friend of creationism or intelligent design, but he said very explicitly that neo Darwinism is a commits a catastrophic error in thinking because it is not addressing this fundamental problem. There's no, but it's not just neo Darwinism. They're really, there's also newer models of evolutionary theory and they don't address this either. This is so there are these sort of fundamental challenges to the creative power of mutation and selection and other similar, similarly undirected materialistic processes that have just not, have not been answered. And they seem pretty fundamental. What it looks like when you look at, I've got a picture of both in two of my books, these networks, they look like circuits. And circuits in our experience are the product of engineers, of intelligence. I mean, we're looking at distinctive hallmarks of intelligent agency when we look at circuitry and code and information processing systems. I mean, this is what we're finding inside life. It's not what Darwin thought in the 19th century or his colleagues Huxley who said, the cell was a simple homogenous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. It's a new day in biology. Things are much more complex than people thought when they formulated these evolutionary ideas. There's a lot to talk about here. Sorry, that was a long answer. It's very long, it's very hard to keep up with you. But when you're talking about this process and this very, first of all, I wanna go back one step further. You were saying something about, and I'm paraphrasing, but whatever this intelligent thing is, creating us somehow or another in its image or somehow or another thinking the way it thinks. How did you say that again? Yeah, this was the idea of the early scientists who got science going. The way they've talked about it was the intelligibility of the universe. It was intelligible. It could be understood by us because our minds had been made in the image or likeness of the creator of the universe itself. Isn't it just possible that our minds are complex and curious? And so we're trying to figure out what all these things are and what DNA is and what molecules and that. We're trying to figure out the very fiber of existence itself. What is it made out of? Wouldn't any curious, self-aware creature start to contemplate these things? And if it really is an intelligent force that made us to think the way it thinks, why would it have war? Why would it have murder? Why would it have all the horrific crimes that we see? Drug addictions. Why would it create us in a form like that? Yeah, I mean, there was a, I mean, the background of this, let's start with the first question. I'll get to the second question. Okay. It's a, you know. I just wanna know. Equally profound and good question. The historians of science have asked a question. It's the why then, why they're question. We've had all these great civilizations. Egyptians made the pyramids, as you and I were talking about. We had the Chinese had gunpowder, the Romans built aqueducts. But for some reason in Western Europe, in the 16th and 17th centuries, and I think the antecedents for that go back a little further, you get these very systematic methods for studying nature arising. And you get this concern to use mathematics to describe the order in nature. And you get this incredibly productive, historians of science call it, they call it the scientific revolution. Something really dramatic changed. And it's different than other civilizations. And as they examined what happened, they said, well, the material, you know, the material substrate or the things you would need to do science were in all the other cultures. And there were many great cultures. But this systematic method of studying nature uniquely arose in Western Europe in a particular time, in a particular context. And many, many historians of science have come to the conclusion that the thing that was, the difference that made the difference was the worldview, was the philosophical assumptions of those Western European scientists who were almost entirely coming out of a Judeo-Christian worldview. And one of the key assumptions that they had was that systematic study of nature was actually possible. It's actually very hard to do science. It's very hard to see a pattern in what can initially seem to be a chaotic jumble of sense data. And these thinkers had the conviction that there were such patterns, there was rationality, there was order behind things, because there was a God who had made the universe to be orderly and to be understood. So that was just one of those thought differences, differences in thinking that historians have identified as a key feature that explains why the scientific revolution happened where it did. And that's not to say that the only people that can do science once it gets going are people of religious faith, but it is to say that the people with a particular religious faith had a reason to pursue science that apparently other cultures did not have to the same degree. Do we know that for a fact though? Because there's a lot of evidence that we've lost some civilizations. We've lost a lot of their knowledge, the burning of the library of Alexandria. We don't really know that much about what they knew. Obviously they had some incredibly complex mathematics if they built the pyramids. We know that. We know there had to be measurement. We know there had to be some very complex geometry in order for them to figure out how to do it correctly. Well certainly there may have been other things that have gone on that we didn't know about and that were lost. The only point I was making was that the people who got science going in the 16th and 17th century did so for a discernible religious reason, if you will. And that is just a fact of history. But that doesn't necessarily mean they were correct. Well it does mean that they generated a very fruitful way of investigating nature. It certainly aided them. And it probably motivated them in a lot of ways and guided them in a lot of ways. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they're correct in that assumption. No, and I wouldn't argue for the correctness of a theistic worldview simply on the basis of the fruitfulness of science. But it is a fact of history I think that a theistic worldview was a very important motivator for those early scientists who did get science going and that science did turn out to be very fruitful. Which is probably a very good point to give to people that are atheists. I have other arguments for theism. No, that's okay. But for people that are atheists, that widely dismiss religion as being silly. Or anti-science. Right, anti-science. But it's literally probably the birth of science as far as we know in the Western world. Yeah, I know you've had Neil Tyson on your show. And he makes this claim that Newton's religious beliefs led to, didn't lead to any good questions. They were a dead end. He had great scientific insights but his religion was bad news for science. But it turns out Newton didn't make the God of the Gaps argument that Tyson accused him of making and many other people have accused. And it was his greatest work, the Principia, his work on gravitation was meant to display. It was partly a religious project. He was trying to demonstrate the principles, the mathematical harmony that had been built into creation by the creator. And he later writes a theological epilogue to the book called the General Scolium where he makes the religious motivation for his scientific work completely explicit and ends up making design arguments right in the context of that work. So this is, I just think it's something that persuaded me that about theism initially before I encountered any scientific arguments for it was this whole question of the reliability of the mind. On what basis can we trust in the reliability of the mind? One very good answer to that is the mind was created by the same God who created the world and that God created structures of the mind that allow us to know the world around us. So again, back to the other question. Why did God create war? Why does God create murder? Why does God create all the horrific things we see in the news, school shootings? Why would God create a mind that acts in that way? Well, I think the traditional theistic answer to that is the free will defense. It's not that God created those things. He created free agents knowing that it was better to create free agents who had the ability to choose and therefore to choose to love him or not or love each other or not than it was to create puppets. But with that decision to create free moral agents, there was also the risk that people would use that freedom to exploit others and harm others. Sorry, but how do you react to the argument of determinism then in the face of this argument that God created free will? Unpack that a little for me. Determinism, the concept that, like when you see someone who's in jail, say he made a bad decision and he went to jail. But if you go back through that person's life, you go through their, the epic. Oh, right, right. Yeah, the life, the childhood, the horrific traumas, all the abuse they've suffered in and out of the justice system at a very young age, surrounded by crime. Tragic, tragic stuff, yeah, exactly. Right, it's not a free will issue entirely. There's a lot of variables. Understood. The philosophical way of thinking about that is to make a distinction between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. The many of those, well, actually let me go a different direction. The, there's two different views of human nature. One is that we are moral agents, free moral agents. And one is that we're completely determined by genes, environment or evolutionary past. And I'm convinced that even in the face of terrible environmental conditions in our background, we are still free to choose. I think there are certain types of backgrounds that incline people towards a tendency to harm others and to do things that we would regard as crimes. But I think we still are free. I think that's a fundamental. There's some real clear research into trauma and the developmental cycle of children, how it leads to psychopathy and all sorts of other real serious problems. Sure, no question. Where free will comes into question and determinism makes a better argument. I would, there's a great philosopher of mind. How do you respond to that? I would say that those are predisposing inclinations that are probably necessary to explain the behavior but not sufficient. That I think even in the face of things that incline us towards certain courses of action, we still have choice. And I think there's a lot of brain physiological research that shows that supports the idea that the mind is not completely determined by the neurophysiological correlates or the underlying brain chemistry. Are we isolating for any reason? What's that? Are we isolating these two variables for any reason? Whether it's determinism or free will. Like why does one have to win out? Are we not? I would agree. But if you allow any free will at all, then we're not completely determined. But no one's saying completely. Yeah. The determinism proponents are. Then we're agreeing, Joe. I once heard an excellent lecture from a Berkeley philosopher of mind, John Searle. He was the guy who did the famous Chinese Room Paradox. What is that? It's not that famous. Well, okay, let's bracket and I'll get to the main point. And he showed that with all the research we've had in brain science, neuroscience, we've shown that there are lots of things that are necessary conditions of certain brain states and necessary conditions, physiological, necessary, so to have a certain brain state, there are underlying physiological correlates that must be in place. To use that brain state to make a certain course of action, to accomplish a certain course of action, also there are necessary conditions, necessary correlates. But he showed that, but we've never in the research showed that have closed the gap between necessary and sufficient. That just because those states are there doesn't mean we will, that someone is forced to make that choice or to undertake that course of action. And so I think you have- You're aware of that as a person though, right? I'm aware of that a person all the time. I wake up grumpy in the morning because I didn't get enough sleep. It doesn't mean I have to slap one of my kids. Of course, yeah. So- But that's why it's kind of a combination of the things. It is a combination, but in saying it's a combination, you and I are saying the same thing. There's an element of agency that is retained, I would say for almost all people, I do think there are people who have lost it, if you will, in the sense, I mean, I think there is a legitimate insanity plea. Sure. But it's been way, way overused because we have an underlying commitment to materialism and determinism. Let me tell you a story. But let me step in that. We also have psych drugs. You know, there's a real issue with that as well. There's a lot of people that are on medications and medications have horrible side effects and unintended effects, and there's a lot of that as well. Yeah, I agree. I'm a big fan of the work of Jeffrey Schwartz. The UCLA psychiatrist has written the book, You Are Not Your Brain. And he shows that those psychotherapeutic drugs can be helpful in stabilizing people, but that for many anxiety disorders, it's also really important to retrain the thinking patterns that lead to anxiety, that there's a mind over matter aspect as well as the material substrate aspect. And I think you and I are saying the same thing effectively, that if you say there's a combination of factors involved and one of them is our own human agency, then we're saying that we retain free will even in the face of predisposing materialistic factors. If I could, a story, okay? We're getting pretty heady and philosophical. So good. Good stuff. 1925 is the famous Scopes trial with Clarence Darrow. The year or two before that, I can't remember the exact year, there's a famous Leopold and Loeb case in Chicago. Two young college students commit a horrific murder. They're taking philosophy courses from a professor who is an advocate or a proponent of Nietzschean, the Nietzschean Ubermitch, the idea of the overman, and saying that the really enlightened person extricates themselves from bourgeois morality and chooses their own morality. And so these two young college students end up killing a 12-year-old boy for the thrill of it, was the justification. They're convicted, they're tried, they're convicted, they're awaiting sentencing, and the ACLU sends out Clarence Darrow to argue for leniency, for clemency, or for leniency in the case. And he makes the first diminished responsibility plea in American jurisprudence history. He says, was Dickey Loeb to blame because of the infinite forces that were at work in him through the evolutionary, millions of years before. And so he appeals to evolutionary determinism to say that these two young guys were not responsible for what they had done. And that basically our genes, our environment, and the evolutionary process that programmed these inclinations into these young men is the real culprit, is what was responsible. And so this is the first time we get the diminished responsibility plea in our legal system. There was a little cartoon in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago where there was this hapless guy standing before the judge, and he says, not guilty by reason of millions of years of evolutionary selection for aggressive behavior, Your Honor. So that's what I reject. I'm a critic of that form of determinism. I don't deny that there are factors that influence behavior or our thoughts or influences, but ultimately I want the mind over matter approach. I wanna say we are responsible ultimately for what we think and what we do with those thoughts. And you think that, I mean, if I'm paraphrasing, but the thought process at our best is what the creator's looking for. Right. This is the idea that what we all gravitate towards, what we all inherently recognize as being good, regardless of culture, regardless of geopolitical boundaries and all the various different things that make us unique all across the globe. We all know what's good, family, love, community, that all these things are somehow or another in us. Exactly. The great Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, argued that there was a universally understood morality that he called the Tao. Or the Tao. We all know it's wrong to kick old ladies in the shins for pleasure. You could do these kind of case studies in ethical philosophy, but there might be a case where you need to kill someone in order for a higher good, but you can easily construct things that reveal these deep moral intuitions we have. It's not okay to kick old ladies in the shins for pleasure, that's wrong. And that's wrong in a Christian culture, it's wrong in an Asian culture, that in a pre-Christian Asian culture, it's wrong in a, it doesn't matter. We all have that awareness of objective moral principles. And I think that's, the way you put it was beautiful. I think the creator wants us to live in accord with those things we know to be the good. But these objective moral principles, they do vary with the environment and the amount of resources and stress and the dangers. Like for instance, I think it's Pinker's work where he talks about hunter-gatherer tribes that relatively frequently kill the older women, because they just can't keep up anymore and they're nomadic and they get in the way. And so they try to catch them when they're not looking. It's a great example, because it actually illustrates the deeper universality of the moral, the deeper moral principles. Even cultures that were involved in child sacrifice. They had belief systems that suggested that if they sacrificed the children, then the crops would come in and it would benefit the tribe as a whole. So the underlying value was the preservation of life, even though they had a, they had a moral, there's a difference between a moral judgment and a moral principle. They made a moral judgment that this is what was necessary to affirm the underlying moral principle. Now, I would argue they had a false worldview that suggested that this was necessary, but because they believed that idea about the need to sacrifice children to the gods, they made a moral judgment that differed from one that I would make or you would make, but they did in the process actually affirm a deeper moral principle, that is the value of human life. Right, but the question is, where did that idea even come from, to sacrifice a child? Well, that came from, that came from their mythological, religious belief. The