SCM:
Delighted to be with you.

SCM:
(2:57 - 8:17) Well, I don't know what Tucker knows about all this, but.

SCM:
It happened here in London a few years ago. 2016, major conference convened by the Royal Society. Arguably the world's most august and prestigious scientific body. It was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who are dissatisfied with the standard neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. And many of the conveners are calling for a new theory. Because the primary mechanism of biological change articulated by Darwin and his subsequent followers now called the neo-Darwinists---the idea of natural selection acting on random mutations and variations---is now understood to lack the creative power to generate major changes in the history of life.

SCM:
There's two issues really. There's how do you get to the first life from the simpler non-living chemicals. That's sometimes called chemical evolutionary theory. And that's a complete mess. It's in a state of impasse. And almost everyone, even your recent guest Richard Dawkins acknowledges. We have no chemical evolutionary theory that accounts for the origin of the first life. And many people don't know that Darwin didn't attempt to explain the origin of the first life. Rather he presumed one or very few simple organisms, which we now know were not simple. And then he proposed a mechanism by which you could generate all the new forms of life we see on the planet today. But even that now is being challenged. Because the main mechanism of evolutionary change does a nice job of explaining small scale variation---what Tucker was referring to I think is adaptation. This would be examples like Darwin's finches. Where the beaks get a little bigger, a little smaller in response to varying weather patterns. But it does a very poor job of explaining the major innovations in the history of life. Such as the origin of birds or mammals or animals in the first place. And there in the fossil record we do see many instances of very abrupt appearance without the transitional intermediates that you'd expect on the basis of the Darwinian picture of the tree of life.

SCM:
I think it does fail. I think it captures an element of the truth. The small scale micro evolutionary variation is certainly a real process. And no one disputes that. Natural selection is a real process. But what's at issue now is the degree to which it has genuine creative power. And I think at this 2016 conference the opening talk was given by a prominent Austrian evolutionary biologist, not an American talk show host. And he enumerated five major explanatory deficits of neo-Darwinism. Many of them surrounding this problem of the mechanism lacks the generative or creative power necessary to account for the major innovations in the history of life.

SCM:
Maybe just a little framing before I dive into the evidence. Professor Dawkins at Oxford has said that the universe has precisely the properties that we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. And though I'm on the opposite side of this science be God issue with the good professor, I think he does a marvelous job of framing key issues. And this is one of those great framing quotations. Because what he's saying is that whether we think of it as a scientific question or a philosophical question or both, if we have a hypothesis about reality, the way we test that is by looking at the world around us, and seeing if what we see comports with what we would expect to see if our hypothesis were true. And his hypothesis is that of blind pitiless indifference, which is a shorthand way of saying that everything came about by strictly undirected material processes. And what the materialists expected coming into the early 20th century was evidence of an eternal self-existent universe---one that had been here for an infinitely long time and therefore did not need an external creator. What in fact the astrophysicists, the cosmologists, the astronomers found was evidence of a universe that had a definite beginning. And therefore one that could not have created itself, because before the matter of the universe came into existence there was no matter there to do the causing. And so the picture of the universe that has emerged starting from the 1920s all the way to the present, both from observational astronomy and from theoretical physics is a universe that had a definite beginning and therefore requires some sort of external creator or cause.

SCM:
I do believe in God, yes.

SCM:
Right. Dawkins wants to portray theistic belief as if it's equivalent to belief in fairies. And he'll concede that, well, it's possible. But I think there's a stronger argument for the theistic case. And that is that when scientists and philosophers reason from evidence, they typically use a method of reasoning that has a technical name. It's called inferring to the best explanation, where the best explanation is one where you're invoking a cause which has the kind of powers that would be required to explain the phenomenon of interest. And you correctly pointed out in your conversation with him that when you get back to that, what physicists often call the singularity, the point where matter, space, time, and energy begin to exist, the materialist is really up against a huge conundrum, because prior to the origin of matter, there is no matter to do the causing, that's what we mean by the origin of matter, that that's where it starts. And so if you want to invoke a cause which is sufficient to explain the origin of matter, you can't invoke matter. Materialistic explanations are in principle insufficient. So you need to invoke something which is external to the material universe and is not bounded by time and space as well. And that starts to paint a picture of the kind of cause you would need that has the sort of attributes traditionally associated with God. God is outside of time and space, has causal powers, is an agent with volition, and therefore can initiate a change of state from, in this case, nothing to something.

