Allen Wolf: 00:05
Welcome to the Navigating Hollywood podcast. My name is Allen Wolf, and I’m a writer, director, producer. Today is a special episode that we recorded live on one of the studio lots featuring Dr. Stephen Meyer. He’s a philosopher of science with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He knows a lot of funky English things. And he’s a former geophysicist with Atlantic Richfield. He now directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He’s the author of Signature in the Cell, named a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis, which makes the scientific case from physics, cosmology, and biology for a personal god. His work has been featured everywhere from Good Morning America to Nightline to Joe Rogan, and has been the subject of two New York Times front-page stories. Welcome, Steve. So the way many of us discovered you is from chapter three of Lee Strobel’s book, Is God Real? In that chapter, it talks about how DNA points to the idea of an intelligent designer. The chapter introduced you about your work and how you came to that conclusion. And I would, for those of us who have not read the book yet, or sometimes people find the science a little hard to wrap their minds around. Can you just walk us through what it is about DNA that points to a designing influence or intelligence? And then I’d love to have just the core argument in a way that uh anyone here could understand and even explain to a friend.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 01:57
Yeah, first of all, thanks for inviting me and for the warm welcome. I feel like you guys are probably a pretty fun group people to hang out with. You probably heard we have this new documentary coming out at the end of next week. I feel like a little bit of a poser being with actual Hollywood people. My brother is inviting a bunch of people to the local theater in his area to see what he calls my Nerdorama. It’s not your usual Hollywood film. Anyway, the DNA thing has fascinated me for a long time. The place to start is maybe where

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 02:32
we where we all might have encountered something about DNA. Like in high school biology, you learn the story of James Watson from the United States going over to England and working with Francis Crick. And in 19 by the early 1950s, the scientists are convinced that this big molecule called DNA has something to do with the transmission of hereditary information or hereditary traits. So we think of you know, we all we now say it’s in my it’s in my DNA. I got this from my parents from their DNA. Um so we we talk about DNA a lot, but the thing that is sometimes overlooked in all that is exactly what makes DNA so special, which is that it’s got a beautiful helical structure and it’s a double helix. So the two things wind on each other at the two sides. But along the interior of the molecule, there are four chemical subunits that function like alphabetic characters or digital characters, like the zeros and ones in a section of machine code. And interestingly, this was not immediately obvious uh to Watson and Crick. They thought it had, when they discovered it, that thought it had something to do with the transmission of hereditary information. But five years later, Francis Crick, who had been a codebreaker in World War II, suddenly has an epiphany, an aha moment. He realizes those four, the those four chemical subunits, which we now label with the letters A, T, G, and C, are indeed functioning like alphabetic letters in a in a book, or uh like the zeros and ones in a section of software. And one of the great physicists at the time was a man named George Gamow, and he started analyzing the DNA, and he realized, oh, these, the, these subunits, these they’re called bases or nucleotide bases. He said they’re you they can be represented as a digital bit string. This is this is this is information. That’s what’s inside the molecule, it’s code. And Bill Gates, our our um software mogul up in Seattle, says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we’ve ever created. And Richard Dawkins, who’s a staunch scientific atheist, in a more candid moment has acknowledged that uh the DNA is like machine code. Um, it’s uncannily computer-like, he says. Well, we know that computer code or software comes from programs. And we know that information in whatever form we find it, whether it’s text in a book or a hieroglyphic inscription, or the information that we transmit over um the internet or through the radio waves, that information always, if you trace it back to its ultimate source, it always comes to a mind, not an undirected material process. So the discovery of information in a digital or alphabetic form at the foundation of life in every single cell of every single living organism seems to point to the reality of a master programmer for life. And so that’s the argument I’ve developed, not in how long did this take me? Two minutes, 500 pages in my first book signature in the cell. Because I had to address all the other attempts that have been made to explain the origin of information, but uh not to, you know, spoiler alert, none of them have worked. And they’ve been there have been multiple attempts in a field known as origin of life research. Because if you want to explain the origin of the very first life, um, even before you get into Darwinian evolution, because Darwin never addressed the question, where did the first living cell come from? And if you there’s a whole field devoted to that called origin of life research. And that field has been in a state of impasse since the mid-1980s. And that’s because people keep trying to explain the origin of code from chemistry, but you don’t get code from chemistry. You get code from a mind, you get code from an intelligence. And that’s the that’s the the core argument of my first book. I bring it back in in the book about the return of the God hypothesis, and it makes a return showing in in act three of our documentary and is the kind of final and culminating argument that we make.