more, I think the more important question is, where did the underlying moral principle come from? And why is that universal? And on what basis can we justify it as a universal ought rather than just a statement of fact? But does it exist in a person who's sacrificing a child? The universal moral principle seems to have been completely abandoned. If you're sacrificing a child for some reason that you cannot prove, that it's somehow or another going to influence something according to whatever your beliefs are, that's gonna make the crops come back. I agree with you. I think something very deep and profound has to be overwritten, but I think that is the role that, I say a religious belief system can play. Not in that situation. Their religious belief system allowed them to do it. And in fact, it probably encouraged them. Well, that's exactly what I'm saying, that that religious belief system overrode the intuition that they would normally have based on the underlying moral principle. Why do they have that religious belief system? If God is going to present religious beliefs, if God is going to somehow or another come down and give wisdom to men, why do some have this very fucked up version of that? Yeah, I can't answer that. There's a multiplicity of systems of belief. What I have tried to do is argue for a theistic belief system that I think makes sense. I think it gives a good account of this objective morality, but also I think there's scientific evidence for it, and that's what my work has been about. I'm not a sociologist of religion, so I don't know exactly how all these different variants arose, but some of them have had these destructive sort of consequences where people have, against their deeper intuitions, overridden them because they have this belief that they've got to do this to make the crops come in or to, you know. I know that's not necessarily a field of study, but it's still, somehow or another, these things are all intertwined in this idea. Sure, sure. Yeah, so. Yes, in making the argument that I'm making, I'm not claiming to have answered all the other imponderables of, you know. Of course, of course. No, look, it's a fascinating conversation. It's a fascinating thought. Already it is, yeah. But I mean, even just the thought of something that is either intelligent or is code that is interwoven into the entire universe itself. I have a question. When we think of human beings, we always think of human beings as being. That's an awesome thing you just said, actually. I mean, I was talking to my colleague David Brolinski about that very issue this morning, you know, it's not just the biologists, but the physicists are now thinking of the foundational reality as being informational, you know. And I mean, we found, we've located, we know the locus or the place where the code is stored in a living organism. That's an unbelievable discovery. For 2,000, 4,000 years, however long humans have thought about these things, at least back to the time of Aristotle, we've had this mystery, why does like beget like? Why are children discernibly like their parents? Why, and in 1953 through 65, we have this amazing flurry of scientific activity that elucidates the source of the signal that ensures that transmission of hereditary information. And we discovered there actually is a code that is responsible for that phenomenon. For, we now talk about DNA replication and gene expression, two different things that DNA molecule does. So there's, to me, that's a stop press moment in the history of science and the history of biology, but in the history of humankind, you know, this suddenly we have an inkling of how this happens, what I was gonna say is that a human being, we think of them as an individual, but really they're a host for a lot of organisms. The human being does not exist without the bacteria in its gut. The human being does not exist without the flora on its skin and the human being is filled with billions of other living things, right? Right. When we think of the earth, we think of the earth as a host for billions of life forms. Insects and amoebas and plants and animals and all that. When we look at the planet itself, we think of the planet as an individual, but when we look at a galaxy, a spiral galaxy, we look at that as an individual, we look at that as a thing. When we look at the universe, when we look at God, are we making a mistake by thinking that it's something that created the universe, that maybe the universe itself is this living thing, the universe itself is God? Well, that's an absolutely great question. There are three basic views about this. One is that the universe is itself, the physical universe is eternal and self-existent. And some people think of it as a kind of organism. There was this Gaia hypothesis that Lynn Margulis, most standard materialists just think of it as the product of matter, an eternally existent or self-existent matter and energy or the physical fields that are expressed in material particles, where they think of those as eternal and self-existent. The other view is a more pantheistic view that there is a kind of God, but it's not an agent or a conscious mind that is, to whom you could pray or with whom you could communicate or who has communicated or created, but rather it sort of pervades the physical universe and it is also eternal and self-existent. And then the third view is that there is a transcendent creator beyond the universe who brought the physical universe into existence. And who brought him into existence or her or they? Just to finish the other thought, and then I'll come back to that. The third view is the view that I hold. I'm a classical theist and I think the scientific evidence is pointing in that direction fairly strongly, in part because we now have evidence from multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the universe did in fact have a beginning. The material universe does not look to have been eternal and self-existent. And so then to answer your second question, I would say that every philosophical system, sometimes philosophers talk about world views, whether they're formal philosophical systems or just sort of the informal set of assumptions that we all need to make about reality. But every world view needs to answer the question, what is the thing or the process or the entity from which everything else came? What's the ground of being, the starting point? And up until the 20th century, I think the materialist naturalist view was very credible because it affirmed that matter and energy were eternal and self-existent in the same way that theists thought God was eternal and self-existent. But in both systems or in all systems, something is what philosophers call the primitive, the thing from which everything else comes. I think as a consequence or in the wake of our modern cosmological, astrophysical discoveries that the material universe itself had a beginning, that matter and energy is now a poor candidate to be that eternal self-existent thing. And therefore, I think that the theistic view that a transcendent creator is the thing from which everything else came without itself being created is the best place to start our philosophical thinking. It provides the best explanation for what we see. When you say that there's direct evidence that the universe has a beginning, what do you mean by that? Well, it's a fascinating story. And when I tell in the new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, it starts, there are basically three different lines of evidence. Well, there's three different classes of evidence. There's the evidence from observational astronomy. Maybe we should just start there and then I'll tell you about that stuff. Theoretical physics, I'm sorry, they keep flopping off my head. Sorry, you can adjust them, they push in. Yeah, oh good. Here we go. Bryan Simpson was here, he's got a big head. That's awesome. Well, it's another one of these, I think maybe part of my story is that I was always fascinated with these issues at the intersection of science and philosophy where the scientific evidence leads you to a big philosophical question or possibly conclusion. So back to the ancient Greeks, we've had this debate. Is the universe eternal and self-existent? Has it always been here? Or is it finite? Did it come into existence at a point in time? In which case, was there possibly an external creator that brought it into existence? In the 1920s, we get the first scientific evidence that helps us to answer that question. Coming into the 20th century, most physicists assume that the universe is eternal. It's infinite in, it's past eternal. You can go back as far as you want, there's always matter, there's always energy, there's always space, there's always time. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble is looking, is it Mount Wilson in Southern California, the big observatory there? He's a lawyer who's come into astronomy at a very propitious time because the astronomers have just started building these great dome telescopes. And they've also been developing photographic technology that allows them to collect a lot more light over a long period of time. And he starts looking at the distant galaxies. No, actually, they were nebula. They didn't know whether they were galaxies or not. And there was a debate right up to 1920 whether or not the Milky Way in which we live is the only galaxy or whether these little smudges that they were detecting on the photographic plates, with a little dot of light with smudges, whether those were other galaxies or just a star with gas around it. And Hubble was able to use some new techniques for measuring distances to astronomical, to distant astronomical objects, in particular to these nebula. And he found that the distance to the Andromeda Nebula was measured at 900,000 light years, but the accepted measurement for the distance across the Milky Way was only 300,000 light years. So clearly the Milky Way could not contain the Andromeda Nebula. So therefore the Andromeda Nebula wasn't just a nebula, it was another galaxy. And in the ensuing years then as he uses the big telescopes and these new techniques, he establishes that there are galaxies galore, spiral galaxies, spindle nebulae, galaxies. So we now know, I think I put in the book, I use the number 200 billion galaxies. I think I've since corrected that it's another order of magnitude that astronomers now think there's two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. It's just unbelievable how much our awareness of the vastness of the universe has expanded in really 100 years, it's amazing. But the second thing that Hubble discovered is the light coming from those distant galaxies is being stretched out. If you shine light through a prism, it separates into the colors red to violet. And the red light corresponds to the light with longer wavelengths. And what he's detecting is light that has shifted in these spectral analyses that they do in the red direction, suggesting that its wavelengths are longer as you would expect if those galactic objects are receding away from us, if they're moving away. So it's like the Doppler effect with the train whistle. If the train's moving away, the pitch of the sound goes down. And that's because the sound waves are being stretched out. Well, the same thing happens with light. And so very early on, as he's studying the galaxies, he's realizing that there's not just a lot of them, and they're not just separate from our galaxy, but they're moving away from us. And in fact, the further out they are, the faster they're moving away. And so that gives rise to the idea of an expanding universe because to explain that observation, you have to posit something like a roughly spherical expansion of the whole to account for what's called the Hubble relationship, that the further out, the faster they're going. And so that's big discovery number two for Hubble. First, there are other galaxies. Secondly, they're moving away from us. And that is suggesting that the universe as a whole is expanding. Now, as you wind that picture of the universe backwards in time, if in your mind's eye you think of, they call it back extrapolating, what the universe would have been like 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago or a million or a billion, however old the universe ends up being, eventually all that galactic material would have converged to a common point past which you cannot back extrapolate. So that point then marks the beginning of the expansion of the universe, but arguably the beginning of the universe itself. And so that's arguably arguably. Now, there I think are other developments. Can I pause here? Oh, yeah. That's again another long explanation. But that's OK. So we're talking about 1920. Now, imagine the detection ability that we might have 500 years from now. Maybe this information is not the big picture. Maybe there's a lot more to be discovered with advancement of science and astronomy as they can develop methods to look deeper and deeper into the galaxy. I mean, aren't we finding some things with the James Webb telescope that are leading some scientists to question the actual age of the universe itself? I was going to talk about James Webb after you started the question, but the James Webb I think has provided. First of all, the answer. There is some debate though now about the timeline. Well, the debate as I understand it, let me answer the first part of the question. And that is, of course, all the arguments that I make in the book are provisional based on the best science that we have. Right. And that's all we can do as scientists and philosophers of science. OK? We're not... But we're looking at a very limited amount of data that we can acquire from things that are 13.9 billion light years away. Right? Sure, but it is striking how decisive the indicators are of a beginning based on what we're discovering. And James Webb has only reinforced that. And there's kind of a long story there. I'll try to make it short. Can we pause you? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm sorry. I have to pee. Yeah, excellent. So we'll come back. James Webb. James Webb. OK. Awesome. Confocates. Condensed my thoughts. I'll give you a shorter answer. Sorry. Sorry. We're back. I didn't even make it for an hour. No, no worries. So James Webb. James Webb telescope. And James Webb. Yeah, there's been a lot of media reports suggesting that the findings of the James Webb telescope have undermined the case for the Big Bang or the Big Bang Theory. But there's an interesting backstory on this. Most of these media reports were based on the writings of a single physics researcher named Eric Lerner, who's been since 1990 kind of carrying a torch to refute the Big Bang. And Lerner, in one of his articles, quoted a University of Kansas astrophysicist saying that she stays up late at night wondering if based on the James Webb that everything that we know is turning out to be false. Turns out that that researcher, that astrophysicist, disclaimed his use of the quote, explained that he took it completely out of context. She was talking about theories of galaxy formation, not about whether or not there had been a Big Bang, and not about whether or not the universe is expanding as we would expect. So he's confirmation bias. Yeah, and in a sense also taking somebody way out of context to make a point of his own. He misused the quotation. On purpose. Apparently. Apparently. So here's... And there have been a number of leading astrophysicists. In fact, people who would like to know more about this, I'd recommend what Brian Keating from University of California, San Diego, great astrophysicist, has been writing about this. But here's the short story. I wrote an op-ed in The Daily Wired distilling some of this stuff. What the James Webb telescope is able to do is to, in fact, what it was constructed to do was to detect extremely long wavelength radiation, stuff that's outside the visible range. I call it uber redshifted. It's actually in the infrared range is the more accurate physics term. So it's looking for very long wavelength radiation coming from galaxies that are very, very far out there. Now, why would it be looking for that? Well, because if the universe is expanding as we would expect based on the Big Bang theory, then the radiation coming from things very, very far out in space and therefore very far back in time should be very stretched out, more stretched out than stuff that's closer at hand. So the James Webb was constructed in hopes of detecting that type of radiation if it existed. It's not assuming that it necessarily would, but it would be a way of confirming the expansion of the universe has been going on for a very long time. And in order to do that, the NASA people created some amazing technology. They super cooled the detection apparatus to, I think, 5, 6, 7 degrees above absolute zero so that the heat coming off of the instrument itself was not creating infrared that would interfere. And what they were, in fact, able to detect from these very ancient, very distant galaxies was super redshifted radiation, uber redshifted stuff out in the infrared, and were able, on the basis of that, to synthesize images of these very, very distant remote galaxies. Now, the very fact that they were able to do that confirms that you have what you would expect on the basis of the Big Bang theory, that the amount of redshift that you would expect to be present if, in fact, the galaxies had been expanding throughout that vast stretch of time was, in fact, present and was detected. Now, that didn't get reported. There were, what, the whole focus was on the fact that there were galaxies that were more mature, there were more of them early on than we would have expected, based on our theories of galaxy formation. And so those are anomalies that need to be addressed and have not yet been explained, as I understand it. Maybe the astrophysicists have made more progress on that in even recent days. But the basic picture of an expanding universe outward from the beginning has not been undermined, but rather confirmed in a very dramatic way, at very great distance and with a, and for galaxies that are very far look back time, way, way back in time. So I think it's a rather dramatic confirmation. There have been many others, the cosmic background radiation that was discovered in 1965, the Kobe radiation of George, that George Smoot discovered in the 90s. So there's been this pattern of confirming evidence of this basic picture of an expanding universe outward from the beginning in observational astronomy from the 20s right up till now. And so that, I think, gives us good reason to think best we can tell the universe at a beginning. Can I pause you on that? What is the, when she