Joe Rogan Experience #2008 — Stephen C. Meyer Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! in your mind already that you were trying to prove? Or was this something that you sort of It was a process of philosophical deliberation. It was not really based on science initially. Well, I read in the hospital after I had this accident, I was reading a book about the history of baseball. What could I possibly do that would have any lasting or enduring meaning?

3:20 But at that point, I was completely comfortable with the evolutionary explanation of everything. And so I began, in a sense, on a kind of intellectual journey to see where these new evidences, proteins and protein machines that every cell needs to stay alive. Bill Gates has said it's Where did that come from? you said that you were very interested in origin stories.

6:02 and did you find comfort in religion? For example, I was in this big leg cast and I would crutch my way up to the – up our driveway, get the newspaper, bring back the box scores to read about the baseball games the night before. everything else that does change is passing ephemeral and ultimately of no account. What do you mean by something that does not change?

8:53 I later found what I think are very, very persuasive arguments both philosophically and scientifically. But we can't prove those things. You had to use those assumptions to make sense of the observations. I believe in, well, I believe in micro evolution. I believe that there are real evolutionary which as it happens, And he simply enumerated the five major, what he called explanatory deficits of neo-Darwinism. And

13:27 Innovation, no. If we now know, thanks to the genetic revolution, the molecular biological revolution, that if you want to build a new form of life, long string, these long digital bit strings, A's, C's, G's, and T's, not zeros and ones, sequences are what are, they're called, they're highly isolated in what's called sequence space. that between 3 and 15 mutations was enough to degrade the thermodynamic stability of the protein structure that the gene was making.

17:33 you that I think is very intuitive. It turns out that there are structures or systems for building that are very important for building new animal body plants. as new cells are going through cell division at the right time and not at another time. core elements of these developmental gene regulatory networks, animal development shuts body plan, you're going to have to change developmental gene regulatory network A into

21:14 design, but he said very explicitly that neo-Darwinism commits a catastrophic error in thinking because when we look at circuitry and code and information processing systems. I mean, But when you're talking about this process, It was intelligible. all the horrific crimes that we see, drug addictions? Why would it create us in a form like And you get this concern to use mathematics

25:12 And there were many great cultures. had the conviction that there were such patterns, there was rationality, there was order Because there's a lot of evidence that we've lost And that is just a fact of history. science going, and that science did turn out to be very fruitful. Which is probably a very good He had great scientific insights, but his religion was bad news for science.

29:29 about theism initially before I encountered any scientific arguments for it, was this whole in that way? Well, I think the traditional theistic answer to that is the free will defense. Unpack that a little for me. in and out of the justice system at a very young age, surrounded by crime. Tragic, tragic stuff. terrible environmental conditions in our background, we are still free to choose.

32:19 No question. by the neurophysiological correlates or the underlying brain chemistry. The determinism proponents are. Then we're agreeing, Joe. I once heard an excellent lecture from a Berkeley philosopher of mine, John Searle. He was the guy who did the famous never in the research showed that that have closed the gap between necessary There's an element of agency that is retained, I would say, for almost all people.

35:32 You know, there's a real issue with that as well. effectively, that if you say there's a combination of factors involved and one of them is our own human agency, The year or two before that, I can't remember the exact year, there's a famous Leopold and Loeb case in Chicago. diminished responsibility plea in American jurisprudence So that's what I reject.

39:45 Exactly. The great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis argued that there was a universally In a pre-Christian Asian culture, it's wrong. anymore and they're nomadic and they get in the they made a moral judgment that differed from one that I would make or you would make, but they did I agree with you. present religious beliefs, if God is going to somehow or another come down and give wisdom to men, why do some have this very fucked up version of that?

44:00 deeper intuitions, overridden them because they have this belief that they've got to do this When we think of human beings, And we've located, we know the locus or the place where the code is stored in a living organism. That's an unbelievable discovery. But in the history of humankind, you know, this this suddenly we have an inkling of how this how this happens.

