Joe Rogan Experience #2008 - Stephen C Meyer

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      (drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. SMStephen C. Meyer0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (heavier music plays) First of all, thank you for being here. Appreciate it.

   4. SMStephen C. Meyer0:14

      It is great to be here, Joe. Thanks for having me.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      I've, I've really enjoyed, uh, watching some of your videos online and, and listening to these arguments. This, this idea of intelligent design. My question to you, like, right off the bat was, is this an idea that you... Did you have a pre- did you have a notion in your mind already that you were trying to prove? Or was this something that you sort of started to believe upon the preponderance of evidence?

   6. SMStephen C. Meyer0:44

      It was more the latter, but I had a, by the time I first encountered it, a philosophical framework that made me open to it. Um, I had a long, protracted, uh, religious conversion from late high school all the way through college. It took... It was the last thing from a Damascus Road experience. And, uh-

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:06

      How did it happen?

   8. SMStephen C. Meyer1:07

      It was a, a process of philosophical deliberation. It was not really based on science initially. I started having weird existential questions when I was 14 years old, after I'd broken my leg in a skiing accident.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:19

      Hmm.

   10. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20

       And st- uh, questions like, "Well, what's it gonna matter in 100 years?" Uh, I, I was... There's this great quote from Bertrand Russell where he says, you know, that, "All the, the noonday genius of human achievement is destined for extinction in the vast heat death of the solar system."

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:37

       Whoa.

   12. SMStephen C. Meyer1:38

       I had never encountered Bertrand Russell as a 14-year-old, but I later-

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:40

       (laughs)

   14. SMStephen C. Meyer1:40

       ... encountered that quote, and I thought, "That was what was bothering me." You know?

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:44

       That dude was a scorcher.

   16. SMStephen C. Meyer1:46

       Yeah, yeah. Well, I, you know, I read... In the hospital, after I had this accident, I was reading a, a book about the history of baseball. And I was totally into baseball at the time. I couldn't think of a, a, a better, uh, a higher form of human achievement than to play for the New York Yankees.

   17. JRJoe Rogan2:00

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SMStephen C. Meyer2:01

       And yet, all the stories of the great baseball guys e- ended the same. You know, they, they were recruited b- by, uh, scouts who saw their talent. They came up to the big leagues. They, uh, uh, uh, amassed records. They won a certain number of World Series. And then, you know, if they were really great, uh, they go to the Hall of Fame and retire at 38, and then what? And then I got to thinking, "Well, but then what for any of us?" You know? And, and so, I was, I was... This, this question of, of, uh, of meaning kind of haunted me. What, what, what could I possibly do that would have any lasting or enduring meaning? And, um, uh, I ended up taking... I d- I did a physics major and a geology major, um, in college, but I took as many philosophy classes as I could along the way, and I encountered these existentialist writers who were asking these same types of questions and realized, "Oh." Uh, as a 14-year-old, I thought I must be insane to be having these questions, and I worried that I was insane. I was a real... I mean, it was a, it was a real funk I was in for six or eight months. Uh, and then later I realized, no, these were philosophical questions. And for me, uh, the religious conversion I had started to address and answer those questions. So, I was, I was... By the time I got out of college, I was a convinced theist for philosophical reasons. But it, but I had... At that point, I was completely comfortable with the evolutionary explanation of everything. And then at a conference in my, uh, that I attended, um, while I was working as a geophysicist, um, it was a conference about the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness. And it was divided on each panel between theists and philosophical materialists, who were debating these, these big questions at the intersection of science and philosophy. And I was kind of stunned to learn or to, to perceive, at least, that the theists seemed to have the intellec- intellectual initiative in each of these big discussions. That materialism was a philosophy that was a spent force. It was not explaining where life first came from or the universe came from, let alone consciousness. And so I began, in a sense, on a kind of intellectual journey to see where these new evidences, the evidence for the beginning of the universe, of the fine-tuning of the universe, or the, the thing that really intrigued me was the discovery that at the foundation of life and even the very simplest cells, we have this amazingly complex code. The DNA we all learned about in high school, the... We think that... You know, we all learned about the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, but that's not the most important thing about it. It's that within that double helix, there is literally a code, uh, uh, digital information that is directing the construction of the important proteins and protein machines that every cells, every cell needs to stay alive. Bill Gates has said it's like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. And I was doing, at the time, um, for the, uh, work as a geophysicist for an oil company, I was doing, uh, uh, seismic digital signal processing, which was an early form of information technology. And I got fascinated with the idea that, that there was this, first of all, an impasse in evolutionary explanations of the origin of life. Nobody how we got, k- knew how we got from the chemistry in the prebiotic soup to the code in an actual living cell. Uh, but it was fascinating that the, the impasse was created by the mystery surrounding the origin of information. Where did that come from? And so, uh, a year later, I was off to, to, uh, grad school in England. I ended up doing a PhD in origin of life biology within a, uh, history and philosophy of science d- um, department in, in Cambridge. And, um, so that's kind of my, a sketch of my journey and how I got interested in this. I saw in one of your previous interviews, you said that you were very interested in origin stories.

   19. JRJoe Rogan5:50

       Yeah.

   20. SMStephen C. Meyer5:50

       And m- me too, you know? That was the...

   21. JRJoe Rogan5:51

       Well, it's always interesting when you see someone who's kind of dedicated their life to a very specific thing. Like, where, w- what's the root of this? Where did it come from? So for you, you, you went through this funk, and did you find comfort in religion? Is, is that what helped you?

   22. SMStephen C. Meyer6:07

       W-

   23. JRJoe Rogan6:08

       Did you find structure in it?

   24. SMStephen C. Meyer6:10

       I found answers to basic worldview questions that I thought were, as a 14-year-old, I thought...... nobody... Uh, you know, there must be something wrong with me. Nobody else is having these questions. I'm not talking to anyone at school who's worried about me.

