Transcript

Brian Keating:
An intelligent design theorist just told me the one thing that artificial intelligence proves is that AI can’t think without us, without a mind. Now here’s the argument. I challenge you to find a cracking.

Stephen C. Meyer:
If you train an AI system, a large language model, on a great body of text, and then you query that text, the AI system will output an answer in the next iteration, the output is progressively more incoherent. And if you do that iteration after iteration after iteration, you get a complete breakdown in coherency. The AI system, as impressive as it is, is fundamentally dependent on the initial input that in fact has come from a conscious agent.

Brian Keating:
That’s Stephen C. Meyer, a philosopher of Science with a PhD from Cambridge who argues the universe looks designed.

Brian Keating:
If I told you we had some uranium somewhere and there was a functioning nuclear reactor that had no human input, there was absolutely no mind in place, would that be a challenge to the argument from the existence of information originating from a mind?

Stephen C. Meyer:
Before jumping into a carefully laid trap like that, I’d like to know what’s the factual.

Brian Keating:
You got me, Steve.

Brian Keating:
I spent years pushing back on him. Today I laid three traps to spring on him. Watch what he does with the third one.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Where did these atheist scientists gain access to the mind of God to know what he would or wouldn’t have done

Brian Keating:
if I told you that AI seems to be mind like and that AI is now creating its own versions of seemingly. According to many people, not only is generally intelligent, meaning that can do anything a person can do, certainly has passed the Turing test by most people’s standards a couple of years back. But more than that, maybe it’s creating consciousness and maybe it’s able to create minds. Does that implicate your hypothesis, which is the abduction? You should explain what abduction means, not alien abduction. We’ll get to that later. But the abduction inference to the best explanation first explain what that means and then is AI a counterexample to that whole thesis?

Stephen C. Meyer:
Just brief primer on inference to the best explanation as a mode of scientific reasoning? As you well know and have explained, scientists don’t come to conclusions that are deductively certain. It is not the goal of science to achieve the standard of absolute certainty through a process of logically certain deduction from certain premises. Rather, scientists reason either inductively or hypothetically, deductively or abductively. And all of these modes of reasoning are similar, where you get plausible conclusions that in the best of cases provide the best explanation of the data that you have at hand. An abductive inference has a different logical form that is not logically certain. It runs something like if A, then C. C, therefore possibly A. Okay.

Stephen C. Meyer:
C is observed. C would be a matter of course if A were true. If it rains, the streets will get wet, right? The streets are wet, therefore you can’t say therefore it rained, because there may be other possible causes.

Brian Keating:
Here in San Diego, you could say that.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And it might have been the car wash, might have been sprinkler system, might have been something fire hydrant bursting, whatever. The only thing you can conclude from the surprising fact that the streets are wet is that it may have rained. Okay, that kind of an inference is what philosophers call, they say that’s under determined. You have the. Under determination of theory by data. It’s a possible explanation that it rained, but it’s not decisive. So what do you do? Well, if you’re using this method of reasoning in science, which is very often used in science, you go out and you look for additional data points and you say, well, oh, there’s a bucket with soapy water by the car. The grass is not wet, but just the driveway is wet.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And so you start adding new facts to your body of data. And one by one you start eliminating the other possible explanations until finally, in the best of cases, you have just one, at least for the time being. So you have a best explanation of the data set at hand. And this is a very common way of reasoning in all the historical sciences, certainly, but in theoretical physics, in all the forensic sciences, it’s used across the board. Increasingly, philosophers of science, yes, they still prize the importance of predictions and confirmation of a theory by prediction. But prediction logically is seen to be a special case of explanation where you’re explaining something that has not happened yet. And so this connection between theory and what you would expect to follow from the theory if it were true is the way we end up testing things and winnowing our different possible explanations till we in, in again the best of cases, we come up with the best explanation. Sometimes we come up with two better explanations than all the alternatives, but we don’t have a completely decisive situation.

Brian Keating:
And that’s partially by design. I mean, it’s not, not to make a pun, but. But abduction is not induction or deduction, and that there’s a reason for that.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Another way to think of abjection is it’s often reasoning from effects back to possible causes and then undergoing this process of elimination. As you introduce more and more data into your analysis set, you get to a point where you can infer to a best possible causal explanation. And sometimes those can be very, very decisive, but still not proof, because the logical form doesn’t admit that. It’s not a deductive argument where if you have certain premises and you use logically valid modes of reasoning, you come to a certain conclusion. You really only get deductive certainty when you, in something like geometry. And even then you have to start with, with postulates that are inside the realm of proof probability. Yeah, I don’t work on AI, but I think there’s some interesting things going on in AI that underscore some of the key insights that we have had in the intelligent design research community. The key insight is that information of a certain kind, we call it specified information or functional information, meaningful information, always arises from a mind.

Stephen C. Meyer:
There’s a famous early molecular biologist who was a pioneer in applying the information sciences to molecular biology, Henry Quler, who said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. This is part of our uniform and repeated experience. Well, so what about what’s going on with AI? Well, I think there’s a tell in AI and it’s, it’s sometimes called the model collapse problem, that if you train an AI system, a large language model, on a great body of text. You know, take a. Recently I got contacted by a group that was involved in a, in a, some kind of a suit against a firm that was taking books and feeding them into their, their LLMs and not telling the authors they’d done that. So I’m going to get kind of a payment for that. I was flattered rather than upset. But in any case, so you, you train your AI on text that has been generated by conscious agents, and then you query that text and the LLM, the large language model, the AI system will output an answer.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And it’s a remarkably cogent answer. Typically, we’re shocked at how well this technology works. But now if you take the output of the system in that first iteration and you treat that as data, sometimes it’s now called artificial data, and you query the outputs of those initial queries with a new question. In the next iteration, the output is progressively more incoherent. And if you do that iteration after iteration after iteration, you get a complete breakdown in coherency. And so what that ends up showing is that the AI system, as impressive as it is, is fundamentally dependent on the initial input of specified or meaningful information that in fact has come from a conscious agent, from an actual human intelligence and mind. In other words, there’s an asymmetry between the output of the AI system over These multiple iterations and the output of the. The initial output of the mind, which is the.