46:52 But when we look at a galaxy, a spiral galaxy, we look at that as an individual. energy or the physical fields that are expressed in material particles, where they think of those I'm a classical theist. process or the entity from which everything else came? What's the ground of being, the starting point? And up until the 20th century, that eternal self-existent thing. And therefore, I think that the theistic view that a transcendent

50:48 There's the evidence from observational astronomy. Yeah. So back to the ancient Greeks, we've had this debate. It's past eternal. more light over a long period of time. And Hubble was able to use some new techniques for measuring distances to astronomical, to the big telescopes and these new techniques, he establishes that there are galaxies galore,

54:17 wavelengths. And what he's detecting is light that has shifted in these spectral analyses that they do in the red direction, because to explain that observation, they call it back-extrapolating, what the universe would have been like 100 years ago Oh, yeah. Maybe this information is not the big picture. Maybe there's a lot more to be discovered I was gonna talk about James Webb after you started the question, but the James Webb, I think, has provided... First of all...

57:29 beginning based on what we're discovering. And James Webb has only reinforced that. And there's James Webb Telescope and James Webb. Turns out that that researcher, that astrophysicist, disclaimed his use of On purpose. What the James Webb telescope is able to do is to, in fact, what it was constructed to So the James Webb was constructed in hopes of detecting that type of radiation if it existed.

1:00:57 was super redshifted radiation, uber redshifted stuff out in the infrared. And were able, on the basis of that, to synthesize images of these very, very distant remote galaxies. there were more of them early on than we would have expected based on our theories of galaxy formation. the cosmic background radiation that was discovered in 1965 the Kobe radiation of

1:02:46 that undermined previous ideas? I'm going to answer tentatively because I don't know this I've wondered that. That seems to me a logical possibility. Maybe the origin of the universe continues to point to the same conclusion. And I think we've had a hundred years now where we've had repeated new and he's diagnosed with ALS. Einstein's theory of gravity. And according to Einstein, a massive body actually curves the fabric of space or space-time.

1:06:55 at that zero point. end up producing several of these singularity theorems, suggesting that if general relativity But like the conclusion that the universe had a definite beginning, It's a little tricky to explain easily, And I think that's the best we can do in science, but that is a pretty weighty range of testimony supporting the same conclusion.

1:10:14 Yeah. And moreover, he said it smacks of the Genesis account, which he detested. And so he rejected the Big Bang and formulated this steady state model Hoyle thought that the laws of physics were – the first law of conservation of matter and energy. are we making assumptions based on very limited data? Again, with the proviso, science is necessarily provisional.

1:13:30 that would work. And long story short, it turns out for that way of building carbon The gravitational force would have to... impossible. And so that is to say, even to get the Sir John Polkinghorne, a great Cambridge physicist, accomplish some remarkable outcome or functional or remarkable outcome. That's what, if you see And with different combinations of the laws and constants of physics and different initial

1:17:44 You can believe in a fine tuner or you could believe in a multiverse. I think the fine tuner, we'll call it theistic design argument, provides a better overall something called inflationary cosmology, and others are based on something called string theory. So in order to explain the fine tuning, you invoke the multiverse. Given that fine-tuning in our experience is always the product of intelligence.

1:20:30 And if you want to say yet, that's fine, because again, all scientific arguments, whether they I think is that thought process and that I wouldn't play the role of perceiving life as having a significance that non-life does not have. But I don't think anyone's suggesting that it's not significant. I mean, that word is a weird Either it was an inside job,

1:24:33 And actually, you'd expect that the vault would never get opened. So now we can say, well, why is it in this, but I think it's very commonsensical, but it can be unpacked with these sort of deeper Right. But again, that is the basis of all scientific reasoning. Right. I understand, Because you're raising, you know, it's awesome the amount of good philosophy you do on this show because of the way you ask questions. And the questions you just asked lead to an answer that is right at the heart of deep philosophical discussions that have been going on for about 500 years. And in the Middle Ages, there were these attempts to prove

1:28:38 entirely subjectively and you just had to take a leap of faith there was no believing things based on scientific evidence that we find. And I think the proofs for God, rational standpoint from as an intellectual when I say that when I am And so I have an inner confidence about my faith in God. And they have guided choices that I've made. I mean, I can look at the biblical witness. I can compare it to the historical evidence. I can look at these

1:32:56 And then I find that, sure enough, that was actually insight or guidance into what I was about to experience. But people have gotten that from philosophy as well. They've gotten Yeah. I agree with all that. Right. pattern of thinking and behavior that's very common to do? And that is one of the beautiful Yes, but you're a young— I understand. or like anybody that's looking for change in their life, anybody that's looking for something better is inclined to do. It's a

1:36:54 Right. I have a lot of other arguments that I would place weight on because I think we all that that person is experiencing some extreme difficulty. Don't know why I suddenly felt that. to figure out like what and i could see why adopting that thought would be very comforting And the guy who ran it was a very charismatic guy He had to choose you for it.

