The Dennis Prager Show LIVE

Dennis Prager interviews Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute about theistic explanations for the universe's origin and fine-tuning. Meyer critiques Lawrence Krauss's "universe from nothing" theory and defends his book Return of the God Hypothesis. The show also features political commentary from Charlie Kirk, J.D. Vance, and Sebastian Gorka on left-wing bias and cultural issues.
Chapters
Judge Thomas, you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
I do.
I was under constant attack. You're not really black because you're not doing what we expect black people to do. This is the wrong black guy. He has to be destroyed.
So you'd still like to serve on the Supreme Court?
I'd rather die than withdraw from the process.
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Man, I miss my father and I want him to be here with me, but he's not.
We all had something in common. A lot of us were miserable. We had no fathers in our lives.
This is how I began the life of crime. I desired to have a father who would tell me that What I did was wrong.
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This is why we're fighting for the soul of America. You should be able to share ideas without fear of being fired from your job or shouted down. You are not to be heard. This is one of the few things we have no precedent for in the United States.
You have the right to remain silent.
Look for Salem now in the App Store or go Hi everybody, Dennis Prager here.
Stephen Meyer, one of my favorite people in the world, or at least in this universe. I don't know if you would be one of my favorites in another universe. I just have to be intellectually honest about that. But in this—
We're having the same conversation in another universe according to the multiverse advocates, Dennis.
Well, not only that, in reverse. I would be the scientist and you'd be the talk show host. Right?
I mean, or any number of variations.
That's exactly right. So Stephen Meyer is a scientist, a philosopher of science at the Great Discovery Institute. 5 of his videos on subjects relating to God and creation design and the like are out today. They're so significant. Here, here is an example of the beginning of one of them, and it addresses truly the reason for our existence, that is PragerU's existence and Discovery Institute, is this story about that Stephen Meyer tells in a video, in one of the 5 videos about Maria. Take it away.
In a recent interview, while I was presenting some scientific discoveries that may point to the existence of God, a camera operator, a young woman whom I'll call Maria, began to weep visibly. Later, she told me the reason for her tears. Like many young people, Maria believed in God when she arrived in college, but while there, she repeatedly encountered professors who insisted that based on the science, God was a myth. No more real than Santa Claus. Maria didn't feel equipped to challenge her professors. She eventually left college with nagging doubts about her faith and wondered whether life, including her own life, might be nothing more than a cosmic accident. Many young people share Maria's doubts. Indeed, powerful voices in the academy tell us that science makes belief in God and human significance untenable. Or as Richard Dawkins, the famed atheist from Oxford, has asserted, the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
All right, let's stop it there. But that's the point. That is the point. I know I'm debating an honest atheist. and I suspect you feel the same if they acknowledge that, okay, so you say there's no God, then we're all cosmic accidents. We're no more significant than a pebble on Neptune. If they acknowledge that, then I know I have an intellectually honest atheist. Is that fair to say?
I think it is fair to say. What I love about that quote from Dawkins is that he lays out the intellectual criteria by which you would decide whether atheistic materialism or theism is more rational. He says, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." And I use— the 5 videos are based on the longer argument I make for God in my new book, Return of the God Hypothesis, and I use that quote from Dawkins repeatedly as a framing device because he's such, in a way, such an honest atheist to say, I think the evidence of the natural world points to blind, pitiless indifference, which is another way of saying atheism or materialism. And that allowed me to say, well, wait a minute, does it really? What are the big discoveries that we've made about the origin of the universe and the origin of life? And I show in each case those discoveries are not at all what you'd expect on the basis of an atheistic or materialistic worldview, but rather they're exactly what you would expect if theism were true. The universe had a beginning. The universe has been fine-tuned from the beginning, and we've got digital code at the foundation of life. Those are 3 big discoveries, all of which are surprising, shocking even, from the standpoint of brute matter in motion or materialism, the dominant philosophy of science espoused by people like Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, and the late Stephen Hawking, now Lawrence Krauss and others. So I appreciate some of those new atheist guys because they frame the issue real clearly and put their belief right on the table and say it's based on science, and that allows us to ask the question, well, is it really?
I am dumbfounded that it is not intellectually obvious, rationally obvious, that it takes a staggering leap of faith to think that everything came from nothing that from rocks we got to life, and that from the amoeba we got to the human. All of that happened on its own according to the atheist. Why isn't that less likely than a designer? That's what I meant earlier, that I don't believe their arguments are, are based in, in reason and science. It's not an impugning of their motives, it's the origins of, of their arguments don't strike me as rational.