Stephen C. Meyer:
The source of. Of the data that is is first queried. You see this dependency on the. Of the AI on the. The intelligent mind. And I think that shows a couple of things. One, that AI is not going to replace the need for a conscious intelligence. And secondly, the initial origin of the information which is the basis of the whole system has come from a conscious intelligence.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Just as Henry Kossler observed in his book in the early 60s when he was first thinking about the origin of information in a biological context. And that is the essential basis of the inference to intelligent design in biology is that that we have in biological systems a large amount of the kind of information that in our uniform and repeated experience always does first arise from a conscious intelligence and that the specified intelligence or specified complexity or functional information. All of those terms are meant to distinguish a particular kind of information, where there is sequence specificity as a condition of function from mere Shannon information, which, which is a measure of the carrying capacity of a channel and the improbability of the arrangement of the characters without respect to whether or not the sequences or strings are functional in any way.

Brian Keating:
I’d love for you to kind of steel man this approach. So if I told you certainly there are natural fusion reactors that exist, right? There’s one powering at least San Diego. It’s up in the sky, it never takes a break, it never goes on strike and it doesn’t ask to defend its PhD thesis right when you need it most. So obviously there are natural fusion reactors. But if I told you that, that we discovered a fission reactor which is much more complicated in a certain sense that we don’t know of effective ways that randomly things can come about. But if I told you we had some uranium somewhere and there was a functioning nuclear reactor that had no human input, there was absolutely no mind in place, would that be a challenge to at least this branch of the argument from the existence of information originating from a mind? Would the existence of a sophisticated neutron moderated fission reactor that self sustained with slow neutrons for a very long period of time without any human design, without any human intervention, would that present you

Stephen C. Meyer:
a challenge before jumping into a carefully laid trap like that? I’d like to know what’s the factual.

Brian Keating:
You got me, Steve. I just like you so much and it’s so fun to talk to you because you do have integrity. Again, we don’t agree on a lot of things, but it’s very fun to talk to you because you have a very fine mind. So yes, you caught the trap. You, you saw it carefully laid by the devilish Keating. And in Africa a billion years ago, there’s something called the Okolo natural nuclear reactor, and it was a sustained neutron, slow neutron moderated fission reactor which operated without any obviously human intervention a billion years ago, and it lasted for millions of years and it was producing heat and light presumably, and you could have extracted energy from it. And it was all due to changing levels of the water table and this natural material that was causing the neutrons

Stephen C. Meyer:
to be split of natural, natural factors

Brian Keating:
that it was completely natural. But, but if you hadn’t known that, you know, I guess the question is, if I didn’t tell you that, or if we didn’t know about it and then tomorrow I discover it, then the question still stands. I think like we see things that are complex, we can’t understand without a mind. But, but who’s to say that the eventual evidence in a Bayesian sense won’t come and, or it hasn’t come already and we just didn’t understand it at the time.

Brian Keating:
Meyer concedes that the math can dodge a beginning. But he says that the dodge has a price and that price looks a

Brian Keating:
lot like a mind does.

Stephen C. Meyer:
What’s interesting about that example is that you have a relatively complex convergence of factors that are producing a functional outcome. So is a kind of finely tuned system that is producing a functional outcome. And I guess our response to that would be to get a little deeper into the apparatus of design detection. William Dembsky, our lead mathematician, has written extensively on this, would want to know what are the relevant probabilistic resources that are available to generate that convergence of factors. You can suspect design at many levels of complexity. There’s a point past which the inference becomes decisive where the level of complexity is such that it exceeds the probabilistic resources of the naturalistic systems that are relevant in this case. Clearly there are naturalistic resources that were sufficient to produce the convergence of factors that made this kind of functional outcome. I ran the math on this in my book Signature in the Cell, looking at not a naturally occurring nuclear reactor, but the complexity of a single protein fold.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And if you take a 13.8 billion year universe and first you run the numbers on the complexity of the protein, the degrees of freedom that allow you to calculate the brute probability of getting that protein on a one off, and it’s infinitesimally extremely small. But you have to take into account to determine whether or not this could be explained by A chance or natural processes, you have to take into account how many opportunities there were for that extremely improbable event to take place. So you run the numbers and if you say, well, if every event in the history of the universe had been devoted to looking for or generating a unique combination of amino acids in sequence connected by by some kind of a bond, and you define an event minimally as an interaction between elementary particles, turns out that if every event in the history of the universe had been devoted to generating a protein, an amino acid sequence of that in this case to be calculated on a basis of 150amino acids, you would search but a tiny, tiny fraction of the total. So the probabilistic cut on that is that it’s much more likely than not that chance is much more likely that chance would fail than succeed. It’s overwhelmingly more likely than a chance or natural processes would fail than they would succeed. Therefore, since we’re looking for a best explanation, it’s more likely that it would fail than succeed. It’s more likely that it didn’t happen that way than it is that it did. And therefore pausing the chance interaction of natural processes is a much less likely explanation for the information content of the protein than design is.

Stephen C. Meyer:
My likely response to the hypothetical or what’s a real example would be to look at, well, what are the conditions that were necessary to make this happen? Do they exceed the probabilistic resources of the entire universe? Clearly on space they don’t because it happened within the natural system on Earth. There are features of living systems, of information systems that we develop that clearly do exceed the probabilistic resources of the universe. And therefore there is a sound basis for inferring to design in those cases, but not all cases where you have complexity and function.

Brian Keating:
Listen to what Stephen just did. Stephen just did something very high in terms of integrity, which a lot of people on either side might not do. There’s a universe where he could have said yes, but who designed the Earth, right? Who designed uranium? Who made the chemical values, the fine tuned values that they actually like? You could have said that. You didn’t say that. You said that. Not in all cases will evidentiary data point to clearly as clearly point to a non mind, right? Like there will be some situations where it will seemingly point to a design and there’ll be, in this case, you could have, in other words, you could have copped out and said God made everything. And actually that’s one of my biggest problems with my friends in the Jewish community and my friends in the Christian community, they’ll deny the scientific evidentiary pathway to their children. They’ll look at a rainbow and say, God made it.

