Music We'll build Newsweek Magazine is not exactly a conservative publication, so it's interesting to see this article that they published by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. And before we get to it, have you had much interaction with Stephen Meyer and his work? Yes, I have. Stephen, I actually go back pretty long ways. When we were still living in Belgium, he invited me to a conference at Queens College at Cambridge University where the founders of the Intelligent Design Movement were collaborating with one another. And that was that movement that I met Philip Johnson, Met Steve, and got to hear about his work and his collaboration with Bill Demsky. I think Michael B. He might have been there. And over the years then, I have been at conferences with Steve most recently at the Evangelical, Theological Philosophical Society meeting where he attended our reasonable faith dinner and he and I were on a panel discussion together on the book Theistic Evolution. And I've read some of his books like Signature in the Cell, so we are colleagues and friends. Stephen begins this article. headlines lately have not been encouraging for the faithful. A Gallup poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe in God has fallen to 81% a drop of 10% over the last decade and an all-time low. This accelerating trend is especially pronounced among young adults, according to a Pew Research center pole 18 to 29 year olds are disproportionately represented among so-called nuns, N-E-S. That's atheist agnostics and the religiously unaffiliated. Pastors and other religious leaders have attributed this trend to many factors. Young people being raised outside the church is one of them, and unfamiliarity with the liturgy and church culture, and even COVID-19 has been blamed for this bill. You know, Bill, maybe you can offer us in speculation. You and I have discussed off-the-air an article that found that the biggest decline was among liberals and Democrats. And that the Republicans have actually come up and religiosity according to this poll is a major determinant of political divisions in the US. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, going opposite directions according to this poll. Any speculation? Yes, one would really like that to be true. That there would be Christians who are liberal or progressive in their politics and that we would break this caricature stereotype that Christians are all right wing political conservatives. But as you say, Kevin, the polling, the demographics, seem to show that there is a lot of truth to this stereotype and that it has been primarily among Democrats and progressives that believe in God is plummeting. Now, the interesting question sociologically, which I'm not equipped to answer is which way does the cause-effect relationship go? Is it because of their political positions that they decline in their religious belief that their atheism or agnosticism is a result of their politics, or is it quite the reverse that their politics are the result of their secularism and unbelief? And that would be a really interesting question for some sociologist to explore. But nevertheless, the trend is apparently real. And I find very disturbing. Those of us who are in Christian ministry have got to try to figure out ways to reach out to this disaffected group of people among whom religious belief is sharply declining. Stephen Meyer continues in the sardicle, we found another answer in our national survey to probe underlying reasons for this growing unbelief, a misunderstanding of science. Perhaps surprisingly, our survey discovered that the perceived message of science has played a leading role in the loss of faith. We found that scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life have, in particular, led more people to reject belief in God than worries about suffering or disease or death.

It also showed that 65% of self-described atheists and 43% of agnostics believe the findings of science generally make the existence of God less probable. Bill, any thoughts on those findings? Well, I think that this underlines a point that I have often made that our Western culture remains deeply modernist at heart. We do not live in a postmodern culture. People are relativistic and subjectivistic about ethics and religion, but they are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, technology, engineering, and so forth. And I do think that this presupposition of scientific naturalism does underlie a lot of the secularism in Western society. The view is that science alone is the arbiter of truth. That science will give us ultimately the facts about reality, and that matters like religion and ethics are just expressions of personal taste or the results of societal conditioning that don't really have objective truth. And so I think that this Discovery Institute survey is probably onto something here in thinking that this misperception of modern science, this scientific naturalism does indeed underlie a good deal of secular belief. Dr. Meyer continues, it's easy to see why this perception has proliferated. In recent years, many scientists have emerged as celebrity spokesman for atheism. Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Michael Schumer, the late Stephen Hawking, and others have published popular books arguing that science renders belief in God unnecessary or implausible. Quoting, the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. Dawkins famously wrote that. Yet between message and reality there, there is a major disconnect. Over the last century, important scientific discoveries have dramatically challenged science-based atheism and three in particular now tell it assidedly more God-friendly story. Bill, you could talk about, as you have many times, you could talk about