1:40:06 hypnotist and knew how to manipulate people and ultimately the the result was terrible these Manipulate their emotions. Well, a couple things to say about that. Yeah. guidance of Christianity as a religious philosophy, there have been occasions in my life where I've conversation, either one of us just appealing to our personal experience is not going to move

1:44:06 That's what I like about your show. They seem like a complicated thing to discuss. They like even some social philosophy, some social trends. exactly. I have a Darwinian debating partner who's a very good-natured soul, Michael Ruse, I already alluded to, I think, that the Darwinian process is a real process. They just don't explain There can be beliefs that are functioning in a quasi-religious way for people that have a

1:48:52 It's called the method of multiple competing hypotheses, I have been in debates with more and less skilled people on the other side. Not that I have anything against the American South. It's just that, conversation with Michael Shermer, who's the well-known editor of Skeptic Magazine, That's a great way to put it. design is not science. And I say, okay, well, that must presuppose a definition of science. What's

1:53:08 Okay, well then let's call it something different. kinds of phenomena in life point, as I think they do, materialist side of the ledger have wanted to say, unless it's a materialistic answer, I'm not going to consider it, I'm not going to talk to you, Yeah, sorry. are we the ultimate expression of that design? Can I come back to that? But first make one more

1:56:26 they might be making a deep intellectual error. Now, if I hold strictly to the The main objection we get to intelligent design is this claim it's not science because it's not materialistic. past transitional intermediate forms and past mutational events based on things we can see. Because if you're right and then I'm wrong and I'm not willing to do it, I can just shut you up.

1:59:47 person. Iron sharpens iron. Yeah, which is what it's all about. And if you just shut that down, Interesting. I have no direct experience of those, but I have other reasons to believe that the Bible is true. We know orcas have a very complex language. And I think there's something much deeper going on with human language. It's not an area of that would allow communication. And this would have had to have arisen very, very abruptly. It

2:04:40 That's the circularity of it. language structures built into the brain. I don't understand that at all. If you're learning there's like i i god my friend adam green tree explained this to me i don't want to say i don't I may even be able to get to run. sequence, but I... So Chomsky himself believed that they were innate to the human animal. without a communication system to define the terms on a mutually agreeable basis?

2:09:30 Do you think that human beings are the ultimate expression? A new creation? Yeah. This is, I think, one of the things that you've objected to, the idea that there are people on various issues that speak for the science and shut down the rhetorical dimension of science. That's why this Italian philosopher of science I mentioned, Marcello Pera, says that science advances as scientists argue with emphasis on the word argue about how to interpret the evidence.

2:12:26 pursuit is a scientific pursuit. I think it is a scientific pursuit. I also think it's a because we saw one at the very beginning of the universe. I mean, we have evidence of that. I mean, It describes a new heavens and a new earth with the people and develop a philosophy that resonates with the people. The books that I've written have been advancing the theory of intelligent design.

2:16:05 And it would be unfair to them for me to answer the question without making that proviso because I'm also here representing those books and those arguments. moral freedom and you don't have to be accountable to a moral judge. And I think in each person, And there is information and an information processing system, that I have a strong avocational interest in the historicity of the Bible as one can test it based

2:19:26 avocational interest in archaeology is that the five or six leading figures, most important that Pilate played. Recently, the... And what year was this attributed to? in Jerusalem under the traditional and established in that time period. evaluate their other claims. where the Josephus text is much more credible, Well, right. I mean, there's no libraries.

