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Atheists will say, well, humans
are the universe knowing itself, right,

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It's like, yeah, humans are
the universe knowing itself. It means that

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the universe is intelligent because we're intelligent. I don't know what to say.

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It's like, we are part of
the universe, and we're the place where

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intelligence finds its highest form that we
know of in the created world, and

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therefore the universe is intelligent because it's
like it's like if I take your body

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and I say, well, you're
not intelligent because your fingernails not intelligent,

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and your thumb's not intelligent, and
you're you know, your your ears not

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intelligent, but Stephen Meyer is intelligent. That's the same with the universe.

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It's like, the universe is intelligent
because we're intelligent. I know that that

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might I know that that might have
convinced a bunch of atheists, but it

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just seems like there's a way in
which often I've noticed that atheists tend to

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abstract themselves from the from the reality
and not consider the place of man in

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the cosmos, Whereas in the Biblical
cosmology, you know, the human is

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placed in a very particular place in
the middle of the whole system, and

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is given to name the animals,
like is given to continue that process of

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information that happens in creation. The
place of knowledge in the world is the

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human person. This is Jonathan Pejo. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So

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hello everyone, I'm here with Stephen
Meyer. Many of you will know Stephen

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Meyer. He is a scientist involved
in the question of intelligent design. He's

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written several books, The Signature in
the Cell, Darwin's Doubt. But he's

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come on my let's say, closer
to my attention recently, because I've noticed

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that he's been getting more and more
attention. You know, I saw a

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few years ago talk between himself and
Berlinsky and and another mathematician talking about,

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you know, kind of opposition to
Darwin or questions about Darwin on the Hoober

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Institution and millions of views on that, and then recently Joe Rogan and then

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Piers Morgan, and so it seems
to me that there's an interesting shift in

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the willingness of people to engage with
the question of intelligent design. And so

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that's what I want to talk to
Steve about. And so thanks for thanks

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for coming on, Thanks for having
me Jonathan and so I mean, first

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of all, maybe you can lay
out for people who don't know your work.

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You know, what is the basic
argument that you're proposing in terms of

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intelligent design. It's different from the
Young Earth creationists approach. It's a it

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tends to take the questions of evolution
and of those types of proof seriously,

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but then see them in a in
a different frame. Yeah. Yeah,

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well that's a great place to start. Quick definition. The theory of intelligent

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design firms that that life and the
universe are best explained by designing intelligence rather

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than by undirected material processes such as
in biological realm natural selection acting on random

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variation. And it's it's quite different
from Young Earth creationism, and that it

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is making no claims about the age
of the Earth. Most proponents of intelligent

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design think, I do that the
Earth is very old, but it's an

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age neutral proposition. It's saying that
life is designed, as opposed to merely

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giving the appearance of design, which
is what many Darwinian biologists say. In

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fact, that is classic darwinianism.
Richard Dawkins has said that biology is a

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study of complicated things that give the
appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

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But the claim that the Darwins make
is that the appearance is an illusion.

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That and it's an illusion because even
though life looks as though it was

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designed, the appearance of design is
a product of an unguided, undirected mechanism,

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namely natural selection and acting on random
variation. So our challenge to the

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evolutionary establishment is not about the idea
of change over time, or about the

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idea of microevolution or adaptation. It's
not even necessarily about the idea of universal

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common descent, the idea that all
organisms are related by common ancestry, although

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I personally and other ID proponents are
skeptical about that, others are not.

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But what we're really challenging is this
idea that there's no evidence of actual design

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in life, the claim that life
is the product of undirected processes, such

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that the appearance of design is just
an appearance, just an illusion. So

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are we named our theory intelligent designed
to contrast it with that idea of Darwinian

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apparent design. So back to creationism. Creationism and intelligent design are differ and

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in two ways. One Creationism is
committed to a particular age of the Earth

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and a particular reading of the Days
of Genesis in the Bible. Our theory

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is neutral about that, but most
of us as scientists hold that the earth

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is very old. And secondly,
the creationism is derivative from, or in

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a sense of kind of a deduction
or interpretation of a bit of the Biblical

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text, whereas the theory of intelligent
design is an inference from biological and astronomical

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and physical and cosmological data. It
starts with the evidence and in ferst to

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the activity of a designing mind behind
the evidence as a matter of scientific and

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philosophical reasoning. And so my understanding
is also that one of the biggest arguments

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you have is that in some ways
the level of complexity that the world is

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actually made of was not available to
Darwin at the time. He didn't understand

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just how many levels of complexity existed, even within the cell and within you

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know, DNA and the constituents of
life, and every level that you add

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acts and adds an exponential level of
randomness or of possibility. And therefore it's

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just the possibility of like the capacity
for something to be simply the things you

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know bumping into each other over millions
of years is just mathematically impossible. Well,

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yeah, you've said a lot there. That's all very relevant if we

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move from our definition that of the
theory of intelligent design. The intelligent design

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firms that there are certain features of
life and the universe that are best explained

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by a designing mind or intelligence rather
than undirected processes. That leads naturally to

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the question, well, what kinds
of features are you talking about? And

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in the realm of physics, one
of those features is something that many physicists

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talk about today, and that is
the evidence that the universe was in some

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way fine tuned to allow for the
possibility of life. We have the basic

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parameters of physics, the laws of
physics, the constants of physics, the

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initial conditions of the universe. All
of these things have been discovered to fall

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within very narrow ranges or tolerances outside
of which life and even basic chemistry would

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be impossible. And so there's this
high degree of fine tuning, this incredibly

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improbable degree of fine tuning that has
led many physicists, even physicists like Sir

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Fred Hoyle, who was a very
prominent scientific atheist early in his career to

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reverse field. Oile discovered some of
these fine tuning parameters and then later realized

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there must be a fine tuner behind
the fine tuning, and he was quoted

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as saying that a common sense interpretation
of the data suggests that a super intellect

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has monkeyed with physics to make life
possible. So that's one of those classes

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of evidence, the evidence of fine
tuning that we find in physics and cosmology.

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But within the biological realm, you're
right. The discovery of the extraordinary

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complexity of even and what we used
to think of as the simple cell has

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led more and more biologists to doubt
theories about the first of all, the

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chemical evolutionary origin of life, the
idea that you could have a series of

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chemical reactions over a long period of
time and move from chemicals in some sort

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of pre biotic soup to the first
living cell. And it has also led

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many scientists to doubt the full on
biological evolutionary theory, the Darwinian part of

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the story that you can get from
the first cell to all the new forms

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of life again through an undirected,
unguided process such as natural selection acting on

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random variation. So what types of
complexity are we seeing inside life? The

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most extraordinary discoveries started in the nineteen
fifties and sixties, and these were the

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discoveries of the information bearing properties of
the large what are called biomacromolecules, things

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like DNA, RNA and proteins.
Watson and Crik elucidate the structure of DNA

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in nineteen fifty three. It's a
pretty big discovery, very big breakthrough.

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But in nineteen fifty eight, Francis
Crick working on his own. It's interesting

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he'd been a codebreaker in World War
Two. He's working on his own and

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he realizes that along the spine of
the DNA molecule and the interior of that

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famed double helix, there are a
series of chemical subunits, and he realizes

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that those chemical sub units, they're
called bases or nucleotide bases, are functioning

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like alphabetic characters in a written language, or like digital characters like the zeros

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and ones in a section of machine
code. And he's making these discoveries about

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the same time that you're having the
information revolution taking place in engineering and math

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and physics, and so you have
the concepts of information coming into the sciences.

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And George Gamma, very famous physicists, realizes that Krick's description of the

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DNA molecule can be rendered that what
he's describing with the function of the nucleotide

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bases. He says, a series
of those bas This can be rendered as

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a digital bitstring. This is a
string of information for directing, and this

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was Krick's hypothesis for directing the construction
of proteins and protein machines that keep cells

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alive. So by the mid nineteen
sixties, when this sequence hypothesis that wants

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Francis Krik is confirmed, biology enters
an information age and people realize that inside

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the cell, we don't just have
chemical reactions going on. It's not just

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metabolism. Even it's an information storage, transmission, and processing system. And

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there's two different processing systems inside the
cell, one for replicating DNA and one

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for using the information in DNA to
direct the construction of proteins. And so

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the sophistication of the informational system that's
at work inside even the simplest cell,

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even one cell, bacteria have information
processing and storage capacity of the type I'm

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describing. This completely changes the terms
of debate about the origin of life and

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even even evolutionary biology, because we
now realize that in order to build the

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first living cell and in order to
build new life from pre existing life,

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in each case you have to have
information. Just as in our computer world

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you need code to produce if you
wanted to give your computer a new function,

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if you want to have a new
app or a new program, or

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a new operating system, you've got
to provide information. Same thing turns out

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to be true in life. If
you want to build a new form of

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life from a simpler pre existing form, or if you want to build life

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in the first place, you've got
to have information to build the proteins and

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the molecular machines and the other structures
inside the cell. And so that creates

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a shift. It puts all evolutionary
theories under pressure. I would say that

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that both chemical and biological evolutionary theory
have reached a state of impasts because they

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cannot explain the origin of information.
And yet we know from experience that information

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always arises from a known source,
and that source is intelligence. Yeah,

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and in some ways we also have
the experience of in the world of seeing

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constraint go beyond the natural like just
things banging against each other, and that

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is exactly the same thing. It's
things like mind, things like will,

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things like purpose, all of these
invisible patterns that constrain reality, the ones

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that go beyond the way you're talking, Jonathan, that's that's you're talking like

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an engineer. But to understand life
today you have to think like a design

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engineer. To understand the universe,
you have to those fine tuning parameters I

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was talking about in physics, those
are nothing more than highly improbable constraints on

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what matter is allowed to do by
the fundamental laws of nature. And we

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find in order to move from all
the possible ways of arranging matter that there

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are to the ways that manifest themselves
in life, one constraint after another has

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to be applied to those that those
huge ensembles of possibilities have to be narrowed

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to get something that we would recognize
as life, and that is that well,

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that makes life possible. Let's just
say that. So the engineering constraints

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that are necessary to produce a cell
are immense and highly improbable, and they

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also represent inputs of information. This
was the basic insight of the early information

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scientists like like Weaver and others,
The idea that information involves the restriction of

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possibilities. In fact, we measure
information today that way. If I flip

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a coin and it comes up head, well let's do it with zeros and

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ones in the computer world. If
I if I get a one, I've

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eliminated a zero. So there are
two possibilities. I've constrained the possibilities and

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elected one and eliminated another. And
that's one bit of information. And so

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we now have a way of quantifying
this idea of informational constraint. And the

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DNA is nothing more. Well,
it's a lot, it's a lot of

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different things, but it is also
a series of restrictions. You've got four

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possibilities at each site along the DNA
molecule, so not a binary code,

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but a quaternary code. And so
at each point, one of the four

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options is elected and three are eliminated, and therefore a quantifiable amount of information

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is imparted or stored at that point. And it turns out that that information

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is also importantly functional because it's directing
the construction of the proteins and protein machines.