Allen Wolf: 06:39
For people who wouldn’t agree with you that there is a designer and intelligent mind behind it all, what would they say is the answer?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 06:51
Well, this is what how we framed the documentary film is that there’s been two great stories about reality in Western culture going back before Christianity, all the way back to the ancient Greeks. And one of those stories or grand narratives is said that everything that we see is a consequence of pre-existing, very simple matter that has been here forever. It’s eternal and self-existing, and that matter has arranged itself through various natural processes into everything we see today. So the ancient Greeks had a school of thought called atomism that was very materialistic, and that was one of the stories, and it’s been told right up to the present. We have figures like Richard Dawkins or Larry Krauss or the new atheists of the of recent times who have been propagating that interpretation of reality. The other story is the story that it was also represented back to the to the Greeks among Roman philosophers, then and certainly in Christianity and uh and in Judaism as well, the idea that there was a there is a pre-existing mind or creator behind everything. And that that that mind not only created matter and energy in the first place,

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 08:09
so the eternal self-existent thing in this broadly theistic view of things is a personal God or a mind, a creative uh intelligence. Whereas the the the prime reality, the thing that lies behind everything that’s been eternal and self-existent in the materialistic story is matter and energy. So in the in the in the theistic story of everything, you have this pre-existent creator who brings matter into existence and then shapes it at different points along the way to create all the intricate forms of, for example, life or that we see today, but maybe also our solar system setting up the laws of physics to make all this possible. So you’ve got these two competing views of reality. And at the end of the day, they’re the main two views that are out there. There’s a third view that sees uh the uh uh the that affirms that the existence of a God, but a God that’s impersonal and is not actually a mind. That would be the more pantheistic view of things. But in the West, it’s been a contest of ideas between the materialist view and the theistic view. And that’s that’s the great conversation.

Allen Wolf: 09:13
Right. And what would you say to the materialist view uh in terms of why you don’t feel like that’s a viable option?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 09:21
Well, that’s that’s what the film’s about, and that’s what my books have been about. But but there have been three great discoveries that I think have challenged scientific, it’s often called scientific materialism because it arose in the late 19th century as a result of the influence of figures like Charles Darwin or Karl Marx or others who are staunchly materialistic in their worldview and who believe that science supported that view. Okay. The message of the film is that however much that seemed to be the case in the late 19th century, it no longer is the case. And that science, properly understood, is not just consistent with the theistic story, it’s actually pointing to the reality of that story. It’s actually providing evidence for it. And there have been three great discoveries that support this. One that is the discovery that, as best we can tell, the whole of the universe, including matters, energy, and space and time, began a finite time ago. So matter and energy have not been here eternally, therefore, they’re not eternal and self-existent. They instead required an external cause or a creator to bring them into existence. So I like I like to say that uh that before the beginning of the universe, though you really can’t talk that way because time itself comes into existence. Per Einstein’s one of Einstein’s great theories called general relativity,

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 10:38
but we could say more accurately, independent of the origin of the universe, there was no matter to do the causing. We can’t invoke a material cause when it’s matter that is the effect, the thing that comes into existence. So that’s the first big challenge to materialism. The second is that from the very beginning of the universe, the basic parameters of physics are what the physicists say that they describe them as being finely tuned. Um by that they mean that uh take a parameter like the strength of gravitational attraction. All suspended bodies fall, we know. But they could fall more with under a greater force or a lesser force. But instead, the force in play is exactly what it needs to be to allow for very important things to happen, like the formation of carbon, which is necessary to form long chain like molecules, which is necessary for there to be life at all. And it’s not just one parameter that falls within these narrow, highly unlikely ranges. It’s a whole suite of these parameters, the strength of electromagnetism, the strength of the outward pushing force that creates empty space in the universe in uh in contravening gravity. Uh, that’s called the cosmological constant. The masses of the elementary particles, and remember for high school chemistry, the electrons, the neutrons, the protons, and now they’re talking about even smaller things like quarks. The masses of those things, not too heavy, not too light, just right. Everything falls within a narrow range or ranges outside of which not only uh life, but even basic chemistry would be impossible. And so the scientists that first discovered this, one in particular called uh named Sir Fred Hoyle, a British astrophysicist, had been a staunch scientific atheist. And when he discovered, and in fact, he did one of the crucial experiments out here at CalcTe, and when he discovered how finely tuned everything was that made life possible, he shifted his position and later was quite quoted as saying, a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible. I was the way the monkeys make it into these designs sitting at the typewriter. But anyway, about face. He called it the Big Bang in order to cast shade on it, and then it stuck. And uh, but then he later himself changed from being a staunch scientific atheist to affirming some form of intelligent design behind the universe. And then the third one is the third discovery, is the one we’ve already talked a bit about, and that is that inside even the simplest living cell, we have an intricate information storage, transmission, and processing system with systems for processing information that I’ve talked to some of our top computer people at Microsoft, the architect-level programmers. A couple of them are in our film, and they say they recognize as they studied the way the cell stores and then transmits and processes that information, they’re recognizing what they call high-level computer design patterns. And a design pattern is an established way of storing or processing information. So there’s a there’s just as we have a spell check on our computers, there’s automated error correction of the transmission of genetic information inside the cell. We have files within folders, within super folders, within on our computer desktop. There’s a hierarchical filing system for of information inside the cell. So the the computer programmers are recognizing not just that there’s code, there’s sophisticated ways of storing and processing it that is eerily like what we’ve only recently invented. And so one of the scientists I first encountered in discussing the question of the origin of life said at a conference in my hearing, he said, the the system for storing and expressing information that we know of from the computer world has been around for 3.8 billion years since the origin of the first cell. But we weren’t here to design it. So who did? So those are three big discoveries. The universe has a beginning that since the beginning, the universe has been finely tuned or structured against all odds to make life possible. And then in the in within the living cell, within the smallest unit of life, we find an automated digital um storage and expression computing system that also produces, by the way, these intricate little tiny miniature machines, rotary engines, sliding clamps, uh uh turbines, little robotic walking motor proteins that tow vesicles of material along other tracks made of proteins. It’s a completely automated factory that’s going on in the miniaturized recesses of every one of our cells. It’s happening right now. You know, we all our lives, very lives depend on it. So I was in a conversation yesterday yesterday with um uh one of the Uber drivers, and she was there.