   25. JRJoe Rogan6:23

       I think you're just smart. (laughs)

   26. SMStephen C. Meyer6:26

       It was... I, I remember one day, I'm in just, uh, total re- Well, okay, for example, I was, uh, in this big leg cast, and I would crutch my way up to the, to the, uh, uh, uh, uh, up our driveway, get the newspaper, bring back the box scores to read, you know, about the baseball games the night before. And every day, it, it's a new date, and I do this, and a new date, and a new date. And I started thinking, time is a really freaky thing. I can imagine an event, you know, I'm gonna lift this cup, I'm gonna drop it, put it over there. Now, that event just took place, but it's already gone. We're not experiencing it anymore. We have a memory of it, but what does that actually mean? Where did... Uh, there was this flow of sensory experience, but there didn't seem to be anything rooting it that gave it a, a, um, an enduring reality. And I had this sense, there must be something that doesn't change, or else everything else that does change, um, is passing, ephemeral, and, uh, uh, uh, and ultimately of no account. And so, you know, you read... I, I ended up reading the big fat family Bible that I'd never cracked. And, uh, found when God revealed His name to Moses, it was the I Am that I Am, this timeless, eternal person. And you found the same thing in the New Testament, the way Jesus Christ was referred to as, uh... And so I thought, I, I wonder if there is something that doesn't change. And so, uh, the kind of philosophical questions I was having made me want to explore whether or not, uh, revealed religion might in fact be true.

   27. JRJoe Rogan8:03

       Can I ask you-

   28. SMStephen C. Meyer8:04

       Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan8:04

       ... to expand on that? What do you mean by something that does not change?

   30. SMStephen C. Meyer8:08

       Um, some eternal self-existent reality, I guess. I, you know, it was not something as a 14-year-old I had worked out. It was a kind of an intuition that-
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Is there possibly a…

   1. SMStephen C. Meyer15:00

      a gene. And if you have a section of DNA for building a protein, that's great. It all works. Now let's ... but if you wanna build a fundamentally new form of life, you gotta have, you gotta have new proteins to service the new cell types to build the new anatomical structures. Um, in our computer world, we know that if you start randomly changing the zeros and ones in a section of geneti- in a section of digital code, you're gonna degrade the function of that code long before you come up with a new string for making a new program or operating system. The, the, the functional sequences are what are, they're called highly, they're highly isolated in what's called sequence space. You, you, you can change a few things and still retain function. But after ver- a very few number of changes, you're gonna degrade the function, and long before you come up with a new function. Now, the Darwinian mechanism, um, starts with the idea that there are random changes in those s- uh, in those digital bit strings, those s- sequences of A, Cs, Gs, and Ts. And based on our experience in the computer world, we would expect that random changes are gonna, again, degrade those strings long before they're capable of building a new protein. And there's now a, very compelling experimental evidence that that's true. There's an Israeli, um, molecular biologist, Dan Tofick. Un- unfortunately, he died fairly recently in a tragic accident. But he was doing, uh, mutagenesis experiments on sequences of the, uh, on sequences of code for building specific proteins that folded into stable structures, called, they're actually called protein folds. And he found that between three and 15 mutations was enough, uh, to degrade the thermodynamics stability of the protein structure that, that, the, the, the gene was making. And once you lose that thermodynamics stability, you, there's no, you have no pr- uh, functional possibilities.

   2. JRJoe Rogan17:00

      Is there possibly a undiscovered mechanism for protecting against that, that we're not aware of yet?

   3. SMStephen C. Meyer17:04

      Possibly. But there's, uh, numerous lines of evidence suggesting that you, that mutations are, are within limits. They're going, you can modify again. You can optimize, uh, an existing protein structure called a fold. But if you, if you allow too many of those mutations, you're gonna degrade. And long before you would get a fundamentally new protein structure, a- another protein fold. So, that's, that's just one of many. I wanna run one other argument by you that I think is very intuitive. Um, the ... if you wanna build a ... it turns out that there are, um, there are structures or systems for building that are, uh, com- very important for building new animal body plans. And they're called developmental gene regular- regulatory networks. They were discovered at Caltech, uh, by Eric Davidson and colleagues. Eric Davidson has also unfortunately recently passed away in the last few years. Um-But what these are-- what, what they discovered is that you not only have genes for building proteins, you have genes that are building, uh, that for, for, uh, constructing molecules that send signals f- that tell the genome when to express other parts of itself. So you've got si- they're signaling molecules that are telling the genome when, uh, when to turn this part or that part on in order to build the right proteins at the right time as new cells are going through cell division in the process of animal development. So if you go from one cell to two to four to eight to 16, et cetera, you've got to... And as, so is that, you have a developing animal form, there, there are points in that trajectory where, where it's important to differentiate one type of cell from another. And for certain types of cells, muscle cells as opposed to nerve cells or, or, uh, bone cells to be... to start to be constructed. And all of this is under... is closely choreographed by these signaling molecules. Uh, so you get a DNA that builds, uh, regulatory RNA that turns on another part of the DNA that then turns on... uh, uh, that, that builds a protein for servicing a particular type of cell at the right time and not at another time. And as Davidson and his colleagues mapped this out, they discovered that the functional relationships that were involved looked like an integrated circuit. It was... And, and they, they call them developmental gene regulatory networks. And the point is, you can't build a completely, uh, developed animal form unless you have this choreography taking place that is expressed through these developmental gene regulatory networks. But they discovered something else about them, and that is that they cannot be altered significantly. If you alter any of the core elements of these developmental gene regulatory networks, animal development shuts down. And this makes perfect sense to anyone with a background in, say, electrical engineering, because there's a principle of engineering that says the more tightly integrated a functional system, and the more difficult it is to perturb any part of the system without defect to the whole. It's a constraints principle, and this turned out to be true in spades of these effectively integrated circuits. Now, they weren't controlling the flow of, of, um, electricity, but more the flow of information in, in the developing organism. So here's the, here's the argument. You need a developmental gene regulatory network to make an animal body plan, but if you wanna turn one animal body plan into another animal body plan, you're gonna have to change developmental gene regulatory network A into developmental... uh, uh, a, a completely novel developmental gene regulatory network to build that novel animal form. But the one thing we know experimentally is these things cannot be altered without the destruction of the first... uh, uh, of the initial form. And once that form is destroyed, there's no more evolutionary development possible. Now, it turns out that not only Neo-Darwinism, the kind of standard textbook form of evolutionary theory has, has no answer for this, and Davidson was quite explicit about this. He was, by the way, no friend of creationism or intelligent design, but he said very explicitly that Neo-Darwinism is a- commits a catastrophic error in thinking because it is not addressing this, this fundamental problem. There's no... uh, um, but it's... and it's not just Neo-Darwinism. There really... there, there's also newer models of, of evolutionary theory, and they don't address this either. The- this is... so th- so there are these sort of fundamental challenges to the creative power of mutation and selection and other similar- similarly undirected, uh, materialistic processes that have... are just not... have not been answered, and they seem pretty fundamental. Uh, what, what it looks like when you look at it... I've got a picture of both in two of my books, these networks, they look like circuits. And circuits, in our experience, are the product of engineers, of intelligence. I mean, we're, we're looking at distinctive hallmarks of intelligent agency when we look at circuitry and code and information processing systems. I mean, this is what we're finding inside life. It's not what Darwin thought in the 19th century or his colleagues. Huxley, who said the cell was a simple homogenous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. Li- it, it's a new day in biology. Things are much more complex than people thought when they formulated these evolutionary ideas.

