How is there something new that we now know about how the universe began? Is there an amalgamation between the Big Bang theory and an idea of an intelligent design? Are those two mutually exclusive? Where are we as we witness what you are calling the return of the God hypothesis?

Right.

Let's put this in a larger worldview context.

Every worldview has to posit something as the thing from which everything else came, the thing or the process from which everything else came.

Scientific materialism, the worldview that denies the existence of God, posits that matter and energy are the things from which everything else came, and that they have existed eternally, that they are the self-existent things that later arranged themselves and evolved to produce all the complex things we see around us today.

But matter and energy play the role of God in a materialistic worldview, the worldview that's held by Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss and others.

Now, So consequently, scientific materialists long held that the universe was eternal in self-existence.

What do you mean by that?

Mm-hmm.

So that provided further evidence.

Um, and I would, I would say the, the, the, the hot Big Bang model is still the, is still the gold standard in cosmology.

But what, what we're seeing now are very cur-- uh, very, I would say, very clever attempts to model an infinite universe, past eternal universe using mathematics.

And there's a, there's a book by a German author called "Lost in Math." And th- there is a sense where the human mind is infinitely creative, and we can model almost anything mathematically.

But one of the reasons that I say that the, as best we can tell, the, the, the postulation of a beginning provides the best explanation for the evidence that we have is that if you, you think about, uh, a, an expanding dynam- a dynamical expanding universe where galactic material is receding from us and where space is getting less and less curved as matter is getting more and more diffuse, you have actually-- what, what you're seeing is a dynamic expanding universe.

Mm

... pre-Planck time static universe if you like, but there's nothing in what we see that suggests that as a natural conclusion.

But I want to ask you, because as I understand it, Your work in intelligent design, you are attempting, you are willing to go a little farther and say, actually, we can bring the notion of an intelligent mind into science, into work.

Go ahead.

Into the question of origins.

There are different types of science.

The type of science that Jim does is he's studying things, the regularity of nature at the bench.

He's doing experiments chemically with nanotechnology and various things.

If you ask the question, what does nature ordinarily do, the answer to that question will necessarily be rendered in terms of material processes, because we're describing what nature ordinarily does.

Dare I read it? I read it and it confirmed my Christianity because it seemed to me he had never begun to understand what the message of Christianity or indeed biblical theism was.

Okay

...

most carefully.

Um, y- there is...

I've, you know, a number of people have asked me, "Well, okay, so you have this powerful critique of neo-Darwinism.

The fossils don't support the pattern of appearance that Darwin expected.

The, uh, the, the mechanism doesn't seem to have the creative power necess-necessary to generate the information you need, and certainly not as fast as it arises in the Cambrian explosion or other similar events." So how...

Let's talk about Darwin's Doubt and, of course, why does it even matter?

[audience applauding]

Five minutes.

Okay.

Um, I'm gonna make a, an additional point.

Uh, the, the idea of population genetics was hatched in 1920s and '30s before we knew about the information revolution in biology, and as a result of that, it made a number of assumptions that are, um, still with us today and yet are, are not well-founded.

The main assumption it made was that it was-- it's easy to produce new traits by making, uh, with, with mutations.

Genes were thought to be unitary entities prior to 1953.

So Dr. Meyer, help us understand this a little bit more.

Inside the realm of proof-

Of probability.

Yeah.

I don't work on AI, but I think there's some interesting things going on in AI that underscore some of the key insights that we have had in the intelligent design research community.

The key insight is that, that information of a certain kind, we call it specified information or functional information, meaningful information, always arises From a mind.

There's a famous, uh, uh, early molecular biologist who was a pioneer in applying the information sciences to molecular biology, Henry Quastler, who said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.

This is part of our uniform and repeated experience.

Sure

Are we at an interesting point, uh, in the evolution of human history where we have a villain, uh, Iran, vowing to destroy not just Israel, not just the West, but, but Western civilization, yet half the world doesn't seem to get it, much of America doesn't seem to get it?