Allen Wolf: 16:02
She didn’t know what she was getting.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 16:06
She says, What are you doing here? Because I just come in from Texas and interviews there, and she said, Well, I’m here promoting a film. She perks right up, she thinks it’s going to be something fun or interesting. You all do. She said, Oh, she said, Well, just so you know, she said, I’m on the atheist side of the discussion. I said, Wonderful. So at the end of the day, a lot of her atheism had to do with having been abandoned by her father. Very sad story. We talked, I thought it was amazing what people will tell you in an Uber car when they when they know they’re not gonna have to see you again. She said, um, you know, the thing that’s the main reason I have her resisting coming back to the religion I was raised with is not actually my father. I know that everybody’s fallible. It’s that I can’t see God. And I I just took up my visual aid of choice and I said, Well, you know what? We can’t explain the origin of this device. We use them all the time. These store information, they

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 17:10
process information, but we can’t explain the origin of the device apart from something we can’t see, which is the mind of Steve Jobs. We we make inferences all the time from things we can see to things we can’t see. And uh we uh infer the cause from the effect based on the nature of the effect. And the name the effect in question in life is the information that makes life possible. Just like in our world, you can’t uh if you want to give your computer a new function or a new program, you have to give it new code. You want to build life in the first place or a new form of life from a pre-existing form of life, some there has to be new information added. And yet we know that information is again always a mind product. So I think we’re dealing with a mind over matter reality. The second story is the story of the primacy of mind or intelligence or creative intelligence over mere matter. Matter is shaped by mind, but matter is not the whole story.

Allen Wolf: 18:04
It’s very interesting. The one scientist that you said who was confronted by this evidence and then had a shift of position. What do you think other scientists who are confronted with the same evidence and don’t make that shift, what do you think is kind of keeping them from changing their own?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 18:20
Well, interestingly, they often tell us. And there is a convention that arose in late 19th century science that didn’t exist before, not at the time of Newton or Boyle or Galileo or Kepler. In other words, the early founders of modern science that when uh when historians of science talk about the origin of science, they talk about a period called the scientific revolution. And those scientists were uh almost to a person uh devotedly religious. And they they were studying nature for religious reasons. They believed that that um that our minds had been made in the image of the same rational creator who made nature to express his divine rationality. So, and that made it possible to know the external world. Because our minds were made in the image of the same rational creator that made us, we can know the rationality and the design and the order he built into the world. And so there was not only a confidence that you could do science, there was also a motivation that was religious, and that is that they wanted to

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 19:23
give glory to the creator by studying his works. Um, there’s a book that I appreciate very much uh because it was written by someone that went to my same Cambridge College. His name was John Ray, the founder of botany and of and the classification scheme in biology. And he wrote a book called The Wisdom of God Manifested in the works of creation. So that was kind of the framing, the perspective of the first scientist. We lost that in the 19th century, and the argument of the film and my books is that that’s coming back because of the discoveries of modern science. But what many scientists will tell scientists who reject our arguments will say, they’ll often say something like, Well, that’s all well and good, but that’s not that’s not it’s not scientific to talk about a creative intelligence. Um, and it was scientific, considered scientific in the time of Newton. Um, for at the end of the his great masterpiece on universal gravitation called the Principia, he added an epilogue. And in the epilogue, he talked about the delicate balance of all the planets in the solar system. The astronauts were just talking about this, how they were having this epiphany in space. And Newton had the same the same feeling about it. He said, This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being, capital B. So he made a design argument right in the context of his scientific work. Now, after the late 19th century, that was kind of verbotent, couldn’t do it anymore. And in fact, when Darwin, when confronted with a competing explanation for the origin of new forms of life, based on the concept of intelligent design, simply ruled it out of course. He said, Well, that what may well be, but he said that exact quote was, but that’s not a scientific explanation. So science became equated with the idea that you must explain everything by purely undirected material processes. And so a lot of the people who have who first challenged uh my work as I was articulating the case for intelligent design came back and their argument was, well, but that’s not scientific. But notice that that’s not really an argument that you haven’t explained the evidence well. That’s a definitional question. That’s saying, well, to be scientific, you must explain in this way only, and you can’t invoke something else to invoke uh invoke a creative mind to explain things. But we know from our ordinary experience in all of life, there are many things that you can only explain by reference to the activity of creative intelligence. No one would uh would attribute an Academy Award-winning film to the movement of atoms on the on the There’s there’s something else. Richard Dawkins does not attribute his best-selling book to undirected material processes or or or the synapses and his brain firing at random. Rather, his creative intelligence and genius is the reason for his success. So we know that minds do things that matter doesn’t do. And we also know how to recognize the distinctive effects of minds. You walk into the British Museum, you look at the Rosetta Stone, it’s got those inscriptions in three different uh scripts, two Egyptian and one Greek. And when they cracked that, they realized this was not produced by wind and erosion. This was produced by an intelligent scribe. So what we’re trying to do, in addition to making a compelling argument for intelligent design, uh, and even God as the designer is to challenge that convention, that rule of science that says, hey, scientists, if you want to be a scientist, you can’t consider anything but undirected material processes. We think that’s intellectually limiting. There are many things that can be explained by undirected material processes, but you want to have a you want to have a bigger toolkit, an explanatory toolkit so that you can follow the evidence wherever it leads, whether it is to a materialistic process, one story of reality, or to to the reality of a creative intelligence.