   4. JRJoe Rogan22:26

      There's a lot to talk about here.

   5. SMStephen C. Meyer22:28

      Sorry, that was a long answer. (laughs)

   6. JRJoe Rogan22:29

      It was very long. It's very hard to keep up with you. But when you're, you're talking about this, this process and this very con- first of all, I wanna go back one step further. You were saying something about, uh, and I'm paraphrasing, but whatever this intelligent thing is creating us somehow or another in its image or somehow or another thinking the way it thinks. How do you... how did you say that again?

   7. SMStephen C. Meyer23:00

      Yeah. This was, this was the idea of the early scientists who got science going. It was the, the, the way they talked about it was the intelligibility of the universe.

   8. JRJoe Rogan23:08

      Mm-hmm.

   9. SMStephen C. Meyer23:08

      It was intelligible. It could be understood by us because our minds had been made in the image or likeness of the creator of the universe itself.

   10. JRJoe Rogan23:17

       Isn't it just possible that our minds are complex and curious, and so we're trying to figure out what all these things are and what DNA is and what molecules, and that we're trying to figure out the very fiber of existence itself? What, what, what is it made out of? Wouldn't any curious, self-aware creature start to contemplate these things? And if it's... if it really is an intelligent force that made us to think the way it thinks, why would it have war? Why would it have murder? Why would it have all the horrific crimes that we see? Drug addictions? Why would it create us in a form like that?

   11. SMStephen C. Meyer23:57

       Yeah. Uh, I mean, there was a... I mean, th- the background of this... Let's start with the first question, then I'll get to the second question.

   12. JRJoe Rogan24:02

       Okay.

   13. SMStephen C. Meyer24:03

       So, so, uh...

   14. JRJoe Rogan24:04

       I want- I just wanna know-

   15. SMStephen C. Meyer24:05

       Equally profound and good question. The, um... the, the...The, the histori- uh, historians of science have asked a question. It's the why, why then, why there question. We've had all these great civilizations. The Egyptians made the pyramids, as you and I were talking about. We had the, um, uh, the D- the Chinese had gunpowder. The Romans built aqueducts.

   16. JRJoe Rogan24:26

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SMStephen C. Meyer24:27

       But for some reason, in Western Europe, in the 16th and s- 17th centuries, and I think, I think the antecedents for th- for that go b- back a little further, uh, you get these very systematic methods for study- studying nature arising. And you get this concern to use mathematics to describe the order in nature. And you get this incredibly productive, uh, historians of science call it s- uh, they call it the scientific revolution, something really dramatic changing.

   18. JRJoe Rogan24:58

       Mm-hmm.

   19. SMStephen C. Meyer24:59

       And, and it's different than other civilizations. And as they, they examined what happened, they th- well, the material, you know, the, the material substrate or the things you would need to do science were in all the other cultures, and there were many great cultures. But this, this systematic method of studying nature uniquely arose in Western Europe in a particular time in a particular context, and many, many historians of science, uh, have come to the conclusion that the, the thing that was, the, the difference, that made the difference was the worldview, was the philosophical assumptions of those Western European scientists who were almost entirely coming out of a Judeo-Christian worldview. And one of the key assumptions that they had was that, that systematic study of nature was actually possible. It would y- i- it's, it's actually very hard to do science. It's very hard to see a pattern in what can initially seem to be a chaotic jumble of, of, of sense data. And these, these thinkers had the conviction that there were such patterns, there was rationality, there was order behind things because there was a God who had made the universe to be orderly and to be understood. So, that was just one of those thought differences or th- uh, d- differences in thinking that historians have identified as a, as a, uh, as a key f- feature that explains why the scientific revolution happened where it did. Um, and that's, that's not to say, uh, that, uh, the only people that can do science once it gets going are people who, of religious faith, but it is to say that the people with a particular religious faith had a reason to pursue science that apparently, uh, oth- other cultures did not have to the same degree.

   20. JRJoe Rogan26:40

       Do we know that for a fact though? Because the- there's a lot of evidence that we've lost some civilizations. We've lost a lot of their knowledge, the burning of the Library of Alexandria. We, we don't really know that much about what they knew. Obviously, they had some incredibly complex mathematics if they built the pyramids. We know that. We kn- we know there had to be measurement. We know there had to be, uh, like some very complex geometry in order for them to figure out how to do it correctly.

   21. SMStephen C. Meyer27:05

       Well, certainly, there may have been other things that have gone on that we didn't know about and that were lost. The, the thing that I, uh, the o- only point I was making was that the people who got science going in the 16thden- 17th century did so-

   22. JRJoe Rogan27:17

       Mm-hmm.

