A mind behind matter

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, April 24th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: science and faith.

A new film is out aiming to challenge the narrative that science and faith are in conflict. It's called The Story of Everything. It's a documentary based on Stephen Meyer's book, Return of the God Hypothesis.

Stephen Meyer is a former geophysicist and college professor. He now directs the Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.

Welcome, Stephen. So good to have you.

MEYER: It's nice to be with you, Myrna.

BROWN: Well, right out of the gate, I'll admit, science...not my favorite subject growing up. So for the listener who may be like me, freezing up just at the mention of the word, allay our fears here. Tell us why we shouldn't be afraid of science.

MEYER: Well, science is just what we get to know about the world that God made all around us! And so all of us have scientific knowledge of some kind or other, and there's some that focus their careers on it and get more specialized knowledge. 

But I had a student, Myrna, that was a favorite of my wife, Selaine...and one day she came up to babysit and she told my wife, “Don't tell Steve that I skipped the history of science class,” she said. “But I'm just a science loser,” she said. [laughs] And so we tried to remedy that by making the lectures very accessible, and I think we made a little progress. 

BROWN: “Science loser”...sometimes I feel like that.

MEYER: A lot of people feel that way, but it doesn't need to be intimidating. And I think the most powerful evidences from science or from nature that support what I call the God hypothesis—the idea that there is a transcendent, intelligent mind and Creator behind the things we see—some of those discoveries are actually very easy to understand. And it's easy to understand why scientists have come to the conclusion that they may be pointing to God.

BROWN: Let's talk about a popular narrative that science and faith are at war, as I mentioned earlier. How does the story of everything make the case that the evidence is actually pointing in the opposite direction?

MEYER: That's the perfect question. Science began in a Christian context. You had figures like Boyle and Newton and Johannes Kepler and many others who started to study nature in a very systematic way because they were confident that nature had secrets to reveal because it had been made by the same God who made our minds in His image, so that there was rationality built into the universe. 

And during the late 19th century, this idea kind of receded and waned as more and more scientists thought that they could explain the origin of things without reference to any kind of designing intelligence or Creator. We can think of Darwin and his theory about the origin of new species and new forms of life. 

But then in the 20th century—and this is the story of the film, The Story of Everything—there were three great discoveries that were made. 

First, the discovery that the universe itself, as best we can tell, had a beginning. And that suggested the need for an external Creator, something or someone beyond the universe, with the power to initiate a massive change from nothing to something. 

The second discovery was the discovery of something that physicists now call the "fine-tuning." The idea that there are very basic parameters of physics: the strength of gravitational attraction, or the strength of electromagnetic attraction, or the strength of the force that's causing the universe to expand outward from that beginning point. All of these things turn out to fall within very narrow tolerances—or ranges—outside of which life and even basic chemistry would be impossible. And that has—to many scientists—suggested that there fight that there must have been a fine tuner. 

And then the third and I think most compelling discovery of all is the discovery that our lives depend essentially on an automated factory on a miniaturized scale that's all being governed by millions and millions of lines of code. 

So we wouldn't explain the origin of the iPhone without reference to Steve Jobs, right? And in the same way, we are discovering inside life distinctive features of design systems. And one of those most striking features is the presence of literally digital code that's directing the construction of little tiny miniature machines that keep us alive.

BROWN: Last question, when the credits roll, what is the one question you want every viewer to be asking themselves?

MEYER: The question I think we leave people with is the sense of, "Does my life have meaning?" 

I did an interview with Piers Morgan in Britain a couple years ago, and we were talking about this crisis of meaning that people don't believe that their own lives have any lasting or enduring meaning. 

And that makes sense if you're a materialist, because nothing can mean anything to a rock or to a planet or even to a DNA molecule. Things only mean things to persons. And yet we all die. And so unless there's a person whose existence persists beyond our grave, beyond our death, there's no possibility of ultimate meaning, and I think a lot of young people in particular sense that. I think it underlies a lot of the sense of anxiety that people have. It certainly affected me that way when I was a teenager. 

And so the evidence that there is a transcendent God, a God who made the universe and whose life will continue beyond our time on the planet, I think puts the question of personal meaning back on the table. Gives us a basis for thinking, "you know, I might matter after all. There's someone who made me and may even care about me."

BROWN: And I'm not a science loser either!

MEYER: I'm not a science loser. Yes, absolutely. You're not either, you ask great questions, Myrna. Thank you.

BROWN: Thank you. Well, the film is The Story of Everything. 

Stephen Meyer, thank you for your time today.

MEYER: Thanks for having me on and thank you to your listeners. We know some very devoted listeners to The World and Everything in It. Shout out to them!

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