Allen Wolf: 23:19
Okay. And how do you go from believing there’s a grand designer specifically to Jesus?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 23:28
Well, uh, it’s interesting that in the Bible itself, there are passages that affirm that from the natural world we can know the reality of a creator. Uh, the famous passage in the Hebrew Bible in Psalm 19 is the heavens declare the glory of God. That’s the one the astronauts have been talking about, by the way. Um Jared Isaacman, the now administrator of uh NASA, said that when he was in space, the um he said his time in space convinced him of, quote, the heavens declare the glory of God. Right. In the Christian New Testament, you have the same idea repeated in in from St. Paul. He says that that um uh from the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So if you examine what’s been made or what’s been created, you can infer the existence of God and his power. And one of his most important qualities reaffirmed over and over again in scripture is that is the idea of his wisdom. One of the psalms says, In wisdom thou hast created all things.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 24:38
So that, but that’s as far as you can take it. And the Bible itself places a limit on what’s called natural theology, on how much we can know about God from nature. And so theologians have typically said that to learn to get uh uh to get the whole picture, to learn about the importance of Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God, you need what’s called special revelation. Now, I think that in addition to the evidence that we have for the reality of God from general revelation, there are many strong evidential reasons to believe in the reliability of the Bible, which attests to Jesus Christ. For just one example. It turns out that uh the trial of Jesus and the whole event of his crucifixion and then later reports of his resurrection is one of the best attested events in all of ancient history. There are seven figures in the trial of Jesus that have been in the last 60 years attested or corroborated by inscriptional findings in ancient Judea, including Pilate, who was the Roman governor who oversaw the trial from the Roman side, um, Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, who oversaw the trial from the Jewish uh side, the side of the Jewish high priest, his father-in-law Annas, who was at the trial, Peter, who betrayed Jesus during the trial, um, Jesus himself, both where we have extensive extra-biblical evidence of his existence, of his teaching, of even of the uh the accounts of the miracles that he performed. And um, and even very, very uh Herod Antipas, the vassal king who was under the Romans in Judea in the first century, and even a very obscure figure, Simon Cyrene, who was the one who carried Jesus’ cross, has been very recently attested on uh on in an inscription, I think on a what’s called an ossu area. These are little bone boxes that was a uh that was a Jewish practice during the time of reburying people, and then and then you would write the name on the box, often ornately decorated. So, in addition to all of that, uh the archaeologist that we work with at Discovery Institute named Titus Kennedy worked under a Jewish, um an Israeli archaeologist named Shimon Gibson, and Shimon has discovered the site of the first century Roman Praetorium where the trial was held, including what’s called the Bhima seat. This was uh a judgment seat in the Roman Empire where trials would be conducted. So the very place where Pilate and Jesus stood eyeball to eyeball has been discovered. This is stunning. You know, for an event in the remote province of the Roman Empire at the time to have that much external corroboration. And so that there’s a whole lot more than I could say about the reliability of the Bible, but there’s certainly enough just even in that to say if you’ve heard these things, oh, well, how do we know that Jesus even existed? Blah, blah, blah. There’s reason to take another look at all that.