Brian Keating:
I think that that’s, you know, I joke. That’s child abuse, Right? If you do that, you could say that, and it cannot be refuted. But isn’t it better, Stephen, to say no? There’s something called a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, and that electromagnetic radiation interacts with molecules in the air and scattering processes take place via Rayleigh scattering, that is wavelength dependent to the fourth power of the wavelength, and then go down the evidentiary chain. You talk that way, Brian, and that’s

Stephen C. Meyer:
the way I talk.

Brian Keating:
I literally talk like that to my older kids. Okay? Because at the end, Stephen, we can always say, yes, God made the universe from you. As Carl Sagan said, to make an apple pie, first you have to have a universe. But if he said the apple pie came about because of the Big Bang, it’s also child abuse, right? So the point is, there’s many mysteries, and being a scientist is a privilege, and it’s so wonderful to think about these things and get paid to do it.

Stephen C. Meyer:
In the current discussion, too, the example you pose, it highlights something that’s really important about our design detection apparatus. There are methods of design detection that we use in lots of fields in cryptography and archeology and forensic sciences. And what Dembski did was, and maybe for the first time in history, there’s people that have had this intuition of design. But what he did was he explicated the joint criteria by which we justify design and showed where the inferences are legitimate and where they’re at least equivocal, where they’re not decisive, there’s a qualitative element that is the identification of what he calls a specification. And there’s a quantitative element, and that is a threshold of that where the complexity of the event exceeds the probabilistic resources of the relevant environment. And in some cases, the relevant environment is the visible universe itself. And in the case of large information bearing biomolecules, unlike probably your natural nuclear reactor, the complexity of those molecules, the amount of information present in them, exceeds the probabilistic resources of the entire universe by many orders of magnitude. And then the calculations I made was relevant to one modest length protein.

Stephen C. Meyer:
So there’s more subtlety in this than the amount that you can give as the bumper music comes up on the talk radio or podcast. And you got to quickly make argument. Thirty seconds, by the way. That’s a way that ideas are often Tested in philosophy, you test them by counterexample.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, and I want to bring up another one because this comes up in the film. And I was shocked. I say shocked, Stephen, to find you agreeing with noted atheist Sean Carroll. He once told me that the God hypothesis, the least likely of all scientific hypotheses because God is not a good theory. God is a weak theory. And the piece of evidence that he gave was, look at all the galaxies in the universe. There’s about probably something like a trillion, maybe, maybe, you know, an order of magnitude more, certainly not an order of magnitude less. That’s known in the observable universe alone.

Brian Keating:
And then you can fold in the multiverse. And his point is that’s an awful waste of space. Kind of aping Carl Sagan’s line in the movie Contact. And I pushed back on him and he didn’t really have a good answer. But I was kind of surprised to similar veins of that argument running through the story of everything. In other words, look at how special we are. What’s the point of all those galaxies? Essentially, you’re conceding Carol’s point like a God should be economical, he should be parsimonious if he exists, but he doesn’t. And so therefore this is sort of capitulating that there’s a waste of space.

Brian Keating:
Now, I say this kind of in jest, but you do make that in sort of a fine tuning argument, or other people, Luke Barnes and others in the film go about this and justify it from a scientific point of view. The conditions on Earth. Earth had to be just right with Jupiter in this place and that place. What’s the point of Jupiter? It’s for life on Earth. So what gives? Are you moving to Sean Carroll’s side of things? Is this an extravagant universe that. That is clearly a waste of space?

Stephen C. Meyer:
I do think it’s an extravagance. But where did we get the idea that God must be something less than extravagant? We have a whole host of these arguments in evolutionary biology. Darwin made these. God wouldn’t have done it that way. Stephen Jay Gould made these God wouldn’t have done it that way arguments. Where did these atheist scientists gain access to the mind of God to know what he would or wouldn’t have done?

Brian Keating:
It’s their mind. Oh, no, they have access to their own mind.

Stephen C. Meyer:
So they’re. Where are they deriving those predicates in the argument? But first of all, I got this wrong in return of the God hypothesis, and I think you sorted me out. I had quoted an earlier figure of 200 billion galaxies and I was off by at least an order of magnitude. So, you know, paperback, I think we corrected that. And it’s a trillion, right? But either way it’s, it’s a lot. And here’s the other crazy thing. We didn’t even know this until a century ago. Up until 1924, they were still debating whether or not the Milky Way was the only galaxy.

Stephen C. Meyer:
That’s just a mind blowing thing, a new awareness of the human race, the vastness of the universe. But I think it’s just as like from a theological point of view, it’s just as plausible to say that there are so many galaxies because God is a God of great creativity. And he expresses that creativity in an extravagant way that gives us a universe to marvel at and to wonder at.

Brian Keating:
My counter example again, to give you more ammunition perhaps, is, you know, you could have made that statement again, like you said in 1922, but you could also made it a thousand years ago with respect to the number of elements. We used to believe there were four elements. The smartest man who ever lived by some opinions, Aristotle. Right, so Aristotle believed in the four elements, right? Which we all know is all there is. No, of course not. And so I said to Sean, why are there 116 elements elements, you know, like, aren’t most of those extravagant? We don’t use anything above, I think iodine in terms of atomic mass in our bodies, like we don’t need it. So is that not extravagant? But if you had asked that question, you know, a couple hundred years earlier, he would have been in a pickle, right? Because we only knew about, you know, maybe a half dozen elements in the 18. We didn’t know about helium until 100 years ago.

Stephen C. Meyer:
These arguments about what God would or wouldn’t have done are very weak on either side. Okay? I think they’re dispositive. We do know something about what minds do. However, we have uniform and repeated experience about the kinds of things that minds generate. And that gives us a foothold into the larger metaphysical discussion about whether the universe is the product of a mind or life is the product of a mind versus undirected material processes. And this is where I think these advances in design detection allow us to make some solid inferences about whether or not life is designed, whether or not the universe is designed. We don’t know why the designer did what the designer might have done, but we can at least infer that a designing agent acted speculating about, you know, why someone would do this or that is inherently More speculative than deciding whether or not there was a someone. If you look at the Rosetta Stone, you can see a mind was behind those inscriptions.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Why did the mind include the same message in three different scripts? We don’t really have access to that different kind of question.

