0:04

I.D. The Future, a

0:06

podcast about evolution and intelligent

0:09

design.

0:12

Greetings, I'm Tom Gilson. Forty

0:14

years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

0:17

delivered a memorable speech on

0:19

the tragedies that nations and societies

0:21

commit when they forget God. He

0:24

had seen it firsthand in Soviet Russia.

0:27

And this year, in February 2023, Stephen C. Meyer, director

0:29

of the Center

0:32

for Science and Culture, recalled that

0:34

speech as he opened the Dallas

0:37

Conference on Science and Faith. With

0:39

a look at so-called scientific materialism

0:42

and the human disaster it is

0:45

increasingly producing. And

0:47

yet now, though, there is

0:49

hope, for science itself is

0:52

pointing more and more to the reality

0:55

of God.

0:57

This year is the 40th

0:59

anniversary of a very significant

1:01

speech that was given by Alexander

1:04

Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet

1:06

dissident. And this was

1:08

his famous men have forgotten God speech.

1:11

There are disasters befalling America.

1:13

And the question I want to ask tonight is

1:16

if these disasters, any

1:18

of them, all of them, some of them have something

1:20

to do with our having

1:23

forgotten God.

1:29

I'm going to start the talk tonight on an unapologetically

1:33

somber note, because I think all of us

1:35

have a sense that our culture

1:37

is in some serious trouble.

1:40

And that there are, in many, many ways,

1:43

the wheels are coming off. And it happens

1:45

that this year is the 40th anniversary

1:49

of a very significant speech that was given

1:51

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

1:54

the great Soviet dissident.

1:56

This was his famous men have forgotten God

1:59

speech.

2:00

And in this speech, he told the story of the

2:02

words spreading across

2:05

the Soviet Union, across Russia,

2:07

Mother Russia at the time, of

2:10

the Bolshevik

2:11

takeover.

2:12

And that the old people were telling

2:15

him repeatedly,

2:17

these things are happening,

2:19

these great disasters have befallen

2:22

Russia because

2:23

men have forgotten God.

2:25

And this is a passage from his speech,

2:27

while I was still a child, I recall hearing

2:29

a number of older people offer the following

2:32

explanation for the great disasters

2:34

that had befallen Russia. Men have forgotten

2:36

God, that's why this is happening.

2:39

Now we have many disasters befalling

2:41

America, if we're clear-eyed

2:44

and honest with ourselves. We

2:46

have a near epidemic

2:49

level of teen suicide.

2:51

We

2:51

have an anxiety epidemic.

2:53

We have mass shootings. We

2:56

have family breakdown out

2:58

of wedlock births. We have

3:00

a confusion about gender

3:03

identity, even a fluidity

3:05

idea that is

3:06

resulting in medical mutilation of

3:09

young people.

3:11

Promiscuity, illegitimacy,

3:13

abortion, it's getting kind of depressing,

3:15

I realize, but I could go on in the crime

3:17

waves, the fentanyl deaths.

3:19

There are disasters befalling America.

3:22

And the question I want to ask tonight is

3:24

if

3:25

these disasters, any of them, all of them,

3:27

some of them have something to do

3:30

with our having forgotten God.

3:33

The Gallup people

3:35

published a great poll last summer

3:37

in which they

3:39

noted that there had been a 10% drop

3:42

in the number of people

3:44

who believe in God in our culture

3:47

in less than a decade. That's

3:49

still a fairly high number, 81%, but

3:52

it was a very precipitous drop in a short

3:54

period of time driven by a particular

3:56

cohort, a particular group of people

3:59

in the population.

3:59

You can probably guess it's

4:02

the Gen Z's, the 18's to 30's. The

4:05

young people, even if they

4:07

have been raised in a

4:10

Jewish or Christian or religious home, are

4:13

walking away from traditional religious belief

4:16

in very decidedly

4:18

large numbers. And we've

4:21

done some polling on this ourselves, trying

4:23

to get underneath numbers like this. The Gallup

4:25

poll is not the only one by any means. You

4:28

has done polling on this and many other

4:30

organizations. So we did some polling on this

4:32

to find out what are the factors that

4:35

are making belief in God seem incredible

4:38

or untenable to young

4:40

people in particular. And

4:43

in a survey that we did, we found that 65

4:45

percent of self-described atheists

4:48

and 43 percent of agnostics

4:51

affirmed the following statement, the findings

4:53

of science make the existence

4:55

of God less probable.