   23. SMStephen C. Meyer27:17

       ... for a discernable, uh, religious reason-

   24. JRJoe Rogan27:21

       Sure.

   25. SMStephen C. Meyer27:21

       ... if you will. And that's just, that is just a, uh, a fact of history. And-

   26. JRJoe Rogan27:24

       But that doesn't necessarily mean they were correct.

   27. SMStephen C. Meyer27:27

       Well, it d- it does mean that they, they generated a very fruitful way of investigating nature.

   28. JRJoe Rogan27:32

       It certainly aided them.

   29. SMStephen C. Meyer27:34

       Yeah. Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan27:34

       And it, it, uh, it probably motivated them in a lot of ways and guided them in a lot of ways, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're correct in that assumption.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Well, I think the,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      the horrific things we see in the news, school shootings? Why, why would God create a mind that acts in that way?

   2. SMStephen C. Meyer30:06

      Well, I think the, the traditional theistic answer to that is the free will defense. It's not that God created those things, he created free agents knowing that it was better to create free agents who had the ability to choose and therefore to choose, uh, to love him or not or love each other or not than it was to create puppets. But with that-... decision to create free m- moral agents, there was also the risk that people would use that freedom for, um, uh, to exploit others-

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:36

      Yeah. How do you-

   4. SMStephen C. Meyer30:36

      ... and to harm others. So-

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:37

      Sorry, how do you react to the argument of determinism, then, in the, in the face of this, uh, argument that God created free will?

   6. SMStephen C. Meyer30:45

      W- uh, un- unpack that a little for me, 'cause-

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:47

      Determinism.

   8. SMStephen C. Meyer30:47

      Yeah. Right.

   9. JRJoe Rogan30:48

      The, the, the concept that the, like, when you see someone who's in jail.

   10. SMStephen C. Meyer30:51

       Yeah.

   11. JRJoe Rogan30:51

       So he made a bad dec- decision, he went to jail.

   12. SMStephen C. Meyer30:54

       Right.

   13. JRJoe Rogan30:54

       But if you go back through that person's life, you go through their, their, th- the ep-

   14. SMStephen C. Meyer30:58

       Oh, right, right.

   15. JRJoe Rogan30:59

       Yeah, their life, their childhood, the horrific traumas, all the abuse they've suffered, b- in and out of the justice system at a very un- young age, surrounded by-

   16. SMStephen C. Meyer31:09

       Tragic, tragic stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:10

       ... crime. Right, it's not a free will issue entirely. There's a lot of variables.

   18. SMStephen C. Meyer31:15

       Uh, u- understood. Um, the philosophical way of thinking about that is the distinct- to make a distinction between n- set of necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. Um, the- many of those ... well, a- actually, let me go a different direction. Um, the- there- there's two different views of human nature. One is that we are moral agents, free moral agents, and one is that we're completely determined by genes, environment, or our evolutionary past. And, uh, I'm convinced that even in the face of terrible environmental, uh, conditions in our background, we are still free to choose. Um, I think there are certain types of backgrounds that incline people towards, um, a tendency to, to harm others and to do things that we would regard as crimes. But I, I think we still are free. I think that's a fu-

   19. JRJoe Rogan32:09

       But there's-

   20. SMStephen C. Meyer32:10

       ... a fundamental-

   21. JRJoe Rogan32:11

       There's some real clear research into trauma in the developmental cycle of children, how it leads to psychopathy and all sorts of other real serious problems-

   22. SMStephen C. Meyer32:18

       Sure. No question.

   23. JRJoe Rogan32:19

       ... where free will comes into question and determinism makes a better argument.

   24. SMStephen C. Meyer32:24

       I, I would s- uh, there's a great philosopher of, um, my-

   25. JRJoe Rogan32:28

       How do you- But how do you respond to that?

   26. SMStephen C. Meyer32:30

       I would say that those are, uh, those are predisposing inclinations that are probably n- necessary to explain the behavior, but not sufficient. That I think even in the face of, of things that incline us towards certain courses of action, we still have, we still have choice. Um, and I, I think the, the- there's a lot of brain physiological research that shows that, um, that supports the idea that the mind is not completely determined by the, the neuro- neurophysiological correlates or the under- underlying-

   27. JRJoe Rogan33:03

       Right.

   28. SMStephen C. Meyer33:04

       ... you know, brain chemistry.

   29. JRJoe Rogan33:05

       Are, are we isolating for any reason?

   30. SMStephen C. Meyer33:08

       What's that?
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Hmm. …

   1. SMStephen C. Meyer45:00

      the foundational reality as being informational, you know.

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:05

      Hmm.

   3. SMStephen C. Meyer45:05

      And, and I mean, we found, we, we've, we've located, we know the locus, uh, or the, the place where the code is stored in a, in a living organism. That's an unbelievable (laughs) discovery.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:14

      Right.

   5. SMStephen C. Meyer45:15

      For 2,000, 4,000 years, however long humans have thought about these things, at least back to the time of Aristotle, we've had this mystery. Why does like beget like? Why are children discernibly like their parents? Why, uh... And in 1953 through '65, we have this amazing flurry of scientific activity that elucidates the source of the signal that ensures that, that transmission of hereditary information. And we discover there actually is a code that is responsible for that phenomenon, for we now talk about DNA replication and, and, and gene expression, two different things the DNA molecule does. So there's, so to me that's a stop press moment in the history of science and the history of biology, but in the history of humankind, to, you know, this, this... Suddenly we have an inkling of how this, how this happens, you know, so...

   6. JRJoe Rogan46:12

      What I was gonna say is that a human being, we think of them as an individual. But really, they're a host for a lot of organisms. The, the human being does not exist without the bacteria in its gut. The human being does not exist without the flora on its skin. And the f- the human being is filled with billions of other living things, right?

   7. SMStephen C. Meyer46:32

      Right.