Brian Keating:
Right. And they wrote the most famous four words in human history. Please like and subscribe. So make sure you do that for Steve’s channel. For my channel. But there’s another piece of fine tuning which I’ve never really heard anybody really make the case for. I’m noting the fact how commendable it is that Stephen just said that some of the weaknesses on both sides is essentially saying in the most scientifically honest fashion that neither one of the two sides can specify what an infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent power could or could not do. So I think that’s foolish.

Brian Keating:
But my other piece of, you know, quiver for your next movie, you know, which I’ll be headlining I’m sure, is that there’s. There’s 116 different elements on the periodic table. Many of them are man made and only last for femtoseconds. But, but of the 92 sort of stable ones up to uranium, even those are, are woefully underpopulated. In other words, there could be like, we could have like helium 26, but we only have helium 3 and helium 4. In other words, there’s an arbitrary number of neutrons that could be added to almost any proton configuration. Hydrogen isotopes. Helium has two.

Brian Keating:
We don’t know why. Why does hydrogen have three and helium have two? We have no idea. But we. It could be that they could have a thousand. I think there’s only something like 400 or 500 different nuclei that are, that have any degree of stability. But a particle physicist would claim, a nuclear physicist would claim is stable. And yet there’s about 40,000, I think different permutations of just, you know, 100 protons and 100 neutrons or whatever it works out to be. In other words, it’s extremely restricted.

Brian Keating:
You know, the Creator or Mother Nature was very parsimonious in some ways. And this brings up another point you make in the film. The film is divided into four chapters, right? Two of the chapters have relevance to what I do. Two of them, I’ll have to concede to you with your degree of expertise and knowledge base, but chapter one is really where I shined on film. The universe had a beginning and we talked a lot about that in our first conversation on the podcast. I’ll refer people to that and it makes less of an appearance this time. I would say the Bordegoud Valen theorem of past incompleteness at the classical level. It is true that Vilenkin claimed, as we, you and I talked about.

Brian Keating:
And again, Stephen is incredibly intellectually honest. You just have to go look at it. I know you haters out there won’t do it, but if you have any shred of intellectual honesty, you’ll go back and see what Stephen and I talked about and what he writes about in his book. Instead of characterizing it as a strawman and then burning down the strawman, we talked about past incompleteness. First of all, let’s talk about that. Why did it feature less in the film? Is it just too complicated around and not controversial? But is it sort of, you know, past incompleteness of geodesics is not something that the audience is going to appreciate. Right.

Stephen C. Meyer:
We kind of wanted to tell the main empirical. The story of the main empirical discoveries that have raised the question about whether the universe had a beginning or not. And you did a fantastic job in explaining the conflict between the two basic cosmologies that arose in the mid 20th century between the steady state and the hot Big bang model. We didn’t go into the oscillating universe. We didn’t get into any of the newer eternal cyclic cosmological models. There’s so much. This is a huge discussion. In fact, we might do a sequel just on the cosmological discussion because I think it could be made very interesting.

Stephen C. Meyer:
But on its face, the main discoveries of experimental, or rather of observational astronomy, coupled with two big developments in theoretical physics, seem to point strongly towards the beginning. Does that give you a proof? No, because you don’t get proof in science. But you do get a prima facie very strong case that the universe had a beginning and it’s been expanding outward ever since. We addressed one of the main objections to that idea, maybe the most prominent one, which is the idea of quantum cosmology, which arises in part because the singularity theorems of Hawking and then Hawking and Penrose and then Hawking and Ellis do not absolutely prove a beginning. And there is a window, a very small smidgen of space or space time in which you can imagine quantum effects predominating energy conditions not applying, and therefore leaving you uncertain as to whether you can back extrapolate all the way to a beginning. I devote two chapters of this to my book. We made a single point about these quantum cosmological models, and that is that they invariably end up Having to depict the universe as a superposition of possible states where the possible universes are represented as different configurations of matter in different spatial geometries. And if you have to represent the physical universe of matter, space, time and energy arising out of that universal wave function describing those possible states of affairs, you end up with this weird paradox that Vilenkin himself, one of the architects of quantum cosmology, has noted.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And that is that you get matter, space, time and energy coming out of mass that you have. The universal wave function is a mathematical representation of possibility states. It is the solution of a deeper, more fundamental mathematical apparatus, the Wheeler DeWitt equation, which can only be solved if the mathematical degrees of freedom associated with that are arbitrarily constrained by the theoretical physicists. So you have this weird input of information into the mathematical apparatus from the modeler to get a universe like ours as a possibility out the other side. So you have this, you’re modeling a kind of end directed teleological process as part of the quantum cosmological program that we couldn’t get into all of that in the film. But what we did point out was just this one observation that Vilenkin made, which I think is very profound. And that is before there is a universe of matter, space, time and energy, what laws? And he was referring to quantum mechanical law of gravity. What law could these equations representing those quantum gravity, what, what could they be written on? What tablet could they be written on? There’s no matter, space, time and energy.

Stephen C. Meyer:
You have this weird paradox of matter and energy emerging out of math. But since math is conceptual, we simply made the point in the film, which is something that Vilenkin himself alludes to. If math is conceptual, are we really saying that? His exact quote, Are we really saying that a mind predates the physical universe? And so we raise this deep question showing that, well, you’ve got this prima facie case from observational astronomy, from theoretical physics that is pointing strongly to a beginning. There is a well known way of circumventing that conclusion. It’s called quantum cosmology. And we simply made the point. Yes, you can circumvent it that way, you can get around that point. But if you do, it comes at a cost.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And that cost actually, oddly seems to point in the same direction. It points in the direction of a pre existing mind. And we kind of left. There’s so much more to say about that.

Brian Keating:
Oh yeah, you know, for sure.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Yeah, I have two big chapters on this in, in my book. And then you’ve got all the newer past eternal cosmological models as well. My take on those is that they also come at a cost that in a weird way typically points to theism on other grounds because they always invoke unexplained fine tuning as part of the necessary gerrymandering of the model to, to fit it to data which is otherwise more simply explained on the basis of the hot Big bang.