4:57

This was one of the top factors cited,

5:00

science.

5:01

Science undermines belief in God.

5:04

Now this wasn't at all surprising to me.

5:06

We have many, many encounters

5:09

with young people. We

5:11

do a science and faith conference every year on

5:13

the East Coast. Every year that I've gone, the

5:16

same, I would say bereaved mother

5:18

comes to give us an update on

5:21

her formerly very devout son

5:24

who went off to one of the great science universities

5:26

in the United States, came under the mentorship

5:29

of a prominent scientific atheist

5:32

and not only lost his faith, but had

5:34

become a very hostile atheist who was

5:36

hostile to everything his parents believed

5:39

and stood for and made for a rift in

5:41

the family. We were at this

5:43

event three years ago,

5:46

almost four now I guess, Eric Metaxas

5:48

and I were doing an interview, Eric was interviewing me.

5:52

It was kind of an interesting evening because as

5:55

we were being interviewed, I could see Staged

5:58

left and he was aware of this as well.

5:59

that a young camera woman who was

6:02

filming the event, about halfway

6:05

through the interview,

6:06

was seen to be visibly weeping. I

6:09

mean, really, a little bit shaking.

6:12

It was a dramatic expression of emotion.

6:15

And she was so embarrassed by this later, she

6:17

wrote the film producer who had hired her to

6:20

work the event and wrote a letter

6:22

explaining what had been going on with her. And

6:25

it was that she was learning in our

6:27

interview about scientific evidence that supported

6:30

belief in God. And she

6:33

was so touched by this because she'd been living

6:35

in a state of cognitive dissonance

6:38

since graduating from college. And this is what she

6:40

wrote in the letter. She said, throughout my college career,

6:43

professors would constantly lecture

6:45

that based on the evidence they

6:48

had provided, there should be no way

6:50

that anyone in class could believe in

6:52

God.

6:53

They'd argue that the science was proven

6:55

and God was hence a myth.

6:58

I was not equipped, she said, to present

7:00

a valid opposition in debate. I

7:02

was desperate to find commonality between

7:05

my beliefs and my scientific

7:07

education, but I could find none.

7:10

Now, apparently, in her case, she did not entirely

7:12

lose her faith, but she decided she

7:14

didn't want to do any more science. She would

7:16

have been otherwise gone to grad school in science. She

7:18

decided to do film production instead and

7:21

had been living for several years in

7:23

a state of, as I said, cognitive dissonance,

7:26

where she wanted to believe, but

7:28

it seemed that the facts of the matter contradicted

7:30

the very possibility of belief. And

7:32

so many young people struggle from

7:34

this very thing, and it's not hard to see why. We've

7:37

had a group

7:39

of very prominent voices in our culture

7:42

advancing the message that science

7:45

properly understood undermines

7:47

belief in God. Some of these

7:49

folks you will know, there was, in fact, a

7:52

publishing genre that became

7:54

The Rage about 2007 and

7:57

has lasted almost to the present day.

8:00

beginning to wane as far as its popularity

8:02

in publishing, but it was called the New

8:04

Atheist genre.

8:05

And you had

8:06

figures like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence

8:09

Krauss, Bill Nye the Science

8:11

Guy, or serious figures like

8:13

Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg, the great physicist

8:16

from the University of Texas who just passed

8:18

away the summer before last. Weinberg

8:21

was famous for saying, the more things

8:23

seem comprehensible,

8:26

meaning to our science, the

8:28

more they seem pointless. So

8:30

this mesh is not only just atheism,

8:33

but a kind of atheistic nihilism,

8:35

that there's no meaning to life because how

8:37

could there be an ultimate meaning? Meaning

8:40

is something that derives from persons, and

8:42

there is no ultimate person behind

8:44

the universe such that when

8:46

we die, that will be the end

8:48

of things. So you had this, and of

8:50

course, the Richard Dawkins title was The

8:52

God Delusion.

