Where Darwinism Breaks Down - with Stephen Meyer
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 มิ.ย. 2024
- In this video, I interview Stephen Meyer about evolution, intelligent design, Darwinianism, the advent of the biological information age, and how it changed the debate about the origins of life. We discuss the questions of what life and mind are, and how pattern and mind are part of and participate in creation.
A former geophysicist and college professor, Stephen C. Meyer now directs Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. He has gained recent popularity about his perspective on evolution and appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Learn more about Steve's work and books: stephencmeyer.org/
Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
01:15 - Intro music
01:39 - Introduction
02:31 - The appearance of intelligent design
05:43 - Fine-tuning and complexity
08:36 - The biological information age
11:58 - Creative constraints
14:36 - Mind and natural selection
17:29 - Functional sequences
23:55 - What is life?
30:20 - Pattern
36:23 - Methodological materialism
41:38 - Panpsychism
45:35 - What is mind?
49:47 - Simulation experiments
56:02 - Media interest
1:02:26 - New atheism
1:07:55 - Emergence
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.
The fine tuning argument does not necessitate us. Nor does it require the Biblical God. For example, the neoplatontic One would be provide a set of constraints. In fact Plotinus argues that mind is dependent on principles that make it possible.
There is equivocation in the notion of information between the Shanon sense with is probabilistic relations between events and semantic information which what intelligence has. A lifeless universe has titanic amount of information in it in the first sense but none in the second. Shanon was repeatedly clear that he was not talking about meaning. The argument about information is very problematic and the fine tuning argument does not necessitate the emergence of mind. All of this is being run together. There is tremendous mindless information in a diamond. Are diamonds made by minds? If you don’t keep this distinction then computers are minds because they have extremely complex Information processing. Simply rolling some dice rules out alternatives and generates Shanon information. Using the language of choosing between alternatives is misleading. The dice are not choosing anything. The laws of nature rule out billions of alternatives but that does make them minds.
Current evolutionary theory does not rely on just random change but also through processes of exaptation (tongue exalted for speech) niche construction, self-organization and emergence. Also if information only emerges from minds then how does it arises in brains? If information only arises from intelligence then how do neurons give rise to intelligence? Do they have minds? This position has many if not more than the questions being raised here against evolutionary theory.
Nagel did not conclude theism. He concluded that we need to change our fundamental ontology. To see that developed well see The Blind Spot.
You have to read The Design Inference by William Dembski, he addresses most of these concerns. ID proponents aren’t speaking of just any information, but Specified Complexity. Furthermore, Dembskis elucidation of the Law of Conservation of Information disqualifies any stochastic process from explaining the emergence of specified complexity. Natural selection and other mechanisms solve nothing - they just push the problem back, usually to the environment.
EDIT: I will expand this point below because John's comment has been pinned.
Natural selection does not create information, it TRANSFERS information. Biological complexity cannot come from biological simplicity; it must come from pre-existing environmental complexity. The image of a man coming from a monkey is propagandistic nonsense - a blatant absurdity. "Natural selection" is just a different way of saying environmental to biological transference. The human does not come from the monkey, according to actual Darwinist logic, but the ENVIRONMENT. The question then arises, "Where did this environment come from?" You cant say its by chance, because then you might as well just say that the organism came about by chance:
Insofar as you invoke natural selection to explain the "origin" of information, you are positing at least the SAME AMOUNT of information to be present in the environment itself, and thus you have accomplished absolutely nothing. Nothing has become more plausible at all. Dembski has proven this mathematically with his S4S "Search for Search" theorems and it is really quite straightforward... All of this is really just basic logic: X cannot come from Y unless X is in some way contained within Y. If X comes about and X is not contained within Y, it did not come from Y; it came from somewhere else. In evolutionism, that "somewhere else" has got to be the environment. The Darwinists have successfully swindled the population for over 100 years and I have to say it is actually impressive.