Brian Keating:
We did talk about the, you know, kind of the past incompleteness and the Bordeaux Guth Valencol, and we did describe it last time we spoke in terms of the, you know, the limits of our knowledge rather than essentially pointing to a beginning. And sort of even Vilenkin acknowledges that as you said, it does point to a beginning of classical time, which then invokes this thing that Hawking smuggles in, as you and I talked about in person many times, that he introduces in the most popular book in popular science ever written in A Brief History of Time. He says, oh, we’re going to do this trick, it’s called a Wick rotation, but you know, don’t worry about it, it’s just a little trick. And then the rest of the book, where time comes into existence at a specific point called the no boundary theorem and the Wheeler DeWitt equation, he just smuggled it in and then he applies it and then he says that’s what, you know, breathes fire into the equation.

Stephen C. Meyer:
The other very analogous quotation from Hawking, wonder. And it’s a deep intuition. We’re trying to explain the physical universe with math right at the end of the day. But the math is inert, it has no causal power. So how does math alone, which is essentially in our experience always conceptual, how does that bring a physical universe into existence? And both Hawking and Valenckin, who have two different quantum cosmological models, kind of come up against this same profound mystery. And I think that’s a mystery that actually points in a mind first view of reality.

Brian Keating:
You’re not saying that it definitively points to it, nor are you saying that you can rule out these conjectures of the null boundary theory, which then invokes time coming into existence and basically, as you say, mathematics. But it is true that people will push back and say, well, the existence of blueprints. You know, the blueprints aren’t the house or the structure or the reality, but they’re not nothing, right? They ain’t nothing. You know, kind of, to use Lawrence Krauss’s famous words, a universe from nothing.

Stephen C. Meyer:
That’s the sort of the more Platonistic concept In this technical article I’ve written about quantum cosmology, I say it’s very odd because the, the quantum cosmological model is meant to, at the end of the day, restore a materialist account of the origin of the universe. But it at least points to idealism, a kind of a Platonic idealism. And I would argue, for reasons I can articulate, that a theistic twist on that idealism makes more sense. We don’t know of ideas that exist independently of minds. We do know that ideas typically and always in our experience exist in minds. And so if we’re going to say the universe came out of kind of mathematical idealism, this is the question that Vilenkin actually raises. Are we really saying that a mind predates the universe? And I think it’s interesting, in his book Many Worlds in One, he leaves that question hanging, having laid the foundation for thinking that, yeah, it’s kind of weird to think of conceptual mathematical realities existing apart from a mind. But he never answers the question.

Stephen C. Meyer:
He closes out the book in the next couple paragraphs.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, and the same with Michio Kaku. You know, say things like, o string theory is the mind of God and the God equation. And where did it come from? Well, it came from evolution. It’s sort of puzzling. And again, you know, I’m very sympathetic to cosmologists because it’s very hard to do cosmology. And I often say, if I go to the biology department, you know, where I can get some chemicals or whatever, you can get like a frog there that’s dead. And I dissect the frog, Steve, it comes back and starts screaming. So they don’t let me around there very often.

Brian Keating:
But over there it’s possible at least to do experiments. But cosmologists, astronomers, I can’t turn up the temperature of the sun and see what does that do to the heliosphere. And I can’t change the distance, distance to the moon and see what does that do to the Late Heavy Bombardment by comet. So there are all these different things that would make it very hard to do cosmology. So that means to me, where you can find quantitative evidence, you should really dwell hard there and make precision measurements.

Stephen C. Meyer:
That’s the cool thing about what you do. You’re an experimental astrophysicist, cosmologist, and many people in cosmology are operating purely in the purely theoretical realm.

Brian Keating:
I have a lot of concerns about that because it portrays the, you know, the existence of physics as being the generation of really cool whiz, bang, wormholes and multiverses and black holes that don’t seem to tunnel to another universe. And also that Michio Kaku has just done my friend Stephen Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO and talking quite frankly a lot of nonsense that the extra dimensions that the universe is expanding into are the dimensions of string theory and that string theory explains dark matter. And so I’m going to have a video about that pretty soon.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Just kind of a generation of mathematical castles in the air because we can, we can depict something mathematically or we can imagine something and then depict what we’ve imagined mathematically. Therefore we need to take it seriously as impossible. Alternative model for the origin of the universe or something. And I think there’s a proliferation of these models. I don’t think that’s actually the sign of a healthy research program. The idea of these infinite universe cosmologies are proliferating and there’s a new book out by Phil Halper with Professor Naish F. Shorty and, and they document and do a very nice job explicating describing these different models. But they don’t, these models, no one of them is caught on as the dominant model.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And they often are mutually contradictory. And more importantly, I think they always come at a huge epistemic cost. They may invoke mathematical sleights of hand like the Wick rotation move that, that Hawking makes, or like the conformal rescaling that Penrose does. Or they invoke physical processes that have no precedent in our known physics and often contradict known physical, well established physics like the unitary principle or a limitation on the speed of light. And, or they invoke a lot of processes that are pure posits. They violate the Occam’s principle of as much as possible avoid postulating pure theoretical postulates. And finally, all of these models that we’ve looked at invoke vast amounts of additional new unexplained fine tuning, which is a kind of measure of the degree to which the models are being gerrymandered to try to retrofit themselves to data which otherwise I think more comfortably fits in the standard hot Big bang model.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I want to talk about the fine tuning next, but before I get there, there is a segment, I think on the chapter on life and the universe, something about 2/3 of the way through the film, which is, which is excellent. It’s so beautifully filmed and, and it’s dramatic, it’s animated, it has, you know, incredible energy, pacing, tempo throughout it. I should say it took you long enough, but, but Now I understand why. You know, I recorded in 2021. I remember how to get like, you know, a Covid pass and all these other. Thank God that’s. That’s over, right, Steve?

Stephen C. Meyer:
Part of the problem, Brian, is that we, we. We couldn’t get to people to interview people we want because of all the COVID restrictions.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, it was incredible. But anyway, the film’s wonderful. People should see it. When it’s out, I’ll publicize it again. I didn’t make a penny from it. Steve, you can swear on whatever you believe is holy that is true. I didn’t make any money, and I wouldn’t have done it for money, because that’s not my interest. I get paid by the state of California.

Brian Keating:
Thanks to Gavin Newsom for now. But the point is, Stephen, that you go through. In the Life chapter, you go through these beautiful things. Literally. I mean, the flagellum, the protein folding. Doug Axe at Biola is featured, and they’re talking about the different ways the protein is synthesized from DNA. That double helix is beautiful.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Beautiful.

