Stephen Meyer: Return of the God Hypothesis

Stephen Meyer received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science. He directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He's authored a number of major works, and the latest is sort of the culmination of his work on God as a man of science. And that is The Return of the God Hypothesis: 3 Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. Stephen Meyer, it is a joy to have you on.

It's always a joy to speak with you, Dennis. Thank you for having me on.

You're so lucky to live in Seattle, uh, just surrounded by kindred spirits.

Well, I'm actually in Redmond. I was telling your caller, or your operator, that I'm surrounded by techies with Microsoft, so we're in a place where people do appreciate the importance of digital information, which is of course what we're also finding at the foundation of life in every living cell.

Right, well, that was a gentle way of responding. I was being sarcastic. Seattle, like Portland and some other places, doesn't have a reputation for openness.

Maybe not the best place to run a center-right think tank, but you know, we're striving. So that's okay.

We run PragerU in LA. Hey, we're a very similar situation.

Absolutely.

All right, so Stephen Meyer, this is the use of science. Is it fair to say you're using science to argue for God's existence?

I suppose, uh, I think there are scientific discoveries that have implications that support a theistic worldview, is perhaps the way I put it, but that's pretty close.

Yeah.

So would you use the word— I'll tell you in advance, I don't— a big believer in God, and for rational reasons mostly. Not emotional or even theological reasons. But anyway, I've never been comfortable with people who have proofs of God's existence. But if you feel you do—

that's a—

go ahead.

Well, that's a very good place to start the conversation because there's been this kind of false dichotomy in the discussion of the relationship between science and belief in God. On the one hand, there are people These were mainly scholars in the Middle Ages who thought they could prove God with certainty using kind of a deductive, almost mathematical style of proof. It's very difficult to attain that standard of certainty. It's only arguably attained in mathematics. In the absence of that, people went to the opposite extreme, particularly starting in the Enlightenment and right up to the present, saying, well, since there's no proof for God's existence, there can be no rational basis for belief in God's existence, no reason for faith in God. And there's a middle ground in that, and that is that we can often have good reasons for believing things, even beyond reasonable doubt, without being able to attain the standard of proof. And in fact, that is actually the way science itself works. Scientists are reluctant to say they've proven any given theory or conclusion. Rather, they will argue that a given theory provides the best explanation of the evidence at hand, and therefore on that basis looks to be the most likely conclusion among maybe a set of competing possibilities. And it's on that kind of basis that I argue for the existence of God as, again, the best explanation for an ensemble of crucial pieces of evidence. And the ones that I look at in the book are evidences that are relevant to understanding biological and cosmological origins. Where did life come from? Where did the universe come from? If we examine the evidence carefully relevant to that, the God hypothesis stands out clearly as the best explanation against a range of competing metaphysical or worldview hypotheses.

I hope everybody got that. That's exactly right. That's the single most logical conclusion. That is what Stephen Meyer is arguing. He's using science to show it. The statement constantly made— you've debated atheists, I have debated atheists— well, you can't prove— I don't believe in anything you can't prove. Then they believe in nothing. We work on the basis of what is the likelihood. So in light of that, I just want you to hear, Stephen Meyer, I'd just like you to hear the late Charles Krauthammer, who was a secular man, and I had no idea how he would react when I asked him what he thought of atheism. Now listen to this.

Oh, I believe atheism is the least plausible. Of all theologies. I mean, there are a lot of wild ones out there, but the one that is clearly so contrary to what is possible is atheism. I mean, the idea that all this universe— I mean, what is it, always existed? It created itself ex nihilo? I mean, talk about the violation of human rationality. So that, that to me is sort of often Charles.

See, okay, so isn't that interesting that he— that this secular great thinker—

that's an— yeah, that's an interesting clip because I, you know, we of course admired Charles for all his insightful commentary about culture and politics and art and everything else. I knew he was a secular person, defined himself that way. I did not know that he, uh, regarded atheism as, uh, absurd, such, uh, limited explanatory power.

Right.

Yes.

No, I knew you would enjoy that. And I never, whenever he was on, I didn't talk to him politics because I figured people could hear that all the time. So when you have a wonderful thinker, you explore everything. Okay, so the subtitle of your book is, and again, it's up at DennisPrager.com, my friends, Return of the God Hypothesis. It was just published. By the way, will there be an Audible?

Oh yes, there will.

Good, because it's not available now. I just, just, just for the record.

No, but there's a— yeah, we've chosen quite a good narrator. I think it should be quite good.

Good. 3 scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. All right, so let's, let's, let's get them in brief. Number 1.

Uh, the, the first discovery is that the universe, as best we can tell, had a beginning a beginning in time, even a beginning in space. Matter, space, time, and energy began to exist a finite time ago.

This really bugs the atheists in the scientific community, is that correct?

It's been a thorn in the side of the physics, astrophysics, cosmology community since the 1920s when these— the evidences for first an expanding universe and then for a definite beginning to that expanding universe started to come online. There's a great Princeton physicist named Robert Dicke who was looking for something called the cosmic background radiation, and he explained what the rub was. He said that an infinite universe would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past. If, if matter and energy came into existence a finite time ago, the possibility of materialistic explanation vanishes, because before there was matter, there was no matter to cause the origin of matter, so you can't have a materialistic explanation. When physicists proved something called the singularity theorem, it implied that at a finite time in the past, the laws of physics broke down, the curvature of Einstein's spacetime went to an infinite corresponding to zero spatial volume, and before that time, it would therefore be impossible to explain the origin of the universe by reference to any physical processes or laws because physics is what came into existence at that beginning point. So this is, this is in a sense an end to the materialistic scientific investigation.

Great, great, great. We're going to continue. Stephen Meyer