Allen Wolf: 27:40
Have you gotten a lot of pushback? Because it’s one thing to say, okay, I believe there’s a God behind all this, and another thing to say, it’s Jesus, it’s not Islam, it’s not Buddhism, it’s not New Ageism.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 27:52
I mean, it’s that well, the the the case I’m making publicly in my scientific work is about first the the um evidence for the reality of a designing intelligence of some it was initially in my first books, it was of some unspecified kind. Because from biology alone, um the designing intelligence might have might have been transcendent beyond the universe, or or it might have been an intelligence interior, uh internal to the universe. Um maybe a space alien or something. And there have been two prominent scientists that have actually floated that. One was Francis Crick himself, and the other was Richard Dawkins in a film he did uh where he was interviewed by Ben Stein. I think he later came to regret that. The idea is that with the evidence we have of biological design does not go back to the very beginning of the universe. It comes into our fossil record at a certain point in the finite past. So it’s at least logically possible that there was some uh creative intelligence within the cosmos that was responsible for the creation of life on planet Earth. You can’t say that when you’re talking about the fine-tuning of the entire universe or the origin of the universe itself. So, in my third book, after having been asked by many impatient readers, well, who do you think the designing intelligence is? I finally, you know, fessed up and said, I’m a theist. I believe it’s God, and I think there’s good reasons for that. Because if you posit a transcendent intelligence, you can explain not only the origin of the information necessary to build life somewhere down the timeline, but you can explain the origin of the universe as a whole and the fine-tuning of the universe from the very beginning. No space alien could be responsible for the fine-tuning that allegedly made its own existence possible, or still less for the origin of the universe itself. So um, so I my public work is about the case for God and sort of leaving it there. I have been a college professor and I teach a um a course, I’ll be teaching a course this summer called From Cosmos to Christ, which addresses not just one question, does God exist, but two questions beyond that. Is the Bible reliable? And then who is Jesus Christ? And I think there are compelling reasons to affirm the biblical answer to the third question that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, he is a resurrected uh divine person. And uh, but the the the those there the there’s you have to go deeper into the investigation to that to get that point. There’s lots of evidence for the historical reliability of the Bible, therefore, a good reason to consider its claims about Christ. But when you begin to, when you dig into it, um, I think there’s also reasons to consider Christ’s divinity and his his office as the Messiah of Israel as well. So we could talk, I’m happy to talk about all of that, especially in this kind of a setting. So, but I I don’t claim that from the work I’ve done on DNA or or cosmology, you could get to the the the Christian, uh you could justify the Christian claims about Jesus. That takes a different type of uh apologia or set of arguments. Does it go from scientific to historical? Scientific to historical, and then with the with the biblical text itself, there’s something really um very eerie about it. I think it’s it’s self-validating as to the reality of the miraculous. Um there’s a there’s a thing that a lot a lot of what I call Christian apologists, people that make arguments for the for the Christian faith have pointed out is that there are many passages in the Hebrew Bible that describe a coming messianic figure that are functioning, that they are either explicitly predictive or they kind of function as predictive prophecy. And lo and behold, Jesus of Nazareth matches his life, his teachings, the way he died, his suffering, matches many of these explicit predictions. But in addition to that, this is something that you don’t find in most Christian apologetic works. The the there are aspects of Jesus’ life and the way that was recorded in the Gospels that unlock hidden or cryptic meaning in the Old Testament. For example, there’s the whole story of Abraham who is being asked by God, possibly to sacrifice his own son Isaac. He gets up to the top

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 32:21
of Mount Moriah. He’s about to do it because he’s been commanded by God, he’s heard the voice, and it’s agonizing. He raises the knife, and it says, the messenger of Yahweh intervenes and says, Now I know you love me, Abraham, for you did not kill your son, your only son. Now, for 2,000 years, the rabbis are scratching their heads trying to make sense of this. How is Yahweh, who hates child sacrifice, who condemns it in the in the in the in the strongest possible terms throughout the whole of the Hebrew Bible, how could he have pushed Abraham to the brink to get that close? Yes, he stopped him, but what’s going on there? And then you realize when you read the New Testament that either on that same mountain or very near in Jerusalem, the God of the Bible sacrifices his own son. And that that passage then is a kind of divine double entendre that’s been hanging for 2,000 years, waiting for its resolution. And there’s all kinds of these connections between the Old and the New Testament. Jordan Peterson, who’s been on this very public um investigation and search into deep spiritual questions, has a little um a little uh PowerPoint slide that he’s put up in one of his presentations about the Bible as the first hyperlinked document. Jesus on the cross, he says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Wait a minute, he’s the son of God, how can he be forsaken? What is he saying? People scratching their heads, and then you realize you go back to Psalm 22, and that’s the first words of the psalm. And then you read Psalm 22, and it’s written a thousand years ago before Jesus is on the cross, but it reads like a first-person description of someone experiencing crucifixion. They pierced my hands and my feet. So there’s this weird sense of this integrated design, there’s this coherent message from Genesis to Revelation in the Bible, and yet it’s written by 40 different human authors with 66 different books. No one of no one of which authors could have been the source of that overarching coherency or these hidden or cryptic connections. And it looks like the Bible as a whole was designed, but not by a human author. And so that’s where I leave it with my students. When I began to realize that I couldn’t read the scriptural text in the same way anymore. There’s that somebody recently sent me a little thing from Joe Rogan. You know, now when I get introduced, no one cares that I wrote three books. Thank you for mentioning them. He was on the Joe Rogan platform. The most important cultural credential you could now have. Somebody sent me something from Rogan, and one of his guests was was sort of uh um being rather snied about Christianity. And Rogan says in his inimitable way, he says, No, no, no, no, you’ve got to look at these Christian scriptures. He said, This is some pretty heavy, and he doesn’t say stuff, you know, okay. And then and then he says, and these Christian people, you know, he said, they’re some of the nicest effing people you’d ever want to know. He drops the full F-b bomb in the hands of Christianity. So so I had I got to that point after a long period of of uh metaphysical anxiety and and angst of realizing the Bible was not an ordinary document. There’s something about it that bore the fingerprints of the divine. And once you start to see that, you can’t unsee it. It’s like a gestalt, it’s like a a ha. So there is a what there is a rational path to to Christian faith. There’s also an experiential one. The two often go hand in hand for for people who have been uh you know trying to follow Jesus over a long period of time. My little sister was not a tortured intellectual, and when my other sister told her the gospel, she broke into tears and said, I always knew something like that had to be true. But she had been reading Lewis and Tolkien. When for me, it was an eight-year tor, it was a tortuous process of overthinking and and panic attacks and the whole thing, you don’t even want to know. It was awful. But I finally settled. And and part of it was realizing exactly what I had in my hands when I opened the Bible.