SCM:
Oh, the single cell as opposed to the universe?

SCM:
Yeah, I do think there's incredible evidence of intelligent design at the point of the origin of life, because that first simple cell, in the 19th century Thomas Huxley said that the cell is a simple homogenous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.

SCM:
Wonderful. He was one of the great scientists of the 19th century, but we know so much more now that he didn't know. And what we now know is that inside even the simplest cell we have digital nanotechnology. We have the information stored in the DNA. We have an exquisite system of information storage, transmission, and processing, and that information is being used to build protein machines and other even more complex nanomachinery inside the cell. So it's a sort of automated factory run by digital information. People didn't know about that in the early 19th century.

SCM:
Well, right. Presumably that's where...

SCM:
(12:05 - 25:47) I do think there was an original cell that was created.

SCM:
Well, again, there's two contexts. There's the how do you get to the first cell? And then how do you get from the first cell to everything else? Let's just take the origin of the first cell.

SCM:
I do.

SCM:
Right. Here's the evidence, though, that when we see information in a digital or alphabetic or typographic form, and this is what we actually see in the DNA, when Francis Crick elucidated what he called the sequence hypothesis in the late 1950s, he realized that the four subunits along the interior of the DNA are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters in a section of software. What we know from experience is that whenever we say information of that sort, it always comes from a mind. Bill Gates, our local hero, has said that DNA is like a software program but much more complex than any we've ever devised. Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that it functions like a machine code. Well, what we know is that software comes from a programmer. And in fact, whenever we see information of that kind, whether it's in a software program or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book, it always arises from a mind, not a material process. So the discovery of information at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cell, I argue, is decisive evidence of the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.

SCM:
Well, this is one way that the physicists refer to something that they call the fine-tuning of the universe, or sometimes they talk about the anthropic fine-tuning. The idea is that the most fundamental parameters of physics fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances, outside of which, we have discovered, life would not be possible. Even basic chemistry would not be possible. So the force responsible for the expansion of the universe, called the cosmological constant, is fine-tuned and accepted value is to 1 part in 10 to the 90th power. So a smidge faster or slower in that expansion, and you either get a heat death of the universe or you get a big crunch, a great black hole. In either case, life is not possible. That's just one of many parameters that fall within that kind of a sweet spot. So sometimes the physicists do talk about our living in a Goldilocks universe. Luke Barnes has written a wonderful book about the fine-tuning of.., physicists who also did his PhD at Cambridge. He's written a book called The Fortunate Universe. So these types of terms are now making their way into physics because physicists did not expect that life would depend upon such an exquisitely and improbably arranged set of basic parameters. But there we have it. This is what they found.

SCM:
Well, one of the scientists who first discovered these fine-tuning parameters was Fred Hoyle. Hoyle was a pretty aggressive scientific atheist. He opposed the Big Bang and even gave the Big Bang its name, the Big Bang, as a kind of pejorative to make fun of the concept. But after he discovered some of these fine-tuning parameters, he had a shift in his philosophical perspective and his worldview. And he was later quoted as saying that a common-sense interpretation of the data, the fine-tuning data, suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible. And I would say I love the way that monkeys always make it into the origins discussion, even if it's in physics.

SCM:
Always monkeys, either at a typewriter or something.

SCM:
The multiverse is the idea that, yes, the universe is incredibly finely tuned against all odds to make life possible, but the explanation for that is not that there was a cosmic fine-tuner, an intelligence who set the universe up so that life would be possible, but rather that there's a billion or gabillions of other universes out there that have different combinations of these different settings of these different parameters, and that ours just happens to be the lucky one. And the reason that we have life in our universe is not that it was designed for life, but rather there was a kind of giant cosmic lottery that is responsible and that life must have arisen somewhere, and again, we just happen to be in the lucky universe. And my response? Yes. Yes, right. Well, the multiverse hypothesis is specifically relevant to explaining this fine-tuning, but there's a problem with it, and that is that if you have all these other universes out there, the very existence of these other universes does not explain the fine-tuning in our universe, and here's why. If those other universes are separate from our own, then there's no causal connection between them, so whatever happens in those other universes has no effect on our universe, including it has no effect on whatever process was responsible for setting the fine-tuning. So in virtue of that, multiverse proponents have had to propose a kind of common cause of all the universes, a universe-generating machine of some kind that could allow them to portray our universe as the lucky winner of a giant cosmic lottery, and that's where the rub comes in.

