Joe Rogan Experience #2008 - Stephen C Meyer

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

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

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

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?

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-

How did it happen?

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.

Hmm.

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."

Whoa.

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

(laughs)

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

That dude was a scorcher.

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.

Mm-hmm.

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.