8:54

So these very popular books,

8:57

Dawkins sold three million, Hawking's

9:00

Brief History of Science at times sold 10 million

9:02

copies. And the most famous line

9:04

from that book was, what need then

9:06

for a creator? So this

9:08

message is percolated. It's been

9:11

around for quite a while because this was repackaged

9:13

late 19th century scientific atheism,

9:16

but it was packaged very effectively. And

9:18

it seems to have had a discernible

9:21

effect on the belief

9:23

system of young people such that pollsters

9:25

are now picking that up

9:27

and reporting on that.

9:28

Now one of the other things that we found when we did

9:30

polling about what lies

9:33

behind this shift in belief

9:35

is another factor that was commonly cited.

9:38

One of the top factors, again, was scientific

9:40

theories about the unguided evolution

9:44

of life. And this was cited

9:46

again by a great number of people.

9:49

More people cited this, more young people cited this

9:51

than cited the problem of pain and suffering.

9:54

So you got a picture of young people

9:56

who were fairly affluent, hadn't suffered a

9:58

lot themselves personally, but had deep

10:00

intellectual doubts, the sense that the facts of

10:02

the matter, the facts of the world,

10:04

of science, of history, of whatever,

10:07

didn't support the faith.

10:08

So this made belief untenable.

10:11

Now again, this second factor

10:13

is not surprising to me and

10:16

to many of my colleagues who work

10:18

on these topics of biological origins

10:21

because we've understood for a long time that

10:23

theories of biological origins and

10:26

cosmological origins end

10:28

up inevitably raising deep

10:30

philosophical questions.

10:33

Sometimes in philosophy, scholars

10:35

will talk about the concept of a worldview,

10:37

a comprehensive belief system that

10:39

people have whether they know it or not, a kind of

10:41

default way of thinking.

10:43

And

10:44

the most important worldview question that

10:47

every worldview has to answer is the question

10:50

of what one worldview writer, James

10:52

Sire, calls the prime reality

10:54

question. What is the thing or the

10:57

process from which

10:59

everything else comes? What is the thing, the entity,

11:01

the process from which everything else comes? Of

11:03

course, in traditional Judeo-Christian religious

11:06

belief, that thing or

11:08

entity, that prime reality is God, a personal

11:10

God. If

11:13

a more common thought

11:16

form in the elite universities

11:18

and the knowledge culture today is a thought

11:20

form or worldview known as materialism

11:23

or sometimes called naturalism, the idea that

11:25

nature is all there is and there's nothing beyond nature,

11:27

no God, no creator, no designing intelligence.

11:31

And Stephen Jay Gould has made very

11:33

clear the importance of, for example, Darwinian

11:36

evolution in support of this materialistic

11:39

view.

11:39

He said that Darwin developed an evolutionary

11:41

theory based on chance variation and

11:44

the process of natural selection and then he

11:46

goes on to explain a

11:48

rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic

11:51

version of evolution.

11:53

Many of you are aware that the term evolution can

11:55

mean lots of different things. Its most basic meaning

11:57

just means change over time. But Darwinism

11:59

isn't just a theory. just about change over time. It's

12:01

about an undirected, unguided mechanism

12:04

that produces the appearance or

12:06

the illusion of design without

12:08

itself being guided or directed in any

12:10

way.

12:11

And so Gould and many other leading evolutionary

12:14

biologists have been very explicit

12:17

about the way in which Darwinian evolution

12:19

supports a materialistic

12:21

worldview and undermines belief in God.

12:24

And that's showing up in the polling data that we've

12:26

seen. This is a major factor

12:28

in causing young people in particular to

12:30

think that there is no scientific

12:33

basis, no evidential basis, no

12:35

factual basis for faith because what

12:37

we know about the prime reality

12:39

question, the process from which

12:41

everything else came, is that it was purely

12:43

undirected and unguided. There was no divine

12:46

hand or intelligence or creative

12:49

intellect behind it all. When

12:52

I was teaching, I used to sketch out,

12:54

depict worldviews with drawings

12:56

on the chalkboard. My drawings were so bad my students

12:59

converted me to PowerPoint. And so

13:01

this is one that we came up with. This

13:03

is a way of understanding that materialistic worldview.

13:06

The blue disk represents the physical universe.

13:09

The pendulum represents the laws of nature.