was discussing the formation of galaxies, what had thrown that into question? Like, what was it about the formation of galaxies that undermined previous ideas? I'm going to answer tentatively because I don't know this as well as the other that I just described. But as I understand it, it's that there were more galaxies that formed earlier and are more mature than we would have expected because they were able to do look back to 13.5, 13.6 billion years ago. They think the origin of the universe is about 13.8 billion years ago. So apparently, galaxies were forming faster than we would have expected. And I think that's the anomaly that is on the table. Does that just push the timeline further back but still come up with the data that points to the idea of a beginning? That, I've wondered that. That seems to me a logical possibility. Maybe the origin of the universe was further back, but it's still, you're still getting this picture of a collapsing sphere in the reverse direction of time back to a point. But is it possible that with further detection, we can, with new data, have a better understanding of what is actually going on rather than just saying it all points to this thing? Because it seems like there's data, but it's what you're describing seems like it's possible, at least in the future, to have better detection methods. Yeah, it's always possible that we can change our minds on things because science is always provisional. But there are many stable theories that have persisted because of a preponderance of evidence that points to and continues to point to the same conclusion. And I think we've had a hundred years now where we've had repeated new types of observations that point towards the beginning. And there were two other classes of two other developments in theoretical physics that also, I think, reinforce this that I also wrote about in the book. One is the singularity theorems that Hawking and Penrose and George Ellis proved in the 1960s and 70s. And then there's something called the Borde-Guth-Vilinkin theorem, which I think is even a tighter physics proof of a beginning. I think there is a loophole with the Hawking-Penrose-Ellis singularity theorem, although it's, I think, very suggestive and highly indicative of a beginning. Let me run it just briefly because it's a fun thing to think about. So Hawking is doing black hole physics for his PhD in the 1960s. And he's at Cambridge and he's having these neurological symptoms and he's diagnosed with ALS. He gets very, very discouraged. He thinks he's going to quit. And he's encouraged to press on by close friends and he does. And he ends up writing this brilliant thesis where he has one chapter where he's thinking about what the cosmologists are talking about is that we've got this expanding universe. And if universe is expanding in the forward direction of time, then matter is getting more and more diffuse over time. Now, part of his thesis involves general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. And according to Einstein, a massive body actually curves the fabric of space or space-time. So if you're going in the forward direction of time, space is getting less and less curved and matter more and more diffuse. But if you're going in the reverse direction of time, the matter is getting more and more densely concentrated at every successive point in the finite past. Until, again, you reach a limiting case where the matter gets so densely concentrated that space gets so tightly curved that it can't get any more tightly curved. It can't get any more densely concentrated. And you move towards a point of infinite density and infinite curvature. You get to a limiting case. Now, infinite curvature corresponds to zero spatial volume. And so the picture of the origin of the universe that sort of intuitively flows from this is one where you get not just matter and energy arising, but space and time come into existence at that zero point. And he presents this in his PhD thesis. The story of this is told really nicely in the little film, the theory of everything. And his fear and trepidation getting examined, but one of his examiner, they're nitpicking all these different things. But then they say, hey, the idea of a black hole at the beginning of the universe, a space-time singularity. This is brilliant. Congratulations, Dr. Hawking. And they shove the thesis book back over to him and he's passed. But one of them says, now go work out the maths. And he ends up working out the math of this intuitive proof that he develops with Sir Roger Penrose, with whom you have done a wonderful interview, and George Ellis, whom I have had the occasion to meet. And so they end up producing several of these singularity theorems, suggesting that if general relativity is true, then there must have been a beginning. This is on grounds independent of all the things from observational astronomy. Now, there's a loophole with that. And that is that in the very tiniest smidgens of space-time, inside 10 to the minus 40 third of a second, or what they call Planck time, quantum effects might have been such that we would have to alter our ideas of how gravity worked. And so out of that has come something called an impulse or a different theories of what are called quantum gravity or quantum cosmology. And I think you've had some conversations on this show about that as well. In my book, I show that that is another possible cosmological model. But like the conclusion that the universe had a definite beginning, I think those models also have theistic implications, and I can explain why. Okay. Maybe we bracket that. Then the third, there's yet a third proof though of a beginning that come by three physicists, Bored, Guth, and Alexander Velinkin. And it's not based on general relativity. It's not based on ideas of what gravity was like in the early universe, but based on ideas of special relativity. It's a little tricky to explain easily, but basically they show that they're always again a limiting case and therefore a definite beginning to time. And therefore, and that it does not have the same loophole that the singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose. So what I've said in my, what I argue in the book is that a body of evidence from observational astronomy, a strong indicator from theoretical physics, namely the singularity theorems of Hawking at all, and then a very compelling proof from Bored, Guth, and Velinkin all point to the same conclusion, that as best we can tell the universe had a beginning. And I think that's the best we can do in science, but that is a pretty weighty range of testimony supporting the same conclusion. Did you ever read any Terrence McKenna? I haven't. Terrence McKenna had a very funny thing that he said about science. He said, science wants you to believe that it's all about measurement and reason if you allow them one miracle. That one miracle is the Big Bang. That all things come from the most preposterous idea ever. That everything came from nothing and one big miracle. That's right. I completely agree. I totally paraphrased it. He probably said it far more eloquently. This was Fred Hoyle's objection to the Big Bang. He said he was a democritian. He said, nothing comes from nothing. And I simply refuse to believe that the physical universe came from nothing physical. And moreover, he said it smacks of the Genesis account, which he detested. And so he rejected the Big Bang and formulated this steady state model that was later, I think, decisively refuted by the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. I've had funny coincidental meetings with Hoyle, Herman Bondi, and Thomas Gold, all three of the architects of the steady state model. I met Bondi and Hoyle when I was a PhD student in Cambridge. And Hoyle held on to his dying day for the steady state. But Bondi, actually, we had a conversation about it. And he said that, well, it turned out that it was a brilliant idea, it was a beautiful idea, just that it turned out that everything about it was wrong. And he rejected it. But later, Hoyle had his own conversion to a kind of quasi-theistic worldview because of his discovery of the fine-tuning parameters. But the point is that the materialist did not expect to have this evidence from the beginning. Hoyle thought that the laws of physics were the first law of conservation of matter and energy, matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, except at the Big Bang. And he didn't like that. But eventually, I think the physics community came around. There were so many indicators of that beginning event. Now, again, as we're discussing detection methods and our ability to understand things is so radically different from 1920, 100 years ago. What is it going to be like 100 years from now? Is this they're going to be, I mean, are we making assumptions based on very limited data? It's a lot of data for us, but it seems fairly limited given the scope of not just this universe, but then the concept of multiverses. Like what are your thoughts of this concept of multiple universes? I love to talk about the multiverses. Infinite universes. Yeah, I'm glad you raised it. And this also connects to the Fred Hoyle story, which is fascinating. Again, with the proviso, science is necessarily provisional. And we always have to be open to new data. But the trend lines, I think, are the things that are really interesting. So let's start with Hoyle, and then we'll get to a multiverse. Okay. So Hoyle is a great astrophysicist. He's thinking about carbon. And he realizes that carbon has this unique property of being able to make long chain-like molecules. And long chain-like molecules, therefore, are capable of storing information. And we need information to build specified structures in particular living systems. So he's trying to explain the abundance of carbon in the universe. And he thinks of four or five different ways that won't work. And finally, he comes up with a way that would work. And long story short, it turns out for that way of building carbon chemically to work, it has to do with combining simpler what are called nucleons, smaller atoms to get the carbon molecule. There has to be a special resonance level for the carbon molecule, special way it sings. It has a certain energy level that causes it to sing at a certain frequency. Turns out the frequency he predicts, which would be necessary to explain the origin of carbon in the universe, exists within a particular form of carbon. And they determine this at Caltech. But then that turns out to be the tip of a deeper iceberg of a whole series of other things in the universe that would have to be just right to make this formation of carbon possible. The gravitational force would have to, inside stars, the gravity couldn't be too strong, too weak. Electromagnetic force couldn't be too strong or too weak. The ratio between them couldn't be too strong or too weak. Everything fell in this sweet spot, this kind of Goldilocks zone where, and we now call this the phenomenon of fine tuning, that there are multiple parameters in the universe that fall within these very narrow tolerances, outside of which not only life would be impossible, but stable galaxies and even basic chemistry would be impossible. And so that is to say, even to get the evolutionary process going, you would have to have all these beautifully finely tuned parameters in place. And so Hoyle starts having a rethink about this, and he's a staunch atheist, scientific atheist materialist, but he ends up concluding that fine tuning points to some kind of a fine tuner. And he's quoted as saying that the best data we have suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry in order to make life possible. And so he moves to this sort of rudimentary, theistic position in his philosophy or his worldview. Now, a lot of other physicists have come to the same conclusion. Sir John Polkinghorn, a great Cambridge physicist, had a late in life conversion, religious conversion. It was partially predicated on his awareness as a physicist of the evidence for the universe as a setup job, the Goldilocks universe, some physicist so-called it. So that's kind of, as Hoyle said, a kind of common sense interpretation. When we see other systems that are finely tuned, like a French recipe or an internal combustion engine, what we mean by fine tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that work together to accomplish some remarkable outcome or functional or remarkable outcome. That's what, if you see an internal combustion engine, you think it was engineered because it's finely tuned. So common sense. The contrary argument to that, the main one, there have been others, but not even most secular physicists regard them as compelling anymore, the main contrary argument has been the idea of the multiverse. That yes, our universe has this array of jointly improbable parameters that are in that sweet spot. But we just happen to be the lucky one because there's a gabillion other universes out there and with different combinations of the laws and constants of physics and different initial conditions at the beginning of those universes. So all those things that were just right in our universe are yes, extremely improbable, but there's so many other universes that that the probability of a universe with that set of life-friendly conditions arising somewhere had to arise somewhere inevitably and we just happen to be in that lucky universe. And then we are stunned by that and they call that this observer selection effect. So that's superficially an equally plausible explanation to the fine tuner argument. And a lot of physicists have told me that they regard the two as a wash. You can believe in a fine tuner or you could believe in a multiverse. I think the fine tuner, we'll call it theistic design argument, provides a better overall explanation and here's why. For the fine tuning argument to actually work, there has to be some sort of causal connection between the universes. If all those other universes are just causally disconnected from our own, then nothing that happens in those other universes affects anything that happens in this universe, including whatever events were responsible for setting up the fine tuning in the first place. And in virtue of that, proponents of the multiverse hypothesis have proposed what they call universe generating mechanisms. And some are based on something called inflationary cosmology and others are based on something called string theory. But the idea is that there are mechanisms that would, according to the physics of those two cosmological models, spit out new universes such that we could portray our universe as the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery that was produced by a common, underlying common cause. Okay, fair enough. But it turns out that the cosmological models that give us these universe generating mechanisms imply that the universe generating mechanisms themselves must be finely tuned in order to generate new universes. And that fine tuning is ultimately unexplained. There's no underlying physics that explains why that fine tuning. So in order to explain the fine tuning, you invoke the multiverse. In order to make the multiverse credible, you invoke universe generating mechanisms. In order to make the universe generating mechanisms credible or plausible, you have to presuppose prior unexplained fine tuning, and you're right back to where you started. And given that fine tuning in our experience, our uniform and repeated experience, when we find it with a French recipe or an internal combustion engine or a hardware-software combination that works, when we find fine tuning, it always results from a mind. And since the multiverse hasn't provided a better explanation for that, I think the conclusion of design or an ultimate fine tuner stands. Say that last sentence again. Okay. Just the last sentence about the\u2026 Given that fine tuning in our experience is always the product of intelligence. Think of any system we would describe as finely tuned. Right. Then, and given that the multiverse has not provided an explanation for the ultimate fine tuning, the best explanation remains intelligent design. And if you want to say yet, that's fine, because again, all scientific arguments, whether they have theistic implications or not, are provisional. Is it fine tuning based on our interpretations of what's happening? I mean, is Hawaii fine tuning? Is the volcanic eruption underneath the ocean that creates the island? Is that fine tuning by intelligent design? Or is that a process of things that happen and then other living things take advantage of this process and use it as home? I think that\u2026 And is that thought process possible in that particular\u2026 Like that example, and then extrapolate that through the whole universe? Yeah. I mean, that's a good thought. And there are processes that are at work and that I wouldn't want to make a design argument about. But I think there are deep and fundamental parameters of the universe and I think of our planetary system that have these joint properties of extreme improbability that are working jointly to achieve some discernible functional end. And what do you think that discernible functional end is and what role do we play in that? I think it's life. I think we play the role of perceiving life as having a significance that non-life does not have. You could then argue, well, that's very subjective. Maybe life doesn't have that significance, but I think we come again and again to affirm that life has significance. We\u2026 The contrary view would be to say life has no significance. There's nothing significant in that outcome. And I don't think we actually believe that. So\u2026 Why does it have to be no significance? I mean, it's significant. It's life. It's a thing, right? Just like water is significant. There's a lot of significant things. Well, in the\u2026 I mean, it is finite. It comes and goes and there's a lot of different forms of life. But no, I don't think anyone's suggesting that it's not significant. I mean, that word is a weird word. Yeah, it's a word. It's a discernible functional outcome that can be separated from all the other events in the universe on some qualitative criteria. Let me give you an illustration that might help explain the underlying rationale of the inference to design in this case. Let's imagine you're on the security duty at a bank and you've suddenly been told that there's a robbery and a bank vault has been opened. So you go back and you look at the security footage and there are two possibilities. You've got\u2026 Some robber got in and there are two possibilities. Either it was an inside job and the robber had the code to open the vault, or it was just lucky random fiddling. Now, if