SCM:
Well, yeah, there's a problem with it, and that is that all of the different universe-generating mechanisms that have been proposed, some based on something called string theory, others based on something called inflationary cosmology, themselves require prior fine-tuning in the universe-generating mechanisms. And so you explain the fine-tuning in this universe by invoking a universe-generating mechanism, but that mechanism in turn has to be finely tuned, and so you're right back to where you started without an ultimate explanation for fine-tuning. And yet we know from our experience that when we find something that's finely tuned, think of a French recipe or an internal combustion engine or a radio dial, fine-tuning always requires, in our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, it always requires a fine-tuner and intelligence. So given that the multiverse hasn't explained, given an ultimate explanation for fine-tuning, the best explanation for fine-tuning is still intelligent design.

SCM:
Oh, of course. Science is inherently prepared.

SCM:
I think it's the... Well, I just lost my mother. Sorry. And I think the deepest and hardest questions in life are not actually these big metaphysical questions. I think if you think carefully about them, there's a pretty clear answer. But I think it's the questions that come up because of the events in your own life, and sometimes suffering, sometimes joys, why things went this way rather than that way. Those are the questions I think are the hardest ones, the existential questions of one's own personal experience.

SCM:
I shouldn't have introduced a personal element like that.

SCM:
I think the experience of grief was something that was unexpected in how intense it was. She had dementia and had been in decline for several years. You think you're prepared when you're losing someone by degrees, but there's a finality of death that I think overtakes all of us in that moment of grief. And there's something about the grief experience that it seems to make everything else pale to insignificance in that moment. And I think it's kind of, my own view of it, it's kind of a signal. Like your conscience tells you what's right and wrong, I think grief is telling you about what's really important, and that in that instance, what was important is that we had lost a person of eternal value. And so, yeah, I think it was... You're never really prepared for the loss of a parent, and I thought I was, but I wasn't.

SCM:
I absolutely do, yeah. And I think when I was on the Rogan program, it was probing about both the objective evidence for belief in God and my subjective experience. And I would never base an argument to another scientist or philosopher on my subjective experience, but I think belief in God has, I think, legitimate objective and subjective basis. And I think that that mysterious moment when you see a loved one passing, when the body is there but the person is gone, it raises some profound metaphysical questions or maybe a metaphysical awareness that there is something more than the material that is part of all of us.

SCM:
Yeah, sure.

SCM:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

SCM:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a both-end thing if you're a believer. There's plenty of good solid scientific evidence, good philosophical reasons for belief, but then there are these experiences too that we have along the way that suggest it's not just matter in motion. There's more to the world than the material stuff.

SCM:
Well, honestly, he signed a book for me once in a line. I've never met him. But I watched the interview you did with him. Honestly, there's something about the guy. I love the guy. He's so intense about...

SCM:
It looked like you were having fun.

SCM:
I always feel that anyone who has that level of intensity about the big questions in life is someone with whom I share a kindred spirit. Now, we've come to the opposite conclusion. But I also think he has this great talent for framing issues. The universe we observe has exactly the properties that we should expect. That's a great quote. No design, no purpose. Another one, he says, that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. And yet, Dawkins himself acknowledges that he can't explain the origin of the first life.

SCM:
You've got to deliver the goods. In the interview with you, it's so telling. When you asked him what he wished he knew and could explain, he said, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of consciousness. Well, those are the very things that materialism... It's not just that science can't explain those. A materialistic world fails to explain those.

SCM:
And this is not God of the gaps, OK. There are gaps there for materialism. But the materialists assume that any explanation that doesn't involve a purely material process is an explanation that is just filling a mere gap. But the rules of explanation are a little different than that. A good explanation provides a causally adequate explanation where you infer an entity which, if true, would be capable of generating and therefore explaining the thing of interest. We look at the origin of the universe and we understand that matter, space, time, and energy come into existence. Then prior to that, there's no matter again to do the causing. So materialistic explanations are inherently inadequate. And yet positing an external entity that has volition and agency does fit the bill. If true, that would provide a positive explanation for the origin of the universe.