Allen Wolf: 36:46
Was there, as you went through that torturous experience, was there a moment that it clicked for you?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 36:52
There was there was a series of clicks and then counterclicks, you know, and just of perhaps overthinking everything. But yeah, but it was it was uh kind of the year after I got out of college and and uh and I left the gloomy weather of the Northwest. Maybe that was part of it. I was in Texas for my first job, and all these can-do people that were starting businesses that believe that you know good things could happen for all my college friends and I were wallowing and reading Nietzsche and Sartre. Uh yeah, so yeah, there were there were points. There was a point by the time I was in the middle of college where I was convinced that Christianity was true, but I I was still didn’t want it to be true. So I had some soul searching to do. And why do you think you didn’t want it to be true? Uh it was the issue of the will. You know, I was reading Nietzsche, and and he’s shaking his fist at God, and I can remember the page, and it’s page 364 in the Kaufman-Nietzsche reader. And he’s he is are he’s the atheist arguing with the the God behind clouds. And his essential objection is is he’s realized because he’s miserable, and he realizes that a condition of his own happiness is accepting God’s,

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 38:03
he he would portray it as domination in his life. I think uh I came to see it differently eventually, but you know, my question was why should he rule and I serve? Why is a condition of my happiness, of my flourishing, the acceptance of the authority of the one who made me? And I finally came to an answer on that, but it took a while.

Allen Wolf: 38:24
So yeah. After you made that decision, did you find that some of those things changed in your life in terms of you said you were very kind of miserable?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 38:32
Everything changed. I I haven’t been depressed since then. And that’s really weird because I was spent most of my young life either depressed or anxious.

Allen Wolf: 38:40
So um and why do you think that is?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 38:44
Um, I think it’s because a lot of the well, I started with a lot of questions that were I didn’t realize were philosophical. And so I thought something was wrong with me. I was asking at 14, you know, my mom wants me to make the bed every morning. Then I get on the bus and I go to school, and then I come home and I do homework, and then I do it all over again the next day. And I had broken my leg and I was in the hospital. My dad gave me a book about the history of baseball. I was aspiring to be the shortstop for the New York Yankees, not realizing that skinny guys like me were never going to make it. But um, I was reading the history of of the of the uh the all the greats of the game, and the stories all started and ended the same way. Very talented young player, gets scouted by the major league scouts, he comes up to the major leagues, he breaks in, he gets rookie of the year, then he has this amazing career, he amasses all these records, and at 36 or 38, he retires. And then maybe he’s an announcer, maybe he enjoys his celebrity for a while longer, but eventually he dies. And then what is the measure of his life? It’s a bunch of numbers written on a piece of paper. Remember going to the Louvre and seeing the records of the Olympiads and then the records of the of those athletes. We don’t even know who they’re, you know, all that’s lost. And so I had this sinking feeling that the thing I wanted to accomplish most would not have any lasting meaning or significance. So I talked to my mother about it, who hated sports, and she said, Well, that’s because you’re aspiring to chase a ball around grown men should not be chasing balls around. You know, that was her take up. Well, what if I’m a surgeon? I’ve saved lives, yes, and you know, I’ll die and I’ll there will be people that will then they’ll die. And then what and and eventually no graves go unvisited. And then I had other weird things about time and about whether I was really seeing what was real and whether my mind was reliable. And I learned later that all these were things that philosophers talk about. But for me, I one day I had a panic attack, and I thought this must be what it means to be insane. And I really felt this surge, I didn’t know what it was, and then I got to then I got to where I was afraid of the questions that I was asking because they created this panic, and then I was afraid of the panic that was about the questions, and I had a fear of the fear of the fear, and I was just an absolute mess. And so my encounter with the the Bible, which I started reading a year or two later, was didn’t produce this sort of euphoric conversion experience that many of my friends in high school were having. Rather, it was addressing questions that had been bothering me at a kind of metaphysical philosophical level. Um, was there in college I came across uh Sean-Paul Sartre without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. And I ran up to the front of the class to that’s what had been bothering me. I said to my philosophy professor who knew a bit of my journey. And he said, I I wasn’t a I wasn’t insane, I was I was a philosopher. In any case, the biblical answer to the the the answers that were implicit in the biblical worldview were addressing these these questions I was having, and it was and were starting to make me feel normal for the first time in my life. And um, so um that was a that was a key part of it. And then and then eventually I settled. Sorry, it’s gone so long as a ridiculous.