Well, I, I of course agree with you about that, Dennis. And when you examine the details of what, uh, what is claimed in support of those propositions— the, for just to take the, the universe began from nothing— there's a popular book by Lawrence Krauss called Universe from Nothing.
I had him on the show.
Turns out that what he means by nothing is not actually nothing. It's a quantum field. But a quantum field is actually a mathematical reality. It's a set of mathematical equations, a set of mathematical concepts that have been imported from a field called quantum physics to try to explain the origin of the universe. But then very quickly you run into a really deep philosophical problem. How can math create matter? How do you get physical stuff out of mathematical equations? Mathematical equations are concepts, and concepts exist only in minds, and the quantum cosmologist whose work Krauss popularizes, has actually reflected on this deeply and said, if we're saying that the universe came out of this pre-existing mathematical realm, are we— and math always comes out of or exists in a mind— are we really saying the universe came out of a mind? So to try to explain the universe from nothing ends up really pointing to the need for the universe to come from a pre-existing mind, and we're right back to Genesis.
Terrific. I had him on the show, and I'll never forget. I mean, it was a very lovely hour. So, uh, I— at one point when I said, wait, you really believe we got a universe from nothing? And he said, well, it depends on what you mean by nothing. And I remember thinking, he's got to be kidding. What does it mean, what do you mean by nothing? No thing. That's what nothing means.
We actually found that transcript of your interview with Lawrence and include it. I opened the chapter on quantum cosmology by quoting your interview with him because at the very end of it you then said, "And that's when I gave up," you said.
I didn't remember that.
Yeah, yeah.
I read your books. I read this latest, The End of the God— what is it, The End of the God Hypothesis?
Return of the God Hypothesis.
Oh yeah, sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah, I rarely Dennis Prager blew that. Yes, the, the Return of the God Hypothesis. That is exactly what you have done, among others, but nobody more, more than you. So there are 5 videos up, folks, just this week at PragerU. Please watch them if you have issues with God, and please show them to your children who are bathing in atheism at the school they attend.
The Democratic Party somehow has convinced black people that they're the good guys, never mind the skanky history of the Democratic Party. That was a party of slavery.
They're racist, racist, racist.
Everything's racist.
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Turning now to the Charlie Kirk Show.
When there is a clash on the left between separate preferred activist groups. Who gets preference? Who wins? Now, on the left, they have a hierarchy, not any different than a hierarchy that you have in any sort of organization. You see, when the left has a moment of disagreement or conflict, it is very important to realize that there is a structure of what matters more than something else. I wrote a piece for humanevents.com where I wrote— it was literally called "This Matters More Than That." Now, a great example of this is when Fauci, the lockdown artist, the anti-freedom activist, mad scientist who is the best example of the technological and scientific elite that the left worships. When he was even confronted by a talk show host where they asked Fauci, they said, so do you think that young people should be should stop hooking up via Tinder and basically having very promiscuous relationships. And Fauci said, well, you have to understand there's some risk to that. He didn't denounce it because he understood that if he dared came out against promiscuous behavior for young people, there'd be a revolution.
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All right, everybody, Dennis Prager here. 5 new videos out this week at PragerU. Very rare. It happens maybe once in 2 years. And Stephen Meyer is the man who has done it. He's a major figure at the Discovery Institute. He's a scientist and a philosopher of science. His degree is from Cambridge, for those of you who want to know the pedigree of his, of his knowledge. And the, the 5 videos are staggering, truly staggering. By the way, you did something, Stephen. I don't know if this— how high this will be on your list of accomplishments. I bet— but it— I hope it's in the top 100. You explained the redshift to me. I just want you to know I had read about it for years, I finally understood it thanks to you.
Well, thank you. Of course, I work real closely with your, your team and your, your producer who also works so intimately on the PragerU videos. Alan Estrin is a fabulous writer, so we really worked hard together on getting those scripts tight and clear so that sometimes very difficult scientific concepts could get across, could be conveyed clearly, and then the animations of course help as well. So it was really fun working with you guys on all this.
Well, it's mutual. You're a real friend of PragerU and a delight when people see you come in. But I just wanted you to know that. Why don't you tell us what the redshift does and why it's so important?
It's a pretty fascinating thing, actually, and that is that one of the key clues as to, that indicates that the universe had a beginning is the signature of the light coming from distant galaxies. Turns out that if an object is moving away from us, then both light and sound are stretched out. And in the case of light, the light with longer wavelengths that's being stretched out is redder light. If you separate light through a prism, you'll have it separate into the colors red and violet.
So if it were moving toward us, it would be violet?