Yeah, I think there's a kind of ideological vacuum in the West that has allowed things like radical Islam and a renewed, um, uh, interest in, essentially communism to take root, and I think that's a byproduct of the loss of our confidence in our Judeo-Christian history and, at an even deeper level, a loss of faith in the existence of God.

So our, we're celebrating our 250th year anniversary this year, and fundamental to that was this core idea that the rights that we have are derived from our creator.

They did not, they are not granted by government.

And so our whole system is based on a belief in a creator, a creator who made us in his own image and who has granted us an intrinsic dignity from which our rights flow.

And if we lose that concept, then, uh, as Edmund Burke pointed out a long time ago, you won't have a completely neutral public square.

Other ideologies will fill in that vacuum, and we've been seeing that happening, uh, not only in America, but especially in Britain and Western Europe.

Doctor, what does the film say about Darwin and his survival of the fittest theory?

Really?

So I think it was connecting with people across the ages.

I, we also got an email from, uh, a 70-year-old man who had been, uh, who was a physicist, who'd been a lo- lifelong agnostic, who walked out of the theater having had an epiphany and realizing that, that God must exist after all.

Uh, another, a, a gentleman here in the Seattle area, his older brother is, uh, suffering from Parkinson's and has been, uh, really closed to the idea of any kind of religious belief.

And, uh, the younger brother took the older brother to see the film.

They didn't leave the theater for 45 minutes, sat where they had seen it, uh, how the credits rolled in the dark, and had a really deep spiritual conversation that, uh, apparently had been long in coming.

And, and, uh-

Okay

What kind of response did you get from the average individual who walks out not knowing what they were going to go see?

Yeah, more important than the box office numbers were the audience response.

I'm a scientist, a philosopher of science.

I was unfamiliar with the film world, but there's a website called Rotten Tomatoes, which is, I guess, the go-to place to review things.

And we've had a 90th It's a 93%, 94% rating, popcorn rating, approval rating from people who have watched the film with over 500 qualified reviews.

So it's just maintained a really strong rating and response from audience members.

More importantly is just some of the reports we've gotten from people.

How do we figure out what the designer wants us to know? Is there a part two coming? Well,

Mm.

Steady state never, uh, uh, never envisioned a place where all the matter in the universe would be, would be congealed into one place.

Rather, it was popping into existence in little, little l- little localized areas all the time.

So s- by the 1960s, pretty much all physicists, mid- mid 1960s-S- uh, steady state kind of goes by the boards.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, Hoyle h- holds on for a while, maybe all the way to the end of his life.

[laughs] Okay.

Yep.

How can you get consciousness from mindless matter?

Yeah.

The, what did, the hard problem of consciousness, the philosophers call it.

And yeah, Yeah, we have no account of how the electrochemistry of the brain produces my perception of your black shirt.

When I go to the eye doctor, the ophthalmologist, I'll often ask about the function of the eye and how it works, explaining what's gone wrong with mine.

And one time I said, but where's the picture? the picture that I see.

Is there a little screen in the back of the brain or is there a physical locus of the perception? He says, no, he said, well, he's now you're asking me the fundamental mystery of consciousness.

And what do you think that would do for someone?

So what new discoveries have been made that indicate that, that you display in your film?

Yeah, that's a great question, Beau.

Thanks for having me on.

The film is actually the story of three great discoveries that are leading scientists to reconsider and even reaffirm belief in God because of, not in spite of, the scientific

What does that say about scientific bias, or is it simply that their discoveries revealed a truth that they could not ignore?

Well, I think it's the latter, but there has been a bias as well.

Since the late 19th century, a kind of rule of reasoning or rule of method became normative in the sciences.

And the idea was that if you're going to be a scientist, you must limit yourself to strictly materialistic explanations for everything.

It's the film version of, tell me about the book first and what the content of the book is and what led you to write it.

Yeah, the book is called The Return of the God Hypothesis, and it's a big story, kind of a rise-fall-rise story.

It tells the story of how science arose in a Christian or Judeo-Christian milieu in Western Europe with figures like Newton and Robert Boyle and Johannes Kepler, deeply religious men who were studying nature because they wanted to give glory to God and believe that they could understand nature because God had made their minds in his image, and therefore they possessed rationality and could understand the rationality he built into nature.