Here is an example to help you understand the problem very simply: We have a target with a bullseye, and we can see that there are arrows consistently hitting the bullseye. We conclude, logically, that this is not due to chance and that there is a skilled archer involved here. The Darwinist, in a sense, would say, "No, no, no! There is no archer here! There is just an arrow shooting machine that is shooting the arrows! There is no mind involved, just a mechanism!" But they don't ask the obvious follow-up question: "What is this arrow shooting machine and where did it come from?" Could it be designed? Well the answer is yes, because the information necessary to hit the bullseye - specified complexity - is CONSERVED as you push the problem back.
Evolution as it is conceived by moderns is impossible; true evolution is an unfolding - the word evolve comes from Latin evolvere, which means to roll out, yet an OUT always presupposes an IN from which it has rolled out FROM. It is like the petals of a flower which unfold from the center. Only two options remain: the entire human genome and the genome of every other animal (as well as other types of information) have been encoded from the beginning of the universe and have unfolded in some convoluted and mysterious way via different environments, OR the universe is not a closed clockwork system. The traditional perspective holds the latter, but neither of these are compatible with secularism, unless you wish to invoke multiverses. (which is just a cry for help)
Personally, I don't subscribe to transformist evolution at all, but even if you do, you cannot escape the fact that natural selection is inherently teleological.
I will give my unsolicited opinion and most likely wrong interpretation.
I believe that if I understood the arguments in the video correctly, the argument about information is that complex information that leads to function, like bits in a computer or ACGT nucleotide bases, point to a mind.
The argument does not seem to be (at least what I interpreted) that the more information there is, the more likely a mind was involved. The fine tuning parameters for example, are important because they lead to life on earth, not because they generate massive amounts of complex information by existing. But having said that, even "mindless" information is only subjectively mindless, given different contexts, it could have meaningful interpretations, and the context comes from a mind.
I don't see a way to escape the connection between mind and information.
But that is just my opinion, and I am not a scientist, nor do I have a PhD. on anything.
There's something very materialistic about Stephen's argument. To explain away evolution, he's making everything mechanical in a Newtonian sense. I'm imagining God writing his programs in C that are later compiled into into machine code stored in carbon based lifeforms to be executed as written. Software updates come from above rather than the rich interconnection that life has with it's environment in it's attempt to traverse uncertain terrain. He unwittingly includes everything into the titanic amount of lifeless information with the exception of a programing engineer that is nowhere to be seen... in his mother's basement maybe.
Dembski points out that improbability itself is not sufficient to infer activity of mind. It must be improbable event confirming to an independently given pattern: getting any given number in a roulette rules out the same amount of alternatives, but when a given number is the winning number, then there is something more going on. He has an explanatory filter in his book, which I don't fully recall.
Here is a wild thought: Is the world a covenant between form and flux, a semiotic/symbolic interface between the two? Implying, to me, that information comes on the scene after the covenental act?
How about a three-way discussion with Meyer? I am not a scientist, but I think that could be interesting if we did it in a way that is not too technical.
Great conversation, gentlemen!
Awesome to see you watch symbolic world! Love your channel brother!
Great to see you here
Arguments for Christianity as a true philosophical and phenomenological way of understanding the world are gaining prominence. Coupled with Meyer’s work on the scientific front, we may be on the brink of a return to an era in the West where goodness, beauty, and truth take center stage again.
We had to go through rough times to get there (and there may be more to come) but it truly is a Renaissance of thought now. All aspects of information are being questioned in a good way. It's exciting to be alive.
Of all the interviews of Dr. Stephen Meyer I have seen, Jonathan, I have to say, in this interview he seemed most engaged. I think that is due to your ability to pick out and elucidate points throughout the discussion that were quite profound, and allowed Stephen to connect dots he doesn’t usually get prompted on in most interviews.
This was truly one of the most enjoyable discussions I’ve seen with Stephen, and that is certainly due to you both being high in intelligence, but also looking at things from slightly different angles.