Allen Wolf: 42:23
No, no, no, not at all. So much of your work depends on sustained attention and careful thinking. And we’re living through a period in our history uh of we’re having a brain rot moment where uh studies suggest our critical thinking as a culture is dulling because of what we’re exposing ourselves to daily. Are you seeing that and how people engage with your arguments? What were you saying? Let me say you a TikTok.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 42:58
Of course, that’s a that’s a problem. But you know what? I think my experience with students, at least, is that that that diagnosis, yeah, I think it’s uh obviously true that tech is affecting all of us, but I have always felt it was okay to try to have sustained discourse and to and to make an argument or tell a story over if you engage people’s interest, they’ll stay with you over a longer period of time. And so we’re kind of counting on that in a in a 95-minute documentary. But I was on an interview yesterday with uh one of the DC talk show hosts, and he wanted to know how long is the documentary. I said, It’s 95 minutes. He said, Good. I thought you were gonna say, Oh, we had so much information, we had to go, you know, two hours and thirty. So, yeah, we’re we’re mindful

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 43:42
of that. And it’s it’s gonna be a stretch for some people. But we’ve got the other thing is, you know, when you first asked me the DNA argument, I’ve got a way of explaining that in 30 seconds when you hear the bumper music come up on the, you know, and the it’s just that’s signaling you to to bring it to a close. Talking about what Bill Gates. Says about DNA and what we know about where software comes from. So there’s ways of getting these arguments across very succinctly. And uh and so I kind of believe in a sort of multi-layer communication strategy from the 30-second soundbite to the hour and a half documentary to the alas, the 500-page book for the scientific.

Allen Wolf: 44:19
So how do you protect your own critical thinking?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 44:24
Uh there’s a there’s a proverb. It says iron sharpens iron, right? So I’m I really believe in uh in uh constructive critique and criticism. Um I’ve got just for two chapters in the book uh in Return to the God hypothesis, I did some retooling in physics. I was a physics major in college, and I had a little team that went over absolutely everything that I that I would, including a for a world-class mathematical physicist at Tulane University, named Frank Tipler, who go to pick up my daughter from school where she she was at Tulane, and I go visit him, and he’d rederived the Schrdinger equation for me to make sure that I was getting the math right when I was critiquing this particular. So I think that that the the key is to is to open yourself up to to critique and and to dialogue with people on the other side. You know, here the best arguments. Uh you need to know the best arguments. Uh philosophical training, I think, is very helpful for that because we learn no straw men. I it’s the Bob Dylan principle. You can’t criticize what you don’t understand.

Allen Wolf: 45:31
That’s great. You’ve mentioned your documentary coming out. It’s called The Story of Everything. Right.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 45:39
It’s uh releasing in theaters April 30th. We have a guaranteed seven-night opening. We’ve just uh uh crossed over 500 screens and we’ve we’re uh guaranteed up to a thousand. And as we get more and more pre-sales, we’re boosting screens every day. So you guys have probably been through this. I’m writing a huge learning curve on the promotional business side of this. That’s crazy. They should never let philosophers of science. Uh so it comes out the 30th, seven ninths. We’re we’re we got really good numbers yesterday, so we’re hopeful of a second week. Some of the biggest media opportunities I’m getting are for the second would be in fall in the second week. And people can, if you go on um the story of everything. You can get tickets there. There’s screen, uh there’s uh sorry, uh trailers and and little promotional pieces and reviews. I was I think I was telling you at the beginning, we’re very pleased that we’ve had uh we may be the only film ever to have had a positive review in the Wall Street Journal on their editorial page, which is notoriously conservative, and a very uh an equally positive review in the Hollywood Progressive. So we understand the ideological divide in

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 46:49
the country nicely. So that’s very fun.

Allen Wolf: 46:52
So we’re talking at a studio lot that helps shape what millions of people watch and feel. If Hollywood wanted to tell the story of design and the God hypothesis, well, what would you want them to get right?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 47:05
Well, of course, we want to get the science right and what the science implies, but you’re I have just immense respect for creatives who are thinking, I think somewhat didactically and philosophically and scientifically. I got to work with a really great creative team who were thinking in ways that I don’t usually think. So we ended up with we uh one of the things about the film is that they completely issued the standard. I’m a narrator or I’m a I’m a I’m a uh I’m a host and I’m gonna take you on a journey motif, which has been so overused with documentaries. They also decided, let’s not do a narrator, let’s do um, let’s let the scientists tell the story, but we won’t let them talk very long each. They intercut the the testimony of the different scientists and scholars and built a great dramatic tension around the storytelling. So this was a device I hadn’t even considered. So the kind of creative stuff that you all do, uh you know, these themes are out there to be explored.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 48:10
These are the biggest questions that everybody has, but they can be they’ve been explored in literature, you know, the the uh Russian literature in particular, with figures like Dostoevsky and uh Tolstoy, uh the British writers, you know, these these deep questions will come into will arise in the context of stories that may be about something else. Um and so I would just affirm all of you and what what Hollywood does better than any anybody else in the world, which is tell stories and and be mindful that people are aware of these deep questions. They’re part of what make make characters interesting, the way they interact with them. And so that’s you know, beyond that, my college roommate said my problem was I didn’t read books because I was doing physics and philosophy. There are equations and syllogisms. He was English in history, you know. So I I can’t give too much advice, but just affirm the interest, you know, that and there have been some some uh some some novels and short stories, and we have a on my website, we have a a playlist for uh intelligent design in song and verse. We’ve got a couple of different rap artists, so one has even figured out how to rhyme with specified complexity, which is the term we use to describe the information in the cell. Um and we’ve got some slam poets, and you know, so you know, there’s a lot of ways to convey truth, right? And you guys know a lot more about that than than we do. We’re pretty one-dimensional in the in the philosophy world.