That view was lost in the late 19th century, largely among elite intellectuals and scientists as a result of figures like Darwin and Marx and Freud.

But the story of the return of the God hypothesis is the story of the return of that theistic perspective as more and more scientists are realizing that modern discoveries in science about the beginning of the universe, about what physicists call its finely tuned structure, and especially the interior workings of the living cell with the digital code stored in the DNA molecule, the whole information processing system and the nanomachinery we're finding in cells.

All these discoveries are leading many scientists to reconsider and even reaffirm belief in God.

And that's what I call the return of the God hypothesis.

Whoever said that to me 40 years ago, is there anything to it?

Mm.

The idea that there are very basic parameters of physics, the strength of gravitational attraction or the strength of electromagnetic attraction or the, the strength of the force that's causing the universe to expand outward from that beginning point.

All of these things turn out to fall within very narrow tolerances or ranges outside of which life and even basic chemistry would be impossible.

And that has, to many scientists, suggested that there must have been a fine-tuner.

And then the third, and I think most compelling discovery of all, is the, the, the discovery that our lives depend essentially on an automated factory on a miniaturized scale that's all being governed by millions and millions of lines of code.

So, um, we wou-we wouldn't explain the origin of the iPhone, uh, without reference to Steve Jobs, right? And in the same way, we, we are discovering inside life distinctive features of design systems, and one of those most striking features is the presence of, of literally digital code that's directing the construction of, of little tiny miniature machines that keep us alive.

When the credits roll, what is the one question you want every viewer to be asking themselves?

The question I think we leave people with is m- the, the sense of does my life have meaning? I did an interview with Piers Morgan in Britain a, a couple years ago, and we were talking about this crisis of meaning, that people don't believe that their own lives have any lasting or enduring meaning.

Wow.

It took me three and a half years to write the book.

So the, the film was a even more extensive project, but we have twenty-two different scientists and scholars who are in it.

The filmmakers are fantastic storytellers, so this is not a sermon on tape.

This is, uh, you know, a, a, a, a genuine, uh, story, and it's the story of two stories, the story of two competing views of reality and how modern science has revealed that one of those stories clearly provides a better explanation for what we see.

The two stories are the, the n- the, the, the thing that we've all heard, that life arose and the universe arose from undirected material processes, uh, or as Richard Dawkins put it, from blind, pitiless indifference.

And the other story is that instead there's a mind, a creator, uh, a creative intelligence behind the universe, and we can tell by looking at, as St. Paul put it, the things that are made.

Could, could you elaborate on that point?

And then I want to hear some of the three discoveries.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, the embarrassing thing about the film project is that with some delays that we encountered during the final stages of COVID, it actually took five years to produce the film.

It took me three and a half years to write the book.

So the film was an even more extensive project.

But we have 22 different scientists and scholars who are in it.

The filmmakers... are fantastic storytellers.

Could you elaborate on that point?

Why is The Story of Everything different?

It's, uh, it's different in a couple respects.

First of all, it tells a story.

It tells the story of the discoveries that have changed scientists' minds, and it tells the stories of those scientists, so it's very viewable, uh, and engaging.

But it's also very comprehensive, and it draws these different threads of evidence together to show that we don't just have evidence of a designing intelligence of some unspecified kind, but rather what we're seeing is evidence of a designing intelligence that has the attributes that traditional theists, Jews, and Christians have long ascribed to God.

There's evidence of a transcendent intelligence who is also active in the creation, and we see that in the evidence of the beginning of the universe, the creation event itself, uh, and we see it in the evidence for the fine-tuning of the basic parameters of physics, and we see it especially in the interior workings of the living cell, where we have an exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology.

And this film brings it to life.

Why'd you decide to go big screen?

Just distinguish deduction from inference for us.

So a deductive argument will start with a major premise.

All men are mortal.

A minor premise, some fact about the world.

Socrates is a man.

Socrates is a man.

And then a conclusion.

Yeah, I prefer to call reality as being