you freeze the footage right before the robber puts his hand on the dial, what would you expect if it was an inside job? Well, you would expect that the robber would go directly to the combination that would pop open the vault. Now, it might be that he got incredibly lucky, but your overwhelming expectation based on your knowledge of the improbability of finding that combination is that the robber will crack the code and open the vault. On the random fiddling hypothesis, you'd expect that there would be a lot of tries. And actually, you'd expect that the vault would never get opened. So instead, what you see when you run the footage is, the robber went right to the combination, it popped open. Now, that combination of an incredibly improbable event that results in a remarkable or functional or significant outcome triggers an awareness that there was design. And that is a\u2026 probabilistically, it's a calculably more probable theory than the idea of random fiddling, because we know the odds against finding the combination. Because it's so incredibly improbable that the robber would find it, it's also incredibly unlikely that that's how it happened. So now, we can say, well, why is it significant that the vault opened or not? We can say, well, but we know that there's something different about that event than the vault being closed. And it's the same thing. We know that there's something very different about life than a lifeless universe. And we know that finding our overwhelming expectation based on the improbability of getting all those parameters right is that if only natural processes had been at work, we would find one of those other combinations that would not open the lock or aka not result in life. So our expectation based on naturalism is a lifeless universe in light of what we know about the fine-tuning parameters. Our expectation based on theism, the inside job hypothesis, is that we would get something. We would get life. There would be something. It's certainly more probable on theism that we'd get life given the fine-tuning than it would be given naturalism, where our overwhelming expectation is we'd find one of those life unfriendly combinations. So there's some kind of second order probabilistic reasoning involved in this. But I think it's very common sensical, but it can be unpacked with these sort of deeper... Is this an egocentric perspective because we are alive? Is it our perspective of life being far more significant than other things in the universe, like the creation of suns? Is this this thing that we have where we're attaching intelligent design to something that may just be a property of the universe itself? We could say that except that we know that fine-tuning in our experience does result from mind. It's not just that we're interested in... In our experience. Yeah, in our experience. But limited experience, right? Right, but that again, that is the basis of all scientific reasoning. Right. I understand, but it's not a conclusion based on all the data that could possibly be available. No, that would be... To have that would be a certain proof, okay? Right. And there's... Do you have, in your mind, are you certain? Am I certain? I have had experiences of God that make me more confident. Can you tell me those experiences? Yeah, but can I make an earlier point? Because you're raising... It's awesome the amount of good philosophy you do on this show because of the way you ask questions. And the questions you just asked lead to an answer that is right at the heart of deep philosophical discussions that have been going on for about 500 years. And there was... In the Middle Ages, there were these attempts to prove God's existence with absolute certainty, and they failed. And in the Enlightenment period, philosophers like Hume and Kant came along. Kant was actually sympathetic to theistic arguments, but he didn't think you could provide absolute proof. And... But there were... Because you couldn't get proof, what came... A trend came in religious thought that was called thedaeism. You believed for no reason at all. You believe in belief alone. You have... I have faith in faith alone. And you got figures like Kierkegaard who believed that you could know God, but you knew it entirely... You knew God entirely subjectively, and you just had to take a leap of faith. There was no rational basis for it. I think there's a middle way between those two extremes. Even in science, maybe especially in science, we don't get absolute proof of the kind that we get in mathematics. So you can get in mathematics where you start with a certain axiom, and then you make a series of deductive... deductions from that using deductive logic. You don't get that kind of argument. Science isn't built on that type of logical structure. So science is always provisional. But we can have very good reasons for thinking things or believing things based on scientific evidence that we find. And I think that the proofs for God's... Or the arguments, rather, for God's existence are of that kind. They have strong provisional weight. They're like in a courtroom where you're beyond reasonable doubt based on what we know. So the two extremes are feederism, where we have no rational basis for faith, or rationalism with the claim that we can have absolute certainty about belief in God. And the middle way, I think, is this idea of what I call... We can make an inference to the best explanation. We have strong provisional evidence and arguments in support of belief in God. And so I think from a rational standpoint, as an intellectual, when I am asked, does belief in God make sense? I would say, yes, it makes sense in that sense. I think we have strong reasons for faith, but not absolute proof. So yeah, that's the first part. Just experientially. Yeah. Well, I don't think this is unique to people who have religious belief, but one of the things that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament talk about is the role of the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit. That what is objectively real in history is made subjectively real, or confirmed subjectively, by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. That's something that I have experienced in different ways, and so I have an inner confidence about my faith. Right. Well, how have you experienced it, though? I have heard non-audible voices. The things I don't hear audibly, but words that come into my head that I am immediately aware are not generated by my own thought processes. How can you be sure? Can't be sure, except... Why do you believe that? Well, I... Because the imagination is so fertile. It is fertile, Joe. And so you have to attest these things, but I've had... It's only happened to me a few times, but they've been words of guidance about the direction that my life is going to take or needs to take, and they have guided choices that I've made, and they were very distinct, very strong. And when I've developed almost a sense of humor about it, I've learned over time... I overthought everything as a young person going back to me. Like everybody. Like everybody. Yeah. And so I used to be really annoyed at these Christians who would say, God told me. What on earth are you talking about? I mean, I can look at the biblical witness, I can compare it to the historical evidence, I can look at these things we've been talking about in science. But what are you saying God told me? But I think there is an experience that many people have over time walking in faith, where they begin to recognize the voice of God in their own life in a more personal way. And for me, sometimes it's been with a sort of double entendre, where there's a passage of the Bible to which I've been drawn for some... Maybe something of completely random reason, but at a particular time where I realized, oh, that's kind of funny, that has a direct application to this situation that I'm in. And then I find that, sure enough, that was actually insight or guidance into what I was about to experience. So people have gotten that from philosophy as well. They've gotten ancient philosophy. And again, I'm not making any argument on the basis of... But you were talking about an experience with God. I've had... Yeah. You think that qualifies as an experience with God? Isn't that just a human moment relating to revelations and things that other human beings have discovered? Yeah. And as a human, we are constantly absorbing the ideas and the revelations and just the observations of all of us, of what we've learned about the human experience, what we've learned about how our own unique biology interacts with the world around us, how we can relate to that. That alone in itself is not an experience with God. I agree with all that. And because this is... When I'm relating our subjective experiences, I would not place any weight on them in trying to persuade anyone else of the existence or reality of God. That's why I wrote the book I did in a completely different vein on the basis of objective evidence. What religion do you study, if you don't mind me asking? It's not so much... I'm a Christian. You're a Christian. Yeah, I'm a Christian. Right. Here, I'll give you the thing that I first experienced upon my Christian conversion was an experience of peace that I'd never had before and an experience of outward focused love and concern for other people that was completely and is completely contrary to all my natural inclinations. Why I would suddenly feel love for a stranger on the street or be concerned about a friend in a way that I had never experienced before. I could not explain that on the basis of my own selfish inclinations. Can I pause you? Yeah, yeah. Isn't that a part of the philosophy of Christianity? And when people go into an ideology, would they adopt a predetermined pattern of thinking and behavior that's very common to do? And that is one of the beautiful aspects of Christianity. Those thoughts, that philosophy, that this would be something that you would adopt because now you have meaning, you have guidance, you have purpose. You are now a part of a group. And being a part of this group, this group has a very beautiful philosophy on other human beings. And you would adopt that. And that would give you great pleasure from that, but that's not necessarily an experience with God. Not necessarily, I agree, but there is a difference between knowing what you should do based on Christian moral teaching and actually having, for the first time ever in your life, having an inclination to do it. Yes, but you're a young, I understand, but you're a young, impressionable person looking for guidance. And your life is not so good before this. Not so good at all. Not so good at all. So then you find something that gives you meaning and gives you focus and gives you this beautiful philosophy to change the way you think and you adopt it wholeheartedly. Like young people are inclined to do it. Or like anybody that's looking for change in their life, anybody that's looking for something better is inclined to do. It's a natural pattern of growth. It's a natural pattern of recognizing there's a better way and you seek out that way. Sure. I mean, that would be an alternative explanation. I experienced it in a way that convinced me that something more than myself and my thinking was responsible. Isn't it beneficial to think that way, though? It's beneficial in adopting that philosophy to think that way. And if you think that way, you're rewarded and you are inside of this philosophy that does have these beautiful tenets to it, that does have these beautiful ideas. Sure. I mean, again, I would not place any weight on my experience in trying to persuade someone else of the truth of theism or Christianity. I have a lot of other arguments that I would place weight on because I think we all have internal experiences. But this was such a dramatic thing and persistent concern for a given friend that I am aware is hurting. Not what is in my natural inclinations. I mean, my natural inclinations towards selfishness are still very much in evidence every day, right? But isn't that part of the human survival mechanism? I mean, there's a lot of natural inclinations that people have towards selfishness if they're not treated correctly when they're young or if they encounter bad experiences. And then when you encounter good experiences and now you can relax and you can be a part of something that's bigger and better. Yeah, don't know. I mean, I'm prompted to pray for someone and learn later that that person is experiencing some extreme difficulty. Don't know why I suddenly felt that. I mean, there are these things. You care about them. I care about them, but I didn't know that they were, in any case, I think this could be somewhat unproductive because I'm completely willing to concede your point that... It's definitely not unproductive. It's interesting. Well, good, good. I just mean that in the sense that I don't think that I could persuade you to be a theist or a Christian on the basis of my personal experience. I would concede that because there's always... Well, I'm not asking you to do that though. Or anyone else. I'm asking to find the underpinnings of yours. Yeah. I want to find your origin story, right? So that's it. I love that. So I'm trying to figure out what... And I could see why adopting that thought would be very comforting. And I could see why adopting that... I mean, there's... That happens in cults. I bought a building that I was going to convert to a comedy club, and it was owned by a cult before I had it. And this cult, there's a documentary on it. It's called Holy Hell. And the cult, it was called the Buddha Field. They existed in West Hollywood, and they made their way out to Austin. And the guy who ran it was a very charismatic guy who was also a hypnotherapist and a gay porn star. And this guy had these people convinced that they had extreme meaning being with him. And it meant so much to them that they were willing to sacrifice the rest of their lives. And they were going to travel with him no matter where he went. And he would do these things to them where we'd have them, and he would impart upon him what he called the knowing. And it was a very difficult thing to get. He had to choose you for it. And people waited years. But when they did have that experience, it was one of the most overwhelming things they had ever experienced in their life. It was like a days-long psychedelic experience where there was no drugs involved. It was merely him with this ritual, this thing that he would do. He's put his hands on their head. And there's videos of these people, like in orgasmic ecstasy, experiencing love and God in a way that they had never before. This was real to them. But it was a cult. It was a guy who was a scam artist, who was a con man, who was a hypnotist, and knew how to manipulate people. And ultimately, the result was terrible. These people lost 20 plus years of their lives. And, you know... Probably a lot of money in the process. Yeah. So, but they believed that because of that personal experience, because they were guided, they did not have a good life. They did not... They were not happy. Now, all of a sudden, they found purpose. They were a part of this group. And there was this guy, and he had the answers to everything. And he says, deity type figure. And he said that he was God, and they were all God. And it was all this beautiful experience, but it wasn't. It was manipulative. It was him figuring out a way to hijack the human brain. And that there's things in the human brain where you can convince the human brain that it's having an experience, whether it has it or not. That's what hypnotism is all about. If you're a young person and you're looking for some meaning to life, you can work yourself into a frenzy where you believe you have this experience with God. Yeah. Well, a couple of things to say about that. One is that, I think it's one of the beautiful things about Christianity is that there is an interplay between the subjective experience of the individual believer and the objective witness of God's actions in time, space, and history. And that there is a... That people are enjoined to check their experience against objective criteria so that... And I think Jesus famously said, you will know the tree by its fruit. In the case of the cult, it had a horrible outcome over time. But not for the first few years. No, no, no. Except they were having a good time. Yeah. So I think these things do have to be tested over time. In my own experience, because I tended to overthink things, because I was annoyed at Christians who talked about their personal experience without being able to explain to me on any kind of objective basis why I should consider their faith, I tended to be very either distrustful or skeptical about subjective experience or overthinking in a way that would almost crowd the possibility of such experiences out. So I didn't really have many of them. As a young convert, I had very... I didn't have a lot of that. These things sort of crept up on me over the years. And I have become more confident that in some cases, in addition to the sort of general guidance of Christianity as a religious philosophy, there have been occasions in my life where I've experienced what I thought were pretty clear instances of specific guidance towards specific courses of action or choices I needed to make. And again, I wouldn't put any weight on that for anyone else, but it has been part of my experience in that sense. Well, I could say the same about my own life. Of course you could. Of course you could. I have many, many moments where I felt like I was guided. Many moments. Cool. I mean, that's why I didn't mean that as a critique of our conversation to say, I don't think it's productive. I just say, I mean that in a philosophical sense that if you want to talk across a worldview divide and say, hey, here's my philosophy, here's my worldview, and you have a different worldview, if we want to have that great conversation, either one of us just appealing to our personal experience is not going to move the discussion towards greater understanding. But you're assuming I have a different worldview. I'm not assuming that. I'm just saying that in general... I'm interested in your experiences. I just want to know how thoroughly you've thought them through. Yeah. Well, I tend to overthink things. But with a particular goal in mind, perhaps? Yeah, I don't want to know the truth. That's what I like about your show. Yeah. But also you want a very particular truth that you seem to have experienced to be true. Like this experience with God, this experience with this sort of this frequency that you feel that if you achieve and you are on, the world works in a more harmonious way, harmonious