   8. JRJoe Rogan46:33

      When we think of the Earth, we think of the Earth as a host for, you know, billions of life forms. Insects and amoebas and plants and animals and all that. When we look at the planet itself, we think of the planet as an individual. But when we look at a galaxy, a spiral galaxy, we look at that as an individual. We look at that as a thing. When we look at the universe, when we look at God, are we making a mistake by thinking that it's something that created the universe, that maybe the universe itself is this living thing, the universe itself is God?

   9. SMStephen C. Meyer47:17

      Uh, uh, well, that's an absolutely great question. There are three basic views about this. Um, one is that the universe is, itself, the physical universe, is eternal and self-existent. And some people think of it as a kind of organism. There was this Gaia hypothesis, Lynn Margulis. Um, most, most standard materialists just think of it as the product of matter and... Eternally existent or self-existent matter and energy or the physical fields that, uh, are expressed in material particles, uh, where they think of those as eternal and s- self-existent. Um, the other view is a more pantheistic view that there's a kind of, there is a kind of God, but it's not an agent or a conscious mind that is, that to whom you could pray or with whom you could communicate or who has communicated or created, but rather it sort of pervades the physical universe, and it is also eternal and self-existent. And then the third view is that there was, there is a transcendent creator beyond the universe who brought the physical universe into existence.

   10. JRJoe Rogan48:25

       And who brought him into existence, or her, or it, or they?

   11. SMStephen C. Meyer48:28

       Um, just to finish the other thought, and then I'll come back to that-

   12. JRJoe Rogan48:32

       Yeah.

   13. SMStephen C. Meyer48:32

       ... uh, the, the, the third view is the view that I hold. I'm a, I'm a classical theist, and I think the scientific evidence is pointing in that direction fairly strongly, in part because we now have evidence from m- multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the universe did in fact have a beginning, the material universe.... does not look to have been eternal and self-existent. And so then to answer your second question, um, I would say that every philosophical system, uh, sometimes philosophers talk about worldviews, you know, whether they're, um, formal philosophical systems or just sort of the, the informal set of assumptions that we all need to make about reality. Uh, but every worldview needs to answer the question, what is the thing or the process or the entity from which everything else came? What's, what's the, the ground of being, the starting point? And up until the 20th century, I think the materialist naturalist view was very credible because it affirmed that, that matter and energy w- were eternal and self-existent in the same way that theists thought God was eternal and self-existent. But in both systems, or in all systems, something is the f- is what philosophers call the primitive, the thing from which everything else comes. I think in, uh, in, as a consequence or in the wake of our modern cosmological, astrophysical discoveries that the material universe itself had a beginning, that matter and energy is now a poor candidate to be that eternal self-existent thing. And therefore, I think that the theistic view that, um, a transcendent creator is the thing from which everything else came, without itself being created, is, is, is the, the best place to start our philosophical thinking. It's, it's the be- it provides the best explanation for what we see.

   14. JRJoe Rogan50:25

       When you say that there's direct evidence that the universe has a beginning, what do you mean by that?

   15. SMStephen C. Meyer50:32

       Well, it's a, it's a fascinating story, and one I tell in the, in the, the new book, Return of the God Hypothesis. It starts, uh, there are basically three different lines of evidence. Um, there are, well, there's three d- different classes of evidence, if you will. There's the evidence from observational astronomy. Um, maybe we should just start there, and then I'll-

   16. JRJoe Rogan50:53

       We'll start there.

   17. SMStephen C. Meyer50:53

       ... tell you about the, the, the stuff from-

   18. JRJoe Rogan50:55

       Yeah.

   19. SMStephen C. Meyer50:55

       ... theoretical physics, uh, before (laughs) I'm starting to keep flopping off my head.

   20. JRJoe Rogan50:58

       Sorry. You can adjust them. They push in.

   21. SMStephen C. Meyer51:00

       Uh, yeah. Oh, good.

   22. JRJoe Rogan51:01

       If you want to...

   23. SMStephen C. Meyer51:01

       There we go. Uh-

   24. JRJoe Rogan51:02

       Bryan Simpson was here, he's got a big head.

   25. SMStephen C. Meyer51:04

       Yeah. (laughs) Okay. That's awesome. Um, well, it's, it's an unbelievi- it's another one of these, uh, uh, and I think maybe part of my story is that I was always fascinated with these, uh, issues at the intersection of science and philosophy, where the scientific evidence leads you to a big philosophical, uh, question or, or possibly conclusion. So back to the ancient Greeks, we've had this disc- this debate. Is the universe eternal and self-existent? Has it always been here? Or is it finite? Did it come into existence at a point in time? In which case, was there possibly an external creator that brought it into existence? Uh, in the 1920s, we get the first scientific evidence that helps us to answer that question. Um, coming into the 20th century, most physicists assume that the universe is eternal. Uh, it's infinite in, in, it's, it's past eternal. Uh, uh, you can go back as far as you want and there's always matter, there's always energy, there's always space, there's always, always time. In the 1920s, uh, Edwin Hubble is looking, is at Mount Wilson in Southern California, the big observatory there. He's a lawyer who's come into astronomy at a very propitious time because they've j- the astronomers have just started building these great dome telescopes, and they've also been developing photographic technology that allows them to collect a lot more light over a long period of time. He starts looking at the distant galaxies. No, actually, well, they were, they were nebula. They didn't know whether they were galaxies or not. Uh, uh, and there was a debate right up to 1920 whether or not the Milky Way in which we live is the only, uh, galaxy or whether these little smudges that they were detecting on the photographic plates, uh, little dot of light with smudges, whether that, those were other galaxies or just a, a star with gas around it. And Hubble was able to use some new techniques for measuring distances to astronomical, to distant astronomical objects, in particular, to these nebula. And he found that the distance to the Andromeda Nebula was measured at 900,000 light years, but the accepted, uh, measurement for the distance across the Milky Way was only 300,000 light years. So clearly, the Milky Way could not contain the Andromeda Nebula, so therefore, the N- Andromeda Nebula wasn't just a nebula, it was another galaxy. And in the ensuing years then as he uses the, the, the big telescopes and these new techniques, he establishes that there are galaxies galore, spiral galaxies, spindle nebula, uh, uh, galaxies. It's, it's, so we now know, I think I put in the book, I used the number 200 billion galaxies. I think I've in- since corrected that it's another order of magnitude, that astronomers now think there's two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. It's, it's just unbelievable how much our awareness of the, the vastness of the universe has expanded in really 100 years. It's amazing.