Brian Keating:
And you quote people saying it had to be, right? It was so beautiful.

Stephen C. Meyer:
The person in question is Francis Crick, who used the beauty principle as a heuristic, as a guide to discovery.

Brian Keating:
I want to dwell on that for a little bit because if Eric Weinstein were here, I’m sure, or Sabina Hassenfelder, they’d be screaming at us, saying beauty is the worst guy, because beauty has led to things like string theory proliferating, sucking the oxygen out of theoretical. Again, I’m quoting Eric, not me. But the point being, it is the most beautiful form. Form of mathematical physics. There’s no doubt about it that it’s elegant, as Brian Greene has called it. And part of the reason for the proliferation of theorists versus experimentalists. I was proposing, like, my third or fourth book to my former editor, my current editor, I guess, and he was saying, well, they don’t want to hear about experiments. They want to hear about fanciful theories.

Brian Keating:
And I’m like, these theories are ridiculous and most of them will never be proven. And most of them are fundamentally disproven and disfavored already. And he said, they don’t care. And so I think that’s a problem. And reference. He’ll quote things like Stephen Hawking, who said when string theory and M theory, he believed in M theory. When that’s proved, then we will know the mind of who, Stephen?

Stephen C. Meyer:
God damn right.

Brian Keating:
The mind of God. Right. So the God equation. Anyway, my point is that I had Kamran Vafa, who’s one of the foremost explicators and also researchers, theoreticians in physics today, period, full stop. I made this claim that string theory makes no predictions. And he said, no, Brian, that’s not actually true. And I said, really? Because there’s like Joseph Conlon, who wrote a book with a chapter called Experimental Evidence for String Theory. It says there is none in that chapter, very famous chapter in a CRC book that he wrote.

Brian Keating:
But anyway, I said, kamran, what is that? He said, well, the string theory makes a prediction that the mass of the electron should be somewhere between 10 to the minus 3 Planck masses, which is an enormous number, by the way, and 10 to the minus 50 Planck masses. And I was like, okay, so that’s like me saying your height should be somewhere between a light year and a micron. And he said, yeah, but he said, it’s not true. Technically, it’s not true. And so I said, fine, so it could be, could have been falsified. Of course we discovered the mass of the electron long before we had string theory. But, Stephen, critics often accuse you guys at the Discovery Institute, or intelligence designers in general of the sharpshooter fallacy. Like, you just paint your target around the arrow, but you don’t make any predictions.

Brian Keating:
Is that really true? Are there no predictions? Or is it all kind of retrodictions which are valid, as, you know, philosophically, Einstein did. He didn’t prove gr. He didn’t discover the perihelion anomaly of Mercury. He retrodicted, he explained it and he was actually wrong for a couple years at first. Right. But tell me, does intelligence, does it predict anything or is it in the business of seeming like. To me, it’s always on the defensive. We have to explain why the inference is to the best explanation being a mind, not like, oh, you’re going to find a hyperon, a three paired quark, and it’s going to have these properties.

Brian Keating:
So does Id make predictions?

Stephen C. Meyer:
It does. But can I come back to that? Because you raised such interesting points, citing Sabine in particular and the beauty thing, I’m very sympathetic to her and her critique a lot because this is actually, I think, where I don’t know whether she coined this phrase or whether I coined it, having read her stuff, but this idea that physicists have become more and more in the business of creating mathematical castles in the air, it’s mathematized metaphysics of a very speculative kind that you find increasingly, especially in the physics of cosmology, with the development of all of these different models so I’m very sympathetic to that and that the idea that you can hold the beauty principle in isolation of other important principles like parsimony, or like explanatory power, or like evidential support. I have a calling. Michael Keyes, who’s written a really important work on the explanatory virtues and he identifies 12 of them as part of the process of good science to get the best set of trade offs among those explanatory virtues. And if you hold one like beauty or symmetry in your equations to the exclusion of all the other explanatory virtues, you’re going to get a skewed model. So beauty is an important element, but it’s not by itself decisive. And I think where, where physics has gone wrong is holding mathematical beauty or just the ability to construct something that is a mathematical apparatus that matches an imaginative scenario. If you hold that the ability to do that in isolation of all the other explanatory virtues, you’re going to get a skewed model.

Stephen C. Meyer:
So I think there’s something. There are some really profound points in the philosophy of science as we think about, well, what are the features of a. Often it’s holding several things, getting the right balance between several things. As to predictions. Yeah, a good scientific theory go back to say Lakitas or some of the. Or Kuhn or people in philosophy of science that recognize that good scientific theories do two things. They explain, well, facts that we already know, and they also anticipate or make predictions about facts that have yet to be discovered or that could be discovered under controlled experimental or laboratory conditions. In other words, a good theory has heuristic value.

Stephen C. Meyer:
It serves as a guide to discovery. The theory of intelligent design does both. We think it does a better job of explaining the irreducible complexity of molecular machines and circuitry in cells. It does a better job of explaining the origin of the information and information storage, transmission and processing systems that we find inside cells, cells, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We could enumerate a number of things that have been long known in biology that suggested a mind played a role in the origin of those systems. But it also makes predictions. One of those really obvious one was about the junk DNA. When the non coding regions of DNA were discovered and it was discovered that the majority of the DNA sequence did not code for proteins.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Neo Darmanists immediately assumed that 97% or whatever it was, was the leftover of the process of natural selection acting on random variations where the random mutations were accumulating over time in the genome. And this was for them an expected outcome of the process that they thought had produced the information in the coding regions and the overall structure of the organism. Our team, starting in the 90s with Dean Kenyon, William Dembsky, Forrest Mims, and then later Richard Sternberg, said, yeah, we accept that mutations are a real process, but we would not expect if the genome were designed, that the information bearing properties of the genome would be dwarfed by the noise, that the signal would be dwarfed by the noise. So we’re going to predict that the non coding regions of the genome will turn out to be be importantly functional. And with the ENCODE project, even before the ENCODE project research that Sternberg was doing in mathematical biology and bioinformatics, but then with the encode project in 2011 and a whole series of discoveries since then in genomics and bioinformatics, it’s really clear that the non coding regions of the genome are in fact importantly functional. That overall their function is something like an operating system in a computer environment in which they’re controlling the timing expression of the coding files. And whereas there are accumulations of random mutation, the majority of the non coding region is in fact importantly functional, just as the ID people predicted. And in my book Signature in the Cell, I laid out that as a prediction prior to the publication of the Encode project in 2011, partly in response to our mutual friend Michael Shermer, who was still marshaling junk DNA as an argument against the idea that you needed Intelligent Design to explain the origin of the information in the genome.