way. Yeah, I would say I'm not trying to conjure up something. It's just been something that has... No one's accusing you of that. Yeah. It's taken me by surprise sometimes that there's a subjective aspect of my faith that has seemed as real as the objective things that the scientist philosopher in me also regards as very weighty. Well, I'm very glad that you have the courage to talk about that. Because I think sometimes when people do deal in science, these things that are not... You can't weigh and measure. They seem like a sort of complicated thing to discuss. That's why I wanted to know how... It's part of the human experience, though, right? And we all have that. And it's part of what I think is so unsatisfying about materialism as a philosophy, is that people do not actually in their own personal experience of consciousness, if nothing else, believe that we're nothing but matter in motion. I think people tend to join groups. And if you're a materialist and if you are a... There's a lot of people that adopt philosophies that mimic religions, whether or not they're religions or not. Even some social philosophy, some social trends, they mimic cult-like behavior. And I think these are patterns that human beings are inclined to take. And I think these very productive patterns that human beings are inclined to take. I think those are the ones that have succeeded over time, either because they are the most ruthless, and the most controlling, and the people can't escape them, or because they're the most productive, and people find that those things benefit them greatly. Yeah, and I think one of the things... Is group think in all groups, right? And that's, I think, one of the things that you like to challenge on your program. Well, I like to challenge in my own mind, too. Yeah, exactly. I have a Darwinian debating partner who's a very good-natured soul, Michael Ruse, a British philosopher of biology. I think he's at Florida State still. He and I, over the years, done a number of debates. He's written a very important book in which he says that evolutionary biology has functioned as a kind of secular religion for many of his colleagues. In that, it answers a very important, deep worldview question. What is the process through which everything else came? Where did life get here? It answers a worldview question that religions also answer. And so, we have in our network of scientists who have been challenging the comprehensive neo-Darwinian account of things. I already alluded to, I think, that the Darwinian process is a real process. They just don't explain everything, right? But in challenging neo-Darwinism, we have found that oftentimes the discussions get very, very hot. And many of our top scientists have been cancelled or censored at prestigious places like the Smithsonian or Cambridge University or the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History. People outside the sciences often say, well, I can't make sense of that. I mean, isn't science the place where people are supposed to discuss competing ideas and theories openly? How do you explain this impulse to cancel somebody with an alternative view who's at that rank of science? And I think Ruz's book helps to explain that a bit, that it's not just religious people who have religious beliefs. There can be beliefs that are functioning in a quasi-religious way for people that have a secular or materialistic or naturalistic worldview as well. And I think we all have to guard against the group think that comes from having a closed system of thought and not being aware of the kinds of challenges that could be brought or alternative points of view. I think one of the things that I advocate in all my work is a method of reasoning that is used in the sciences, but also in philosophy, also in detective work. It's called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inference to the best explanation. And it functions, it only functions well if you're open to considering the competing hypotheses. And so I just think that there's a philosopher of science that I really like of Italy named Marcello Pera, who says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence. And so I think that openness to competing ideas is crucial to coming to conclusions that you can put some weight down on. Trevor Burrus Have you ever had someone debate you that you feel like had a very good argument against the things that you believe? Paul Jay I have been in debates with more and less skilled people on the other side. I have had a general experience \u2013 a surprising and somewhat \u2013 an common experience that has been somewhat surprising. Many of the people who have debated me about, for example, the theory of intelligent design have come somewhat unprepared to debate the merits of what I actually have proposed or affirm or argue for. They have in their mind typically a kind of stereotypical \u2013 Trevor Burrus Cartoonist. Paul Jay Cartoonist version of a young earth creationist in white shoes thumping the Bible from the American South or something. Not that I have anything against the American South, it's just that there's the stereotypes. I once had a debate on the BBC with Peter Atkins, an Oxford chemist, one of the most prominent scientific atheists. And it's still up online, people can go listen to it, but almost everyone that has told me they've listened to it said he was debating a cartoon caricature of you and was not at all prepared to debate your actual arguments. So I've had that happen a lot. Trevor Burrus People just like to win. Paul Jay Of course. But there's good people on the other side. I recently had a good conversation with Michael Shermer, who's the well-known editor of Skeptic magazine, on your friend Brian Callan's show. It was a very good discussion. I've had good discussions with Bruce, a terrific astronomer at University of Washington, Peter Ward. My own approach to this is I love these deep origins questions. Where do we come from, the philosophical questions? And I feel a kind of kinship with anybody who loves those kinds of questions, even if they've come to a different conclusion about the answer to those questions than I have. So I tend not to view people willing to have those discussions, call them debates, as adversaries, but rather as a sort of co-belligerence in an exploration. Trevor Burrus That's a great way to put it. Paul Jay And so I don't really, I tend not to think afterwards about who won and who lost. If the host gets good comments because it was a good discussion, I feel that's a win. What I mean is, has anybody ever presented you with an argument that made you reconsider? Paul Jay I've become progressively more confident in the position the longer I've examined it. When I started out examining it, I wasn't fully convinced. So there's been, for me, a trend line of greater confidence. There are more and less challenging arguments on the other side. The one that we hear most is intelligent design is not science. And I say, okay, well, that must presuppose a definition of science. What's your definition of science? And at that point, we usually get crickets because this type of argument is used mainly to shut people up rather than to engage the merits of the argument on the basis of the evidence and the structure of the argument presented. They're called, in the field, they're called demarcation arguments, the idea that there are, and this one is based on the assumption that if you're invoking a cause which is not materialistic, then it's by definition, not science. Okay, well, then let's call it something different. What I found in my PhD research was that when people investigate questions of origins, they are in, they're investigating questions that have both the scientific and the philosophical dimension. There's evidence that bears on the question, but whatever conclusion they draw is going to have larger implications for philosophy and worldview. If you can show that life arose by an under, completely undirected chemical evolutionary process, you're going to be more inclined toward a more materialistic worldview. You're going to say matter and energy are sufficient to explain how everything got here. If, as I think the evidence of digital code in the DNA molecule and a complex information storage and processing system and those nifty developmental gene regulatory circuits I was telling you about, if those kinds of phenomena in life point, as I think they do to a mind, a pre-existing mind, after all, takes a program to make a program, takes a programmer to make a program, and if we've got something like software programming in DNA, we're looking at a strong indicator of our mind. If that's a good argument, then that has different metaphysical implications. That's going to point more in a theistic direction. So these origins questions have an incorrigibly philosophical dimension. You can't get away from that. And that's what makes them interesting and exciting. That's not something that makes them inherently off-limits to discussion. But too many scientists on the materialist side of the ledger have wanted to say, unless it's a materialistic answer, I'm not going to consider it. I'm not going to talk to you. And I'm going to use a pejorative term to stigmatize your point of view. And in the end, I don't think it works because what we care about is not how you classify the idea. We don't care whether the evidence, whether intelligent design is science or philosophy or metaphysics or what I think it is, which is a form of historical science. It's a conclusion that comes from historical scientific reasoning that has metaphysical implications. But that's not what's important, how we classify it. What's important is whether or not it's true. And when we say that the evidence supports it, yeah, sorry, are we, when we're talking about metaphysical, we're just talking about things we can't measure. But it might be because we don't have the capacity to measure them. It might not be because they don't exist. We're very limited. So which brings me to this question, if we are the product of design, if the universe is the product of design, are we the ultimate expression of that design? Can I come back to that, but first make one more point about the metaphysical science divide. Sure. I think it's really important. Metaphysics is the subject of, in philosophy, of being. What is the case? Science is concerned about what is the case. And so that there would be an overlap between those two concerns is not unexpected, to separate them entirely. And when people say, well, I'm not going to consider that because it's not scientific, they might be making a deep intellectual error. Because let's, let's, illustration, if I go into the British Museum and I look at the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone, and I study them from bit and realize, oh, okay, three different languages with the same message. When the archaeologists figured out what was going on, they realized, oh, these are inscriptions. These were produced by a scribe, by an intelligence. They did not arise by wind and erosion or of some materialistic forces. In other words, they were looking at evidence that compelled the conclusion of an intelligent designer. Now, if I hold strictly to the rule, it's only science, I'm only going to look at what I regard as science and what is, what I regard as science limits itself to strictly materialistic explanations. I may encounter evidence that's pointing towards the reality of a mind. And I'm not going to be able to see it because I've put philosophical blinders on my inquiry. I've limited the range of hypotheses that I'm willing to consider before I even look to the evidence. And I think that's what's been going on. The main objection we get to intelligent design is this claim, it's not science because it's not materialistic. And sometimes people will justify that by saying, well, it's not science because the thing you postulate is unobservable. And that's the connection to the comment you made a minute ago. But science is full of unobservable elements. Science works by inferring, it has an indirect method of inference. We often infer unobservable things, quarks, physical fields, subterranean geological structures, states of mind from evidence that we can observe or see. We infer from the unobservable to the observable. Well, if you can do that in other branches of, in evolutionary biology, we infer past transitional intermediate forms and past mutational events based on things we can see. So the fact that we're positing an unobservable designing intelligence having acted in the past should not disqualify that as being a scientific theory or a legitimate theory of a metaphysical kind because science and metaphysics often does that very thing. We can't get around that. Well, I think human beings get very arrogant when they're the disseminators of information and people listen to them on a regular basis. And there's this appeal to authority. I'm the person who explains science and anything that confuses that or questions that or is an alternative theory gets dismissed because if you're right, then I'm wrong and I'm not willing to do it. I can just shut you up. Man, we've experienced that in spades and some very top people are... It's more common than not. Oh, it's super common. It's just a human inclination, I think, especially when you're encountering a very difficult thing like this. Like instead of having a long form discussion or years of debate and then years of examination, it's easier to dismiss and to not have a conversation with that person. And I think that's foolish. I really do because I think that it's an opportunity, first of all, if you really truly believe what you're saying, it's an opportunity for you to state your point more clearly than the other person. Iron sharpens iron. Yeah, which is what it's all about. And if you just shut that down, I usually think that you're vulnerable. I generally think that people who shut that down, their ideas are vulnerable. I agree with that. I've seen that a lot. I want to go back to the other part of the question. Cambridge supervisor, high Oxford accent, he said to me, he said, beware the sound of one hand clapping. He said, if there's an argument on one side, there's bound to be an argument on the other. And if there's only one hand clapping, often it's because the person clapping that hand is afraid of what the other hand is going to say. Interesting. Yeah. The other question I have, do you think that human beings are the ultimate expression of this intelligent design? In this cosmos, I think there is a sense that humans are qualitatively unique in the creation, that we were made as sort of a crowning of the process of creation. When you say cosmos, how are you defining it? What do you define it? Well, I'll speak as a Christian who also believes that there may be other beings besides human beings that have consciousness. The Bible speaks of angelic beings, for example. I have no direct experience of those, but I have other reasons to believe that the Bible is true. So I take things like that on the authority of the Bible, no experience of them. But of the creatures we know, I think there are qualitative differences between humans and all other forms of animals that make us special. Our ability to use language, for example, our ability to experience humor, our ability to use mathematics, our ability to have conversations like this one. Can I stop you right there? We know orcas have a very complex language. We know dolphins, a very complex language. We know monkeys experience humor. Do they tell jokes? I don't know. They joke with each other. Yeah. There's playfulness. They communicate with sounds. We know that they have sounds for different animals and sounds for predators. I think that the studies of human language show that a three-year-old human can do things that the best chimp just... There's a qualitative difference in the way we use language, in the complexity of the language forms, and Chomsky's universal grammar idea. But you know that chimpanzees are, in fact, even better at solving some puzzles with rewards for food than humans, than young humans. I think there's a Skinnerian account of animal behavior that's pretty good. I think the Skinnerian account of human language was pretty much refuted by Chomsky in the 60s. And I think there's something much deeper going on with human language. It's not an area of particular expertise. But my colleague David Berlinski is very interested in this and has corresponded with Chomsky over the years. And he told a story about Chomsky at a conference that I attended where he said that Chomsky was at one point very openly skeptical about Darwinian accounts of the origin of language, and then was later sort of pressured to walk some of that skepticism back. But he said, okay, language could have evolved, but there would have had to have been sort of a pre-existing universal grammar that allowed people to make sense of all the... to develop a symbol convention that would allow communication. And this would have arisen very, very abruptly. It couldn't have gradually emerged. Why? I'm just telling the story for now, because I'm not an expert on the origin of language. But Berlinski finished the story and said, well, that's great, no, but why not then call that what it sounds like, which is a miracle. You have this... Here's the problem, I think, as I understand it. If we've got just tapping and scratching and pointing, okay, so I say, red, red, red, and you say, okay, red, red, red. So we're going to develop a symbol convention with... Here's the problem. To get a symbol convention going in order to communicate, you need a symbol convention. That's the circularity of it. And the behaviorist idea is, well, maybe we could do that with pointing and grunting, okay, and rewards. That might work for nouns, okay, red, tree, ball, shirt, whatever. But how do you express something like the subjunctive tense with pointing and grunting and rewards? What I would have done is, or the imperative, what I should do is that all human languages have these multiple tenses. It's something really striking. They're in all languages. And it's very hard to imagine how you could express that subtlety conveyed by those tenses without already having the universal grammar or those language structures built into the brain. Well, I don't understand that at all. If you're learning how to describe things around you with sound, and if you have a sound that you associate for different objects, a sound that you associate for different feelings, a sound that you associate with love, and it's universally agreed upon, and we know that that varies so widely along the world. If you go to some cultures, like a good example is Australia, what