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Yeah, and I mean, what's
fascinating to me is that even when

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I hear the Darwinian argument to say
that it's it's just random mutation and then

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natural selection. It's like what even
the term natural selection? What exactly?

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So you're saying, so being has
a tendency to persist, and being as

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a tendency to be autopoetic and to
constrain reality is in a manner that non

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living beings do not have. And
that type of constraint even though we don't

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even necessarily have mind at the outset, like at the lowest forms, but

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that type of constraint already looks like
what mind does at a higher levels.

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And so you know, like you
said, like the idea of saying that

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we can notice that this type of
constraint, even in the world of biology,

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is already there in the structures themselves. And and then but then at

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some point thinking well, then we
can't go any further than that, like

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we we noticed that that actually does
what it what we need, what we

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need for it to happen, for
it to constrain reality in a way that

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goes beyond random just randomness. Uh
that that analog analogically you would be able

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to infer that then mind is an
aspect of the universe that constrains matter like

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it already is in lights like why
does it body? The insight you have

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that I'm thinking back on on Shannon
Chan and Weaver who developed information theory in

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the first place, and the idea
was that any reduction of uncertainty results in

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a corresponding input of information. And
so that's what we can think of.

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The idea of imparting information is also
a way of constraining things. But what

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we also know from our experience,
our uniform and repeated experience, which is

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the basis of all scientific reasoning,
is that if we have a big input

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of information into a system, it's
always come from a mind, whether we're

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talking about a computer program or a
paragraph in a book or a hieroglyphic conscription,

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or we're transmitting information now across the
internet. And so but where does

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that information come from? It comes
from a mind, And that kind of

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makes sense when you think of or
from intelligence. Well, what is the

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Latin root for intelligence is interlego.
It's to choose between. That's what minds

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do they choose between. And in
the most base sense, information is choosing

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between between zero and a one,
between a A or a C, or

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a G or a T. And
so what we find in life is stored

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information in DNA, suggesting a prior
the prior activity of a mind in choosing

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between the options to elect the one
that's there present. And so there's a

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lot of deep concepts here. But
I think that from the standpoint of evolutionary

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theory, there, and you brought
up the whole question of Brandom mutations,

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the evolutionary mechanisms do not and are
not providing adequate explanations for the origin of

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information. Let's just look at the
mutation selection idea for a minute. If

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if, in fact, the a
section of DNA containing information for building a

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protein is alphabetic or digital in character, and it is Leroy Hood, our

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famous biotech expert out here in the
Seattle area, just says DNA is contains

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digital code. Richard Dawkins says it's
like a machine code. Francis crick Uh

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made very clear that it's stored information, and not just information in a mathematical

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sense, but information that was also
functional like that. Yeah, it's a

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constraining factor. It's it's it's a
it's commanding. It's exactly. Bill Gates,

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are also other local hero in the
Seattle area, says DNA is like

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a software program, but much more
complex any we've devised. So what,

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well, what do we know about
software information in the digital form? Well,

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if it's functional, we know that
you can't change it very much without

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degrading its function and very quickly causing
it to lose function altogether. But what

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what do do the Darwinians propose as
the mechanism by which new form is is

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generated. Well, they proposed that
you will have random changes in the section

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of a gene, the acs,
gs and T in a gene, and

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that some that many of those random
changes will be degradative, but occasionally you

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get lucky and you'll get a good
one, and then that that one will

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be will result in a new protein, and that new protein will result in,

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uh, we'll combine with other proteins
and form some sort of anatomic new

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anatomical structure. And as those those
those changes accumulate, you'll eventually get new

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new form, new biological form and
function. But there's a problem, and

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that's the problem, a problem we
know well from our computer world, and

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that is that the functional sequences are
so rare that if you begin to change

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the bit strings, you're inevitably,
after very few changes, going to destroy

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the function long before you ever get
to something new or functional. If I've

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got a section of code for building
an app and I I want to evolve

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it by random changes to generate a
new app, I'm going to degrade and

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destroy the existing app long before I
find a new series of characters that will

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give me a new app or a
new operating system or something. And the

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reason for that is that the functional
sequences are so rare among all the possible

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ways of arranging the zeros and ones
in computer code, or we can think

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of we can do the same thought
experiment with English text. If we've got

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a line of poetry time and Tide
wait for no Man, and we want

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to evolve it into line from the
Principia by Newton, we can. We'll

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start to change the time and tide, and pretty soon we'll get in undecipherable

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gibberish, long before we get a
line from Newton or Hawking or or anybody

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else. So, and what's going
on here. What's going on is that

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in all linguistic systems, our systems
for conveying information digitally or alphabetically, the

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islands or the arrangements that are functional
can be represented as little, tiny islands

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separated from other little tiny islands by
vast spaces of non functional gibberish, just

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the kind of an abyss between them. Now does that same kind of problem

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apply in biology? Well, it
turns out it does. We have strong

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experience empirical evidence now that the sequences
that form functional genes capable of building proteins

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are extremely rare among all the possible
ways there are of arranging the acsgs and

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t's and DNA, or arranging the
amino acids, the twenty amino acids and

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the proteins. I have a colleague, Douglas Acts, who worked fourteen years

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at Cambridge University to investigate the question, well, how rare or common are

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these functional sequences? And for in
studying a protein of modest length, of

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about one hundred and fifty amino acids
in length, he discovered that for every

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sequence that will fold into a structure
that's capable of doing a protein, a

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structure called a fold, there were
ten to the seventy four power non functional

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combinations. Well, what that means
is that inevitably, then if you start

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changing the functional ones very much,
you're going to fall into the non functional

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abyss. Because there's just so many
more of them in comparison to the ones

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you want now. In addition to
that, since Acts has done this work,

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there have been other scientists have gotten
similar numbers, but there have been

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a scientist at the Weismann Institute named
Dan Taufik. Acts did his work at

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Cambridge University. Tafic has studied what
are called He's studied proteins and he mutates

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them intentionally but randomly, and he's
found that after a very few number of

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mutations that the stable structure called a
fold will unravel. And if it unravels,

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there's it can't perform a function,
there's nothing there to select, so

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and the number of changes that are
necessary to cause it to unravel are far

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smwer are far fewer than the number
of changes that need to accumulate to build

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a new fold, So that can't
get there from here a problem. Not

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only are the functional genes and proteins
very rare, they're highly isolated in what's

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called sequence space, in the in
the space of all the possible ways there

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are of arranging the parts. So
it's very much like the computer analogy.

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You start changing the zeros and ones, you're going to destroy your computer program

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or your app long before you generate
a new one by random changes. The

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same problem applies at the genetic level
in biology, and that leaves a big

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unanswered question. How do you explain
the origin of new information? The new

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information you would need to build a
new protein, which is kind of the

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scene of quan non of biological innovation. You've got to have new proteins and

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new protein folds in particular, if
you're going to build anything. So,

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Mike, I'm not a scientist,
it's important to understand that is there a

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way to understand top down constraint,
you know, like a computer program at

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every level. So in some ways, the zeros and ones, the reason

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why they ordered that way necessarily is
constrained by a level of programming that is

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constrained by you know, like a
constrained by by a human will at the

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top. And so that when you
look at the difference between the zeros and

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ones and the program, you see
a form of constraint. But you how

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can I say this that it has
to layer itself so that you find the

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will because the will is much higher
the employee organized exactly thet there's constraint.

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You can think of constraint in two
ways. There's a functional requirement that you

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want the computer program to achieve or
to meet, and then the engineer constrains

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the possibilities to produce a program that
will produce the outcome that's desired, the

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functional requirement or the functional outcome or
end. And in living systems you have

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highly constrained information rich molecules that are
part of a larger information rich hierarchy and

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information rich system for storing and transmitting, storing, processing, and transmitting information.

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But that ends up being that DNA
producing proteins system is part of an

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even greater hierarchy of information. There's
information that turns out beyond the DNA stored

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in other places in the cell and
in the organism. And so the best

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way to think of life today is
as a hierarchically organized information storage, transmission

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and processing system. Well, that
may not be the whole of what life

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is, but life certainly contains all
that. And if you want to explain

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the origin of life, you've got
to explain that because that's what's present.

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Yeah, And I mean that seems
to be because in the description in Genesis

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one, that seems to be the
way that God creates the world as a

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hierarchy of identities that are laid out
in purpose. Sometimes we don't realize the

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reason why the categories in Genesis are
used. They are actually all categories of

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place in an ontological hierarchy and purpose. Right, So like when you think

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of when God creates the mammals,
the categories he uses are wild animals,

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tame animals, and creepy crawlers.
Like those are not scientific categories, folks.