13:12

The guy being moved back and forth by the laws

13:14

of nature implies that

13:16

we are completely determined by forces

13:19

beyond our control, our genes and our

13:21

environment and so forth. And then the other

13:24

picture here that comes up is the Godbuster

13:26

sign, the idea that there's nothing beyond

13:29

the physical world, that nature

13:31

is all there is, and nature being composed

13:34

of matter and energy. And so this worldview

13:36

has become very dominant, as I said, in

13:38

our knowledge culture, in the media,

13:41

in the law schools, in the courts, in

13:44

the permanent bureaucracy, and especially

13:47

in the universities,

13:49

particularly in the sciences from which

13:52

it seems to have emanated going

13:54

back to the 19th century. And

13:56

so materialism has many tenets, not just that

13:59

we are the product of our own. unguided, undirected processes,

14:01

but also things like human beings

14:04

have no intrinsic value. Free

14:06

will is an illusion. Objective

14:08

morality is an illusion. Life has

14:10

no ultimate purpose. And when we

14:12

die, we rot. There is no possibility

14:15

of an afterlife. We're talking

14:17

tonight about the concept or

14:19

the enterprise of

14:21

apologetics. And we're going to be

14:23

talking about why apologetics matters,

14:26

why making a case for faith

14:28

based on the facts around us is

14:30

an important thing to do. And

14:32

there's a biblical passage about this, a Hebrew proverb

14:35

that says what many people

14:37

in our political discourse will often say,

14:39

ideas have consequences. The biblical

14:41

way of saying that is, as a man thinketh, so

14:44

is he, or in older translations, so

14:46

shall he act. And this is what's true

14:48

of individuals, it's true of the culture, that our fundamental

14:51

thought forms, our guiding worldview,

14:55

will affect the decisions we

14:57

make in our life, and sometimes, alas,

15:00

tragically so. A few

15:02

years ago, some of you may know that we had

15:04

a film called Expelled that

15:06

was out in the theaters. And over a million people saw

15:09

it and it explored some of the

15:12

ideas surrounding the concept of intelligent

15:14

design. And a year

15:16

or so after the film came out, we

15:18

got a call from a bereaved father whose son

15:20

had committed suicide. The son's

15:23

name was Jesse Kilgore, apparently a fine

15:25

young man. He'd been in the military, he got out, and

15:27

he went back to university. And he was taking

15:29

biology courses and

15:32

he ran into a buzzsaw of

15:34

an aggressive proselytizing

15:37

scientific atheist and he

15:39

was challenging the students to read

15:41

some of the works of the scientific

15:43

atheist that I mentioned earlier. Anyway,

15:46

after Jesse's body was found, they

15:49

also found in his bedroom, under

15:51

his bed, an annotated copy

15:53

of the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. And

15:56

you could see in the annotations, according to

15:59

his dad, the progression of

16:01

his thought, that first there was a sort of outrage

16:04

and anger at Dawkins' thesis, and

16:06

then there was some sort of creeping doubts as he

16:08

didn't really know how to answer some of the

16:11

arguments, and then there was some soul-searching,

16:14

and eventually it became clear

16:16

that he had lost his faith, and

16:18

very soon after kind of lost his hope. Now

16:21

not everyone who loses belief in God takes

16:24

their own life. I'm not trying to imply that,

16:26

but some people take ideas very

16:28

seriously and think through their implications,

16:31

and I'm very sensitive to this because as

16:33

a young person, as a 14-year-old,

16:35

I had a severe case of what I

16:37

would now term metaphysical anxiety.

16:40

I was asking questions about, well, what's

16:42

it going to matter in 100 years? I couldn't

16:45

come up with an answer to that. It seemed like no matter

16:47

what I did, it wouldn't matter that

16:49

when you die, you rot indeed. And then there's

16:52

this great quote from Bertrand Russell when he talks about

16:54

all the highest human achievements

16:57

will be lost in the heat death of the universe,

17:00

and there's nothing that will have lasting value.

17:02

And I saw a little video the other day of a campus

17:05

event.

17:06

It was

17:07

one of these God's Not Dead events, and

17:09

they did man-on-the-street interviews

17:12

with students before the event and afterwards, and

17:14

they were asking students, do you believe in God? And

17:17

one of the students said, you know, I'm probably

17:19

the wrong person to ask because I just,

17:21

to be honest, I'm having some problems with mental

17:23

illness because I can't find any meaning

17:25

in life.