they call mobs of these indigenous people, when they call themselves mobs, when they could travel just a few hundred kilometers, and they experience a language they have no understanding of at all, another 50 kilometers that way, the same thing. They don't know how many languages they have. They don't know how many of them are lost. These people develop these languages, like in isolation in these small groups. And within the people that were indigenous to Australia, there's like, God, my friend Adam Greentree explained this to me. I don't want to say, I don't want to misstate how many different languages there are, but I believe it's hundreds of different languages. And they don't understand each other, but they develop these in isolation. Yeah, well, I mean, we're both talking somewhat derivatively based on, this isn't my area of expertise either. It's not mine either. But can you imagine a world, can you imagine, where over time, cultures who existed in the same sort of harmonious groups and learn to till the soil together and hunt and gather and do things together and raise their children together, they would develop sounds that they all agreed upon, which means certain things. But I think Chomsky's argument was that is only possible because there are innate language structures that where people already intuitively understand these differences in tense. Could you get from, I mean, in a way, the thing is to turn it back on the person who thinks the pointing and grunting is going to be enough. How do you get for, I can get to read, I may even be able to get to run, but how do I get to what I would have done? Don't you do that over time? Don't you do that over time of adjusting the sounds and developing ideas? What do you point at to get at something? You don't have to point to it. You just have to develop a whole structure of language over time where it's agreed upon. And that's why the thing about this. But that was Chomsky's point is the agreement is innate. We already have the language structures for those different tense. That's why they're universal across languages. And so, he did not think that they evolved in a gradual Darwinian way. And I can't see it. I mean, maybe you could unpack that sequence, but I... So, Chomsky himself believed that they were innate to the human animal. I think that's right. That was his idea of the universal grammar. And what did he think it came from? At one point, he said he was a Jeffersonian creationist, meaning not a religious creationist. At another point, he said he was skeptical about Darwinism. And then later, I think he said, well, it could have evolved, but the conditions he put on a successful evolutionary process were ones that were not, strictly speaking, neo-Darwinian. They were certainly not gradualistic. And I do think it's just something for consideration. It's something I've thought about a lot that makes sense to me. How do you get a communication system started without a communication system to define the terms on a mutually agreeable basis? Don't you think that can just evolve over time? I don't. Or it's adjusting and the language itself during our lifetime is evolving. I think the burden of proof is on the evolutionist to provide an account of how that happened. Okay. I don't think that that's been done. Back to the original question. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. Do you think that human beings are the ultimate expression? I think we were a... I guess I would just say yes. I think we were the pinnacle of creation. Do you think we're done? Yeah. And this is it? This is as good as it gets? Or do you think we evolved past this? Well, I think that there will be a new creation. That's part of the biblical view. A new creation. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Well, I think there is in the human experience, there's both evidence of our great capacity for creativity and nobility, but also the idea that something's not as it was initially intended in our nature as well. And so the Judeo-Christian story is a long arc of redemption. And so I think that we will be improved, but not by an evolutionary means, but by God's own action. So you believe that there will be some sort of a miracle that improves human beings? Yeah. But let me say a few words about miracle. A miracle is strictly speaking an act of God. And so just as I see evidence of divine action or intelligent agency in the past, or because I see evidence of such things in the past, I don't find the idea of miraculous acts of God in the future as something that are inherently implausible. But as a person who believes in science and your degrees in philosophy of science? Yeah, I did pitch in philosophy of science, right? And science is based on measurement. It's based on measurement. It's based on reasoning. It's based on observation. It's based on argumentation. This is, I think, one of the things that you've objected to, the idea that there are people on various issues that speak for the science and shut down the rhetorical dimension of science. That's why this Italian philosopher of science I mentioned, Marcello Pera says that science advances as scientists argue with emphasis on the word argue about how to interpret the evidence. Darwin's origin of species was, he presented as one long argument. Newton started the Principia with the theory of vortices is beset by difficulties on many sides. And then he argued against the standard theory of gravity in presenting a case for a better view of how gravitation works. So science has this rhetorical dimension that has been written out of science as we've advanced more of an authoritarian view of science that portrays to the public the idea of an indubitable consensus on numerous issues. And there we get the group thing. So you consider yourself even, I mean, you consider intelligent design to be science. And your pursuit is a scientific pursuit. I think it is a scientific pursuit. I also think it's a philosophical pursuit. And I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. There are domains of science where we're raising questions that have incorrigibly or incorrigible philosophical dimensions. Repair back to our earlier discussion about determinism, same kind of thing. We've got social science data and neuroscience data that bears on this huge philosophical question of free will, the determinism. So as a person of science, what in science leads you to believe that God will create a miracle that changes human beings? Science leads me to believe that. I believe in the possibility of miracles in part because we saw one at the very beginning of the universe. I mean, we have evidence of that. I mean, if God can bring the universe into existence from a spatial temporal material singularity, then perhaps he can raise someone from the dead or give us life after this life is over. The power is certainly, there's nothing implausible about believing that. My belief in a new creation, as it were, is based on the biblical witness that such a thing will happen and my independent reasons for believing the Bible. So I wouldn't make a scientific case for that. How does the Bible describe it? It describes a new heavens and a new earth and a place where every tear will be wiped away and pain will be a thing of the past, a restoration of all things. How do you reconcile with the reality that the Bible was written down at least by human beings and that human beings are generally unreliable? At least in terms of 100% accuracy and also inclined to manipulate each other, especially when they're in control of large groups of people and also inclined to appease the instincts and the desires and needs of their followers. So they create texts that resonate with the people and develop a philosophy that resonates with the people. And if they say that it comes from God itself, who, especially if it resonates, especially if it makes sense, and maybe perhaps it is in some way from God because it is coming from this divine inspiration. But how do we know when something's written down and also we're translating it, right? We're translating it from you know Aramaic, from ancient Hebrew, and it goes into Latin and Greek, and there's a lot going on there, and then eventually to English, and there's a lot of room for interpretation. Let me give a general answer and then come back to the specific challenge, okay? Maybe even a caveat first. The books that I've written have been advancing the theory of intelligent design. First was Signatures in the Cell about the Origin of Life. Second was about the question of the origin of the first animals called Darwin's Doubt. The third was about the worldview implications of the theory of intelligent design. I happen to be a believing biblical Christian. I believe the Bible's witness. I just need to say that not all proponents of intelligent design hold my viewpoint about religious matters, and it'd be unfair to them for me to answer the question without making that proviso because I'm also here representing those books and those arguments. So I just want to, we actually have some agnostic proponents of intelligent design and even an atheistic philosopher who's inclined towards thinking there must be some intelligent design. So, and then secondly, your question about motivation, your question embedded an interesting insight about motivation, that we have confirmation bias, we have all these things. And in this basic discussion about God between, say, the new atheists who aren't so new anymore and people who are on our side of the worldview divide, there's a tendency to point fingers about motivations. Oh, you religious people believe this stuff because it gives you comfort. And the religious argument to the atheists is, oh, you atheist materialists, you disbelieve because it gives you moral freedom, you don't have to be accountable to a moral judge. And I think in each person, there's that push-pull. There's motivations to believe, there's motivations not to believe. And one of the benefits of philosophical training is the attempt, at least, to extricate debates from those motivations. That's essentially ad hominem arguments and try to avoid those as much as possible on both sides. So, that's why I've developed the case for God in the last book based on key evidences that are public and commonly accepted across the worldview division. You know, the universe had a beginning, it was finely tuned from the beginning, and there is information and an information processing system and even the simplest living cells. Those three pieces of evidence, I think, support a robust case for God as an inference to the best explanation. Now, people, so I tend to take an evidentialist and philosophical approach to the kinds of questions you're asking, including the question about why believe the other parts of the Bible, not just about the creation of the universe, but about the historical witness of Jesus Christ, or the Exodus, or things like that. And there I would say my general answer is that I have a strong avocational interest in the historicity of the Bible as one can test it based on external sources of historical evidence from documentary historical sources and archaeological sources. So, just a quick thumbnail and in a way I'd prefer not to go too deeply into this because again, I'd rather talk about the ID and the God stuff. And I have Jewish colleagues, Muslim colleagues, agnostic, non-religious theists who all agree with me about the scientific evidence and what it points to. And then we have different discussions about the religious. I want to know your thought process. Okay, so my thought process. So crucial event in, for example, the New Testament is the trial and death of Jesus of Nazareth and subsequent resurrection. One key really striking thing that I've discovered in my avocational interest in archaeology is that the five or six leading figures, most important figures in that trial narrative, which take up about a quarter to a third of the four gospels, have all been independently attested by archaeological inscriptions in the last 50 or 60 years. There were some construction workers working in Caesarea, Meritima in Israel in 1960-ish, turned over a big slab of rock and on the back was an inscription from Pontius Pilate listing himself as the governor of Judea with a tribute to Tiberius Caesar. It's significant because in the gospels, the ministry of Jesus is reported to have occurred when Tiberius was the Roman emperor, Pilate was the governor, and we know all about in the trial that the key role that Pilate played. Recently the\u2026 And what year was this attributed to? Well, it's attributed to the period of time in which Tiberius was emperor. So I think that was 15 through\u2026 15 through\u2026 I can't remember the end of his emperor's ship, but it's the time mentioned in the New Testament as to when Jesus did his thing. And you have recently in Jerusalem, under the traditional site of the high priest, was discovered the stone ossuary bearing the name of Caiaphas and Caiaphas Ben Joseph on two sides of an ornately decorated ossuary containing the bones of someone who was reburied by this practice that the Jews undertook during that unique period of time from about 20 BC to the destruction of the temple. So you have multiple figures from that key event who have been independently attested and established in that time period. Herod Antipas, we know from his coins and his building projects, Jesus himself, Peter, Annas, the other high priest. So you have these multiple lines of external corroboration for this really important account. And then you have external sources like Josephus and Tacitus. So there's a weight of external corroborating evidence supporting the historicity of these narratives. And that gives you, I think, a good reason to take the narrative seriously and to evaluate their other claims. It's in fact a level of corroboration that I think is almost unprecedented for any document that old. So that's corroboration in terms of the narrative of the stories or corroboration in terms of the historical figures being real. Both. In Josephus... The narrative of the stories being the resurrection of Jesus? Reports of same. You find reports of... There's two different texts of Josephus, one that was likely doctored by medieval Christians that historians rightly regard as too affirmative in his expression of belief in Jesus of Nazareth and one that came to us through the Arabic world where the Josephus text is much more credible where he records the basic facts of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth including being crucified under Pontius Pilate. And then that there were reports that he had appeared to many after being resurrected. So there's a whole... Right, but there's reports of Bigfoot. Well, right. But we have... I love you. Particularly back then. There's no real access to universal information like the internet. There's no real... I mean, there's no libraries. Like, where are you getting all your information from? Right. So you have one of the best formats in all of talk anything because you have these long-form discussions. But I think even this format will not lend itself to being able to wrestle the question of the historical real about... I don't think we're going to wrestle it. I just want to know why you... Right. So I think there are three great scholars who have addressed the question of whether or not actually four. One is Wolfhard Panenberg, the great German theologian historian. One is William Lane Craig. One is N. T. Wright with his magisterial tome, the resurrection of the Son of God. And the other is Gary Habermas. And there are numerous questions that come up in evaluating all this different type of historical testimony regarding that seminal event, if true, in human history. And I've done a deep dive on that stuff and I'm convinced that the resurrection of Jesus Christ happened as a real event in history. Because people said it did. Well, because of the various forms of testimony that we have, the historical evidence we have coming down to us from this day. Now, I may be wrong in that. I'm not, as a scholar, arguing about that myself. But it is your personal belief. But it is my personal belief. And I would tell you, I have reasons to believe that that are well considered and they are reasons not of subjective experience or subjective experience alone, but the reasons that are derived from having examined very detailed historical analyses of the relevant data. And that's probably as far as we could take something in a discussion like this. But I do affirm that belief in such an extraordinary event should be well grounded in historical evidence and not something that we just believe because we want it to be true. Well, is it historical evidence or is it historical statements of people who were discussing a thing that may or may not have happened that might have been legend? Well, much historical evidence is also historical statement. It's testimony, eye witness or otherwise. Sure. But this is an extraordinary event. Right. You're talking about a resurrection of a person who died and came back and was the son of God. This is a big claim. Yeah, it is a big claim. What historians must do is evaluate the reliability of historical testimony of what's coming is historical testimony. One piece of historical testimony that's always been extremely compelling to me is the testimony of James, who is mentioned in the New Testament as one of the witnesses to whom Jesus appeared after the alleged resurrection event. He was also mentioned earlier in the New Testament as one of his brothers or half brothers, depending on whether you're a Protestant or a Catholic Christian, how you view that. But he was mentioned as one of his own family members who did not accept his crazy messianic claims and he did not believe in him. But something changed James' mind. We later find that he becomes the leader of the Jerusalem Christian church, the early Jewish believers in Jesus. But we also then know from Josephus that James was stoned to death and martyred for his witness to the resurrection. Now, there's a kind of very simple argument, but it goes back to one of the early Christian writers, Eusebius, saying that people will lie to get out of trouble. They do it all the time. We see it in our politics. But people don't lie to get into trouble. We're just assuming that they would let him lie or do anything to get out of trouble. There were many, many early Christians who died claiming to have seen the resurrection of Jesus. But in the case of James, we know that he expressed that testimony and we know it from an external to the Bible source, namely Josephus. What do you think of... So I think this is an example of, okay, here's an historical claim. How can we evaluate the