Violet or— it would be violet or bluer.
Right.
So the astronomers talk about redshift and blueshift. So if the— and we know that the The most familiar example of this, and we use this in the video to get across, is the idea that the Doppler shift with sound. If you have the pitch of a train whistle, as it's receding it drops, hmm, goes lower. That's because the sound waves are being stretched out. Well, stretched out light is redder than it would otherwise be, and it gives a spectral signature that astronomers can detect, so they were able to determine that the galaxies in nearly every quadrant of the night sky were moving away from us.
When did they discover the redshift?
When?
Yeah.
Yeah, it was first discovered by an American astronomer named Vesto Slipher before we even knew that the redshift was coming from galaxies. At the time, there were these blotches in the night sky called nebula, which were, they thought, stars with gaseous material around them. And once they got better telescopes in the 1920s— Vesto Slipher was in the 1910s— in the '20s when they got better telescopes, and were able to use some new techniques for measuring distances, they realized that these little nebular structures were actually galaxies in their own right. And so, in addition to our Milky Way, turns out we now think there's probably 200 billion or maybe even 2 trillion galaxies in the visible universe. And as we've surveyed the night sky, we get this consistent signature of an expanding universe because—
So if we knew this so long ago, Steven, Why didn't the argument for the universe having a beginning, why wasn't that made sooner?
Well, it was, but there was a lot of kicking and screaming and kicking against the goads, if you will. Einstein came to the conclusion that the universe must have a beginning early in the 19— well, in the 1910s, soon after he developed his theory of general relativity, but he didn't like the conclusion. Oh, he fiddled with his own equations. General relativity, his theory of gravity, implied a beginning, a dynamic universe.
But he didn't like it.
He didn't like it, so he gerrymandered his own equations.
Oh my God, that's great. That is great.
We tell this story in the second video about the video about the evidence for the universe having a big beginning. He finally came around and acknowledged, to his credit, that his attempt to circumvent the implications of his own theory was the greatest blunder of his life.
That is— that story alone is fascinating. Anyway, anybody with the name Vesto deserves to be immortalized.
I think so. Yeah.
All right, we'll be back in a moment. Stephen Meyer has 5 videos up this week about God and science, design, etc. And my friends, I want to tell you about NervaNew, one of the few sponsors that I asked to advertise because I, like most people, have something that they're born with. Mine, I could live with certainly. It should be the worst thing that ever happens to me. I'm lucky, but it's a pain. Tingling and numbness in my feet. Some have it in their hands. If you have any of that, A lot of people do. I want you to know that after 8 months of taking Nerve Renew, I threw away the inserts in my shoes which were made for me and did help when I wore shoes. Nerve Renew made it possible to throw away the inserts. And I called them up. If you have this tingling or numbness, go to trynerverenew.com. 2 weeks free trial, 1 year Amazing money-back guarantee. Try nerve renew.com.
This is a story of how a million children were placed with local foster families. Parents from all walks of life share their stories of overcoming the one-child policy by taking in orphans. At a time where there's so much negativity and cynicism, here's proof that a single leap of faith can change the world.
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Trending now on America First with Sebastian Burke.
How buoyed are you that Americans are finally waking up, JD?
Look, I'm very excited about what I'm seeing, you know, certainly in Virginia but also in Ohio. It feels like there's a real grassroots movement brewing on the conservative movement right now. And it's, you know, just like in times past, it's not just the politicos. It's not just the establishment folks. Sometimes not even people who are that political, but they're just very fired up about what their kids are teaching. You know, their kids are coming home crying, upset because they're being told that they're a, you know, a bad person depending on the color of their skin. And they're just fed up about it. And I think it may very well take down Terry McAuliffe, but I certainly think it is the beginning of a movement all across this country that's going to take down a lot of Democrats all over the nation.
In the break, we were talking to my team here and somebody said, well, it's neck and neck. And if Glenn loses by 3 points, that's a big, big deal in any other normal election. And here's the reaction I have, JD. There is no such thing as a normal election after 2016. Do we have any faith that there will be a normal election? Talk to us about the recent breaking news about Facebook and the censorship of conservatives. You've written a piece about it. How do we get back to quote-unquote normal, JD?
Oh man, we've got a lot of work to do. Facebook did two things. Basically in the 2020 election, one of which we've known about for a while. They basically censored information that was negative about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. They promoted information that was negative about Donald Trump. And I really believe, uh, that swung the election in a really important way.
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You called your son.
You personally promised him you would be here.
Lucas, I don't know how to help you.
Your daddy loves you.