   26. JRJoe Rogan54:02

       Right.

   27. SMStephen C. Meyer54:02

       But the second thing that Hubble discovered is the light coming from those distant galaxies is being stretched out. It's, it's, um, if, if you shine light through a prism, it separates into the colors red to violet. And the red light, it corresponds to light with longer w- wavelengths. And what he's detecting is light that has shifted in these spectral, uh, analyses that they do in the red direction, suggesting that it's, it's, it's wavelengths are longer as you would expect if those galactic objects are receding away from us, if they're moving away. So it's like the, the Doppler effect with the train whistle, you know? If the train's moving away, the pitch of the sound goes down, and that's because the sound waves are being stretched out. Well, the same thing happens with light. And so very early on as he's studying the galaxies, he's realizing that there's not just a lot of them.... and they're not just separate from our galaxy, but they're moving away from us. And in fact, the further out they are, the faster they're moving away. And so that gives rise to the idea of an expanding universe because to explain that observation, the, the, you have to posit something like a, a roughly spherical expansion of the hole to account for that, what's called the Hubble relationship, that the further out, the faster they're going. And so that's big discovery number two for Hubble. First, there are other galaxies. Secondly, they're moving away from us, and that's su- is suggesting that the universe as a whole is expanding. Now, as you wind that, that picture of the universe backwards in time, if in your mind's eye you think of, uh, uh, they call it back extrapolating, what the universe would have been like 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago or a million or a billion, however old the universe ends up being, eventually all that galactic material would have converged to a common point, past which you cannot back extrapolate. So that point then m- marks the beginning of the expansion of the universe, but arguably, arguably the beginning of the universe itself. And so that's, that's-

   28. JRJoe Rogan56:04

       Arguably?

   29. SMStephen C. Meyer56:04

       Arguably. Now, there are, I think are other, other developments both in-

   30. JRJoe Rogan56:08

       Can I-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Hm. …

   1. SMStephen C. Meyer1:00:00

      why would it be looking for that? Well, because if the universe is expanding as we would expect based on the Big Bang Theory, then the, the radiation coming from things very, very far out in space and therefore very far back in time should be very stretched out, more stretched out than stuff that's closer at hand. Uh, so the James Webb was constructed in hopes of detecting that type of radiation if it existed. It's not assuming that it necessarily would, but it would be a way of confirming the expansion of the universe has been going on for a very long time. And in order to do that, the, uh, NASA people created some amazing technology. They super cooled the detection technolo- or the d- detection apparatus to, I think, five, six, seven degrees above absolute zero so that the heat coming off of the instrument itself was not creating infrared that would, that would, uh, interfere.And what they were, in fact, able to detect from these very ancient, very distant galaxies was super redshifted radiation, uber-redshifted stuff out in the infrared, and were able, on the basis of that, to synthesize images of these very, very distant remote galaxies. Now, the very fact that they were able to do that confirms-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:01:16

      Hm.

   3. SMStephen C. Meyer1:01:16

      ... that you have that, what you would expect on the basis of the Big Bang theory, that you would... that the amount of redshift that you would expect to be present if, in fact, the galaxies had been expanding throughout that vast stretch of time was, in fact, present and was detected. Now, that didn't get reported. There were... what... the whole focus was on the fact that there were galaxies that were more mature, there were more of them early on than we would have, have expected based on our theories of galaxy formation. And so those are anomalies that need to be addressed and have not yet been explained, as I understand it. Maybe the astrophysicists have made more progress on that in even recent, recent days. But the basic picture of an expanding universe outward from the beginning has not been undermined, but rather confirmed in a very dramatic way, at very great distance, and with a... and for galaxies that are, uh, um, uh, a very far look-back time, way, way back in time. So, I think it's a rather dramatic confirmation. There have been many others, the cosmic background radiation that was discovered in 1965. The COBE radiation of George... that George Smoot discovered in the '90s. So there's been this pattern of confirming evidence of this basic picture of an expanding universe out from the beginning in, in observational astronomy from the '20s right up till now. And so that, I think, gives us good reason to think, best we can tell, the universe had a beginning.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:02:35

      Can I pause you on that?

   5. SMStephen C. Meyer1:02:36

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:02:36

      What is the, the... when she was discussing the, the formation of galaxies. What, what had thrown that into question? Like, what, what was it about the formation of galaxies that undermined previous ideas?

   7. SMStephen C. Meyer1:02:49

      I, I'm gonna answer tentatively because I, I don't know this as well as the other that I just described.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:02:54

      Okay.

   9. SMStephen C. Meyer1:02:54

      As I understand it, it's that there were... are more galaxies that formed earlier and are more mature than we would have expected because they were able to do... look back to 13.5, 13.6 billion years ago. They think the origin of the universe is about 13.8 billion years ago. So apparently, galaxies were forming faster than we would have expected, and I think that's the anomaly that is on the table.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:03:18

       Does that just push the timeline further back, but still come up with the data that points to the idea of a beginning?

   11. SMStephen C. Meyer1:03:24

       I... that... I, I wondered that. And I do-... that seems to me a logical possibility. Maybe, maybe the origin of the universe was further back, but it's still... you're still getting this picture of a, of a, uh, of a collapsing sphere in the reverse direction of time back to a point.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:03:40

       But is it possible that with furthe- further detection, we can, with new data, have a better understanding of what is actually going on rather than just saying, "It all points to this thing"? Because it seems like there's, there's data, but it's... what you're, what you're describing seems like it's possible, at least in the future, to have-

   13. SMStephen C. Meyer1:04:03

       It, it, it-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:04:03

       ... better detection methods.