Great interview! 👏
Jonathan, please discuss with your friend and frequent collaborator, Jordan Peterson, the idea of having Steven Meyer on his podcast. JP read Meyer's most recent book Return of the God Hypothesis and remarked that rarely had he read a book which contained so much information that he did not previously know. Pretty high praise from the hyper educated JP. I have been lobbying him in the comment section of his podcast to have Meyer on, but somehow I think you may be a bit more influential. Anyway, thanks for having SM on.
So glad to hear that Jordan Peterson has read some of Meyer's work. It has always seemed to me that JP basically just takes the Neo Darwinian synthesis as a given (as many with a modern, Western education do) and so I have wondered what it would do for him to call that into question by engaging with Meyer's work.
I've actually contemplated trying to mail him a copy, though I'm sure people do that all the time and I'd imagine it might be somewhat annoying, so I never did XD
Great idea!
I'm sure it's in the works, he is a perfect fit for JBP's channel
I discovered Mr Meyer recently so this discussion came right on time! Would love to see a 4-way discussion with Jonathan Pageau, Stephen Meyer, Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke!
Make this happen, Jordan Peterson needs to hear what Stephen Meyer has to say about biology.
Meyer is a grifter. Within two years of college bio I have personally seen and done enough in labs to know why he's full of it. He just wants more ignorant people to hear what he's saying
And Bret Weinstein
@@michaelstapleton9128 Bret Weinstein is a complete idiot. John Vervaeke is not far from that.
John Vervaeke is a broken man
What a blessing to millions that this man has devoted his life and research to intelligent design, which gives believers every where a viable theory opposing Darwinian evolution!
it really doesnt do that, though.
this guy doesnt understand evolutionary theory. we have had responses to his problems for decades, but he doesnt even address them.
I don't know if anyone has insulted Jonathan so thoroughly by accident as Stephen did when he said Jonathan was thinking like an engineer. 🤣
YES!!!!! I love it! This is Sooooo Good
I know Steve well and he means this as a genuine compliment which I think Jonathan could appreciate. In Steve‘s world he is dealing with theoretical scientists and philosophers who dogmatically insist upon ideas that don’t actually work in the real embodied world that an engineer has to deal with.
Well actually engineers aren’t like scientists and mathematicians dealing with theories and abstractions but modern day artisans who construct things that are actually incarnated and embodied that people actually participate in like trains, roads etc.
HAHAHA, i think he saved himself by adding "Design Engineer".
It ties up nicely with the icons of Christ as the Divine Architect.
@@anniecrawford2500 to be clear I don't think there's animus. It was a joke.
I’ve watched hundreds of hours of Stephen Meyer and his talks… And I’ve never seen him so anxious to enter into a conversation (to interrupt / in a good way). - This looks like to me that he is extremely engaged in this level of thinking… I’d say you’re definitely pulling the right strings to get this kind engagement from Meyer. By the way, I find all of this fascinating, and I find Myers work to be at the top of a very impressive list of scientific research. - great interview.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny the truth of Christianity at this point. I was an ardent atheist for years, but with all the research I’ve done the last 6 years, I can’t hold that position any longer. Great conversation!
no its not. Even if there was proof of intelligent design, that in no way gets you to the christian god.
"Every knee will bow, every tongue confess that He is Lord". We aren't going to accomplish that - He will. Welcome aboard! :)
@@neilknowsnuthinyour intelligence coming from a Nonintelligence source makes perfect sense!!! 😂
why specifically Christianity?
if atheism is false that doesnt mean God is a mortal human being...
there is a better and more coherent alternative for you out there..
Thats a poor strawman of the Christian position@@Harris19941
I would love to see a conversation between Stephen and John Verveake
John Vervaeke is a broken man. A lot of mumbo jumbo and no value. He is a broken man. He is Bret Weinstein part 2
Been looking forward to this episode of Better call Saul
😂
😂
Jonathan, it would be great to hear your conversation with biologist Michael Levin. He's already in conversation with Vervaeke and McGilchrist and, as I see it, kinda open for different ideas.
Oh yea, that would be fantastic.
Never heard of this fella. Ordering some of his books now.
Darwin’s Doubt
Signature In The Cell
The Return Of The God Hypothesis
Three important books.