You gotta know it, pal.
Prayer is a powerful thing, Ethan. It really does work if you believe.
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Statement about Omicron.
If you're among the majority of Americans who are fully vaccinated, and especially if you've gotten the booster shot, that third shot, you're much— you have much, much less reason to worry. You have a high degree of protection against severe illness. Because Omicron spreads so easily, we'll see some fully vaccinated people get COVID, potentially in large numbers. There'll be positive cases in every office, even here in the White House, among the unvaccinated— among the vaccinated, among the vaccinated from Omicron. But these cases are highly unlikely to lead lead to serious illness. Vaccinated people who get COVID may get ill, but they're protected from severe illness and death. That's why you should still remain vigilant. According to our doctors, even if you're fully vaccinated, you should wear a mask when indoors and in public settings. Wearing a mask provides extra protection for you and those around you. And I know some Americans are wondering, If you can safely celebrate the holidays with your family and friends, the answer is yes, you can. If you and those you celebrate with are vaccinated, particularly if you've gotten your booster shot, if you are vaccinated and follow the precautions that we all know well, you should feel comfortable celebrating Christmas and the holidays as you planned it. You know, you've done the right thing. You can enjoy the holiday season. And thanks to the progress on vaccinations this fall, we've gone from nearly 90 million adults in July who had not even started their vaccination process to fewer than 40 million today. Still too many, but down from 90 to 40. All these people who have not been vaccinated, you have an obligation to yourselves, to your families, and quite frankly, I know I'll get criticized for this, to your country. Get vaccinated now, it's free, it's convenient. I promise you it saves lives. And I honest to God believe it's your patriotic duty. Another question folks are asking is, what can you do to make yourself and your family feel safer and be safer? The answer is simple, get your booster shot. Wear a mask. Our doctors have made it clear booster shots provide the strongest of protection. Unfortunately, we still have tens of millions of people who are eligible for the booster shot but have not yet gotten— they've gotten the first two shots, but they've not gotten the booster. Folks, the booster shots are free and widely available. Over 60 million Americans, including 62% of eligible seniors, our most vulnerable group, have gotten their booster shots. I got my booster shot as soon as they were available. And just the other day, former President Trump announced he had gotten his booster shot. It may be one of the few things he and I agree on. People with booster shots are highly protected. Join them. Join us. It's been 6 months or more since my second shot. If it's been 6 months or more for your second shot when I got my booster, you can get yours today if you've been 6 months or more since your second shot. Another question that folks are asking is, are we going back to March 2020? Not this last March 2021, but March 2020 when the pandemic first hit. That's what I keep getting asked. The answer is absolutely no. No. Here are 3 big differences between between then and now. One, number one, first one, more than 200 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. In March of 2020, no one was fully vaccinated. What that means is today, as cases— a case of COVID-19 for fully vaccinated and boosted person will most likely mean no symptoms, or mild ones similar to the common respiratory viruses. Over 200 million Americans should have a peace of mind that they did not have in March of 2020. They're protected from hospitalization and they're protected from death. Second point, we're prepared today for what's coming. In March of 2020, we were not ready. Today we stockpile enough, we stockpiled enough gowns, masks, and ventilators to deal with the surge of hospitalizations among the unvaccinated. Today we're ready, and as I'll explain in a few minutes, we're going to be reinforcing our hospitals, helping them. Number 3, we know a lot more today than we did back in March of 2020. For example, last year we thought the only way to keep your children safe was to close your— close our schools. Today we know more and we have more resources to keep those schools open. We— you can get 5 to 11-year-olds vaccinated, a tool we didn't have until last month. Today we don't have to shut down schools because of a case of COVID-19. Now if a student tests positive, other students can take the test and stay in the classroom if they're not infected, rather than closing the whole school or having to quarantine. We can keep our K-12 schools open. That's exactly what we should be doing. So folks, let me summarize. We should all be concerned about Omicron, but not panicked. If you're fully vaccinated, and especially if you got your booster shot, you are highly protected. If you're unvaccinated, you're at a higher risk of getting severely ill from COVID-19, getting hospitalized, and even dying. So the best thing to do is get fully vaccinated and get your booster shot. And no, this is not March of 2020. 200 million people are fully vaccinated. We're prepared. We know more. We just have to stay focused. So that's where we stand. Now let me tell you about the additional steps I'm ordering today to take on what is coming. I know you've heard a lot of this in the news already this morning. 3 weeks ago, I laid out a COVID-19 action plan for this winter that prepared us for this moment. Today, we're making the plan even stronger. First, we're setting up our vaccination and boost
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