   15. SMStephen C. Meyer1:04:04

       Yeah. It's always possible that we can change our minds on things because science is always provisional, but there are many stable, um, uh, uh, theories that have persisted because of a preponderance of evidence that points to and continues to point to the same conclusion. And I think we've had 100 years now where we've had repeated new types of observations that point towards a beginning. And there were... there are two other classes of, of, um... two other developments in theoretical physics that also, I think, reinforce this that I also w- wrote about in the book. Uh, one is, uh, um, the, the... one, one is the, the, the singularity theorems that Hawking and Penrose and, uh, George Ellis, uh, proved in the 1960s and '70s. And then there's something called the, um, Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which I think is even a tighter, uh, physics proof of a beginning. I think that there is a loophole with the Hawking-Penrose, um, uh, uh, Ellis singularity theorem, although it's, it's, I think, very suggestive and, and highly indicative of a beginning. I'll, uh... let me run it just-

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:05:15

       Please go ahead.

   17. SMStephen C. Meyer1:05:15

       ... brief- briefly, because it's f-... it's, it's a fun thing to think about. So Hawking is, um, doing b- black hole physics for his PhD in the 1960s. And he's at Cambridge, and he's having these neurological symptoms, and he ex-... he's diagnosed with ALS. He gets very, very discouraged. He thinks he's gonna quit, and he's encouraged to press on by, uh, close friends, and he does. And he ends up, uh, writing this brilliant thesis where he has one chapter where he's thinking about what the cosmologists are talking about, is that we've got this expanding universe, and if the universe is ex- expanding in the forward direction of time, then matter is getting more and more diffuse over time. Now, um, generally... je-... part of his thesis involves general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. And according to Einstein, uh, the... a massive body actually curves the fabric of space or spacetime. So if you're going in the forward direction of time, space is getting less and less curved, uh, and matter more and more diffuse. But if you're going in the reverse direction of time, the matter is getting more and more densely concentrated at every successive point in the finite past until, again, you reach a limiting case where the matter gets so densely concentrated, that space gets so tightly curved that it can't get any more tightly curved. It can't get any more densely concentrated. And you move towards a point of infinite density and infinite curvature. You get to a limiting case. Now, infinite curvature corresponds to zero spatial volume. And so the picture of the origin of the universe that sort of intuitively flows from this is one where you get not just matter and energy arising, but space and time come into existence at that, at that zero point. And, um, he presents this in his PhD thesis. Uh, it's... the story of this is told really nicely in the little film, the, The St-... the, The, um, uh-... Theory of Everything.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:07:10

       Mm-hmm.

   19. SMStephen C. Meyer1:07:10

       And he's fear and trepidation, getting examined, but one of his ex- examiner... He, they're nitpicking all these different things, but then they say, "Hey, the idea of a, of, of a black hole at the beginning of the universe, a space-time singularity, this is brilliant. Congratulations, Dr. Hawking." And they shove the, the thesis book back over to, to him, and he's passed. Uh, but o- one of them says, "Now go work out the maths." And he ends up working out the math of this intuitive proof that he develops with, uh, Sir Roger Penrose, with whom you have done-

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:07:40

       Yes.

   21. SMStephen C. Meyer1:07:40

       ... a wonderful interview, and, and George Ellis, whom I've had the occasion to meet. And, and so they end up producing several of these singularity theorems, suggesting that if general relativity is true, then there must have been a beginning. This is on independ- on grounds independent of all the things from observational astronomy. Now, there's a loophole with that, and that is that, in the very tiniest smidgens of space-time, um, inside 10 to the minus 43rd of a second, or what they call Planck time, quantum effects might have been such that we would have to alter our ideas of how gravity worked. And so out of that has come something cal- uh, an impulse, uh, or a, or different theories of what are called quantum gravity or quantum cosmology. And, um, I think you've had some conversations on this show about that as well.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:08:28

       Sure.

   23. SMStephen C. Meyer1:08:29

       Um, in my book, I show that that's, that is a possible, uh, another possible cosmological model, but like the conclusion that the universe had a definite beginning, I think those models also have theistic implications, and I can explain why.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:08:44

       Okay.

   25. SMStephen C. Meyer1:08:44

       Um, maybe we bracket that.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:08:46

       Okay.

   27. SMStephen C. Meyer1:08:46

       Then the third, there's a, yet a third proof, though, of a beginning, that come, uh, by, um, three physicists, Borde, Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, and it's not based on general relativity. It's not based on ideas of what gravity was like in the early universe, but based on ideas of special relativity. It's a little tricky to explain easily, but basically, they show that there are, again, a limiting case, and therefore, a definite beginning, uh, to t- to time, and, uh, and therefore... A- and that it does not have the same loophole that the, the singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose. So what I've said in my, I, what I argue in the book is that a body of evidence from ob- observational astronomy, a strong indicator from theoretical physics, namely the singularity theorems of Hawking et al., and then a very compelling proof from Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin all point to the same conclusion, that as best we can tell, the universe had a beginning. And I think that's the best we can do in science, but that is a pretty weighty, um, range of testimony, uh, supporting the same conclusion.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:09:51

       Did you ever read any Terence McKenna?