2:24:04 And the other is Gary Habermas. about that myself. Well, much historical evidence is also historical statement. He was also mentioned earlier in the New Testament as one of his brothers or half-brothers, saying that people will lie to get out of trouble. They do it all the time. We see it in our politics. But people don't lie to get into trouble. We're just assuming that they would let him lie

2:27:59 for a factual claim that they know to be false. That's lying to get into trouble. True, but we don't know what James' mental state was. We don't know if James was schizophrenic. I'm very much concerned to – I'm a philosopher, okay? And in many, many periods of biblical history, there is just extensive, same kind of extensive they're conquered, only Jerusalem remains. The city is put under siege, which is a death sentence in

2:31:10 That is a way of providing warrant or support or justification for the historical reliability of the Bible. Well, we don't know. Why didn't God do that? For one reason or another, yeah. Why didn't God stop Hiroshima and Nagasaki? An extraordinary event. Let's imagine this is a pool table instead of this cool – I know the law, the physical law of momentum exchange because I'm a physics geek even though I'm not a pool player.

2:33:32 in the exact same place where I expected it to end It's an act of God. evaluating those more extraordinary events as possibly true as well. And that was my reference to the our creator. And so I believe that for biblical reasons, I think. But I also see the evidence of what I would do if I wanted to freak people out or if I was trying to obscure some sort of a very

2:37:43 I'll tell you what it is. I wrote an op-ed for the New York Post two summers ago when a lot of this stuff first broke, you know, with the Navy stuff. the placement of the rivets in just the right place. That's the kind of complexity of information processing that's not there is extraterrestrial life. It's a big universe. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know.

2:40:09 configuring matter, not that. Information is crucial to specificity of form. to get any kind of evolutionary process going, what does that do with your biblical interpretation of life? Yeah, again, I'm completely agnostic because the Bible tells us that we were made in the image of There's been two different lines of thinking about that. Okay, unless there is intelligent design.

2:43:52 And that it is so big that not only does this Earth exist, but a version of this Earth where all the events exactly as they've taken place on Earth have taken place in space on other planets an infinite number of times That is happening simultaneously in so many places, sufficient to render even the origin of life. And I have argued in Signature in the Cell,

2:45:59 if not trillions of galaxies as well, against the multiverse. Infinite number of universes. It might be true, it might be Well, maybe – I mean, again, I don't know. animals, the nefesh, the Hebrew word, and they have a mind of a sort. And anyone who's a dog Well, they can't manipulate their environment like you're, you're, I, uh, I work the other end of the timescale, the cosmology, the origin of life, the origin of animals.

2:48:47 Well, I have a former student who had an experience of God on a psychedelic. Say hi. started studying theology. He was one of the people that deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls, That's in one type of mushroom. the idea is that these ancient rituals were how they connected to God and that they hid these from the conquering Joe, what was your experience of God in,

2:53:05 beyond anything you could possibly comprehend in our material realm. I don't know what it is. It's very, very quick. And these people that are having these experiences, they're mapping out these experiences in this very new and profound way where they're saying there might be some sort of chemical portal in the mind that can be activated through these psychedelic chemicals.

2:54:43 And when you're experiencing... having it. And a lot of people like Dawkins have not had that. And he spoke openly about perhaps maybe one day taking LSD under the right clinical settings, and he probably should do that. that intelligent design could be part of the answer? Maybe a little afraid. towards this malevolent experience. Are you aware of these Brazilian churches that they practice Christianity,

2:59:26 different parts of the world. But one part of the brew contains dimethyltryptamine and the other part of the brew contains a natural MAO inhibitor called harmine. And the two of them combined to Taking the charismatic movement and putting it on steroids. It's a more earnest pursuit. this is where they first discovered this ayahuasca. mysteries, when they were involved in these rituals and they were drinking wine, that

3:02:33 There's evidence that this went to a bunch of other different places. called scientific materialism is failing on multiple fronts. And stuff I've written is And even Stephen Hawking got into it in the end, the sort of the so-called new atheism that was and invoking extra ad hoc or auxiliary hypotheses to try to save the evidence, spiritual realities that were not even considered in the late 19th century among elite intellectuals

3:06:55 and some infinite being that is also a part of a universe that's an atom and another infinite being? we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we're talking No one has found such a signal yet. to these big three things that science has discovered, that the universe had a beginning, Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this conversation.

3:09:50 The previous book was Darwin's Doubt, The Explosive Origin of Animal Life, and the Case for Intelligent Design, subtitle. Thank you.