reliability of that witness? People will give their lives for an abstract philosophy they believe to be true. People do not give their lives for a factual claim that they know to be false. That's lying to get into trouble. That's true, but we don't know what James' mental state was. We don't know if James was schizophrenic. There's so many variables that could be taken into consideration. It's a question of weighing the preponderance of the evidence and deliberating on it over time. I agree. Okay. I'm not claiming that in sharing these things that I will persuade... No, I'm happy you are sharing them. I'm happy you're sharing them. You're just getting an insight into my thought process. That's all I'm trying to do. I'm very much concerned to... I'm a philosopher, okay? Alvin Planning is great work with warrant and proper function. We say that philosophers say knowledge is justified true belief. For my religious beliefs, as much as for my scientific beliefs, I want to know what the justifications are. I want to have justifications for those beliefs. What do you make of more ancient scriptures? What do you make of the Old Testament? What do you make of the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls? What do you think of that? I actually have taught college classes that included an evaluation of the historical reliability of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. In many, many periods of biblical history, there is just extensive, same kind of extensive extra-biblical corroboration of the history that is provided in the Old Testament. I think the same types of evidences can be brought to bear to provide external support. One example of... A favorite lecture of mine was the story of the Assyrian invasion of Judah in 701 BC. It's recorded in Kings and Chronicles, and Hezekiah is the king. And there are multiple points of agreement between the biblical record and the account of that same event in the Assyrian records, many of which are now stored in the British Museum. There's a fantastic tour you can take of the Assyrian room there, where the absolutely the same basic story is told where the Assyrians come, they siege to ancient Judah. The 46 strong-walled cities of Judah are put under siege, they're conquered, only Jerusalem remains. The city is put under siege, which is a death sentence in the ancient world when a dominant world empire like Assyria comes. And for some reason, the reason recorded in the Bible and implied in the Assyrian records, the siege was broken, the Assyrians returned to Assyria, and Sennacherib was killed by his own sons. When I do a lecture like this, I list the biblical claims, and then I list the claims from the secular archaeological records, and I point out the multiple points of convergence and agreement. That is a way of providing warrant or support or justification for the historical reliability of the Bible, and I think you can do that with the Old Testament as well as we do. But these are historical representations of things that are plausible, like sieges, things that happened all the time. It's a part of human history. Well, right. There's something kind of mysterious about this siege and why it was broken, because the Assyrian power was overwhelming in comparison to what was left. And there is a, the biblical account is that God himself created confusion in the ranks of the Assyrian soldiers. Is that really how God would handle it? Well, we don't know. Why didn't God do that one more time? For one reason or another, yeah. Why didn't God stop Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why did God allow the Holocaust to take place? Why did he allow the fog to descend at Normandy? I don't know. I don't know all the answers to these questions. I'm just saying that there are, I am unpersuaded by Hume's skeptical argument against miracles. I think it's a very weak philosophical argument against the possibility of miracles. He says miracles violate the laws of nature. The laws of nature cannot be violated. Therefore, miracles are impossible. But yet the big bang's a miracle. Well, the big bang's a miracle. Or I don't think a miracle is actually a violation of the laws of nature. Maybe the word miracle is a bad word. An extraordinary event. Yeah. Well, an extraordinary unique event, a completely novel event. If God exists, then miracles are possible because miracles are nothing more than an act of God. This is a fun philosophical point to share. I don't think a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature. Let me give you an example. Let's imagine this is a pool table instead of this cool. You play pool? Not well at all. So I'm about to hit the ball. Don't go like that. Yeah. Thank you. Cute ball. I know the physical law of momentum exchange because I'm a physics geek even though I'm not a pool player. And so I can calculate where the second ball ought to go based on the momentum and the initial condition or position of that first ball. So I make that calculation. I know the laws of physics cause me to expect this given outcome. And I can do that 100 times and it's all going to be the same, especially if I hit the ball in the exact same place with the exact same force. But what if right as I make the shot, someone comes along shakes the table. Now all bets are off. The ball will not end up where I expected it to end because all the laws of physics have a ceteris paribus clause or all things, other things being equal, which includes no interfering conditions from an outside agent. But if an outside agent disrupts the system, I'm going to get a completely unexpected event. But the law of momentum exchange was not violated. A new set of events was fed into the matrix of natural law, into the concourse of the regular system of cause and effect. And that can be described as a miracle. That's what a miracle is in the Bible. It's an act of God. In the Exodus miracle, it says, and the Lord caused an east wind to blow. It represents God as an actor within the matrix of natural law, which he otherwise sustains and upholds. So I think for that and other reasons, I think Hume's argument against miracles, his in principle argument fails, which means that we have to be open to evaluating claims of the miraculous on the basis of the evidence that pertains to them. Most of them may be bunk, but there is a consistent pattern of corroboration of biblical witness where we can check the biblical witness, the historical reliability that I think means that we ought to be open to evaluating those more extraordinary events as possibly true as well. And that was my reference to the scholars who have done the deep dive on the case of Pro and Con about the resurrection. So as a Christian and as a person who believes in God, you believe that currently human beings are the greatest expression of life. The most complex? Certainly we're the most complex. Certainly we have qualitative capabilities that other animals don't have. I think the biblical way of phrasing that was talking about being made in the image of God, having this conscious awareness and creative capabilities that reflected the capabilities of our creator. And so I believe that for biblical reasons, I think. But I also see the evidence of the qualitative differences as well in some of the things we were talking about before. What do you make of all this UAP, UFO stuff, all these whistleblowers that are coming out and saying there's advanced crafts that can move in ways that defy physics, that they seem to be off-world origin, that the United States has been studying them, that there's a project that retrieves crashed vehicles, and that these things are far more advanced than us? Some of this stuff has been suppressed and coming out. I really don't know. I mean, have you looked into that? Yeah, a lot. Yeah. What's your take? It's hard to know if it's a PSYOP. It's hard to know. The government oftentimes will lie or create a narrative to obscure reality or to give people some sort of confusion while something else is going on to distract you. There's always the possibility of that. I mean, that would be what I would do if I wanted to freak people out or if I was trying to obscure some sort of a very advanced project that we have, where we have capabilities far beyond what's conventionally thought of as our supreme method of propulsion or travel or drones or even our understanding of gravity and space-time. If there is some sort of monumental breakthrough that was made and made in secrecy and made through some sort of a project that involved US government and top physicists, and they kept this all under wraps, what better way to keep it under wraps than to say that it's something from another planet? I mean, I just don't know. I have only one point of intersection with this issue. Right. Okay, I'll tell you what it is. I wrote an op-ed for the New York Post two summers ago, when a lot of this stuff first broke with the Navy stuff. And it happens that there are a number of scientists who upon being confronted with the difficulty of explaining the origin of the first life from simple chemistry and upon being confronted with the digital code that's stored in the DNA molecule. I mean, it's really striking, not just the amount of information, but the way in which it's stored and processed and expressed. It's very much like a CAD CAM system where we've got computer assisted design and engineering. If you're up at Boeing, you've got an engineer that writes code. Code goes down a wire. It's translated into another machine code that can be used to direct the construction of an airplane wing or some other mechanical part. And then the manufacturing apparatus, the code will be used to direct the placement of the rivets in just the right place. That's the kind of complexity of information processing that's going on inside the cell. It's unbelievably cool. So Dawkins himself, seeing an animation of what's called gene expression, said he was knocked sideways with wonder at the complexity of the digital information processing in cells. There have been leading scientists who have actually proposed, well, maybe that is evidence of intelligent design, but it's intelligent design that is coming from an extraterrestrial source. So this actually has a name in science. It's called panspermia. And I am not a supporter of the panspermia hypothesis, though I am completely agnostic as to whether or not there is extraterrestrial life. It's a big universe. Maybe not. I don't know. But I don't think it helps us with the problem of explaining the origin of life for reasons that are similar to the critique of the multiverse I offered. Even if you posit that a super intelligence evolved on some other planet and then designed life or designed the genetic code and parted it in cells and sent it to our planet, you've still got to explain the origin of that evolutionary process on some other planet. And it takes you right back to the problem of the origin of information. If you want to build any kind of system that has a high degree of specificity, you need information to say, I want this structure, not that. I want this way of configuring matter, not that. Information is crucial to specificity of form. I understand what you're saying. Well, and just to complete the thought, and I'm very interested in what you have to say about this other thing because I don't know much about it. The other thing is that the panspermia hypothesis doesn't do a good job of explaining the ultimate fine tuning of the universe or the universe itself upon which any future intelligent aliens evolution would depend. You have to have the universe fine tuned in the first place to get any kind of evolutionary process going. And therefore, if you want to explain the big three things that I've put out as a challenge to scientific materialism, panspermia doesn't cut it because it might explain the origin of the first life, but only by kicking the problem into outer space without answering the question of ultimate origin of information. It definitely doesn't explain the origin of the fine tuning of the universe because that precedes any possible subsequent evolution of any alien being. That would be getting the cause and effect relationship reversed. But if there are alien beings on another planet, what does that do with your biblical interpretation of life? If there are far superior beings that in fact did come here and did manipulate human DNA and did create what we now think of as modern humans, if that becomes fact and you still have to account for how did that were they created, you still have to account for the code. You still have to account for all these things that you're saying about intelligent design, but what does that do for your interpretation of the biblical version of history if in fact there are some untold numbers of advanced civilizations? Yeah, again, I'm completely agnostic because the Bible tells us that we were made in the image of God with capacities that reflect those of our Creator. It doesn't tell us that he didn't make other such beings on other planets. C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, wrote that wonderful space trilogy in which he speculates about other planets with other forms of higher conscious life. I don't think there is a biblical doctrine on that, so I'm completely agnostic and open on biblical grounds and as a scientist, of course, I'm interested. There's been two different lines of thinking about that. One, that there's so many universes and therefore likely solar systems that it's inevitable that we would have life someplace else. The other strain of thought that's a bit more recent is the idea that yes, there's lots and lots of places where it could happen, but the number of parameters that would have to be just right and the probability of getting each of those parameters is so small that even that two trillion galaxy universe is not enough to render the probability of getting life somewhere else. Could I stop you there? Probable unless there is intelligent design. Okay, unless there is intelligent design, but if it exists here, we have proof that it exists here. Right. Talking right now. Right. You and I are here. We know intelligent life, at least in our own personal experience exists here. And the universe could be of a size and a scope that we can't even possibly comprehend. We're talking about infinity. And this is not an uncommon thought about the universe. The universe is in fact infinite and that it is so big that not only does this earth exist, but a version of this earth where all the events exactly as they've taken place on earth have taken place in space, on other planets, an infinite number of times. Because you were talking about something that's so large, it's so huge, every possible version exists. An insane, huge number of views are out there in the world and infinite numbers of views presenting this exact same discussion. Or maybe there's an infinite number of times. But what I'm saying is, maybe it's even more complex than just simple intelligent design. But intelligent design on a scale that's so large that is happening simultaneously in so many places, so ubiquitous in the universe, that it's impossible for us to even quantify. Well, let me come back at you on this just a little bit. This is where the idea of the multiverse comes in, because it happens that our universe actually has a quantifiable number of elementary particles and a limited number of interactions that could take place between the elementary particles and therefore an upper bound number of events that might have taken place from the Big Bang till now. Right. And that's why the multiverse gets proposed, because the multiverse proponents realize that what are called the probabilistic resources of this universe are not actually sufficient to render even the origin of life, and I have argued in Signature in the Cell, even the origin of a single protein, probable given those probabilistic resources. That's if there's not a multiverse. Yeah, we need a multiverse. And if the theory that each galaxy which contains a supermassive black hole, that inside that supermassive black hole, if you could somehow get through the event horizon, you will go to another universe that has hundreds of billions, if not trillions of galaxies as well. And that this is the portal, and this is the process that they all have, that there is just an infinite number of universes. It is possible, right? Right. But as I mentioned before, the plausible accounts that have been, to render the multiverse concept plausible, one needs a universe generating mechanism. Which also means something intelligent. It means something in some prior fine tuning. But that could be also the case, right? Right. This universal intelligent thing is... I'm not against the multiverse. It might be infinite number of universes. It might be true. It might be false. But it's only plausible if there's prior design. That's the argument I'm making the book. What you think is that the universe itself has grand design to it, and that it's ultimately moving towards a goal? I would say that the designer has a goal. What do you think that is? To restore relationship between himself and human beings. But just human beings? What about alien life forms? Or maybe, I mean, again, I don't know. Life in general? I may be... Intelligent life in general? Like, what is it? Is it the soul? Like, what do we have that's particularly unique? In the biblical ontology, it is being made in the image of God means we not only have a mind, but also a soul and a spirit. There's a biblical word for animals, the nafesh. The Hebrew word. And they have a mind of a sort. And anyone who's a dog owner knows this. There's a lot of smart creatures, but there is something special about us. And we all, I think, understand that intuitively. Well, we understand it to us. So it may be that there are other creatures that have those unique endowments in other planetary systems. But not on Earth, not orcas, not dolphins. I think they're super intelligent. I think they're super intelligent animals. They can't... Well, they can't manipulate their environment like we can, but they do have a cerebral cortex. It's 40% larger than a human being's. Yeah. I mean, mere brain capacity is not the whole story as we go from the paleoanthropology. And dumb people with big heads. Yeah. Yeah. Who do things like boxing and MMA, right? Yeah, there you go. Well, that... Yeah. So, well, anyway, I mean, I work the other end of the timescale, the cosmology, the origin of life, the origin of animals. You're asking me about anthropology issues. Well, I'm just asking you about your thoughts on these things. I mean, it's a great conversation. I have to imagine that you've considered a lot of these things. I think about all this stuff, of