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Those are categories of let's say,
constraint towards purpose within the human with

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a human experience. And so you
see that It's like the reason why I

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identify these animals is related to me. Right. They're the animals that that

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I can use and that ultimately maybe
I can eat. They're the ones that

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eat me, right, And they're
the ones that are kind of hidden on

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the ground and that you know,
are akin to the chaos and weakly stuff

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underneath. And so you can see
that that the way that it's described is

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as related to you know, because
the reason why I'm saying that is because

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I don't know if you tried or
attempted to make the connection between a lot

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of your work and what some of
the let's say leading edge cog size stuff

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that is coming out. I've had
a lot of conversation with John Raveaki,

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and obviously Jordan Peterson talks about this
a lot, which is that even our

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category, our category structure, right, even the way in which we recognize

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beings in the world is related to
constrained purpose. Right, So why we

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even identify beings is related at the
first level to the reason why we're identifying

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it. Right. So I don't
see a cup, I see something to

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drink from, right, And so
I don't see a chair, I see

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something to sit on. And that
all identities are actually constrained by purpose,

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because the border between identities is not
is not that obvious right without intelligence,

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even the actual identities themselves. And
our argument and is that is the entities

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that manifest purposive function or behavior are
invariably the product of mind in our experience.

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And that's especially true when we're talking
about information. The argument I make

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in a book called Signature in the
Cell is that whenever we see information in

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a digital or alphabetic form, as
we do at the foundation of life,

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and we trace that information back to
its source, we always come to a

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mind, not a material process,
and then I ask people to, well,

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what are some examples. Well,
a hieroglyphic inscription, you see that

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on the Rosetta stone in the British
Museum. You're not going to infer wind

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in erosion. You're going to realize
there was a suscribe there. A computer

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program comes from a programmer, A
paragraph in a book comes from a writer.

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Information embedded in a radio signal or
being transmitted across the internet ultimately goes

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back to a speaker, a broadcaster
information if we trace information back to source.

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The one thing we know very very
confidently is that information always arises from

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a mind or an intelligence, and
that relates to some of things we were

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talking about at the beginning of the
interview that if information is related to electing

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some options and eliminating others, in
other words, constraining possibilities, that information

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is imparted as possibilities are constrained,
and so a constraint represents a choice,

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a choosing between an interlego. Well, then interlego is actually what we mean

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by intelligence. That intelligence is choosing
between the options. There are things that

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do happen randomly, but there are
limits to what are called the probabilistic resources

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of the universe, and the amount
of information in the linguistic transmission that we're

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participating in right now, and the
amount of information in a computer program and

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the amount of information in a DNA
molecule all exceed what you can reasonably expect

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to occur by random random processes or
stochastic processes, even if you take into

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account the entire history of the universe. So we're with DNA, we're well

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beyond that probabilistic threshold into it both
an amount of information and a kind of

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information which is indicative of intelligence.
Yeah, and I mean it seems to

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me too that you know, even
taking you know, the the idea of

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random mutation and the notion of constraint, right, so you can you can

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00:30:27,799 --> 00:30:30,519
use the word patterning right to talk
about constraint. It's like, basically,

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you have a bunch of stuff,
and then that stuff is actually ordered in

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a manner that makes it into some
turns it into something else. Right,

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So you have a bunch of stuff, you order it together, and now

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it's not just a bunch of stuff. It's an actual animal, or it's

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a chair, it's you know,
whatever it is that I can identify as

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being because it's made of stuff,
right, It's made of all these different

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levels of things. But that that
patterning itself, it seems like it has

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to It just has to has to
pre exist to some extent for the for

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00:31:02,279 --> 00:31:06,440
the patterns to be, like to
come into to the pattern. Right.

375
00:31:06,440 --> 00:31:07,680
So it's like, even if you
have a bunch of stuff and it comes

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00:31:07,720 --> 00:31:11,279
into a pattern, that pattern makes
sense and it makes sense to form a

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new being that is a higher level
of being, you could say, a

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00:31:15,839 --> 00:31:19,160
more complex level of being. It's
like, what is calling that into being?

379
00:31:19,279 --> 00:31:23,319
Like? What is? What is? The pattern has to at least

380
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in some manner pre exists. This
is something a connection I explore in some

381
00:31:29,240 --> 00:31:37,759
of my work, the connection between
form and information. And the medieval philosophers

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00:31:37,839 --> 00:31:44,160
like Thomas Aquinas talked a lot about
formal causes and they were drawing on an

383
00:31:44,160 --> 00:31:49,720
Aristotelian background, and Thomas himself had
a notion called exemplar causation, which was

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the idea that there's form in matter
that results first in an idea, an

385
00:31:56,240 --> 00:32:00,200
exemplar in the mind of a creator. So we have a we have a

386
00:32:00,279 --> 00:32:04,039
chair that we're sitting on, there's
a we can we can describe that as

387
00:32:04,079 --> 00:32:09,960
a form a structure, but we
know that that came from an idea in

388
00:32:09,960 --> 00:32:15,640
the mind of a carpenter, so
that the form we see in matter issues

389
00:32:15,720 --> 00:32:20,559
from a different kind of form,
an idea or pattern in the mind of

390
00:32:21,200 --> 00:32:24,880
a creator. And so there's a
connection between form and if you can think

391
00:32:24,920 --> 00:32:31,359
of an idea as informing information,
and I think in modern in modern engineering,

392
00:32:32,559 --> 00:32:38,480
with the idea of information theory,
and within other informational concepts, we

393
00:32:38,880 --> 00:32:45,440
see there's a similar connection in biology
between form and information. That the three

394
00:32:45,480 --> 00:32:50,640
dimensional structure of an organism depends upon
information that's encoded in DNA, but also

395
00:32:50,759 --> 00:32:54,119
information that's encoded three dimensionally in other
parts of the organism. That's why we

396
00:32:54,119 --> 00:33:00,079
get back to that idea of a
hierarchical organization of of information generated biological form.

397
00:33:01,200 --> 00:33:05,039
But even in the recognition of the
being so right, so you have

398
00:33:05,119 --> 00:33:07,559
apples, so say you have to
go in to apples, like every single

399
00:33:07,559 --> 00:33:10,119
one of those apples different. None
of those apples are exactly the same.

400
00:33:10,160 --> 00:33:15,359
So how do I recognize identity across
variation because they're all different, and so

401
00:33:15,599 --> 00:33:22,279
there there has to be a pattern
that links them together that makes it possible

402
00:33:22,279 --> 00:33:29,079
for me to recognize the the the
fact that they all participated in this right

403
00:33:29,079 --> 00:33:32,240
exactly. And so that's a very
pristmologies. Well, how do we recognize

404
00:33:32,319 --> 00:33:38,880
universals among all the different particular manifestations
of those universals? But and that seems

405
00:33:38,880 --> 00:33:43,960
to be something. Yeah, I
mean humans seem to be particularly good at

406
00:33:44,000 --> 00:33:46,839
that, and you know, and
that seems to place them in a particular

407
00:33:47,359 --> 00:33:52,519
position, you know. And sometimes
I'll hear It's interesting because sometimes I'll hear

408
00:33:52,640 --> 00:33:55,720
something people say something like atheists will
say, well, humans are the universe

409
00:33:55,839 --> 00:34:01,519
knowing itself, right, It's like, yeah, humans are the universe knowing

410
00:34:01,519 --> 00:34:07,319
itself. It means that the universe
is intelligent because we're intelligent. I don't

411
00:34:07,319 --> 00:34:09,440
know what to say. It's like, we are part of the universe and

412
00:34:09,480 --> 00:34:14,639
we're the place where intelligence, you
know, let's say, uh, intelligence

413
00:34:14,840 --> 00:34:17,559
finds its highest form that we know
of, that we know of in the

414
00:34:17,920 --> 00:34:22,719
created world, and therefore the universe
is intelligent. Because it's like it's like

415
00:34:22,760 --> 00:34:27,519
if I take your body and I
say, well, you're not intelligent because

416
00:34:27,519 --> 00:34:30,199
your fingernails not intelligent and your thumb's
not intelligent, and you're you know,

417
00:34:30,239 --> 00:34:37,280
your your ears not intelligent, but
Stephen Meyer is intelligent, and so that's

418
00:34:37,320 --> 00:34:40,440
the same with the universe. It's
like the universe is intelligent because we're intelligent.

419
00:34:40,599 --> 00:34:44,079
I know that that might I know
that that might have convinced a bunch

420
00:34:44,079 --> 00:34:46,639
of atheists, but yeah, it
just seems like there's a way in which

421
00:34:46,840 --> 00:34:52,760
often I've noticed that atheists tend to
abstract themselves from the from the reality and

422
00:34:52,800 --> 00:34:58,880
not consider the place of man in
the cosmos, whereas, like in the

423
00:34:58,880 --> 00:35:01,280
Biblical cosmology, you know, the
human is placed in a very particular place

424
00:35:01,440 --> 00:35:06,480
in the middle of the whole system
and is given to name the animals,

425
00:35:06,519 --> 00:35:12,960
like is given to continue that process
of information that happens in creation. And

426
00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:17,000
therefore it is in some ways the
place of knowledge in the world is the

427
00:35:17,079 --> 00:35:22,320
human person. Anyways, that's a
bit taking you off track there. It

428
00:35:22,679 --> 00:35:27,400
reminds me of the book that was
published a few years ago by Thomas Nagel,

429
00:35:27,519 --> 00:35:31,519
very famous atheist philosopher of science who
had come to be very skeptical of

430
00:35:32,039 --> 00:35:38,920
Darwinian evolution and also origin of life
research. Origin of life the chemical evolutionary

431
00:35:38,920 --> 00:35:42,559
theory of the origin of the first
life, and he wrote a book called

432
00:35:42,559 --> 00:35:50,119
Mind and Cosmos titled how the Neo
Darwinian materialist view of reality is almost certainly

433
00:35:50,159 --> 00:35:57,000
false, and so he was a
big part of his argument was that any

434
00:35:57,760 --> 00:36:01,159
theory of origins that can't account for
mine, yeah, is missing something really

435
00:36:01,199 --> 00:36:07,119
big. And the neo Darwinian theory
of biological origins cannot account for mind,

436
00:36:07,159 --> 00:36:12,840
and therefore it's missing something really big, especially because it's because of mind that