SCM:
Tragic messes of the kind you just described.

SCM:
(26:20 - 32:56) Well, of course. There's a traditional theistic answer, goes back to Augustine and maybe earlier, the idea of what's sometimes called the free will defense if you're in an argument about the so-called problem of evil. I actually find it persuasive and compelling. And it's the idea that God created us as free moral agents and understood in creating us that way that he was taking a risk, that we could use our agency for good or for ill. We could use it to love him and to love the other creatures he's made or we could use it to aggrandize ourselves. And we have instances of both on this planet. And the people will say, well, why would God do that? Well, I think the answer is that God understood that creating agents with free will opened the possibility of evil, but it also opened the possibility of genuine love. If he had created mere robots, we wouldn't really be persons. We wouldn't have the quality of life that is possible to us. So in a sense, it's evidence of a divine risk, but it was a risk that I think he deemed worth taking. And ultimately, in the Christian tradition, which you and I share, there's a plan for sorting all that out in the end, you know, redemption.

SCM:
Well, I'm very sceptical about extraterrestrial intelligence. It used to be...

SCM:
That's a very good question, Piers. It used to be thought among physicists and astrophysicists that the answer to that question was yes, because there's so many galaxies. And this is part of the cosmological question that's so fascinating. I wrote in Return of the God Hypothesis that there were 200 billion galaxies. I've since been corrected by an astrophysics colleague who says it's probably closer to 2 trillion now, another order of magnitude.

SCM:
There's a couple of books that came out in the early 2000s, one called Rare Earth by two astronomers at University of Washington, another called Privileged Planet. And yes, there's a lot of galaxies out there, but it turns out that the number of parameters that have to be finely tuned in a just right way to make not just a universe consistent with life, but a life-friendly solar system, a life-friendly planet, the number and improbability of getting all of those parameters right may actually dwarf the number of galaxies and planets out there. It's an open question. But it used to be thought as slam dunk, there must be life elsewhere. Now I think there's an argument both ways among the astrophysicists.

SCM:
Nobody knows. We haven't found anything like it.

SCM:
Well, I think it ultimately is to come into a relationship with the creator who made the universe. In the closing chapter of my book, I talk about Viktor Frankl and the man's search for meaning and how universal that is. And that nothing can mean anything to a rock or to an atom or to a planet. Things only mean things to persons. So if there is to be meaning in life, there must be genuine persons to whom we can mean something and who can mean something to us. And yet we all die. And so I think if there is a God, it reopens that question of ultimate meaning. The French existentialists used to say of Sartre, without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. But if there is an infinite reference point, and that infinite reference point is personal, that is to say if the universe was created by a personal agent who wants to know us, then the possibility of enduring meaning is again on the table.

SCM:
That's the question that haunted me as a teenager. It was, what's it going to matter in 100 years? No matter what I worked on, no matter what I achieved, no matter what goal I set, I thought I couldn't, what was the point? And I one time came across the quote from Bertrand Russell where he talks about all the great labors of the human race and the noonday, the brightness of human achievement, noonday human achievement is destined for extinction and the vast death of the solar system. I wasn't much fun at parties as a teenager. But those sorts of, at a certain point in life, whether it's when you're very young or often when you're nearing the end, those sorts of questions percolate.

SCM:
That's the other thing about the grief emotion, is that it seems to be telling us there's something profoundly unnatural, not intended by death. But then, on the flip side, in that realm of objective scientific evidence, and this is the message of my book, to me, when I look inside the cell and see the evidence of that digital storage, transmission and processing system, Richard Dawkins himself said, upon seeing an animation of this recently, that he was knocked sideways with wonder at the intricacy and complexity of the digital information processing that's going on inside cells. This is extraordinary. It's like a 3D printer. You've got digital code directing the construction of three-dimensional structures and machines all inside the tiniest recesses of the cell. There is no materialistic chemical evolutionary or other account of that. But we se e features inside the cell that are reminiscent of our own high-tech information and digital technology. This seems to be pointing, obviously, to a transcendent mind.

SCM:
Wonderful.