Stephen C. Meyer:
So that’s one example. But I also included in the book an epilogue of nine other predictions of intelligent design. And as our research program matures, it not only is demonstrating rich explanatory power, it’s generating more and more testable predictions that are proving, are providing a guide to research. And we have now very robust research program where people are doing research around predictions that have been generated by an ID model.

Brian Keating:
When I talked to James Tour a couple times, once on the podcast, once in person, it seemed to me his main line of argumentation is look at how complex it is, look at the cell, look at the lipid layer. We can’t even understand that most people think we’ve made frogs in the lab, but we haven’t even made a cell. In other words, it was more sort of. Again, and I’m trying to do this in a way that strengthens your position, which we’re free to disagree with, but the point is it’s always a defensive posture, like they can’t explain this. They don’t understand that. What is your reaction to that line up? Is it valid?

Stephen C. Meyer:
Jim has been very explicit up until quite recently and I’ll tell you the recent twist on this, that he really doesn’t have the tools as an organic chemist to make the argument for intelligent design. And so he doesn’t, doesn’t attempt to. He’s been more a critic of the theory of chemical evolution or different models of evolutionary abiogenesis. And there are, you know, there’s a proliferation of those models as well. He’s played the role that Robert Shapiro once played in origin of life research. They used to call Professor Shapiro Dr. No. With his deep knowledge of chemistry, he would hold, hold origin of life theorists accountable.

Stephen C. Meyer:
It was a kind of a chemical accounting, saying no, you say that that’s a plausible model, but that’s not how chemistry works. That won’t happen. We know that. And Tour’s main involvement in the origins debate has been principally in that vein of critiquing the plausibility of chemical evolutionary theories based on what we know actually can and cannot happen chemically. But recently he and I have jointly authored a paper which will be coming out in a Cambridge University Press volume in which he’s turned the corner. And while still saying I’m not really an intelligent design theorist, I do see the logic of this. And part of the logic comes, flows out of the critiques that he’s been making. If you look at these prebiotic simulation experiments again and again, you can’t get the chemistry to move in a life friendly direction without intelligent intervention of the simulator of the chemist.

Stephen C. Meyer:
And so what you find is that to the extent that you get life tropic life friendly chemical processes arising from even more simple chemistry, it invariably involves the chemist reaching into the system, removing some reaction products, characterizing and moving others on to the next step, starting with purified reagents. And you can quantify the information that’s being input into the system by the intelligent simulator, by the person doing the simulation experiment. So I made the point. Well, if you always need a mind to input information into the chemical system to get it to move in a life friendly direction, and we’re nowhere near simulating in the lab an actual living cell. But if you need information from a mind to even get you moving in the right direction, what are you simulating? Because the logic of a prebiotic simulation experiment is the logic of uniformitarianism. The present, our present observation of cause and effect processes in that laboratory setting is a key to the past well, if we see that we always need the hidden hand of the investigator to move things in the right direction to generate information in a chemical environment, are we really saying then we need a mind to explain the origin of life? Jim gets that argument and we built that into this paper that we wrote together. So I wouldn’t look to him though, and I think he’d be the first to say this. I’m not the guy to articulate the

Brian Keating:
logic of no, I understand. But he’s very effective.

Stephen C. Meyer:
He’s very, he’s formidable. And people in origin of life research have repeatedly passed on very friendly open ended invitations for conversations.

Brian Keating:
Oh, I know. And he’s debated people that will be attacking this podcast and when it comes out. And he’s fearless and I respect him. But I want to say something. I do think it leaves vulnerability for the chemist of the gaps kind of hypothesis again, that we didn’t know about these things. And if I told. If you had been alive 40 years earlier or if you had written this paper 40 years earlier, perhaps you wouldn’t know about, you know, the asteroid Bennu that has, you know, incredible numbers of really complex chemistry on. Again, you know, I’m not the guy to go to with biology and I’ll defer to your expertise on it, but there are advanced amino acids and compounds and, and it is true that Miller Ury Urey was here at UCSD and I’m going to give you a tour of his lab when you come and visit me.

Brian Keating:
And we know that Miller Urey was wrong in terms of the reduction versus the oxidizing atmosphere that they assumed, but they still made amino acids. And I guess the point is, are we not in this low information, low signal to noise regime where yes, of course, anyone, anything made in a lab is going to be traceable to the Fisher Scientific Company, right? So with the reagents and so forth, but in space, in laboratories, in this meteorite here which has biological material on it. And you’ll get it if you subscribe to my newsletter and have a Edu email address and live in the United States brianketing.com edu and it’ll have biology on it because I touched it. But the point is, Stephen, where do we come down where we don’t know now this particular fact. But we also didn’t know about the complex amino acid chemistry which I can look up while you’re answering my question. But the point is we didn’t know about it, but now we do. And so does that not leave you vulnerable to God of The gaps type

Stephen C. Meyer:
attacks God of the gaps is another way of expressing the idea that an argument is committing the informal fallacy of arguing from ignorance. And I’ve had this debating point back and forth with Michael Shermer over the years. Typically, the claim is that, yeah, you ID people are arguing from ignorance. You’re saying that known processes of chemistry, whether based on chance, whether based on natural laws, or whether based on some combination of the two, are insufficient, are not causally adequate to produce the kind of information that we find in living cells. Specified or functional information. And then from that you say, therefore an intelligent agent God must have done it. And that’s an argument from ignorance. And that would be an argument from ignorance if we were arguing that way.

Stephen C. Meyer:
The fallacy of arguing from the informal fallacy of arguing from ignorance is that you’re asserting simply a negation of the causal power of one cause without affirming or providing evidence for the causal power of the alternative cause which you want to elect as the better explanation. And instead we’re saying, no, we’re not saying that natural processes can’t produce functional or specified information, therefore a mind must have done it. It we’re saying natural processes do not, and for profound theoretical reasons in some cases cannot produce that type of information. But there is a cause of which we know that does routinely generate that kind of information. We have positive experience of conscious agents generating the kind of functional or specified information that we find in living cells. We’re not arguing from ignorance. We’re making an inference to the best explanation based on our knowledge, not our ignorance of known cause and effect processes. What are we including in the known cause and effect processes? We’re including what we know from our own observation of what our own minds can do.