437
00:36:12,920 --> 00:36:15,880
we even have those evolutionary theories in
the first place. It's like there's a

438
00:36:15,920 --> 00:36:20,320
meta question that no one is looking
at, which is that without mind,

439
00:36:20,400 --> 00:36:22,320
you don't even have your evolutionary theory. Folks. Well, and there's an

440
00:36:22,440 --> 00:36:28,920
there's another cut on this, and
I think is relevant to argument that we've

441
00:36:28,960 --> 00:36:37,920
developed, and that is that that
the evolutionary explanation for the origin of animal

442
00:36:37,920 --> 00:36:40,280
body plans the origin of new forms
of life, the origin of the first

443
00:36:40,320 --> 00:36:50,199
life is always rendered as a strictly
materialistic theory that does not have any place

444
00:36:50,360 --> 00:36:54,920
for it, no place in it
for mind. And that's that is not

445
00:36:55,000 --> 00:37:00,519
because there's no evidence of mind in
the natural world, or no evidence of

446
00:37:00,599 --> 00:37:06,880
mind having acted in the past in
the natural world, but rather it's a

447
00:37:06,880 --> 00:37:10,960
methodological choice. It's a choice of
method from the outset. And there's actually

448
00:37:12,000 --> 00:37:15,119
a principle that evolutionary biologists affirm,
as do many scientists today, and they

449
00:37:15,119 --> 00:37:19,760
say that if you're going to be
a scientist, you must limit yourself to

450
00:37:19,800 --> 00:37:24,679
strictly materialistic explanations for everything, even
the origin of life, the origin of

451
00:37:24,679 --> 00:37:29,280
the universe, the origin of consciousness, the nature of consciousness. They write

452
00:37:29,280 --> 00:37:32,360
it in a book. Well,
and there's the principle is so common that

453
00:37:32,400 --> 00:37:37,639
it has a name. It's called
methodological naturalism or methodological materialism. And part

454
00:37:37,639 --> 00:37:43,679
of what we're challenging in our work
on intelligent design is that principle, the

455
00:37:43,719 --> 00:37:46,320
idea that that should be normative for
science. It wasn't normative during the period

456
00:37:46,320 --> 00:37:50,719
of the scientific Revolution. You found
that Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and

457
00:37:50,760 --> 00:37:55,440
many others made design arguments right in
the context of their scientific work. They

458
00:37:55,480 --> 00:38:00,239
saw evidence of design and nature,
and they talked about it, and they

459
00:38:00,480 --> 00:38:05,280
made arguments about why what they saw
was best explained by a designing intelligence.

460
00:38:05,760 --> 00:38:09,760
That move that inference has been ruled
out of court since the late nineteenth century,

461
00:38:09,519 --> 00:38:15,159
but in post Darwinian evolutionary biology,
but that means and This was part

462
00:38:15,159 --> 00:38:21,320
of the Nagel concern. That means
we're putting blinders on ourselves as scientists and

463
00:38:21,320 --> 00:38:24,400
philosophers. We're saying, here,
no design, see no design, even

464
00:38:24,440 --> 00:38:31,400
if there's very evident, if there's
powerful evidence of design. And so the

465
00:38:31,519 --> 00:38:39,559
question I think for the scientific atheist
is is what best explains? Open ended

466
00:38:39,639 --> 00:38:46,280
question? What best explains, Not
what materialistic explanation best explains, but what

467
00:38:46,440 --> 00:38:52,000
explanation best explains. Things like the
fine tuning, things like the circuitry and

468
00:38:52,079 --> 00:38:59,119
cells, things like the digital code
in DNA, things like the whole information

469
00:38:59,199 --> 00:39:02,880
processing system them in life, things
like the circuitry that we find controlling animal

470
00:39:02,920 --> 00:39:09,760
development. These are features which in
any other realm of experience would immediately awaken

471
00:39:09,960 --> 00:39:15,679
an awareness of the activity of a
mind antecedentally in the past. So if

472
00:39:15,719 --> 00:39:22,519
you find I could show you a
wonderful picture of the circuitry that controls animal

473
00:39:22,519 --> 00:39:27,239
development. It's called a developmental gene
regulatory network. When the scientists at Caltech

474
00:39:27,320 --> 00:39:31,280
map this out, the way that
genes and gene products interacted to control the

475
00:39:31,280 --> 00:39:37,599
way cell division occurred, and the
way different gene products were expressed at different

476
00:39:37,639 --> 00:39:43,239
times as the organism was going through
cell division from one to two to four

477
00:39:43,280 --> 00:39:46,840
to eight to sixteen, et cetera. They mapped out these relationships between the

478
00:39:46,880 --> 00:39:51,679
genes and the gene products, controlling
the expression of genes at just the right

479
00:39:51,719 --> 00:39:53,840
time, in just the right place
and just the right cells and cell types.

480
00:39:54,480 --> 00:39:58,360
They mapped it out, and it
looked like a circuit I an integrated

481
00:39:58,400 --> 00:40:05,079
circuit, only it wasn't a circuit
controlling the flow of electricity as much as

482
00:40:05,079 --> 00:40:08,280
it was controlling the flow of information. Look at that, and you look

483
00:40:08,280 --> 00:40:14,159
at that, and then they discovered
something else that the circuits, the systems,

484
00:40:14,719 --> 00:40:21,880
the molecules that are part of this
system are the system cannot be perturbed

485
00:40:22,519 --> 00:40:29,239
without shutting down animal development. The
developmental gene regulator networks are immutable, essentially

486
00:40:29,239 --> 00:40:31,559
immutable. A little bit of around
the margin is but very little, which

487
00:40:31,599 --> 00:40:36,119
means that if you want to get
a new animal form from an old animal

488
00:40:36,159 --> 00:40:39,360
form, you've got to change the
developmental gene regulatoratory network. But those are

489
00:40:39,480 --> 00:40:44,719
that's the one thing we know empirically
you can't do. And so this presents

490
00:40:44,719 --> 00:40:49,880
a fundamental challenge to all forms of
evolutionary theory, as theories of the origin

491
00:40:49,920 --> 00:40:52,639
of new body plans, what has
to be explaining the orison of life.

492
00:40:52,719 --> 00:40:55,280
And yet we look at that circuit
and we say, wait, I've seen

493
00:40:55,280 --> 00:41:00,639
that before. I've seen systems that
have that characteristic and they're always the product

494
00:41:00,679 --> 00:41:05,719
of engineers. So we're looking at
a feature which, in any end of

495
00:41:05,719 --> 00:41:09,360
the other realm of experience would be
would immediately trigger the awareness of an activity

496
00:41:09,360 --> 00:41:15,880
of a mind. We're also looking
at a system that poses a fundamental impediment

497
00:41:15,920 --> 00:41:19,920
to the adequacy of evolutionary theories for
the origin of major innovation in the history

498
00:41:19,920 --> 00:41:23,480
of life, the origin of body
plans. So you've got one one paradigm

499
00:41:23,559 --> 00:41:30,039
failing, and we've got evidence that
very powerfully points in a design direction.

500
00:41:31,840 --> 00:41:36,719
Time is time to consider that maybe
mind ought to be part of our theories

501
00:41:36,760 --> 00:41:40,559
of origin again. Yeah, have
you dealt with some of the panpsychist ideas,

502
00:41:40,639 --> 00:41:45,000
you know, because that seems to
also be a way to answer you

503
00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:49,079
know, I had a discussion with
Bernardo castrop and a few other people that

504
00:41:49,519 --> 00:41:53,320
posit the notion of mind as you
know, he you know, even being

505
00:41:53,360 --> 00:41:59,760
all close to even being idealist,
where basically he encapsulates all of all of

506
00:42:00,119 --> 00:42:06,480
materiality within mind in order to account
for that that problem. But what's interesting

507
00:42:06,519 --> 00:42:10,199
about people like Castrop and a lot
of the panpsychis is that they don't necessarily

508
00:42:12,400 --> 00:42:15,679
attribute mind in the way that let's
say, a Christian or a Monotheist would,

509
00:42:15,880 --> 00:42:20,960
as a transcended absolute origin of all
patterns, I'd say, but rather

510
00:42:21,039 --> 00:42:25,639
as this kind of amorphous you know, this amorphous thing that is there,

511
00:42:25,760 --> 00:42:30,199
that is part of the material world
and is extend it's co extensive with matter

512
00:42:30,800 --> 00:42:36,519
and all matter, even what Newton
called brute matter, you know, atoms

513
00:42:36,559 --> 00:42:43,760
and molecules, and yeah, and
so there are a number of things to

514
00:42:43,800 --> 00:42:46,320
say about that. I address it
in my most recent book, Return of

515
00:42:46,320 --> 00:42:52,960
the God Hypothesis. Pan Psychism,
first of all, doesn't do a very

516
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:59,639
good job of explaining the evidence of
design we have from the very beginning of

517
00:42:59,639 --> 00:43:05,760
the universe. Those fine tuning parameters
are set right from the beginning, and

518
00:43:06,679 --> 00:43:09,880
they seem to require a causal,
an antecedent cause, which is not the

519
00:43:10,000 --> 00:43:15,000
universe, but which can explain the
structure of the universe as a whole from

520
00:43:15,000 --> 00:43:20,559
the beginning. So that if the
if, the if, the mind that

521
00:43:20,599 --> 00:43:27,039
the panpsychis affirm is co extensive with
matter, you find this also in pan

522
00:43:27,599 --> 00:43:32,840
pantheism. You've got a little bit
of a problem because you need a cause

523
00:43:32,920 --> 00:43:39,039
that's that is sufficient to produce the
effect in question, and the cause must

524
00:43:39,119 --> 00:43:43,800
be in some way separate from the
effect. And that they want to invest

525
00:43:43,920 --> 00:43:47,559
all of mind in the materiality of
the of the physical universe. And yet

526
00:43:47,679 --> 00:43:52,920
the nature of the evidence of design, the evidence of mind we have is

527
00:43:53,280 --> 00:44:00,119
present from the beginning and seems to
require something outside the system to explain in

528
00:44:00,159 --> 00:44:10,800
its origin. Secondly, I would
say that that investing mind in in inanimate

529
00:44:10,920 --> 00:44:16,719
objects does not really pass the test
of experience. We know of minds because

530
00:44:16,719 --> 00:44:27,880
of our internal, self conscious awareness
of our own powers as agents we have.