scientism here and so could Stephen in this article, but he's saying that even the typical view of science is offering pointers to God that is given the atheist own definition of science. Yes, that's a good point, Kevin, even if you did think incorrectly that science is the sole arbiter of truth and that any metaphysics that we do needs to be an extension of our best physical sciences. The fact is that since the beginning of the 20th century, there has really been a series of scientific revolutions that have made belief in God more credible than at any time in recent memory. The sort of 19th and 18th century view of the world, which promoted atheism and a kind of absentee God, I think has been undone during the 20th century. And now in a number of different areas, I think physics shows itself to be more open to the existence of a transcendent creator and designer of the universe than at any time in recent centuries. The article continues, first, scientists have discovered that the physical universe had a beginning. This finding, supported by observational astronomy and theoretical physics, contradicts the expectations of scientific atheists who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent and therefore in no need of an external creator. Evidence for what scientists call the Big Bang has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theist, Nobel laureate, Arno Panzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang Theory,

has noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of

divine creation. He says the best data that we have or exactly what I would have predicted had

I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses and the Bible as a whole. Bill, I'm thinking that you have a whole lot to say about this first one. I have said a lot about this, Kevin. When I did my doctoral work back in the 70s at the University of Birmingham in England, I wrote on on the socalled Kalam Cosmological Argument. This is a very ancient argument that argues for creation and for the existence of a transcendent creator on the basis of the finitude of the past. Medieval proponents of the Kalam Cosmological had no scientific evidence whatsoever to suggest that the universe is not past eternal. Indeed since the ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle, the universe was assumed to be eternal in its existence and never to have begun to exist. And this view dominated Western thinking apart from the Judeo-Christian tradition right up until the 20th century. But I was vaguely aware that modern cosmology had developed a model of the origin of the universe called

the Big Bang theory, and that this was in contrast, for example, to the steady state theory, which posited an eternal past. And so as I was doing my doctoral studies, I thought I needed to look into this in greater detail. So I began to read read the physics literature. And the deeper, and deeper I got into this literature, the more astonished I was, at the way in which modern astrophysics confirms the prediction that the universe is not past eternal, but had an absolute beginning, a finite time ago, before which literally nothing existed. There was not anything prior to the beginning of the universe. And I included this material in my doctoral thesis and submitted to John Hick. And after reading it, he came back to me and he said, I took your thesis to one of the physicists here at the university to review. And he got back to me and said, well, yes, everything that your student has said is absolutely correct. And I said, well, yes, I know it is. And it said to me, why don't the theologians know about this? And I couldn't answer that question, but there was this great gap between what contemporary science was saying and what theologians were saying. And sadly, that gap still apparently persists because I think this is a dramatic development in science that makes belief in a transcendent creator certainly rational. Continuing the article, Stephen writes, second, discoveries from physics about the structure of the universe reinforce this theistic conclusion. Since the 1960s, physicists have determined that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe are finally tuned against all odds to make our universe capable of hosting life. even slight alterations of many independent factors, such as the strength of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, or the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe, would have rendered life impossible. Scientists have discovered that we live in a kind of gold elux universe, or what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely fortunate universe. Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable fine-tuning points to a cosmic fine tuner. As former Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argued, a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkey with physics to make life possible. Okay, Bill, go to town. I'll be honest. This is the famous argument from the fine tuning of the universe for a cosmic designer. What scientists have discovered is that the constants and quantities which appear in the laws of nature appear to fall within an extraordinarily narrow life-permitting range of values. Were any of these constants or quantities to be altered by almost incomprehensibly tiny amounts, the universe would have been life prohibiting instead. For example, an alteration in the force of gravitation would have resulted in the universe's expanding too rapidly for stars and planets to congeal and form where life might evolve. On the other hand, if gravity were too strong, the universe would have long ago recalapt into a catastrophic cosmic black hole before life could evolve. Luke Barnes, who Steve mentioned in the quotation, I was just reading an article by him this afternoon in study for my systematic philosophical theology, where I'm covering the fine-tuning argument. And Barnes lists a number of these fundamental parameters of the universe and the improbability of each one falling with this

in this exquisitely narrow like permitting range. And he comes up with a combined probability that all of these would fall into the life permitting range by chance alone is on the order of one chance out of 10 to the 135th power, which is simply an incomprehensible number. And so this fine tuning of the universe does cry out for explanation. And basically there are three options in the literature on fine tuning that are vying for the status of the best explanation. One would be that these constants and quantities are all really physically necessary. If we really understood the laws of nature, we would see that these are not free parameters that can vary, but they all are necessary in their values. Well, he no believes that the more scientists explore, the laws of nature, the more they are able to see that these constants and quantities are not determined by the laws themselves. And this is very helpful because it means that you can describe other possible universes governed by the same laws, but with different values for the constants and quantities. And because they are governed by the same laws, you can predict what those universes would be like and what they discover is that the results would be catastrophic. There wouldn't even be chemistry. There wouldn't even be matter in these other worlds without these finely tuned constants and quantities. So in order to defend the hypothesis that this is due to chance, many theorists are adverting to the so-called multiverse hypothesis, which says that there is an ensemble of universes like ours, preferably infinite, which very randomly in their constants and quantities, so that life permitting universes would appear somewhere by chance in this infinite ensemble. And since you can only observe universes that are fine-tuned for the existence of observers we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in such a universe. And this is really where the debate lies today. The debate