17:26

And it was the most bracing

17:28

and honest response I was really, I was

17:30

really taken with. And I thought, well, you know, that was me at 14.

17:32

And so when I heard the

17:35

story of Jesse Kilgore, I thought, not

17:37

everyone takes things that much

17:39

to heart, but here's a young man who did. And

17:42

we have this problem with teen suicide, and it's

17:44

often with kids from very

17:47

affluent families. It's not a matter of lack of

17:49

resources or opportunities. Here's just

17:51

another example. It's very, again, very personal,

17:53

but we had these mass

17:55

shootings. And John West has

17:58

often dug into this and documented this. In

18:00

many, many cases with the mass shootings, there's

18:03

an underlying philosophical materialism

18:05

that's involved, or a Darwinian

18:08

rationale. One of the first major

18:10

ones that came into the media was the Columbine case in 1999,

18:14

where 12 students and a teacher were killed by two

18:16

students who were deeply depressed,

18:19

and they wrote a manifesto. The

18:21

media was asking, well, why would they do this? And it

18:24

had to do with all the

18:25

various left and right political debates were

18:28

all being debated. It was actually something

18:30

deeper. It was that

18:32

they believed that they were helping natural selection

18:34

along. They were committed Darwinian

18:36

nihilists. And of course, not all Darwinists

18:39

are nihilists. Not all Darwinists would endorse

18:41

such an action. But these guys were taking

18:43

the idea very seriously that natural

18:46

selection culled the herd, and we needed to get rid

18:48

of the weak and the biologically

18:51

failing. And so this was part of their manifesto.

18:53

Natural selection is the best thing that ever happened

18:55

to the earth, getting rid of all the stupid

18:57

and weak organisms. And it's all natural.

19:00

Yes, it's good. And so we

19:02

could go on. And one of the people on the panel

19:04

tonight is Nancy Pirsi. And I've had a long

19:06

admiration for her work, because one of the things that Nancy

19:09

does so well is show

19:11

the connection between ideas and how ideas

19:13

have consequences and how these fundamental

19:16

ideas about prime

19:18

reality and our basic worldview

19:21

end up affecting many, many different

19:23

aspects of life. If we had more time, we could

19:25

map all of them. But we're going to talk more

19:27

about that in the conversation

19:29

that follows. Just one more example, the

19:31

sanctity of life, the whole issue of abortion.

19:34

You've got two different views. If you're a

19:36

theist, you think of the

19:39

developing fetus as a human

19:41

being made in God's image. If

19:43

you're a materialist, you think of the developing fetus

19:46

as a lump of tissue, as a group of cells.

19:49

And that makes all the difference in the position

19:51

you take on this contentious issue. The underlying

19:54

worldview has a profound influence

19:56

on the way you're going to think about that political and social

19:58

issue. Now the 19th century,

20:01

as I said, was where

20:03

most of this started. Darwin told us where

20:05

we came from. Marx had a utopian

20:07

and materialistic vision of the future about where

20:09

we were going to end up. And

20:11

Freud, early in the 20th century, told us what

20:13

to do about our guilt.

20:15

And so between these three great materialistic

20:18

scientists, philosophers,

20:20

or scientific philosophers, these

20:22

different theories were answering all

20:24

the basic questions that traditional Judeo-Christian

20:26

belief had always answered, but in materialistic

20:29

terms. And I think it's fair to say

20:31

that we have seen the consequence of that through

20:33

the 20th century and now into our

20:35

own.

20:36

Okay, I told you it was a somber opening.

20:39

But

20:39

now here's the good news.

20:41

There is a tremendous change

20:43

taking place in science and philosophy. And

20:46

it's taking place at the highest levels of

20:48

scientific and philosophical discourse. It's

20:50

still controversial. It's still contentious.