@@brando3342 Recommend reading in that order?
@@soundsnags2001I read Return of the God Hypothesis, it is an incredible book that I reference often. It touches on aspects of his previous books, but with less detail on those specific topics.
He gets a lot wrong. It all stems from his misrepresentation of the Cambrian explosion. He knows enough to not be seriously making his arguments, so I think he must be intentionally full of it
It’s nice to see these two together today. Steven Meyers book Signature is n the cell started me down a long road that lead me to Christianity. Johnathan’s work has lead me down a long road that lead to Orthodoxy. I was baptized today in the Orthodox Church on Pentacost due to the help of many people like these men guided by the Holy Spirit. Glory to God, and God bless these men and everyone who’s helped me along the way!
Thank you, thank you, thank you Dr. Meyer for pronouncing "processes" correctly. (Most Darwinians say "process-ease", and that's my favorite reason for not taking them seriously.)
This is the most rational scientific discussion I think I've ever seen.
Awesome interview, Dr. Stephen Meyer!!!
Something’s happening and I like it
Yeh!
Something is coming - LA Marzulli
I DEEPLY appreciate scientists like Meyer and others who provide strong evidence for intelligent design, HOWEVER, as Christians it’s important to understand that adopting theistic evolution undermines the Gospel and really the entirety of scripture (or at least most of the Old Testament).
Is that because of original sin?
@@nathanbell6962 because it assumes death before the fall which undermines the Gospel.
Agreed. Does Meyers believe in theistic evolution though? I took it to mean we weren't evolved at all and were created each according to its kind by God.
Not that God put the information into evolution. But into DNA.
I could wrong about Meyers thoughts on this though.
@@tacsmith if I remember correctly, in other interviews he’s said he believes in theistic evolution.
But to be fair, that was awhile ago. Whenever the Hoover institute interview was new
I have no problem with intelligent evolution and the Fall as they're both just descriptions of how we came to be, one is mechanistic and the other is philosophical.
It's the same reason I don't have a problem with people calling Genesis "mythological", something being a myth doesn't make it untrue, it's just a higher form of description
I’ve been wanting this conversation to happen for at least a year!!
Thank you!! 🙏🙏
Yes! Great combo!
Great conversation. I'm glad to hear Jonathan bring up Kastrup. While Bernardo has many good points, I was a bit frustrated in our conversations with him and have long thought that someone like Meyer could fill in the holes in his work. Stratford Caldecott goes back to Pythagoras, from a distinct Christian perspective, in his terrific book: Beauty for Truth's Sake.
i was hoping this conversation would take place... looking forward to it. signature in the cell was one of the best books I've read from the last few years.
i would say that the panpsychist perspective follows logically... we don't have an awareness of "Mind" capital M, or anything transcendent. We infer a transcendent mind in relation to our own, less transcendent mind. However, there's no reason to assume that line from more consciousness to less consciousness has to stop at us, or that it jumps arbitrarily from whatever nameless force or forces created the universe to our arbitrary level of awareness. Why would a table not be somewhere on the continuum from "most mind" to "least mind"
My Hosts Stephen and Jonathan. Here, I'm just listening and attending unto my OWN! Watching!
Absolutely brilliant stuff guys! - "information.... it's right THERE!" 😄 Your enthusiasm is contageous.
I would love to hear Michael Levin opinions on this episode
The best explanation for the appearance of design is design
thank you both very much
Great discussion guys, thanks
you should have Rupert Sheldrake on to talk about Morphic Resonance
"We live in a simulation."
How do these people think a simulation works?
Amazing interview. Stephen is a genius and living legend! The tide is turning, toward God
Thanks for the conversation!
Now this will be good!
Meyer see sign of designing mind in a cat. Pageau see a sign of mind in the fact that we see a cat.
Yes. I think it’s important to not simply let it rest on how an artisan relates to an artifact in a distant indirect way (pulling from Hart), but that it’s also “in and through” all things in how the world coheres and is intelligible… to realize that those intelligible forms permeate the world through and through, and are not simply the product of our “brain” creating these things in our heads to where we’re lonely islands of meaning and purpose
And I think that is another reason why the Triune God is the only One. Pageau doesn't have the molecular physics background of Meyer's, and Meyer doesn't have the rough hands of a carver. But, through their dialogos, we glimpse the "One".
