How The Human Genome PROVES Intelligent Design & A Creator | Stephen C. MeyerBN

Stephen C. Meyer joins Kirk Cameron to discuss how scientific research, theories of the unexplainable, and a fine-tuned universe point to the proof of intelligent design, and ultimately, a Creator. Learn about how human DNA reveals the hand of a programmer, and if the discovery of aliens would challenge a biblical worldview. Don’t miss this discussion from Takeaways with Kirk Cameron on TBN!

Learn more in Meyer’s new book, “Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.”

The great Christian apologist, uh, CS Lewis wrote a whole trilogy.
Uh, it was speculating on what things might be light if there was life on other planets, he posited another planet where there was where there were intelligent forms of life who had not rebelled against God, And, um, and so it was a very interesting kind of space, uh, science fiction, uh, series.
I so I don’t think it has a direct effect on the plausibility of of religious belief or Christian belief or biblical belief one way or another.
Intelligent design, um, apologetics, uh, science has always been such a topic of a fascination to me, and I’ve loved watching your debates.
Uh, I was there when you were debating someone named Michael Schirmer I believe he was the editor for skeptic Magazine.
And, uh, boy, you just shined, uh, like the the noonday sun in that debate.
Oh, well, thank you.
I want us to talk today about this new book, uh, that is called the return of the god hypothesis.
It’s actually not brand new. It’s been out for a couple of years, but it’s it’s it’s new to the scientific community to be really seriously considering the god hypothesis.
And your work is specifically in this area, uh, of intelligent design.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, can you just give us a summary? What is intelligent design.
Well, intelligent design is the idea or the theory that there are certain features of life and the universe that are best explained by a designing intelligence rather than by an undirected, unguided mess mechanisms such as for example, natural selection acting on random mutation, or you could say even more succinctly that intelligent design is the idea that you can detect the activity of an intelligence from the features of life in the universe that we see around us.
So is going the route of intelligent design to end up with a god hypothesis, uh, is that really necessary when we have something like the revelation of god in scripture.
Uh, why not just assert that god exists based on the authority of scripture rather than what appears to be backing into that truth by way of evidence.
For a number of reasons, one, we’re a group scientists and that we’re interested in what the science can tell us about the origin of the universe and the origin of life.
So We’re looking at the scientific evidence, and we wanna come up with the best explanation or the best theory about how things came to be.
And when we find things like the digital code that’s stored in the DNA molecule or the tiny miniature nano machines, the rotary engines, and sliding clamps and little turbines and things that we find in cells, we wanna explain where they came from.
And, uh, as we examine what we know about undirected material processes, um undirected chemical interactions.
If we’re talking about the origin of the first life, Turns out that those undirected processes simply don’t have the creative power to generate the types of features that we’re we’re seeing in living organisms.
Bill Gates, for example, has said that that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we’ve ever uh, created.
And we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, that software comes from, um, from a mind, from a programmer.
So the best explanation of what we’re looking at when we see the digital code stored in the DNA, uh, is by using standard methods of scientific reasoning, the activity of a designing intelligence.
And that’s just so we’re just wanting in at that in that in that sense, just to do good science to follow the evidence where it leads in accord with our standard methods of scientific reasoning.
But from a standpoint of Christian faith, um, if you’re wanting to to persuade someone of the existence of god, and they don’t already presume the reliability of the Bible.
You can’t appeal to biblical authority to persuade them.
You have to appeal to them on the basis of something you have in common, uh, common ground premise, and scientific evidence actually provides that.
Many, many people in the culture, except that science is a good way to know things and that there’s the evidence that we’re looking at, whether it’s the digital code and DNA or the mini miniature machines I was talking about, what physicists are talking about when they talk about the fine tuning of the physical parameters of the universe or the discovery that the universe itself has a beginning just as the book of Genesis affirmed, uh, all of those discoveries are, uh, in the realm of science that that pretty much everyone accepts.
And so that provides a common ground for reasoning about how best to explain them.
Well, well, that makes perfect sense. And and what you are explaining here is also affirmed in scripture.
And I think of Romans chapter 1, uh, wherein we we read that what can be known of god is obvious to men through the things that he’s made, and that’s what you’re talking about.
These little nano machines, these little rotary engines, these sliding clamps, uh, how on earth do we explain this?
Other than, uh, uh, a god of of immense power and intelligence and design.
Doctor Meyer, uh, intelligent design challenges, uh, the scientific orthodoxy that has been in place for so long.
How had you found the response then to you asserting this god hypothesis in intelligent design?
Well, um, I might tease those two ideas apart first.
The theory of intelligent design just affirms that there is an intelligence of some kind that best explains certain classes of evidence.