course. But how much have you looked into psychedelics and the origins of religious experiences? Your driver was telling me about it on the way here. It sounds like... You haven't looked into that other than that? Well, I have a former student who had an experience of God on a psychedelic. Me too. You know, so I'm aware of those experiences. You haven't had them? I have not. Would you want to? I'm sort of happy with the experiences of God I've had in the sort of... Wouldn't you like to actually say hi? Say hi. Say hi. Say hi. Say hi. Like say hello to God. Yeah. Well, I found other ways to do it, but I'm not... And again, this is the thing we were saying about personal experience before. It's not dispositive of these big discussions. Are you aware of John Marco Allegro? No. John Marco Allegro, who was a scholar, a biblical scholar, and he was also an ordained minister who became agnostic when he started studying theology. He was one of the people that deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he worked with it over a period of 14 years, deciphering it. And it's very controversial, but his interpretation of Christianity after reading these scrolls was that it was initially about psychedelic mushroom rituals and fertility rituals, and that this was what they were documenting in these ancient scrolls. And that what he believed is that these psychedelic mushrooms were what we thought of as mana, or the host, the body of Christ, that these experiences were directly attributed to people taking these psychedelic mushrooms in these rituals. And many people have had psychedelic experiences, especially on psilocybin and on other very potent psychedelic drugs. Is that the acting agent within mushrooms that creates the psychedelic... That's in one type of mushroom. The one that John Marco Allegro alleges is a little bit more complex. It's called the Ammonita muscaria. And it's more complex in that the belief is that it is seasonably variable, genetically variable, and that it must be cultivated in a specific way. And many people who have tried to achieve these states with Ammonita muscaria have failed, where others have succeeded. And it's because of, obviously, because it's illegal and frowned upon, it's very complex. John Hopkins has done... They've done a lot of work on psilocybin, and so have maps, and so have... There's a lot of... Maps have done a lot of work with various psychedelic drugs. But the idea is that these ancient rituals were how they connected to God, and that they hid these from the conquering Romans and from all these different religions that wanted to impose their philosophies on them when the people were conquered. But they kept these parables, and they kept these stories, and they kept these legends of these experiences. And John Marco Allegro wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. It's a very interesting book. And then he wrote another book called... I think that book... Oh, was it... Oh, God, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth is his other book that he wrote about it. But it's interesting. And I... Well, Joe, what was your experience of God in when you were using those substances? I mean, I'm kind of joking around when I said it's God. What it seems like is the root of everything. Like, when you have these experiences, they're so profound and so transformational. They have this impact on you where you enter into a realm of the impossible, and it's so easy to get to. It just doesn't take that long, and then all of a sudden you're there, especially through things like dimethyltryptamine, which is also endogenous in the human brain. If you can take that, you will be transported into a realm of impossible beauty, of geometric patterns that move and dance in front of you, and you're confronted with some sort of intelligence, some sort of intelligence that's beyond anything you could possibly comprehend in our material realm. I don't know what it is. No one knows what it is. People have... They think it's a well of souls. They think it's an encounter with God. They think it's aliens. They think it's so many different things, but there's a university in, I believe it's in London, that Graham Hancock was talking about, where they're doing a... They're putting these people on an IV drip of dimethyltryptamine. Dimethyltryptamine is a very, very potent psychedelic, but the body brings it back to baseline very quickly because it's endogenous in the human body. It's one of the quickest drugs from the initial breakthrough experiences, which is insanely profound to 15 minutes later, you're completely sober. It's very, very quick. And these people that are having these experiences, they're mapping out these experiences in this very new and profound way, where they're saying there might be some chemical portal in the mind that can be activated through these psychedelic chemicals. And then you experience or perceive transcendent beauty or... Overwhelming in a way that it's not... This is not like sitting in a field and feeling love. This is just an overwhelming thing that feels more real than reality itself. And it seems like you're kind of dipping your toe also into this infinite realm. And when you're experiencing... You almost feel like you're in the waiting room. You can't really handle the whole thing. And... So having had an experience like that, you're not inclined to a simplistic materialism as a... There's something, you're saying there's something more. Well, anybody who hasn't had that experience that wants to diminish it or wants to somehow or another have a reductionist take and what it means to be a human being, I think you've had a limited amount of experiences if you want to say that. I don't know how you could dismiss that without having it. And a lot of people like Dawkins have not had that. And he spoke openly about perhaps maybe one day taking LSD under the right clinical settings. And he probably should do that. And it would be pretty profound. But I would actually recommend... Go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say Dawkins was one of the scientists that actually proposed the Panspermia idea. Later regretted it. He was kind of in a film with Ben Stein. Ben Stein got him to admit that no one had any idea how the first life had evolved from the chemical prebiotic soup. And then Stein asked him, well, what do you think about the possibility that intelligent design could be part of the answer? And then Dawkins speculated maybe somewhat imprudently from his point of view about, well, it might be, but it would have had to have been another alien being who evolved by a purely explicable process on some other planet. And then later, I think he came to wish he had not said that. But in any case... Even psilocybin is thought to perhaps have come here through Panspermia. Because psilocybin is like a very unique compound. Are there downsides of these experiences that people have? Are there bad trips, as it were? Sure. Yeah, sure. People have bad trips. And I think some of that bad trip is trying to control the trip because your ego sort of takes over and you try to stop it because it's so overwhelming and scary. Maybe a little afraid. It's very terrifying. It's terrifying because it's a complete loss of control. And reality melts down in front of you. Reminds me a little bit of the British philosopher A.J. Ayer, one of the great scientific more of an atheistic philosopher, the founder of something called logical positivism. In 1986, 87, something like that, he had a near-death experience and felt himself being drawn inexorably towards this malevolent red light. And then kind of a sense of being drawn down into a maelstrom or a vortex. And then he was revived and wrote the whole thing up for, I think it was the National Review of all places. And at first he was sort of really affected by it, but then later he gave it a reductionist account of it and said it was a loss of oxygen to the brain or something like that. So there are... And I know a very dear friend in England who's had an experience while under the knife of not a near-death experience, but one where he felt an encounter with a deity in a probably drug altered state of consciousness because he was being deeply anesthetized. So I think these experiences are rather pervasive in human experience. Are you aware of these Brazilian churches that they practice Christianity, but they practice Christianity while consuming this psychedelic brew? I have not heard of that. Yeah, they actually have religious protection in the United States. There's two. See if you can find them. Central Daim\u00e9. I can't remember the names of the two churches. Here they are. Central Daim\u00e9. That's it. Central Daim\u00e9 is a Brazilian religion that makes elaborate use of ordering principles, techniques, and symbology to shape and direct the effects of the hallucinogenic brew Ayahuasca. So Ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT. DMT is broken down in the gut by monoamine oxidase. And Ayahuasca combines the leaves of one plant, which they do it in different ways in different parts of the world. But one part of the brew contains dimethyltryptamine, and the other part of the brew contains a natural MAO inhibitor called a harmine. And the two of them combined through this very elaborate brewing process converts it to an orally active version of DMT. So with the MAO inhibitor and with the DMT, you take it, now it's orally active, and it's a slow release trip of dimethyltryptamine, that instead of lasting for 15 minutes, it lasts for hours. And so this church combines Christianity with this psychedelic ritual. And I know people that have done it there. They said it's extraordinary. It's just this wild thing. You see these people singing hymns and talking about Jesus and they're tripping balls. And they're doing it collectively as a group. Taking the charismatic movement and putting it on steroids. Yeah, but I don't think they're... I don't hear any abuse. I don't hear any stories of... I just hear... I mean, it's very anecdotal. But I don't necessarily think you can put them into like this dangerous cult thing, like the Buddha field people that I was talking about earlier. I think this is a more... I don't know... Is honest the word? Honest pursuit? It's a more accurate pursuit. It's a more earnest pursuit. I think they're really trying to connect with God and they believe they're doing that through this. And I'm just speaking for them and I probably shouldn't be. But I believe from my friends who have done it and have these experiences with this church. And I think there's two churches in the United States that are allowed to do this. And I think they, again, they originated from Brazil where in the Amazon, this is where they first discovered this Ayahuasca. You are definitely broadening my horizons because I had not heard of that. But I think anybody who's really truly religious, and if you do go into the ancient history of mushroom symbolism and religious texts and how much connection there is to psychedelic rituals and ancient religious art, Brian Murarescu, who wrote this fantastic book called The Immortality Key on the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece, because of his work, because of this amazing book and because of more than a decade of research, they've now determined that there's actual physical proof that during the Eleusinian Mysteries, when they were involved in these rituals and they were drinking wine, that the wine they were drinking was laced with ergot, which is a very potent psychedelic drug. And they think it was laced with other psychedelics as well. And that the beer was as well. These people that were creating democracy as we know it, they were having psychedelic experiences. And this was a very persecuted thing. Where they were banned by the Romans from doing it there. And so they left Greece and they went to other, they went to Spain. There's evidence that this went to a bunch of other different places. So is this like the first or second century or earlier? You'd have to Google that. But the book is fantastic. Interesting. And it's actually opened up a field of study at Harvard because of Brian Murarescu's work. That's Shakespeare quote. There are more things under heaven and earth ratio than are acknowledged in your philosophy. I think the one, you know, I don't know anything about this, but the one thing I do know is that the default philosophy or worldview that we inherited from the late 19th century called scientific materialism is failing on multiple fronts. And stuff I've written is arguing that it can't explain the science. It was supposedly based on science, but it's not explaining the cutting edge scientific discoveries. Dawkins has this wonderful way of framing the issue. He says that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect. If at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. And blind pitiless is indifference is shorthand or his way of talking about purely undirected material processes, matter in motion, the molecules and the energy, and that's it. And the evolutionary process that ensues from it. But what is striking to me is that the big discoveries that we've made about where the universe came from, about the structure of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the fact that the universe had a beginning, the complexity of life, the information stored in life, the information processing system in life, all of these things have turned out to be deeply surprising and unexpected from that perspective of the 19th century scientific materialism that we inherited and which has been popularized by people like Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. And even Stephen Hawking got into it in the end, the sort of the so-called new atheism that was so popular around 07 through 2015, but I think is now waning that no materialist expected the universe to have a beginning. Every one of them resisted it. Einstein initially, before he adopted a less materialistic worldview, bent over backwards to try to circumvent the conclusion that there had been a big bang. Hoyle hated the big bang. People confronted with the fine tuning of inventing the multiverse concept, but that hasn't actually solved the problem. And in the origin of life problem, they've punted the problem to outer space. So it's actually now the scientific atheism that's getting exotic and invoking extra ad hoc or auxiliary hypotheses to try to save the evidence where the the the theistic design view has a sort of parsimony and elegance and simplicity to it as an explanation. So there's been that that kind of a shift. But in any case, you know, I don't discount experiences of the kind you are describing. I haven't had them. I don't discount near-death experiences. My worldview is open to things beyond just the molecules and the atoms in front of me. And I think there have been big shifts in science and philosophy that are putting materialism on the defensive and are opening people to spiritual realities that were not even considered in the late 19th century among elite intellectuals or among most elite intellectuals through the last hundred years. But I think that's shifting. I think there's a real danger of being an elite intellectual and all agreeing upon a very specific thing that gives you social credit to sort of a spouse. We've seen that in a lot of things. Yeah, we certainly have. And it's just there's so many mysteries and the mystery of design, the possibility of design is so intriguing to so many people. And it means so many different things to so many different people. Like what does that mean? Is the universe alive? Is it a part of something that's even bigger than that? Is the universe itself just an atom and some infinite being that is also a part of a universe that's an atom and another infinite being? This is why I wrote Return of a God Hypothesis. In the first two books, the first book was Signature in the Cell about the origin of the first life. And I argued that the information-bearing properties of DNA and the information processing system that's present in even the very simplest cell presents a profound challenge to the idea of undirected evolutionary processes. A mind had to be involved because what we know from our uniform and repeated experience is that whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we're talking about computer code or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal, we always come to a mind, not an undirected material process. The people looking for extraterrestrial intelligence with SETI were looking for information-rich sequences embedded, modulated in a radio signal. And had they found them, they would have concluded, yes, there is definitely an extraterrestrial intelligence. No one has found such a signal yet. But the presumption that information is a decisive indicator of prior intelligence is shared not just by theists or Christians. It was shared by the SETI people, or ID people. But having made that argument, my readers then wanted to know, well, who do you think the designing intelligence is and what can science tell us about that? And what I do in the new book is look at competing metaphysical hypotheses, theism, deism, pantheism, panentheism, space alienism, and good old-fashioned materialism, and then compare their explanatory power with respect to these big three things that science has discovered, that the universe had a beginning, that it's been finely tuned from the beginning, and that since the beginning, we've had these big infusions of new code into our biosphere that make new forms of life possible. I think theism provides the best overall explanation of that. But I do think it is a completely new day that it's the scientific materialism of the 19th century that's getting weird and exotic. And I think that's a way of saying that there must be something more than just these simple simplistic materialistic explanations that we have defined as coextensive with science, such that we will not consider anything outside that box. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this conversation. I did too. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. Appreciate it. Tell everybody about your book. Oh, sorry. Well, I was just... Website. I'm sorry. I may have been giving a little plug there. Please do. Please do. Latest book is Return of the God Hypothesis, three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. The previous book was Darwin's Doubt, The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design subtitle. And the first book was Signature in the Cell, DNA and the Evidence for Intelligence. Do you have a website as well? I do. The best one is Return of the God Hypothesis.com. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.