Are you saying Pageau is a solipsist?
@@Michaelfrikkie No. I think he thinks that mind lump objects into categories. That sorting process give rise to identities.
There's plenty of design in a cat. Cats are fragile but resilient. If you could design a machine with half the agility of a cat, and the ability to suffer through to survive and thrive after catastrophic injuries that would literally kill any human being, they wouldn't be showing off ridiculous, clunky robots as if they think people will be impressed. You sound really undereducated. I feel sorry for you. I guess you went to public school. 😢
Meyer should talk to Vervaeke, they have significant disagreements regarding darwinism and naturalism.
5:12 the wine at the wedding at Cana would also have had the appearance of being ‘old’. It wasn’t.
Wonderful host!
Wonderful guest!
I've talked about this for some time. If origin of life simulations were ever to model reality. The scientist who managed to pull it off would find intelligent organisms inside his simulation, arguing over whether or not he exists.
Bring on James tour next please
I'm so pleased to see Jonathan Pageau and Stephen Meyer in conversation. I had seen the Uncommon Knowledge video discussion with Mr. Meyer previously, and have read his book Return of the God Hypothesis. God bless you both and keep up the good work!
Glad you guys got together for an honest discussion.
“The privileged planet” is an awesome film. I thought it was dedicated to explaining the Fine Tuning argument but that’s just half of it. The universe was not only finely tuned to have complex life. It was finely tuned to be scientifically discoverable!
Love this. Just wanted to show my appreciation by liking this video and leaving a comment. lol brilliant
This is incredible. Jonathan I believe what you're saying when you talk about something preexisting is the question, "what makes it sensible?" That's also the responsibility of a higher mind.
The one sentence summary:
The functional sequences (of genetic code) are so rare that if you change the bit streams, you are inevitably after very few changes, going to destroy the function long before ever get to something new or functional. - Stephan Meyer
In the beginning was the Logos…
I really enjoyed this talk and hope to see him back sometime
Amazing
Really good talk. Thank you.
Pageau should talk to someone who actually understands natural selection.
I'd recommend Clint from Clint's Reptiles. He's actively religious and very good at explaining things.
Do tell. Natural selection creates nothing. It has zero creative power.
People who make these comments should bother to explain themselves.
Natural selection creates nothing. It selects for things that already exist. So maybe the lack of understanding is on you, just saying..
I love how someone else saw the clints reptiles video and is here 😂. I took two semesters of biology, but I genuinely struggled to make meaningful and understandable arguments before I saw that video. Clint was really helpful at showing me how to make understandable arguments
I loved this! Next question - what is this intelligence driving us towards? Or is that a matter of faith?
Fantastic. Thank you Dr. Meyer for your endurance and courage! It was great hearing that the arguments are finally gaining some traction and momentum among the Big Thinkers. May YHWH bless your work!
Girlfriend: I'm a Methodist and I'm not sure I want kids, the world is a cruel place.
Me: I'm an Atheist, but I should learn enough about Christianity to hold a conversation with you. Kids? I don't know.
GOD LAUGHS FOR 4 YEARS
(GF) Wife: I'll take care of the baby girl, are the boys dressed for Mass?
Me: Is your veil in the minivan? We better hurry if we're going to make Confession.
It's amazing how things work out, I only wanted to know enough about Christianity to talk to some chick I was dating, but I ended up marrying that chick and converting both of us to the Catholic faith.
I just wanted to know enough to talk to some girl, but I kept learning and kept researching and at some point, the truth of Christianity and the Catholic Church just got harder and harder to deny. At some point, it just became intellectually dishonest to deny it anymore.
In fact, being an atheist gave me an advantage, I didn't have all the Protestant hangups. My wife and her mother would shriek, " they worship Mary" and because I was an atheist that just researched without bias, I had already learned that wasn't true and I didn't have to work through any Mary baggage.