And in my first two books, uh, signature in the cell, and then a second book, Darwin’s doubt, I argued that the evidence that we have from biology in particular about the burst of information that come into our our, uh, planet into our biosphere provide evidence of the activity of a designing agent.
Uh, but many of my readers after writing those first two books wanted to know, well, who do you think the designing intelligence is and can science tell us about that question?
So in the most recent book, return of the god hypothesis, I go beyond just the theory of intelligent design and reason carefully about what, uh, what type of designer would best explain the evidence that we have at hand, and I expand the investigation from looking at just the evidence in biology but also then, uh, I look at evidence from physics and cosmology about the origin of the universe and about what’s called the fine tuning of the physical parameters that have been in place since the very beginning of the universe.
Some scientists had suggested that, yes, there is evidence of design in biology.
Richard Dawkins, even in an interview with Ben Stein in the film back in 2008, uh, allowed is how we might be looking at a signature of intelligence is how we put it when we look at at the question of the origin of life, But then he posited that, well, if there if an intelligence had been involved, it must have evolved from some, uh, through some undirected explicable process on maybe some other planet and then was seeded here on earth.
Uh, and, uh, so that’s sometimes, uh, other scientists, even Francis Crick, propose that at one point.
That’s a hypothesis called panspermia, the space alien designer hypothesis. I’ve never been, uh, persuaded by that.
It just kicks the doesn’t kick the can down the road.
It kicks the, uh, ultimate question of the origin of information out into space.
Um, but, in the new book, I I very carefully examined that hypothesis as well as other design hypotheses, for example, a a deistic design hypothesis or a pantheistic version of of design and show that it’s really classical theism with the idea of a transcendent intelligence that is also active in the creation that can explain the whole range of evidence we have.
Some kind of intelligence is necessary to explain the information in biology but only a an intelligence that is in some way beyond the universe could explain the exquisite design of the universe itself in the fine tuning of its laws and constants and initial conditions, and clearly no space alien within the cosmos could explain the origin of the universe itself, instead that would also require an agent beyond the universe to bring the universe into existence.
If you posit an immaterial agency, uh, with great power separate from the universe, then you’re able to explain how the physical universe of matter, space time, and energy came into existence.
We now have very good evidence that the physical universe did come into existence a finite time ago And that means that before that, there was no matter to do the causing.
So no materialistic explanation is gonna be sufficient for the origin of the material universe.
You need to look for something immaterial It’s nevertheless powerful, and that’s the god hypothesis.
And we need to be thinking in in this way because we get asked questions from critics, like, Well, uh, if you’re saying that everything, uh, has a beginning and an end or if every created thing is created, well, then who created god?
If if god is here, then how what what was his beginning?
And we have to understand that that’s sort of a category mistake. Right? We’re talking about the uncalled cause.
We’re talking about the god that exists outside of the universe, as you’re saying, time and space who can actually create these dimensions in these things?
Well, yeah, it’s a question of what provides adequate ex an an adequate explanation of the evidence that we have at hand.
Every philosophical system, every world you have to propose what philosophers sometimes call the prime reality or a primitive, the thing from which everything else comes, In materialism, it’s matter and energy that are thought to be eternal and self existence and do not require, uh, anything else to create them.
In theism, theists affirm that god is the eternal self existent thing.
So the the question philosophically is which of those two systems of thought is more consistent with the evidence we have now that we have good evidence that the material universe itself had a beginning, uh, finite time ago, We can no longer affirm that matter and energy have existed internally into the past.
They had a beginning point, and that makes, uh, that makes matter and energy, uh, a a poor candidate to be that prime reality, the thing from which everything else comes.
And instead, if you want to provide an adequate for the origin of the material universe, you need to posit something that’s external to that universe.
And for that and other reasons, uh, the god hypothesis provides a better explanation of the evidence that we have.
Of the god hypothesis and other intelligent design books is is so compelling, at least it is to me and to so many others, yet you still have critics What do your critics say about your
design, but rather that the theory is not scientific that it doesn’t qualify as a scientific theory because it posits, for example, an unobservable designing intelligence.
But, um, that’s not really a statement about whether or not the theory is true.
It’s a statement about whether qualifies as a certain kind of inquiry, namely scientific inquiry.
And it turns out that as I’ve developed the case for intelligent design, I’ve used the exact same method of reasoning that Charles Darwin used in the origin of species.
It’s a distinctively historical method where you inferred a a past unobservable state or action in order to explain the evidence that we have at hand.
And, uh, in fact, there are many unobservable entities that are part of Darwin’s theory, unobservable past, uh, alleged transitional intermediate species or forms of life past unobservable mutational events, and many other branches of science also invoke unobservable entities, theoretical physics, for example, invokes the existence of, uh, unobservable elementary particles or fields, uh, but these things are known.