531
00:44:28,400 --> 00:44:31,880
We have introspective awareness of our minds, and we therefore know something about

532
00:44:31,920 --> 00:44:38,840
what they can do. To impute
that same those same powers to to a

533
00:44:38,880 --> 00:44:45,800
table or to a rock seems to
be a stretch. I don't think we

534
00:44:45,880 --> 00:44:53,440
have good reason to to believe that
that those entities have have minds. Now,

535
00:44:53,480 --> 00:44:58,599
you might want to say that there's
a mind behind quantum mechanical phenomena.

536
00:44:59,559 --> 00:45:01,119
Uh, But I again, I
think that takes you in the direction of

537
00:45:01,159 --> 00:45:06,239
a transcendent mind, not in the
direction of saying that there's there's a mind

538
00:45:06,280 --> 00:45:10,360
in every particle or in every every
immaterial object. There's something. When we

539
00:45:10,400 --> 00:45:15,119
think of mind and we want to
invoke mind, we're invoking it based on

540
00:45:15,159 --> 00:45:17,760
our own introspective awareness of what it
means to have a mind. We we

541
00:45:17,920 --> 00:45:24,360
have an awareness of what a mind
is because of our our being, our

542
00:45:24,440 --> 00:45:29,000
being minds and using minds, and
that's what we really mean by mind.

543
00:45:29,039 --> 00:45:31,000
So we end up equivocating when we
want to say a rock or a planet

544
00:45:31,280 --> 00:45:36,679
as a mind as well. I
mean, that's intuitively obviously that that makes

545
00:45:36,719 --> 00:45:42,000
sense to me. Also because we
we kind of understand mind as a as

546
00:45:42,079 --> 00:45:46,440
an active constraint over over materiality.
It's like that's how we actually experience mind

547
00:45:46,440 --> 00:45:51,960
as being. And so, for
example, Bernardo Castrop's theory is wild,

548
00:45:52,000 --> 00:45:55,159
but it's it's an interesting provocation to
that idea, is that his idea is

549
00:45:55,159 --> 00:46:00,280
that all of the world is actually
a form of dissociation shit. He almost

550
00:46:00,280 --> 00:46:02,760
sees it as a kind of disease. It's almost like a gnostic way of

551
00:46:02,800 --> 00:46:07,800
thinking, where you know, there's
this unitary mind and then it starts to

552
00:46:07,920 --> 00:46:12,639
break apart, and that all the
aspects of the world are actually a form

553
00:46:12,679 --> 00:46:16,559
of dissociation and lack of memory,
you could say, of being part of

554
00:46:16,599 --> 00:46:22,320
the original mind, and that's why
they perceive themselves or they exist independently from

555
00:46:22,760 --> 00:46:25,239
from the original mind. And so
it's a it's a I find it to

556
00:46:25,280 --> 00:46:30,679
be a very good I'd say the
panpsychists are getting warm. Yeah, yeah,

557
00:46:30,719 --> 00:46:36,400
that's right from they moved from the
simplistic materialism that has dominated science,

558
00:46:36,559 --> 00:46:39,440
philosophy, and the academy and much
of culture for the last one hundred years,

559
00:46:39,480 --> 00:46:43,719
and they're saying, no, there's
there's a third fundamental reality. There's

560
00:46:43,760 --> 00:46:46,199
matter, there's er. What in
science I think people are coming to is

561
00:46:46,199 --> 00:46:51,639
there's a third fundamental reality in the
sense that there's mind. Sorry, there's

562
00:46:51,920 --> 00:46:55,159
there's there's there's matter, there's energy, and there's information information. Yeah,

563
00:46:55,199 --> 00:46:59,199
I've heard that. What do we
know from our experience, which is the

564
00:46:59,239 --> 00:47:02,039
basis of all signific reasoning, is
that information always comes from a mind.

565
00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:09,880
And then I think you get into
a more philosophical discussion with panentheists, pan

566
00:47:09,920 --> 00:47:15,159
psychists and others. I want to
say that mind is fundamental or a fundamental

567
00:47:15,159 --> 00:47:21,159
reality, or straight up idealists who
want to deny the materiality of the world.

568
00:47:21,760 --> 00:47:25,639
And I think there the Judeo Christian
worldview has the balance right. The

569
00:47:25,639 --> 00:47:30,000
matter and energy are real, space
and time are real, but so is

570
00:47:30,119 --> 00:47:35,920
information. In the beginning, after
all, was the word this idea biblically,

571
00:47:37,760 --> 00:47:40,960
even when you were talking about the
Genesis account again stipulating theory of intelligent

572
00:47:42,000 --> 00:47:45,119
design is not based on a reading
of Genesis. But it is interesting to

573
00:47:45,159 --> 00:47:52,320
me as a person who's both an
intelligent design theorist and also a religious believer,

574
00:47:52,960 --> 00:47:58,320
that the biblical text in the Creation
account repeatedly says affirms that, and

575
00:47:58,400 --> 00:48:01,239
God said, the agent of creation
is the word. It is information,

576
00:48:01,440 --> 00:48:06,599
not just that, it's more than
that, because God says, God's God

577
00:48:06,960 --> 00:48:09,599
sees and God evaluates. That's what
he does during all of Genesis one.

578
00:48:09,920 --> 00:48:15,880
And so that's what mind is.
Mind is basically giving a pattern of constraint,

579
00:48:15,519 --> 00:48:22,760
right, and then let's calling that
the multiplicity into that constraint and evaluating

580
00:48:22,960 --> 00:48:27,800
the distance between the participation and the
constraint. Like that's how we live,

581
00:48:27,960 --> 00:48:32,559
that's how all our lives. Yeah, he's taking he's taking stock of information,

582
00:48:32,960 --> 00:48:37,880
or he's taking in information to take
stock of a situation. And then

583
00:48:38,719 --> 00:48:44,679
acts accordingly by imparting and for new
by evaluating saying that it is good.

584
00:48:44,719 --> 00:48:47,079
It's like you know, naming,
evaluating, and then judging. It's like

585
00:48:47,159 --> 00:48:51,440
that's actually that is the greatest way
of understanding mine. And I think,

586
00:48:51,480 --> 00:48:55,199
like you said, you know,
very simplistic story that can be read at

587
00:48:55,239 --> 00:49:00,199
a very simple level, but there's
some very profound things going on there from

588
00:49:00,199 --> 00:49:07,400
the standpoint of oh yeah, philosophy, engineering, science, epistemology, Yeah,

589
00:49:07,679 --> 00:49:10,119
very interesting. I definitely think the
genesis one is the best account of

590
00:49:10,159 --> 00:49:14,360
the origin of the world. It
just happens to not be a scientific account.

591
00:49:14,880 --> 00:49:19,039
It's it's an account of the origin
of the world in meaning and how

592
00:49:19,280 --> 00:49:24,000
mind and meaning are the source of
reality, and then everything else is downstream

593
00:49:24,039 --> 00:49:29,280
from that from that description. But
I was wanted to say, based on

594
00:49:29,360 --> 00:49:31,960
what you said of the the kind
of materials scientists, when I hear them

595
00:49:31,960 --> 00:49:37,079
saying something like there's energy, matter
and information, it's like, my mind

596
00:49:37,119 --> 00:49:40,559
is just flaring up, because,
like you said, information is active constraint.

597
00:49:42,239 --> 00:49:44,320
Yes, you know, and so
if you don't, if you don't

598
00:49:44,400 --> 00:49:47,840
like mind, that strainth come from
it begs Yeah, you're right there,

599
00:49:47,960 --> 00:49:52,159
Like you're right next to it if
you don't like question right, and see,

600
00:49:52,159 --> 00:49:57,400
in the nineteenth century, late nineteenth
century, there was something you could

601
00:49:57,480 --> 00:50:02,280
understand everything by reference to matter and
operating within space and time. And we've

602
00:50:02,639 --> 00:50:09,400
realized late twentieth century, neither in
biology, nor in physics, nor in

603
00:50:09,440 --> 00:50:13,760
other fields can you understand what's going
on, but especially not in biology can

604
00:50:13,760 --> 00:50:17,159
you understand what's going on apart from
a third fundamental entity, and that is

605
00:50:17,199 --> 00:50:24,320
information. And you're right, information
implies logically, it implies a constraining agent.

606
00:50:24,920 --> 00:50:31,760
But empirically we know from our experience
that information always comes from an intelligence

607
00:50:31,800 --> 00:50:37,559
source. Even by the way,
Jonathan, in these origin of life experiments,

608
00:50:37,599 --> 00:50:42,719
I don't know if you've seen any
of the videos online of James Tour,

609
00:50:45,199 --> 00:50:50,239
organic chemist from Rice University, and
critiquing these guys who do what are

610
00:50:50,280 --> 00:50:55,159
called prebiotic simulation experiments are trying to
simulate how the first cell could have arisen

611
00:50:55,280 --> 00:51:02,159
from some kind of pre biotic environment
through a series of of chemical undirected chemical

612
00:51:04,159 --> 00:51:09,519
interactions or reactions. And what Tour
shows and which many people working in origin

613
00:51:09,559 --> 00:51:15,840
of life research actually know but don't
want to lead with, is that at

614
00:51:15,880 --> 00:51:19,519
each step along the way to get
the chemicals, the simple chemicals to move

615
00:51:19,559 --> 00:51:23,519
in the direction of more complex and
biologically relevant chemistry, constraints have to be

616
00:51:23,559 --> 00:51:31,440
applied from outside the system by the
prebiotic simulator himself. No, even if

617
00:51:31,440 --> 00:51:35,039
they get to it, like even
if they would actually do it, it

618
00:51:35,119 --> 00:51:38,880
means that they've completely constrained everything to
be exactly in the right place for it

619
00:51:38,920 --> 00:51:44,519
to happen. So here's a big
question. Okay, if these experiments are

620
00:51:44,639 --> 00:51:49,639
simulation experiments, what's being simulated?
If at every step along the way you

621
00:51:49,719 --> 00:51:53,519
need an intelligent agent to restrict degrees
of chemical freedom to move in a life

622
00:51:53,880 --> 00:51:59,199
relevant direction, what are you simulating? Must have occurred on the early Earth

623
00:52:00,119 --> 00:52:04,360
the same thing, right, There
must have been an intelligence playing a role.