The only real issues I had to work through were the existence of God, the Resurrection and the divine establishment of a Church. Once I was convinced of that, church history led me the rest of the way.
Moral of the story, when you see a couple get together and you're thinking, "Oh this won't end well," just cool your jets. God does amazing things with broken people.
That's kind of His thing.
Hilarious.... I got mine because I Heard the gospel While I was high as a kite from a girl who was on acid.
Go figure.
Your story, totally understand....
(Ya,... the veil is in the mini van, now hurry up.)
What a beautiful story! God bless you and your family, my sibling in Christ 😊
The Natural Selection part of Darwin's theory doesn't break down. The evolving part does break down, and he knew nothing about DNA back in his time.
"Information presupposes intelligence": a paraphrase of Dr Meyer's observation early in the wonderful discussion that I find truly pivotal. Considering we don't really know what 'matter' is, or 'energy', but have a far better idea about information - data made meaningful by mind/intelligence, where mind/intelligence is, in part, a meaning-making process - we can start from this clear fact of existence - information - and not need a big leap to swap out our concept of matter/energy for data, data which mind then 'creates' or 'organises' into our universe of laws - who knows exactly how at this point - such that we have a functioning or feasible idealism in which there is only consciousness (there is only God), and can do away with the ugly over-complications of mind-matter dualism.
That's my (ontological) sense of it, anyway.
Information is not data that's made meaningful by our minds. If that were true, either ribosomes couldn't read and then write mRNA into proteins, or DNA and RNA would have to be said to not be Information.
In other words, since ribosomes are not mindful, either they are incapable of reading RNA (which is false), or RNA is not actually Information, or Information does not require a mind and you gave a bad definition of it
Finally talking about something that isn't AI
If intelligent design is not a factor, then tell the software programmers that are designing artificial intelligence to just let it be and all will come together on its own.
😂😂
So how did the designer come up with it? Where did they do it and how was it tested?
@@sh0k0nesIf we are walking though a forest and come across an old helicopter, must we first know how the designer came up with the idea, the factory in which it was assembled and the airfield in which it was tested in order to safely assume it had a creator?
Me: “look at this beautiful wristwatch, the craftsmanship that went into it is outstanding”
You: “I refuse to believe it was designed and built by intelligent beings, as far as I’m concerned it came to be through random chemical processes until you can tell me who designed it, where it was built and how it was tested”
@@dirtyharold7164 Stop being an NPC repeating tropes from last century. Have an original thought for once. Fux sake🙄
@@dirtyharold7164 1000 years ago u'd be one of the people that thought the gods sent lighting to smite people. I mean, lightning is complicated right?
The argument he made for quite some time that because DNA works like a code just like computers interpret ones and zeros isn’t a good one. Computers only interpret ones and zeroes because of the physics of semiconductors when a voltage is applied. You could make computers based off of binary code out of pneumatic, macroscopic tubes that perform the same functions.
From a one and zero to typing a comment on this video is a traceable line of physics. While I’m not a biologist, I can’t imagine there isn’t a similar line of physics that go from DNA encodings to how it instructs proteins to be built. It’s all analog in the end.
So essentially his argument boils down to, “there are laws of physics so there has to be a law maker,” but that has nothing to do with intelligent design.
It's closer to
1) Information comes from a mind
2) Computer code contains information
3) Computer code comes from a mind
1) information comes from a mind
2) DNA contains information
3) DNA comes from a mind
The laws of physics are insufficient for explaining the phenomenon of seeing these pixels in the screen and interpreting them into language.
You can take it for granted as "just happening" but without being able to justify it it becomes an arbitrary "just is"
And if that can just be arbitrarily assumed everything else can also be with equal validity.
@@isaacclarkefanread his book for a better understanding
Ali G would say:
1)All mammals live on land.
2)Whales are mammals.
3)Therefore, whales live on land.