today over fine tuning is a contest between these two metaphysical hypotheses, the multiverse hypothesis and the hypothesis of a divine designer. And I think that there are good reasons to prefer the hypothesis of divine design over the multiverse hypothesis. One of

these I think that there are good reasons to prefer the hypothesis of divine design over the multiverse hypothesis. One of these has been explained well by Roger Penrose, and that is that if we are living in a multiverse of randomly ordered worlds, then we have absolutely no basis for thinking that our perceptions of the external world are indeed

accurate. In other words, there are observable worlds in which you have sort of freak observers.

These are sometimes called Boltzmann brains. Brains that simply fluctuate into existence out of the the thermal vacuum with the illusory perceptions of the external world. And on the Moldivar's hypothesis there is no way to know that we are not just one of these freak observers. So if you believe in the multiverse hypothesis, you cannot rationally believe that you have a body that you're surrounded by a real external world that you actually have other friends and acquaintances. In fact, and here's the real irony, you can't even rationally believe the multiverse hypothesis because if all of your sense perceptions are unreliable, then how do you know that the empirical evidence on which you believe the multiverse hypothesis is reliable and not simply any illusion of your brain. And so it turns out that this hypothesis is seriously self-defeating and cannot be rationally affirmed. So that's where this debate over fine-tuning lies today and it is a very animated and important debate and a good many philosophers and physicists are defending the hypothesis of divine design as the best explanation. Steve then says in the article, third, molecular biology has revealed the presence of living cells of an exquisite world of informational nanotechnology. These include digital code and DNA and RNA, tiny, intricately constructed molecular machines which vastly exceed our own digital, high technology in their storage and transmission capabilities. And even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Implying it would seem the activity of a master programmer at work, the origin of life. At the very least, the discoveries of modern biology are not what anyone would have expected from blind materialistic processes. Evidence of design and biology, Bill? Whereas I've worked on those first two areas that Steve talked about, namely the origin of the universe and the fine tuning of the universe for intelligent life, Steve is the one who has worked most on this third area of evidence of intelligent design and biology. He claims that the information that is contained in the cell itself bespeaks of intelligent design. And the argument here is that even if we are evolved from lower life forms that, this cannot be explained solely in terms of random mutations and selection, natural selection, operating on these random mutations or other factors in embryonic development, example that the best explanation would require some sort of intelligent design behind the process, even on an evolutionary scenario. So you have a number of these intelligent design theorists like Michael Beehy, who are quite willing to accept the thesis of common ancestry, all life is evolved from some primordial organism, but they will deny that this biological complexity can be plausibly explained by the usual mechanisms offered in evolutionary biology. And the article concludes, all this underscores a growing disparity between public perceptions of the message of science and what scientific evidence actually shows, far from pointing to blind, pitiless indifference. The great discoveries of the last century point to the exquisite design of life and the universe and arguably to an intelligent creator behind it all. Build your conclusions on the article. I think Steve's conclusion is quite justified. I think that in light of the evidence that we've talked about today, it is at least reasonable to believe in a transcendent creator and designer of the universe. And so today's Christian does not find himself fundamentally at odds with modern science, as these polls seem to suggest. Rather, I think the person who believes in a transcendent creator and designer of the cosmos finds himself situated very comfortably within contemporary mainstream science. And by the way Bill, we just have to talk about the web telescope images as we wrap up the podcast today. Steve mentioned Luke Barnes earlier. He said about these images. Imagine you're lying on your back, looking up at the stars, and these images zoom in and in and in until it's the same size in the sky as a grain of sand held at arm's length. And we've zoomed in enough so that in that spot we can see thousands of galaxies.

Isn't that amazing? I mean a grain of sand if you held it at Arms Link and we just examined that portion of the universe and that's what we see. The universe is incomprehensibly large and I think these images from the telescope underline the biblical Psalmist words the heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Thank you.