624
00:52:04,760 --> 00:52:10,639
So even the prebiotic simulation experiments of
the chemical evolutionary theorists are inadvertently reaffirming

625
00:52:10,679 --> 00:52:15,639
the principle that it takes intelligence to
generate information, because every one of those

626
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:22,039
constraints can be rendered as a quantifiable
input of information. And in fact,

627
00:52:22,079 --> 00:52:28,320
it even gets more specific than that. There are experiments called riebozime engineering experiments

628
00:52:28,599 --> 00:52:32,440
where there's a particular origin of life
theory called the RNA world, where the

629
00:52:32,519 --> 00:52:37,480
idea is that the first molecule was
an RNA world that stored information and could

630
00:52:37,519 --> 00:52:42,360
also act as a catalyst of some
kind kind of like but not really like

631
00:52:42,400 --> 00:52:47,639
a protein. That's the theory.
And so there are experiments trying to develop

632
00:52:47,920 --> 00:52:53,519
RNA molecules that have the capacity to
copy themselves, but to build RNA molecules

633
00:52:53,519 --> 00:52:58,760
that have even a limited capacity to
copy themselves. And the best we've been

634
00:52:58,760 --> 00:53:00,800
able to do in the lab is
get about a molecule that could copy about

635
00:53:00,840 --> 00:53:07,159
ten percent of itself. The rie
azime engineer has to literally engineer the sequence

636
00:53:07,280 --> 00:53:14,760
of letters on the RNA molecule the
nucleotide bases in a very specific way to

637
00:53:14,840 --> 00:53:19,360
get a molecule that has this limited
self replicating capability. So, yes,

638
00:53:19,440 --> 00:53:23,039
now you have a molecule that can
partially replicate itself, which is therefore a

639
00:53:23,039 --> 00:53:29,119
little bit more possibly life relevant down
the road. It's just one step along

640
00:53:29,760 --> 00:53:31,320
the way, along the way of
many that will be needed. But at

641
00:53:31,400 --> 00:53:34,920
least it's going in the right direction. But how did you get that?

642
00:53:35,000 --> 00:53:39,159
How did you accomplish that step?
An intelligent ribozyme engineer, And I kid

643
00:53:39,159 --> 00:53:45,000
you not that's what they're called input
information into the RNA molecule in order to

644
00:53:47,360 --> 00:53:52,119
move it in that life friendly,
life tropic direction. So what are you

645
00:53:52,119 --> 00:53:55,400
simulating. You're simulating the need for
intelligence to generate information. The very thing

646
00:53:55,400 --> 00:54:01,119
that intelligent design advocates have been saying
is the basis of our design inference that

647
00:54:01,480 --> 00:54:05,239
we know, you need to get
information, you need a mind. Since

648
00:54:05,280 --> 00:54:07,719
there is information present in the cell, there must have been a mind active.

649
00:54:08,159 --> 00:54:13,239
Yeah, I think that that your
example is an amazing example of what

650
00:54:13,320 --> 00:54:16,239
I've often seem to be the problem
at the outset, which is the scientists

651
00:54:16,360 --> 00:54:22,480
ignoring their place in the system and
acting as if they're just transparent, these

652
00:54:22,719 --> 00:54:25,760
weird transparent you know, I don't
know what exactly or like kind of these

653
00:54:25,920 --> 00:54:30,880
disincarnated gods that are that are just
doing these experiments, when in fact,

654
00:54:30,920 --> 00:54:36,400
the very even even the very act
of looking and constraining even the experiment itself

655
00:54:36,480 --> 00:54:40,000
is already an active constraint, like
the limiting of phenomena to one phenomena that

656
00:54:40,039 --> 00:54:46,400
I will isolate and identify and analyze, then the capacity to write that in

657
00:54:46,440 --> 00:54:50,800
a book and to tell other people
about it, and to then you know,

658
00:54:50,920 --> 00:54:53,519
like educate others, like everything you're
doing is in mind, and you're

659
00:54:53,639 --> 00:54:58,559
telling me that mine is an illusion, as you're using mind to do all

660
00:54:58,599 --> 00:55:04,000
the things that you're doing. This
happens in the simulation of the origin of

661
00:55:04,000 --> 00:55:09,079
the or the modeling of the origin
of the universe by physicists called quantum cosmologists.

662
00:55:09,639 --> 00:55:14,960
Uh. They end up postulating a
pre existing mathematical state out of which

663
00:55:15,000 --> 00:55:19,039
matters somehow arose. But even with
the equations that they postulate, they have

664
00:55:19,119 --> 00:55:22,559
to manipulate them to get an answer
that will indicate that our universe is possible.

665
00:55:22,840 --> 00:55:29,440
So the manipulation of the mathematical apparatus
involves an imparting of information that's coming

666
00:55:29,599 --> 00:55:32,480
from the minds of the physicists.
The chemical evolutionary theorists do it and forget

667
00:55:32,480 --> 00:55:38,320
that they are the man behind the
curtain doing all the important constraints of the

668
00:55:38,400 --> 00:55:45,599
chemistry to get things to move in
the in the right direction. So every

669
00:55:45,639 --> 00:55:53,079
attempt to explain the origin of interesting
aspects of our physical universe apart from intelligence,

670
00:55:53,559 --> 00:56:00,159
ends up inadvertently reaffirming the importance of
intelligence in the origin of those features.

671
00:56:01,320 --> 00:56:05,840
And so you you've seen I mean, I've seen this this shift in

672
00:56:06,440 --> 00:56:09,760
perception, this this shift in the
capacity for people to consider this theory.

673
00:56:09,880 --> 00:56:13,880
You know, you see that in
the amount of attention that you've been able

674
00:56:13,920 --> 00:56:15,199
to get, you know, in
the the past few years, which I

675
00:56:15,199 --> 00:56:17,920
imagined to some ways is like to
be on Dree Rogan must have been a

676
00:56:17,920 --> 00:56:22,280
surprise, Like I imagine that was
a surprise very much. So. It's

677
00:56:22,360 --> 00:56:27,400
kind of funny in the aftermath of
it, though, Jonathan, I you

678
00:56:27,440 --> 00:56:30,760
know, I did do a PhD
at a well known university, and I've

679
00:56:30,760 --> 00:56:36,119
written three books, and I've been
part of this. Yeah, I've accomplished

680
00:56:36,159 --> 00:56:38,280
a few things in my life.
Yeah, but when I get introduced now

681
00:56:38,320 --> 00:56:42,639
on the podium for a talk,
the only thing that gets mentioned is that

682
00:56:42,960 --> 00:56:45,760
and he was on the Joe Rogan
experience. That's hilarious. Like everything else

683
00:56:45,760 --> 00:56:51,239
I've done in my life is of
Noah was all leading up to Joe Rogan.

684
00:56:51,320 --> 00:56:53,760
You know that. And now soon
you'll be like weightlifting and UFC fighting

685
00:56:53,840 --> 00:56:58,400
or something, right, Right,
So what's happened, Like, what do

686
00:56:58,400 --> 00:57:04,719
you think has happened in the culture. I think the media interest is really

687
00:57:04,960 --> 00:57:08,079
just a symptom, if you will. It's a manifestation of something deeper that's

688
00:57:08,119 --> 00:57:14,159
going on, and that is that
the kind of arguments that we've been discussing

689
00:57:14,519 --> 00:57:19,639
are starting to percolate, and there's
a number of I had another media encounter

690
00:57:19,679 --> 00:57:25,360
that illustrates this a little bit.
I was I did a conversation with Peter

691
00:57:25,519 --> 00:57:32,400
Robinson, who at the Hoover Institute, who has that wonderful program Uncommon Knowledge.

692
00:57:32,599 --> 00:57:38,559
Peter wrote the famous mister Gorbachev Tear
down this Wall speech Reagan in nineteen

693
00:57:38,599 --> 00:57:45,159
eighty seven, and he did an
interview with David Berlinski, David Galeran,

694
00:57:45,599 --> 00:57:51,880
the chairman of the Ale Computer Science
Department, and me about the mathematical problems

695
00:57:52,920 --> 00:57:58,039
facing neo Darwinian theory. And it's
a pretty heady topic, you know,

696
00:57:58,039 --> 00:58:01,840
because we got into the math and
we describe the problem of combinatorial sequence space

697
00:58:01,880 --> 00:58:08,599
and the rarity of genes and proteins
in sequence space and why this poses a

698
00:58:08,599 --> 00:58:15,320
problem for neo Darwinism. We got
three and a half million views, and

699
00:58:15,880 --> 00:58:17,719
so, you know, kind of
words getting out. Something's wrong in the

700
00:58:17,719 --> 00:58:21,599
House of Darwin. People are getting
the message. At the same time.