20:52

What's driving it are major

20:55

changes in philosophical

20:57

thinking and also major

21:00

discoveries that have been made in science. And I just want to

21:02

tick off three with a brief description

21:05

of each to get our conference going. Some

21:07

of you who have read some of our books

21:10

from Discovery Institute, if you've been kind

21:12

enough to pick up a copy of my book

21:14

at one point, you will be familiar with these

21:16

three discoveries. And

21:19

most unexpected, that the material

21:21

universe had a beginning. You may

21:24

remember the quotation from Richard Dawkins

21:26

where he says, the universe we observe

21:28

has precisely the properties we should expect

21:31

if at bottom there is no purpose, no

21:33

design, no evil, no good,

21:36

nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

21:39

Blind pitiless indifference is shorthand for materialistic

21:42

worldview. So he's saying

21:45

the universe we observe has exactly

21:47

the properties we should expect if the materialistic

21:50

worldview is correct. Well

21:52

that has in three very important respects

21:54

proven to be incorrect. One

21:56

of the great discoveries of 20th century science was

21:58

that the material universe had a beginning. And

22:01

you may know something of the story that started in

22:03

the 19-teens and 20s. Astronomers began to

22:05

use these great big dome telescopes. Edwin

22:08

Hubble was one of the first and

22:10

he was using the 100-inch Hooker

22:12

telescope at Mount Wilson in California.

22:15

And through that telescope and with the use

22:18

of new photographic plate technology,

22:21

he was able to resolve

22:23

little tiny points of light in the distant

22:26

night sky, which had

22:28

been somewhat mysterious before. People didn't

22:30

know whether they were... Astronomers didn't know whether

22:32

they were stars with gas around

22:35

them within our galaxy or

22:37

whether they might be galaxies in their own right.

22:40

And what Hubble discovered, to make a long

22:42

story short, is they were not only galaxies in

22:44

their own right, but they were galaxies

22:47

that were expanding outward in every

22:49

direction of the night sky. And

22:52

I had the opportunity here

22:55

in Dallas in 1985 when I was very early in

22:57

my career to

23:00

attend a conference that discussed the

23:02

evidence about the origin of the universe. And

23:04

one of the scientists there was Alan Sandage.

23:08

Sandage was a long...well, he was a student

23:10

of Edwin Hubble. He'd been very involved

23:12

in verifying the expansion of

23:14

the universe outward from a singular beginning

23:17

point, from a creation event. And

23:21

at the conference, he announced

23:23

that he had become a Christian,

23:25

which was shocking to the audience there.

23:28

It included some of the other cosmologists

23:30

and astrophysicists were people like Carl Sagan's

23:33

science advisor, Donald Goldschmidt.

23:36

And Sandage explained how

23:38

the evidence of a beginning to the universe

23:40

had shaken his materialistic faith. And

23:43

eventually that led him to soul-searching and to

23:45

a full religious conversion. And what he

23:47

said about it was extremely memorable to me. At

23:50

the time he was describing all the evidence for

23:52

this beginning point past which

23:54

you could not go any further back. And

23:57

he said, here is evidence for what can only

23:59

be described. as a supernatural event.

24:02

There's no way this could have been predicted within

24:04

the realm of physics as we know it. Hard-bitten

24:07

scientific materialist changed

24:10

his worldview in response to one of the great discoveries

24:12

of 20th century science, that the material universe had

24:15

a beginning. Second

24:18

great discovery, this in

24:20

physics more than just astrophysics

24:23

or cosmology, and that is that from the

24:25

very beginning of the universe, the fundamental

24:28

physical parameters of the universe, the

24:30

laws of physics, what are called the constants

24:33

of physics, and the initial condition

24:35

of the matter and energy at the beginning of the universe,

24:38

all these fundamental factors were

24:41

very, as the physicists say, finely tuned

24:44

to allow for the possibility of life. By

24:46

fine-tuning they mean that these physical parameters

24:48

are balanced on a razor's edge. They

24:50

fall if you're an engineer within very

24:53

fine tolerances, outside

24:55

of which life would be impossible,

24:57

and even basic chemistry would be impossible.

25:01

Such that

25:02

you can't say that the evolutionary process

25:05

evolved to take advantage of the finely tuned

25:07

parameters. We had to have fine-tuning

25:10

for any kind of evolution of any

25:12

kind to be possible at all, and

25:14

still more for there to be life. And

25:17

so many of the great physicists of the 20th

25:19

century and our century have been talking about

25:21

our universe as a kind of Goldilocks universe.