We affirm them uh, because if they exist, they can help us explain things that we can see.
And so, uh, it turns out that if you wanna say intelligent design is unscientific not scientific because it posits a past unobservable entity, you would have to say the same of a lot of other branches of science including evolutionary biology itself.
So there’s a kind of a double standard at work in this objection.
Whatever intelligent design is, if it’s I think it’s a historical scientific theory that has larger metaphysical implications.
I think we can say the exact same thing of Darwinism.
It’s an historical scientific theory that has larger metaphysical implications.
The 2 things aren’t different types of inquiries or different types of things.
They’re 2 different answers to the very same question. How did life arise on planet Earth?
Well, that that makes so much sense.
And and it sounds to me like people who are trying to just find any loophole to get around the answer that seems to be so obvious.
Um, I I think of forensics.
I think of of, uh, basic things that we can’t prove with the historical method because we can’t observe those things today, uh, was, uh, Nero, uh, really in charge of Rome.
Well, we we can’t go back and find that out through the the the scientific method, but we can use other things to demonstrate that that’s the most uh, reasonable explanation for all the evidence that we find.
Yeah. That’s a well chosen phrase because the, uh, the method that is used in the historical science.
This is sometimes called the method of inference to the best explanation.
There are good explanations, historical explanations, and there are bad historical explanations.
And it really depends on their the how well they are able to account for the data that we have, uh, that’s left over from the past.
And Uh, let me give you another example that demonstrates why this objection intelligent design is in science is really, uh, missing the missing the point.
If I walked into the, uh, British Museum or any if your viewers walk in and they they encounter that beautiful display with the Rosetta Stone, um, and asked and and looked at it for a few minutes.
They very quickly realized that they were looking at an artifact that had been produced by an intelligent agent because there before us lies 3 different sets of inscriptions.
Um, and they’re obviously linguistic.
And when the scientists cracked the different codes and understood that they had the same message written in 3 different languages.
They realized that there must have been intelligent scribes behind that artifact.
It wasn’t something that was produced by wind and erosion.
So they but they didn’t violate any laws of reasoning or laws of science to do that.
They were just using good thinking to infer the best explanation.
And when people insist that to be a scientist, you must limit yourself to strictly materialistic explanations Well, there are actually, um, many, many branches of science that already don’t do that because they are encountering evidence that is best explained by the activity of an intelligence.
So we think that the best approach when we’re looking at the origin of life or similar questions is to follow the evidence where it most naturally leads and and posit the explanation that based on our uniform and repeated experience is best capable of explaining the the evidence that we have at hand.
And if you have information, the best explanation is a mind.
Whenever we see information, whether it’s in an in a hieroglyphic inscription, or a paragraph in a book or in a in a section of software, in a computer, or in or if it’s embedded in a radio signal, whenever we see information and trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process.
That’s what we know from our experience And therefore, when we find information embedded in even the simplest living cells in the DNA molecule, the best explanation is, again, the activity of a prior designing intelligence, and we shouldn’t let our definitions of science prevent us from seeing that reality.
Boy, the more that you talk, it becomes clearer and clearer.
Uh, even with a simple example of I look at a painting of the Mona Lisa, what evidence do I have that there was ever a painter?
Well, I would have I would have to have had a lobotomy to think that paintings like that just paint themselves or perhaps I would have an ulterior motive and then go to a real living, breathing human being.
Uh, and and then to say that there wasn’t a designer behind that, is even more preposterous in my estimation.
Well, that’s the thing that’s so magnificent in our modern era.
Our mod in our era, this contemporary period in biology is that isn’t just that we have digital code in cells.
It’s that the digital code stored in the DNA is part of an intricate information storage transmission and processing system, and the processing of that information is is, uh, accomplished by exquisite nano machines And so you have you have got miniature machinery.
You’ve got digital code. You’ve got an information processing system.
There’s a kind of circuitry that’s involved in coordinating the, uh, the the expression of genetic information during animal development of living systems is absolutely mind boggling, but it’s not complexity in the sense of a random array of of of junk.
It’s an integrated and functional complexity that’s absolutely necessary to to sustaining life.
And so there is we’re in a new day in biology.
When Darwin was writing in 1959, one of his contemporaries, Thomas Henry Huxley, described the cell as a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
The idea was it was just a a a bunch of simple jello or goo.
Well, when that’s what we thought life was made of, it was easy to imagine that a few simple chemical reactions could have produced it.
But now when we see that life is complex on the order of a a a factory run by by digital code, like one of our modern, uh, CADCAM systems, and beyond, uh, the the the idea that undirected chemistry could produce the 1st life is implausible in the extreme.
So and instead, what we’re seeing in every re in every realm of biology are hallmarks or distinctive features of life that in all other in all other realms of experience also indicate the activity of a designing intelligence.