And Terrence Howard :
1x1=2
@@SuperJohnmusic premise "all mammals live on land" is false because we have found marine mammals
In order for that analogy to not be faulty you would need to be able to prove "all information comes from minds" is a false statement without begging the question
It seems that you don't understand the relationship between a DNA codon and the choice of amino acid for each point in the sequence of amino acids of a protein. There are 20 amino acids to choose from, each choice depends on the DNA code, a thing that has no known provenance. And you don't understand the importance of each amino acid in a protein to its function; single point mutations cause many diseases.
A cookie is the universe being delicious, therefore the universe is delicious.
you wouldn't say that a man is hard just because his bones are hard either. But we do say that a man is intelligent
Terrific discussion. Had trouble with vision -Jonathan was too far away from Steven on the 55 inch TV.
Johnny Paggy pookie bear deluxe
Lol! Please make this a meme. It is endearing and will totally confuse JP.
😂 New Merch Drop
Ok so let’s imagine there was an intelligent designer - what’s the mechanism by which god starts off life, and then moulds it to make each new species? The universe is already going for billions of years and then suddenly he’s manually sticking together the right chemicals in the right way so that they can later replicate all on their own without continued intervention? So it’s just a short time thing where he’s meddling with the physical world? Or he sets it all off at the start of the universe knowing that everything will collide in such and such a way? Or maybe it’s just a few times that he does the meddling? Why did god start with unicellular life, then multicellular, then chordates, then fish, then primitive (not modern) amphibians then lizards etc. why make that gradual increase in physiological complexity?
I don’t see how this idea is actually useful scientifically, there’s no actually mechanism being posited here, no set of constraints of when we might expect there to be a bit of godly meddling and when it’s ‘business as usual’ and the biological processes are doing their self replication thing on their own.
Do you have to know the intention behind every stroke of an artists brush in order to accept that it was painted by an intelligent sentient being? Or do you believe the painting came to be through completely natural chemical processes without any intelligent input?
I find this line of reasoning incredibly odd. I guess it makes the purely materialistic worldview easier to swallow because you can omit any “why” questions.
@@dirtyharold7164 I’m not a materialist, I just don’t think this line of thought is fruitful or useful or convincing. I’m not talking about the intention, that’s not the contention here. I’m saying this is offering a quasi rational/scientific argument that actually offers no greater explanatory power.
In addition, it’s not a fruitful line of thinking for the spiritual life, and coming to theosis. The question of whether god exists is not something to tie yourself to one scientific proposition or another. What if they suddenly did find the RNA that could replicate itself. Would you stop believing in God? It’s the same trap as before with the materialists. God is something to aim to apprehend in each moment.
Awesome
It makes sense that information, dna etc would take the form of language derived from mind when God spoke the world into being, whatever that means technically doesn’t really matter to me very much, but phenomenologically it would look like a language so that’s a fine analog to explain what’s happening there in a symbolic manner that we can actually understand.
Nice comment, I wish I'd written it but I at least thought that even if I couldn't articulate it!
The physical laws are not only tuned to generate an environment where life, as we know it, can occur, but also to the possibility that it survives and replicates. These laws should be totally indifferent to whether an organism survives or not, and whether it replicates or not.
However, the theologians of evolution, want us to believe that the principle of survival and replication is sacrosanct, there is something in an organism that wants to make it survive, because that's how it has to be, and there is something that wants to make it replicate, also because that's how it has to be.
Let's imagine that potential first organism, formed by some chemical miracle, well, that's not the only miracle, it also, miraculously, has the "will" to search, passively or actively, for the resources it needs for its survival. Now, in a totally random environment, and devoid of all consciousness, where would that need for survival arise from?
To survive or not to survive is the same from non-consciousness perspective, and not to survive is the simplest thing from the point of view of purely random change, and we are not talking about replication yet.
But for the theologians of evolution, those miracles are simply possible due to the great God of chance, who can do everything with enough time, although they really never seriously began to calculate how much that enough time would be. They also don't want us to think much about it, it's rather, the magic potions are poured, they let them to be mixed for "enough" time, they say abracadabra, and what we see now happens ..