Stephen C. Meyer:
In other words, and this is the point that Thomas Nagel made in his book Mind and Cosmos, if we leave out our awareness of the reality of minds as part of our characterization of the universe, we’re leaving out something really significant. And that’s what gets left out in the analysis of the prebiotic simulation experiments. The role of the mind in simulating the movement from less life friendly to more life friendly chemistry. So we want to say that in making the inference to design, we’re not arguing from ignorance. We’re arguing from our knowledge of the cause and effect processes at work in the world, from our uniform and repeated experience of what it takes to generate functional or specified information.

Brian Keating:
I do want to make a couple advertisements. Again, I don’t get a penny from this film, but it is I think it’s the best made film of its kind and there’s no real competitor to it. It’s. It fills this void that that was missing for so long. I mean just for one example, that again, I didn’t know about it. I didn’t know what, what cuts I’d be in. I would have liked more screen time, but I’ll take what I got.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Well, it gets you in the sequel on cosmology friend. That’s, that’s where we got to go next.

Brian Keating:
Top billing, me and Ryan Gosling. Right. And you of course, course we got to have you in there. You do a great job. But the Hoyle resonance sequence where you talk that and you actually bring up one of my heroes which almost nobody ever knows about Willie Fowler, who helped describe why these kidding.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Did you know? Did you overlap with him at all?

Brian Keating:
I didn’t but his prize student is my good friend and close colleague George Fuller who just got elected the National Academy of Sciences. He’s my closest collaborator here. They along with the Burbages who were famed atheists who owe office I now occupy which I will delight in bringing to the Burbage’s office. They described how meteors, meteorites form. Again, this is incredible storytelling and no one has ever had, you know, this compelling of a storyline where you talk about very complex topics but in a way that anyone can understand. But it’s scientifically rigorous.

Stephen C. Meyer:
One of our young film editors found that footage or found the reel to reel tape of Fowler telling the story in.

Brian Keating:
It’s incredible. And if you’re, even if you’re an A, I don’t care if you’re the most militant atheist, Lawrence Krauss, you’re going to learn something from this film film about the science. You may reject it, not wanting to come into the film, but you’re going to learn something scientifically from the, from the first person sources. And I think the fine tuning arguments are really a puzzle. And, and I, as you know, I had a conversation on common knowledge with Luke Barnes and Jay Richards. I come down along with Fred Adams who’s a past guest on, on the fine tuning maybe not being as big of a puzzle, but there’s some aspects of again I don’t know about the biology whatsoever, but the cosmology is done incredibly with care and with attention, with respect. And I think the materialist philosophy has weak points and I think pointing that out to the general public is important. You don’t come away saying it has to be.

Brian Keating:
It means to be solved and it needs to be Solved. There’s only one way to solve it. We have the right answer now because I think you have the vulnerability there. When I’ve heard William Lane Craig again. We talked about this in our first conversation on the podcast. The inference back to a kalam argument that then goes to a God that then goes to Jesus Christ. A lot of people, including me, find that not really very probative and not helpful. Helpful.

Brian Keating:
So you don’t do that in this film. This is not a Christian, you know, film. There’s nothing about.

Stephen C. Meyer:
I don’t do that in my book

Brian Keating:
and you don’t do that anywhere. You cannot attack Steve for being a Bible thumping Christian. He’s talking to a practicing Jew. He’s done it many times. He’s not scared to talk to me and he’s not scared to talk to militant atheist Michael Shermer. You quote Lawrence Krauss in that book, which. And then the return of the God hypothesis. I think for me, you know, the thing that I’m most interested in is the experimental side.

Brian Keating:
Like you hit a. We don’t have enough evidence. We’re operating in a realm at least in a cosmology field. Hopefully with new instruments like the Simons Observatory and our competitors around the world, we’re going to get more information about perhaps the very first moments of the universe with hard, factual data. And I think this is an eternal mystery. I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s a wonderful thing to think about. It’s the kind of thing you stop thinking about when you go to college because you don’t have time in the quotidian demands of a family and kids and pets.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Stephen C. Meyer:
Courses done. And get a job. Okay. Right.

Brian Keating:
And speaking of which, I got to go grade a final. Give a final. But Steve, I want to give you the last word. Where. Where is this film? Where can we find more about this? Where are these papers? And. And I want to support the film in any way we can. Thank you.

Stephen C. Meyer:
We had a really nice run in theaters. It was initially scheduled for seven nights. We got a two. Two separate extensions of the film. Well, at the box office. I learned all this stuff on Rotten Tomatoes, the go to site. They’ve got a 92 plus percent popcorn rating, which I guess means it’s good. The film will be coming out on streaming platforms starting with a release on Amazon prime on June 25th.

Stephen C. Meyer:
It’ll be coming out on other streaming platforms later in the summer. But if people are eager to see it soon, June 25th is the date when you can first purchase your own copy to watch on your laptop or big screen at home. I think you’ll learn something. And it certainly opens up these big questions that, that Brian and I so enjoy talking to each other about.

Brian Keating:
So, Dr. Steven Seymour, thank you so much for sharing so much of your time. And I can’t wait to show you around the lab here in San Diego and maybe we can search for some maybe intelligently designed things that, you know, it’s something made by me, maybe not so much, but my students are quite intelligent.

Stephen C. Meyer:
I always say that in my own stuff. It’s evidence of quasi intelligent design if

Brian Keating:
it’s intelligent and happened because of my wife or my students. Stephen, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.

Stephen C. Meyer:
We’ll see you soon. BR thank you.

Brian Keating:
Steve Meyer thinks that AI proves minds can’t be reduced to matter. If that rewired anything in your mind. Subscribe. I know you’re intelligent and you’ll want to turn on the notifications as well. Tell me in the comments, is MAVA collapse evidence of a design or is it just bad training data? And go deeper. With my conversation with Sean Carroll linked right here.