When you see circuitry, you know that there was an engineer involved.
When you see when you see machinery, rotary engines, for example, you know, you know, there must have been an engineer you see digital code, you know, there must have been been a programmer.
So the the 19th century view of life, I think, is no longer plausible.
Speaking of Darwin describing the simple cell, I remember seeing in that movie that you were in called the privileged planet uh, David Burlinski was there, and he was asked if if Darwin thought the cell was just a simple cell, and with what we know of the complexity of the cell today, What is the cell in actuality?
And he said a universe.
Yeah. It’s a universe with intricate elements in every way.
I mean, the the this is the other thing we haven’t talked is that the universe itself bears hallmarks of design.
Uh, beginning in the 19 fifties sixties, the physicists began to discover that the fundamental forces of physics, the many of the other fundamental parameters of physics were, uh, exquisitely finely tuned, meaning that if you have, for example, the force of gravity, if it’s a little stronger or a little weaker, um, life in the universe will not be possible.
There’s a whole range of parameters that that fall within very, very narrow tolerances.
And one of the scientists who discovered the first set of these fine tuning parameters was named Fred Hoyer, sir Fred Hoyle, great British astrophysicist.
And he had been a long time scientific atheist, uh, who opposed the discovery of the the beginning of the universe, the big bang idea because he thought it smacked of the Genesis account.
He didn’t like that, but he later himself changed his worldview upon discovering these fine tuning parameters.
And he, at one point, was quoted as saying that the best data we have, meaning about the fine tuning, suggested a super intellect has monkeyed with in chemistry in order to make life possible.
And so we have lots of physicists today talking about our universe as a fortunate universe or a privileged planet or a Goldilocks universe where everything is just right.
The the fundamental, uh, forces of physics are not too strong, not too weak.
The expansion rate of the universe is not too fast, not too slow.
The the masses of the elementary particles are not too heavy, not too light, everything falls in this incredibly improbable sweet spot.
And for many scientists, the best explanation of that seems obvious it’s the idea that the fine tuning points to a fine tuner.
If we were to ever discover that there was extraterrestrial life out there, What would that do to a a a a theistic worldview or a biblical worldview?
Well, I don’t think it would challenge it because I think the Bible example, is, uh, completely silent about the question of whether or not there are, uh, other intelligent forms of life on other planets Uh, it’s just not something it it addresses.
The great Christian apologist, uh, CS Lewis wrote a whole trilogy, uh, it was speculating on what things might be like if there was life on other planets, he posited another planet where there was where there were intelligent forms of life who had not rebelled against god.
And, um, and so it was a very interesting kind of space, uh, science fiction, uh, series.
I so I don’t think it has a direct effect on the plausibility of of religious belief or Christian belief or biblical belief one way or another.
Scientifically, uh, there’s a it’s this is something that’s been debated for quite a long time.
And for a long time, the the default assumption was, well, there are so many other galaxies out there, and therefore, so many other, uh, solar systems that there must be a lot of other planets that have a set of life friendly conditions.
And therefore, there probably is life on other planets, maybe even intelligent life.
But more recently, there’ve been a series of books, including one called rare earth written here in Seattle by 2 professors of a of astronomy at the University of Washington, in another book called Privilege Planet written by colleagues of mine, Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer, Jay Richards, a philosopher, challenging that consensus because they these both these books have said, yes.
There are lots and lots of other potential planets out there potential life supporting planets, but on the other hand, the number of parameters that have to be just right and the odds of getting even one of those parameters, let alone the whole ensemble, to make life possible, is extremely that the number of parameters to get it just right is extremely large.
The probability of getting all those parameters is extremely small, and we have to take that into account when we consider the number of potential planets that might be out there.
So there’s a and that kind of balancing those two factors I think there’s increasing skepticism in the scientific community.
And so I think it’s a completely open question.
It’s not one that I think bears importantly on, um, theistic belief one way or another, but I think there has been a kind of materialistic assumption that because it’s easy to evolve life, then life must life inevitably must exist on any life friendly planet.
Turns out that life friendly planets are hard to find and that the the chemical evolution of life from non life is something that we’ve not been able to demonstrate in any way, shape, or form on this planet.
And so I don’t think it’s such an easy question anymore.
I think it might be that we are on a very privileged planet.
We may be alone in the universe as the only forms of intelligent life, but I may be wrong.
Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, and and you’ve got me thinking, uh, about the the fact that I actually do believe in non human terrestrial intelligent beings.
Uh, I think angels fall into that category.
Well, there you go. If you have a good reason to believe the authority of the Bible, then you would have a good reason to believe that such beings exist.
So so that might be that might be one one, uh, category of such extraterrestrial intelligence that at least biblical Christians might want to affirm.