   29. SMStephen C. Meyer1:09:52

       I haven't.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:09:53

       Terence McKenna had a very funny thing that he said about science. He said, "Science wants you to believe that it's all about measurement and reason, if you allow them one miracle."
6. 1:15:00 – 1:24:06

   Say that last sentence…

   1. SMStephen C. Meyer1:15:00

      stable galaxies and even basic chemistry would be impossible. And so, that is to say, even to get the evolutionary process going, you would have to have all these beautifully finely tuned parameters in place. And so Hoyle starts having a rethink about this, and he's a staunch atheist, scientific atheist materialist. But he ends up concluding that fine-tuning points to some kind of a fine tuner. And he's quoted as saying that, uh, "The best data we have suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry in order to make life possible." And so he moves to this sort of rudimentary theistic position in his ph-... in his philosophy or his worldview. Now, a lot of other f- physicists have co- come to the same conclusion. Uh, Sir John Polkinghorne, great Cambridge physicist, had a late-in-life conversion, religious conversion, that was partially predicated on his awareness as a physicist of the evidence for the universe as a setup job, the Goldilocks universe, as some sup- physicists have called it. Um, so that's kind of... uh, as Hoyle said, a kind of commonsense interpretation. Uh, when we see other systems that are finely tuned, like a French recipe or an internal combustion engine, what we mean by fine-tuning is an ensemble of improbable parameters that work together to accomplish some remarkable outcome or functional... uh, fun- functional or remarkable outcome. That's what... if you see a internal combustion engine, you think it was engineered 'cause it's finely tuned. So, common sense. The contrary argument to that, the main one... there have been others, but not even most secular physicists regard them as compelling anymore. The main contrary argument has been the idea of the multiverse. That yes, our universe has this array of jointly improbable for-... par- uh, improbable parameters that are in that sweet spot, but we just happen to be the lucky one because there's a gabillion other universes out there, and with different combinations of the laws and constants of physics and different initial conditions at the beginning of those universes. So all those things that w- were just right in our universe are, yes, extremely improbable, but there's so many other universes that, that r-... that i-... that, that the probability of a universe with that set of life-friendly conditions arising somewhere had to arise somewhere, inevitably, and we just happen to be in that lucky universe. And then we are stunned by that, and they call that this observer selection effect. So that's superficially, uh, uh, an equally plausible explanation to the fine tuner argument. And a lot of physicists have told me that they regard the two as a wash. You can believe in a fine tuner, or you could believe in a multiverse. I think the fine tuner, uh, the, the... we'll call it theistic design argument provides a better overall explanation, and here's why. For the fine-tuning argument to actually work, there has to be some sort of causal connection between the universes. If all those other universes are just causally disconnected from our own, then nothing that happens in those other universes affects anything that happens in this universe, including whatever events were responsible for setting up the fine-tuning in the first place. And in virtue of that, proponents of the m- multiverse hypothesis have proposed what they call universe-generating mechanisms. And some are based on, um, uh, s- something called inflationary cosmology, and others are based on something called string theory. But the idea is that there are mechanisms that would, according to the physics of those two cosmological models, spit out new universes, such that we could portray our universe as the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery that was produced by a common... underlying common cause. Okay, fair enough. But it turns out that the cosmological models that give us these universe-generating mechanisms imply that the universe-generating mechanisms themselves must be finely tuned in order to generate new universes. So, a- and that fine-tuning is ultimately unexplained. There's no underlying physics that explains why that fine-tuning. So you... so in order to explain the, the fine-tuning, you invoke the multiverse. In order to make the multiverse credible, you invoke universe-generating mechanisms. In order to make the universe-generating mechanisms...... credible or plausible, you have to presuppose prior unexplained fine-tuning, and you're right back to where you started. And given that fine-tuning, in our experience, our uniform and repeated experience, when we find it with a French recipe or an internal combustion engine or a, a, a hardware-software combination that works, when we find fine-tuning, it always results from a mind. And since the f- multiverse hasn't provided a better explanation for that, I think the conclusion of design or a, uh, an ultimate fine-tuner stands.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:20:01

      Say that last sentence again.

   3. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:02

      Uh, okay.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:20:03

      Just the last sentence-

   5. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:04

      Yes.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:20:04

      ... about the, the, the-

   7. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:06

      Given that fine-tuning, in our experience-

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:20:08

      Yes.

   9. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:09

      ... is always the product of intelligence.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:20:12

       Right.

   11. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:12

       Think of any s- any system we would describe as finely tuned.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:20:16

       Right.

   13. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:17

       Then, and given that the multiverse has not provided an explanation for ultimate fine-tuning-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:20:23

       Yet.

   15. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:24

       ... the best explanation remains intelligent design.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:20:29

       Hmm.

   17. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:30

       And if you want to say yet, that's fine, because again, all, all such s- all scientific arguments, whether-

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:20:35

       Is it fine-

   19. SMStephen C. Meyer1:20:35

       ... whether they're, have theistic implications or not, are provisional.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:20:38

       Is it fine-tuning based on our, our interpretations of what's happening? I mean, is Hawaii fi- fine-tuning? Is the v- the volcanic eruption underneath the ocean that creates the island, is that fine-tuning by intelligent design? Or is that a process of things that happen, and then other living things take advantage of this process and use it as home?

   21. SMStephen C. Meyer1:21:01

       Um, (clears throat) I think that-

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:21:02

       And is that-

   23. SMStephen C. Meyer1:21:03

       ... I, well, yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:21:04

       I mean, is that thought pro- process possible in that particular, uh, like, that example, and then extrapolate that through the whole universe?

   25. SMStephen C. Meyer1:21:13

       Yeah. Uh, I mean, that's a good thought. And, um, the, there are, there are processes that are at work and th- that I wouldn't wanna make a design argument about. But I think there are deep and fundamental, uh, parameters of the universe, and, and I think of our, our planetary system, that, uh, that have these joint properties of, of extreme improbability that are working jointly to achieve some discernible functional end.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:21:45

       And what do you think that discernible functional end is, and what, what role do we play in that?

   27. SMStephen C. Meyer1:21:49

       It's l- I think it's life. I think we play the role of perceiving life as having a significance that non-life does not have. You could then argue, "Well, that's very subjective. Maybe life doesn't have that significance," but I think we, uh, come again and again to r- to affirm that life has significance. We, we, it, uh, the, the, the contrary view would be to say life has no significance. There's nothing significant in that outcome, and I don't think we actually believe that. So part-

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:22:21

       Well, w- why does it-

   29. SMStephen C. Meyer1:22:21

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:22:21

       ... have to be no significance? I mean, it's significant. It's life.

Episode duration: 3:10:27