701
00:58:21,639 --> 00:58:25,039
That was twenty nineteen, and there
were a lot of angry comments. Three

702
00:58:25,119 --> 00:58:30,159
years later I did another three way
interview with Peter Robinson, this time with

703
00:58:30,239 --> 00:58:37,960
John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician,
Michael Bhe one of the most most important

704
00:58:37,280 --> 00:58:44,679
advocates of the theory of intelligent design, and me, And after the interview

705
00:58:44,760 --> 00:58:46,119
dropped, we've had I don't know, two and a half million views of

706
00:58:46,119 --> 00:58:51,559
that so far. After the interview
dropped, Peter Robinson called me on the

707
00:58:51,559 --> 00:58:55,000
phone and he said, is something
changing the dynamics of your debate? He

708
00:58:55,000 --> 00:58:59,320
said, three years ago we got
a huge number of views, huge interests,

709
00:58:59,360 --> 00:59:01,639
but a lot of people are really
angry and there was a lot of

710
00:59:01,679 --> 00:59:06,440
angry comments. I had people calling
me up warning me off in association with

711
00:59:06,480 --> 00:59:09,559
you guys. He said, have
you seen the comments this time? He

712
00:59:09,559 --> 00:59:13,280
said, they're off the chart,
positive people saying why haven't I heard these

713
00:59:13,360 --> 00:59:15,920
arguments before? This is really compelling
stuff. This makes this looks like it

714
00:59:15,920 --> 00:59:22,480
sounds like sweet reason to me.
What's the problem. And so that's just

715
00:59:22,559 --> 00:59:28,639
one little snapshot. But we've had
high level conversions to intelligent design from people

716
00:59:28,800 --> 00:59:32,719
in the science establishment. You may
have heard of Gunter Beckley, the very

717
00:59:32,719 --> 00:59:40,440
prominent German paleontologist who was the curator
of the bi centennial exhibit of the celebrating

718
00:59:40,719 --> 00:59:46,239
the Origin of Species and Darwin's birth
in two thousand and nine, he set

719
00:59:46,320 --> 00:59:52,960
up an exhibit with scales of justice
where he had on one side the book

720
00:59:52,039 --> 00:59:55,079
The Origin of Species and on the
other side a stack of books about the

721
00:59:55,079 --> 01:00:00,480
theory of intelligent design. And then
he made the scale contra orry to the

722
01:00:00,639 --> 01:00:07,079
law of gravity tip in this direction, with the Origin of Species on the

723
01:00:07,960 --> 01:00:12,360
downside, and then he had a
little caption that said the one book that

724
01:00:12,400 --> 01:00:17,480
outweighs them all. And apparently some
of Gunter's colleagues of Gunter, if you're

725
01:00:17,880 --> 01:00:24,480
going to mox intelligent design people,
you better read their books, and he

726
01:00:24,519 --> 01:00:31,559
said that was my mistake. And
about two months later I got an email

727
01:00:31,639 --> 01:00:36,719
from him asking if we could have
a phone conversation, but please not to

728
01:00:36,719 --> 01:00:39,519
call him at the office, to
only call him at home. And he

729
01:00:39,519 --> 01:00:42,519
said, I want to come out
and talk to you guys, because I

730
01:00:42,559 --> 01:00:45,840
realized you've been very unfairly maligned.
There's a lot of solid science in your

731
01:00:45,880 --> 01:00:51,159
work, and your arguments are very
compelling. And he set out to have

732
01:00:51,199 --> 01:00:54,159
a deep think about the whole issue, and seven years later, in twenty

733
01:00:54,239 --> 01:01:01,199
sixteen, he announces that he now
also he had already begun to express skepticism

734
01:01:01,239 --> 01:01:06,679
about neo Darwinism in the immediate wake
of reading our stuff, but he had

735
01:01:06,719 --> 01:01:08,559
a deep think about all this,
and in sixteen, seven years later,

736
01:01:08,639 --> 01:01:13,199
he announced that he was now a
proponent of the theory of intelligent design.

737
01:01:13,440 --> 01:01:19,079
He's doing active research on a problem
in paleontology called the waiting times problem,

738
01:01:19,079 --> 01:01:28,239
and is advancing intelligent design with his
actively with his scientific research. Galeran,

739
01:01:28,480 --> 01:01:32,320
the chairman of the Yale Computer Science
Department, who sat in that interview about

740
01:01:32,320 --> 01:01:37,679
the mathematical challenges to neo Darwinism,
wrote an essay a year or two before,

741
01:01:38,119 --> 01:01:42,440
in a long review essay in the
Claremont Review of Books called Darwin vont

742
01:01:42,480 --> 01:01:47,159
Farewell that he wrote as a consequence
of having read David Berlinski's book The Deniable

743
01:01:47,239 --> 01:01:54,400
Darwin and my book Darwin's Doubt,
which both of which outlined this mathematical problem

744
01:01:54,639 --> 01:02:00,519
for neo Darwinism. So, you
know, chairman of the Computer science apartment,

745
01:02:00,239 --> 01:02:07,360
paleontologists, who's the curator of the
Darwin exhibition at the largest natural history

746
01:02:07,480 --> 01:02:12,599
museum in Europe. These sorts of
people are not supposed to be changing their

747
01:02:12,679 --> 01:02:15,840
point of view, but that's what's
happening. So when that's taking place at

748
01:02:15,840 --> 01:02:21,400
the high level of science, then
inevitably things in the culture will start to

749
01:02:21,800 --> 01:02:23,599
follow. And I think that's part
of the reason we're getting some of the

750
01:02:23,599 --> 01:02:28,719
media attention that we happened. Yeah. There. I think there's also a

751
01:02:28,760 --> 01:02:34,880
more existential aspect to this, because
you know, it's nice and fun to

752
01:02:34,920 --> 01:02:37,639
say that the world is meaningless and
that you know that there's no intelligence and

753
01:02:37,679 --> 01:02:43,519
no mind behind the world when everything's
going nice and dandy. But I think

754
01:02:43,559 --> 01:02:49,360
that COVID put a lot of people
into a vice and and force them to

755
01:02:49,440 --> 01:02:54,480
face the problem of meaninglessness in their
own life, or a sense of things

756
01:02:54,519 --> 01:03:00,280
falling apart and things not going the
way that they thought. Yeah, that's

757
01:03:00,320 --> 01:03:04,519
my perception as well, because we've
seen quite a bit of even like in

758
01:03:04,599 --> 01:03:07,239
terms of in the Orthodox tradition in
the US, we've seen this huge wave

759
01:03:07,280 --> 01:03:14,079
of converts of young men that are
that are coming to church and they're all

760
01:03:14,519 --> 01:03:20,960
of one single type, very intelligent, highly educated people that you know,

761
01:03:21,239 --> 01:03:25,400
are realizing that meaninglessness is is no
joke. Like it's not that we we

762
01:03:25,480 --> 01:03:30,519
need we need an anchor and that
and I think that some of that is

763
01:03:30,519 --> 01:03:32,960
probably leaking out also. I mean, I think everything you said is right,

764
01:03:34,000 --> 01:03:38,519
but there's also a culture of of
a sense that that that that we

765
01:03:38,599 --> 01:03:43,960
need meaning for for our lives to
to to have. I think that's been

766
01:03:44,000 --> 01:03:50,239
a huge factor in the unraveling of
the New atheism. Atheism has unraveled for

767
01:03:50,280 --> 01:03:52,840
a bunch of reasons. There was
do you know of the author Justin Brierley

768
01:03:52,880 --> 01:03:58,719
in the UK. Yeah, there's
a terrific book, the The Surprising Rediscovery

769
01:03:58,760 --> 01:04:00,760
of Belief in God, And it's
just story of the way in which of

770
01:04:00,800 --> 01:04:03,840
the demise of the new atheism,
which was all the rage in two thousand

771
01:04:03,840 --> 01:04:09,920
and seven, eight and up until
about fifteen twenty sixteen. Then there was

772
01:04:09,960 --> 01:04:15,079
a lot of infighting, disagreement about
moral and political issues, that sort of

773
01:04:15,119 --> 01:04:23,960
thing. But also I think this
the scientific and philosophical argument started to wear

774
01:04:24,119 --> 01:04:27,639
very thin. The new atheists didn't
really do a good job of engaging any

775
01:04:27,679 --> 01:04:30,440
of the arguments that we've been talking
about, you know, the rich because

776
01:04:30,480 --> 01:04:34,280
they don't actually don't have an answer
argument. They don't have Richard Dawkins,

777
01:04:34,360 --> 01:04:41,119
Yeah, Richard Dawkins himself has acknowledged
that nobody knows how life first began.

778
01:04:41,360 --> 01:04:44,159
We don't have a good chemical,
evolutionary theory of the origin of life.

779
01:04:44,280 --> 01:04:46,880
Well, then how do you square
that with your claim that biology is the

780
01:04:46,880 --> 01:04:51,079
study of complicated things that only give
the appearance of having been designed for a

781
01:04:51,079 --> 01:04:58,360
purpose. If you have a system
which clearly is evidencing purposive behavior and namely

782
01:04:58,679 --> 01:05:03,199
even the simplest living cell, and
you haven't given given an evolutionary explanation for

783
01:05:03,280 --> 01:05:10,800
that, maybe you don't have the
goods, and maybe maybe your statement that

784
01:05:10,880 --> 01:05:15,840
life only appears to be designed is
ungrounded. And so I think that the

785
01:05:16,199 --> 01:05:23,199
scientific arguments that the new atheists made
uh or thin. I think that was

786
01:05:23,239 --> 01:05:27,559
part of the reason. But another
facet of this is that the new atheists

787
01:05:27,599 --> 01:05:31,119
have nothing to offer by way of
personal meaning. That's just inherent in the

788
01:05:31,119 --> 01:05:34,440
worldview, and it's not. If
it's true that God does not exist and

789
01:05:34,480 --> 01:05:39,559
that science shows that, well then
we have to face that like good existential

790
01:05:39,599 --> 01:05:44,719
troopers. But yeah, and you
can did downstream because now you have some

791
01:05:44,800 --> 01:05:49,119
of the really prominent neu atheists arguing
for female penises, and it's like what

792
01:05:49,280 --> 01:05:54,159
happened, Like Okay, how did
we get? How did we get?

793
01:05:54,400 --> 01:05:59,599
You know, there's a sense in
which a lot of the crazy political stuff

794
01:06:00,199 --> 01:06:03,440
became the place where people put their
meaning and then like a kind of fervor

795
01:06:03,480 --> 01:06:09,360
towards purpose in the political sphere.
But that is not particularly that's interesting.