25:24

There's a major book out right now by a young

25:26

astrophysicist named Luke Barnes called The

25:29

Fortunate Universe. And the idea

25:31

is that all these different parameters, and you could think of a

25:33

kind of universe-creating machine with dials and

25:35

knobs to get the idea across,

25:37

each one representing one of the physical parameters,

25:40

each one of those dials, knobs, or sliders

25:42

is set to a very precise value. Again,

25:44

such that if you moved it one click this way or that,

25:47

you'd get a catastrophic consequence that would

25:49

make life impossible. A heat death

25:51

or a collapse into a giant black hole, that

25:54

sort of a thing.

25:55

So, one of the physicists who

25:57

discovered some of these parameters, Sir

25:59

Fred Hoyle,

25:59

It said a common sense interpretation

26:02

of the data suggests that a super intellect

26:04

has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry

26:06

and biology to make life possible. You

26:09

may have heard me say before that I always love

26:11

the way the monkeys make it into the origin scenarios,

26:14

even in physics. Okay,

26:17

last big discovery, third big discovery,

26:19

and that is, we'll talk a lot about this

26:21

tomorrow morning, so I'll cover this very quickly,

26:24

but to me this was the one that rocked my

26:26

world. It was the discovery of

26:28

the digital code stored in the

26:30

DNA molecule, that at the foundation

26:32

of life, we have a molecule that literally

26:34

stores information. And you

26:37

may know a little bit of the story, Watson and Crick elucidate

26:39

the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953.

26:43

In 1957, 1958, Francis Crick, working on his own, formulates

26:48

something called the sequence hypothesis in which

26:50

he realizes that the chemical

26:53

subunits running

26:54

along the interior of that famed

26:56

and beautiful double helix molecule, those

26:59

subunits are functioning like alphabetic

27:01

characters in a written text or digital

27:04

characters in a section of machine code.

27:07

And that has raised an extraordinary

27:10

question, which is, where did all that digital

27:12

information come from? Bill

27:14

Gates has said that DNA is like a software program,

27:17

but much more advanced, far more

27:19

advanced than any software we've ever created.

27:22

That's a highly suggestive remark because

27:25

we know that software comes from

27:27

programmers.

27:28

And in fact, whenever we see information

27:31

and we trace it back to its source, whether we're

27:33

talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or

27:36

a paragraph in a book or a headline in a

27:38

newspaper

27:39

or information embedded in a radio signal

27:42

or built into a software program, that

27:44

information has always come from a mind,

27:47

from an intelligent source, not an undirected

27:49

material process. So of course, I've

27:51

developed this argument in about 500 pages. We're

27:55

just sketching it right now, but it's

27:57

one of the three big factors that suggests

27:59

that...

27:59

that a designing intelligence has indeed

28:02

played a role

28:03

in the origin of life in the universe.

28:06

So three big discoveries. The material

28:08

universe had a beginning. The

28:10

universe has been fine-tuned for life from

28:13

the very beginning.

28:14

And there is evidence of design in life,

28:17

in particular the big infusions

28:19

of digital information that

28:21

have been infused into our

28:23

biosphere since the beginning of the

28:25

universe. One great historian

28:28

of science says that the idea that God

28:30

created the universe is a more respectable

28:32

hypothesis today than any time

28:34

in the last hundred years. In my book,

28:37

I go a little further than that and say that

28:39

the postulation of a transcendent,

28:43

intelligent and active creator, the

28:45

kind of creator we find in the Judeo-Christian

28:47

Scriptures,

28:49

provides the best overall explanation

28:51

for biological and cosmological origins,

28:53

where everything came from. And I think that

28:56

is creating a kind of renaissance

28:59

in the field of apologetics, which is

29:01

what we're going to talk about tonight.

29:05

That was Stephen C. Meyer, Director of the

29:08

Discovery Institute's Center for

29:10

Science and Culture, with an opening

29:12

address to the 2023 Dallas

29:14

Conference on Science

29:15

and Faith. Stay tuned to ID

29:18

the Future for more

29:19

encouraging words on advances in science

29:21

that are pointing us more and more to

29:24

the reality that we live in an

29:26

intelligently designed universe.

29:29

For ID the Future, I'm Tom Gilson.

29:31

Thank you for listening. Visit

29:35

us at idthefuture.com

29:37

and intelligentdesign.org. This

29:39

program is Copyright Discovery Institute

29:42

and recorded by the Center for Science and Culture.