Allen Wolf: 49:42
So well, in our last few minutes, I want to open it up to questions from the floor. And then if you’re watching online, you’re welcome to text or quite a bit of the QA. It’s a QA. So ask questions, and then we can answer your question. Yeah, right at the end of the paper.

Participant 1: 49:58
So um Higgs boson theory, how does that relate to what you’re studying? Sorry, the Higgs boson. Higgs bosons.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 50:07
Oh, Higgs and bosons, yes. Uh if you can repeat the question, she asked, how does the Higgs boson boson theory uh relate to everything I’m saying? Um there’s a a theory, uh, another theory of everything called string theory, which purports to be an account of matter, the everything we know about the material universe, the fundamental theory of matter and energy. And a prediction of that theory is that for every particle, there should be a corresponding antiparticle. And so the Higgs boson is one of those things that people have been looking for, and you but to detect it, you need something called a super conducting supercollider. And there’s one of those in in Europe, in in Switzerland, underground. And alas, every attempt to detect the antiparticles

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 50:59
that you would expect on string theory have so far failed. And so for that and many other reasons, a lot of physicists are now doubting that string theory is really our best fundamental theory of reality. But um, that’s a great question. I discussed the string theory in my book, the in a in a particular context, because it’s one of the attempts that have been made to um explain why we have all these exquisitely finely tuned physical parameters. Uh, and it’s part of it has been incorporated into something called the multiverse hypothesis, which has made its way into Hollywood. And uh and the the the critique that I make of the multiverse, in addition to destroying all good storytelling, because if there’s a multiverse, then every every story can end every possible way, and uh it’s it’s it’s actually it’s creatively kind of a mess. Um, but um uh the the more fundamental thing in physics is that to explain the origin of the fine-tuning, people have invoked the all these other universes, a gabillion other universes, so that that yes, what they can say, our universe, the parameters needed for life are very improbable in our universe, but given the number of other possible universes, the the right set of parameters would have had to have arisen someplace. The problem with that is that if the other universes are just out there being disconnected from our own, they don’t have any effect on our universe and they wouldn’t have any effect on the processes that are responsible for the improbability of the fine-tuning in this universe. So, in virtue of that, physicists have proposed that there is a kind of underlying common cause of all the universes, some sort of universe-generating mechanism so that they can portray all the universes that they’re proposing as a kind of process of a giant lottery, and that we just happen to be the lucky winner of the lottery. But then here’s the final rub, and that is that uh they proposed physicists have proposed two different uh underlying universe generating mechanisms, one based on string theory and one based on something called uh inflationary cosmology. And in both cases, what they found is that for those processes or mechanisms to produce other universes, they themselves would have to be finely tuned. And so you’re right back to where you started. Even if the multiverse is true, you need fine tuning, which points to a fine tuner.

Participant 1: 53:24
Thank you.

Allen Wolf: 53:25
Okay, great.

Participant 2: 53:27
It’s two part one is what is a question that has stumped you lately that someone either asked you or that you’ve asked yourself, and you’re like, okay, we’re gonna have to write another book about this. Two, um, besides your own movie, uh documentary. Um, what is a movie that you love to speak about that either kind of has inklings of your work or you know, we’re we make movies here, so yeah, the new Ryan Gosling film project Hail Mary is uh apparently um I’ve seen some of the extended trailers and stuff.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 54:01
My daughter went and saw it. We’re getting in the theaters where our film is going to be, our distributor arranged for us to be one of the the uh coming attractions. So a lot of people are already seeing us on the screen, but there’s some there’s some thematic connections there. One of the characters asks, you know, is uh uh is asked about whether or not she believes in God, and she says, No, I do believe in God, you know. And and uh, but of course, it’s so so I think that’s a that’s a film, a current film that’s got a lot of a lot of things to commend it. And uh um but um uh there’s a lot of films I like, so I I think great storytelling is my favorite film of all time is actually still Terry’s a Fire. Oh, studying in St. Andrews, you know, it was the best Christian film ever made, and it was made by non-Christian

Dr. Stephen Meyer: 54:46
filmmakers and non-Christian actors. So I on this interview I did yesterday, particularly the interviewer said, you know, we’ve we’re getting we’re reading the reviews, and a lot of people are saying, you know, this is a film that you can take if if you’re if you’re religious, if you’re a God believer, you can take not you can take skeptical friends too, and you won’t be you won’t you won’t be uh embarrassed. And I said, Yeah, that it does not have the cringe factor that we have with a lot of uh faith-based film filmmaking. And he said, I’m so glad you said said that because that is a real thing.

Allen Wolf: 55:16
Well, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for listening. If you’d like to learn more about Navigating Hollywood, check us out at navigatinghollywood.org. Looking forward to seeing you next time.