796
01:06:09,400 --> 01:06:13,800
You can say, well, we
don't need meaning. Well, we may

797
01:06:13,880 --> 01:06:15,960
need it, we may want it, but we just have to face the

798
01:06:15,960 --> 01:06:20,679
fact that the universe doesn't have any
meaning because there's no person behind the universe

799
01:06:20,719 --> 01:06:25,039
to give it meaning after all.
In this is I think both the New

800
01:06:25,079 --> 01:06:30,559
atheists and I agree, meaning is
derivative of personhood. Nothing can mean anything

801
01:06:30,599 --> 01:06:36,119
to a rock or a planet or
an atom. Things only mean things to

802
01:06:36,320 --> 01:06:42,360
persons. And if the universe does
not have a personal source, and at

803
01:06:42,760 --> 01:06:45,199
the end of the universe we're going
to have a heat death and there will

804
01:06:45,199 --> 01:06:50,960
be no more persons, then there
is no possibility of ultimate meaning for human

805
01:06:51,000 --> 01:06:58,800
existence. And I think that prospect
actually has as that has settled in for

806
01:06:58,880 --> 01:07:03,000
many people. It's had a kind
of jarring impact metaphysically. So you have

807
01:07:03,199 --> 01:07:08,360
a figure like Ian Herciali, who
was one of the leading New atheists,

808
01:07:08,360 --> 01:07:13,079
who has now announced her conversion to
Christianity, and one of the factors that

809
01:07:13,159 --> 01:07:18,440
she cites is that the new atheism
had absolutely nothing to offer in uh for

810
01:07:18,519 --> 01:07:25,400
those or for what Victor Frankel called
man's search for meaning, there was there's

811
01:07:25,440 --> 01:07:29,039
nothing there. So I think it's
a combination of factors as to why it's

812
01:07:29,079 --> 01:07:34,280
unraveling. I think the theistic worldview
makes better sense intellectually. It provides a

813
01:07:34,320 --> 01:07:41,280
better explanation for the origin of the
universe, the origin of life, the

814
01:07:41,400 --> 01:07:46,400
nature of human consciousness. I think
it provides the only real grounding for epistemology,

815
01:07:46,400 --> 01:07:54,679
our ability to know, and but
it also it also provides a basis

816
01:07:54,679 --> 01:07:59,880
for meaning. Yeah, I mean
because you need you also need of like

817
01:07:59,880 --> 01:08:02,320
a vertical integration. And this is
I think this is one of the problems

818
01:08:02,320 --> 01:08:06,400
that all these theories of complexity are
struggling with, is that they just want

819
01:08:06,440 --> 01:08:11,320
to talk about emergent qualities and emergent
phenomena, but they just have no way

820
01:08:11,360 --> 01:08:15,760
to account for the jumps in qualities
between the different levels of a beam.

821
01:08:15,119 --> 01:08:21,399
That's really well said. Emergentism is
is is word salad. You just you

822
01:08:21,560 --> 01:08:26,960
just name the effect its own cause
yeah, dividently hard said, just put

823
01:08:26,960 --> 01:08:29,600
the word matter. We have,
we have mind? Did mind come from?

824
01:08:29,720 --> 01:08:32,720
It? Came from emergent mental properties? You know? Okay, well,

825
01:08:33,960 --> 01:08:40,199
there's something qualitatively different between the mental
experience that you and I are having,

826
01:08:40,319 --> 01:08:44,560
the mental experiences that we're having right
now. My seeing that that gold

827
01:08:44,600 --> 01:08:49,960
medallion behind you, and the chemistry
that's going on in my in my synapses,

828
01:08:50,000 --> 01:08:55,920
those are qualitatively different. And saying
that there's the mind is emergent off

829
01:08:55,920 --> 01:09:00,119
of that just renames the mystery.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. David of

830
01:09:00,119 --> 01:09:02,520
the Art said, just put the
word magic. Just use magic, because

831
01:09:02,560 --> 01:09:05,159
that's what it is. Just basically
think, I don't know what this is.

832
01:09:05,199 --> 01:09:08,039
I'm going to give it a name
so I don't have to deal with

833
01:09:08,079 --> 01:09:11,880
it. And then and then and
then pretend like you're actually to be fair,

834
01:09:12,119 --> 01:09:15,600
to be fair, we theists don't
know what mind is either, but

835
01:09:15,640 --> 01:09:19,880
we have experience of it as possessors
of minds. But what we know and

836
01:09:19,960 --> 01:09:25,199
do not discount is that mind is
a reality. This was Thomas Nagel's huge

837
01:09:25,199 --> 01:09:29,279
point. You cannot simply right mind
out of the cosmos. It's a reality.

838
01:09:29,920 --> 01:09:32,279
And we also know that there are
some things that minds can do that

839
01:09:32,399 --> 01:09:36,840
matter cannot do, and what we
see in the physical universe and in the

840
01:09:36,840 --> 01:09:44,560
biological realm in particular, are features
of those systems that we know from experience

841
01:09:44,640 --> 01:09:47,720
only minds produce. And so if
you reason that back to the beginning,

842
01:09:48,199 --> 01:09:51,960
you realize there must have been a
mind at the beginning to give rise to

843
01:09:53,039 --> 01:09:58,000
those features that we see in the
physical world and in the biological realm.

844
01:09:58,399 --> 01:10:03,520
And therefore, if you go back
to that basic metaphysical choice between mentalism or

845
01:10:04,199 --> 01:10:10,680
mind first versus matter first, the
mind first view makes a lot more sense.

846
01:10:11,319 --> 01:10:15,520
There's one of the great nineteenth century
scientists, and probably often ranked as

847
01:10:15,560 --> 01:10:21,079
the third greatest physicist of all time. James Clark Maxwell, turns out,

848
01:10:21,319 --> 01:10:28,960
was a staunch critic of Darwin.
He's eighteen seventies, in the heyday of

849
01:10:29,000 --> 01:10:33,680
his powers as a physicist. He
helps to found the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

850
01:10:34,039 --> 01:10:38,319
He gets it, he has it
inscribed with a verse from the Psalms

851
01:10:38,479 --> 01:10:41,800
greater the works to the Lord,
sought out by all who take pleasure therein.

852
01:10:42,279 --> 01:10:48,960
He is a devout Presbyterian physicist,
but he's deeply skeptical about the whole

853
01:10:49,039 --> 01:10:57,640
Darwinian Revolution, and he says the
conclusion of design follows inevitably from an application

854
01:10:57,800 --> 01:11:03,560
of the laws of logic to the
uh to the observations of the senses.

855
01:11:04,720 --> 01:11:09,880
And what does he mean, Well, a law of logic is that we

856
01:11:09,960 --> 01:11:14,000
have to have a cause that's sufficient
to the effect. So what do we

857
01:11:14,079 --> 01:11:17,680
see in from our through our senses? We see effects that we know only

858
01:11:17,760 --> 01:11:24,239
arise from the activity of minds.
Therefore, and since some of those effects

859
01:11:24,239 --> 01:11:29,039
go right back to the beginning of
the universe witness the fine tuning discoveries that

860
01:11:29,079 --> 01:11:32,000
we were talking about. We see
evidence of mind from the very beginning of

861
01:11:32,000 --> 01:11:38,520
the universe, and thus we must
invoke a transcendent mind to make to explain

862
01:11:38,840 --> 01:11:42,399
what we see around us. It's
some level, it's not that hard.

863
01:11:43,000 --> 01:11:48,479
It's not that hard. The big
metaphysical questions can be resolved by careful thinking

864
01:11:48,960 --> 01:11:56,520
and apply the laws of logic to
the observations of the senses. I think

865
01:11:56,560 --> 01:12:00,000
that's a great way to end a
conversation. Stephen, Thank you so much

866
01:12:00,039 --> 01:12:02,920
much for thanks for your work,
and thanks for all the you know,

867
01:12:02,960 --> 01:12:08,119
and I'm really I'm happy to see
that people are paying attention and that,

868
01:12:08,199 --> 01:12:12,479
you know, the arguments are kind
of breaking through the secular the world and

869
01:12:12,600 --> 01:12:15,159
I and I hope to see more
of that as as the time continues.

870
01:12:15,439 --> 01:12:19,560
Hey, that's awesome. And one
other, one other indicator I think of

871
01:12:19,800 --> 01:12:27,640
this shift intellectually is the the the
amazing amount of young talent we're attracting to

872
01:12:28,640 --> 01:12:33,439
our larger movement of scientists and philosophers
and historians of science, but also to

873
01:12:33,560 --> 01:12:38,640
our summer programs. And so if
you have young listeners out there who have

874
01:12:38,840 --> 01:12:45,239
aspirations for careers in science or philosophy
or related fields, have them direct them

875
01:12:45,279 --> 01:12:47,520
to the Discovery Institute website and find
out about some of the summer programs.

876
01:12:47,840 --> 01:12:51,840
It's an amazing amount of energy where
you have a program this summer we're doing

877
01:12:51,880 --> 01:12:57,840
in Cambridge for the first time England, and that to me is one of

878
01:12:57,920 --> 01:13:00,920
the most exciting indicators of an intellct
shift. Thomas Cohone, the great historian

879
01:13:01,000 --> 01:13:06,399
of science, said that scientific revolutions
occur one funeral at a time. The

880
01:13:06,479 --> 01:13:11,159
older generation, well, we will
just encourage retirements, not funerals. But

881
01:13:11,920 --> 01:13:15,439
you know, as one generation passes
from the scene and a younger generation arises,

882
01:13:15,680 --> 01:13:19,239
oftentimes that's when you see people becoming
open to new ideas and I think

883
01:13:19,279 --> 01:13:24,279
that's absolutely happening. That's great.
Well, thank you and everybody, Yeah,

884
01:13:24,399 --> 01:13:29,960
check out the check out the summer
programs and also look into Steven's books.

885
01:13:30,359 --> 01:13:33,319
And thanks and hopefully maybe one day
we'll have another conversation. This is

886
01:13:33,359 --> 01:13:34,600
great, Jonathan, thanks for having
me.