Our God indeed is a covenant keeping God. Has he said a thing and not perform it? I watch how things unfold in my life, from penury to $76,000.00 Bi-weekly and I can only praise him and trust him more.
Hallelujah🙌❤️
Excuse me for real?,how is that
possible I have struggling
financially, how was that possible?
Thanks to Elizabeth Marie Hawley.
I always appreciate God for his kindness upon my life
I have heard a lot of wonderful things about Elizabeth Maria Hawley on the news but didn't believe it until now. I'm definitely trying her out
Same here, with my current portfolio made from my investments with my personal financial advisor (Elizabeth Maria Hawley) I totally agree with you
Now do a conversation with Bernardo Kastrop and Meyer with Pageau moderating. Brilliant minds.
1:10:30 - Maxwell is how we understand light, electricity and magnetism. You get really mind-blown when you realize that this guy came up with the notion that light is in fact two perpendicular waves of electricity and magnetism. Like what? How does someone come up with that? Later on, quantum mechanics does experiments showing that there is a wave-particle duality of light with packets of light called photons coming into prominence but his theories of electricity and magnetism that he created in the 1860s are still used today and how we have many of the modern appliances we enjoy.
Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. Maxwell is the physicist no one outside of physics has heard of. It's crazy too because everything we use in modernity relies on his equations.
The puddle insists the pothole has been designed for it.
Cope and seethe.
@@linusloth4145yes. They did the whole time.
@@Pllatinum1 you wouldn't recognize a deathblow to naturalism even if it would hit you in the face.
I don't find the fine tuning argument convincing. It's just looking at phenomena backwards, from the point of a foregone conclusion. From a certain perspective, my toast crumbs have a one in a trillion chance of landing on my plate in the particular pattern that they do -- but we don't wax that they were designed that way. Likewise, if the universe was "set up" another way with different parameters, there might well be a different type of intelligence that thought itself lucky that gravity or radiation or what have you was "just right" for it to exist.
It seems to be the same type of physicalist analysis that Pageau critiques when it comes from Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc. We can still talk about God establishing the pattern to which things tend, for example, without insinuating that "complexity as such" (much less the complexity of physical processes) is somehow indicative of his activity.
What functionality are your toast crumbs engaged in?
That might be the key difference here.
The rarity of living organisms includes their FUNCTIONALITY.
You can claim your random toast crumbs ARE serving a function. But let's see those same crumbs, eminate from themselves a new generation of crumbs which perform a similar function.
It's not the odds that are "important", it's the functionality nested within those odds.
My understanding is that there simply aren’t enough possible combinations of physical parameters that would lead to chemistry (let alone life) to make random chance a reasonable conclusion. Of course it’s not impossible, but so unfathomably unlikely that it’s laughable. So we owe existence itself either to an unfathomably unlikely chance or a mind.
@@blairholmgren9748This seems fallacious. You are analyzing a phenomena from the privileged position of it having already occurred. The likelihood of any given phenomena occurring is 100%, provided you analyze it in the present.
You are also comparing our reality vs "our reality, changed" - not our reality vs some wholly different reality. So all you are really saying is, "things would be different if things had been different". Sure, and provided there was still time and cause and effect, those "different things" would seem just as "fine tuned" as our own - reliant as they would be on the whole history of the universe before them.
There's also no saying that there couldn't be consciousness in your alternate reality, either. We are on Jonathan's channel after all, and it seems like having your cake and eating it too to suggest that consciousness is reliant on a particular configuration of chemistry, but also immaterial/miraculous. I'm sure Jonathan would find it silly to speculate on how chemistry determined the consciousness of Man before the Fall, for example.
@@easymentalityI did separate phenomena from their function - I said we can talk about God's establishment of a pattern to which things tend (a pattern of being or function, if you like) without fine tuning.
I really just find the topic to be a red herring that needlessly muddies the waters with a kind of physicalism. On the one hand we disparage the notion of "balls bouncing into each other" - on the other we suggest that God's work is in one way or another reducible to arranging or upholding a particular configuration of balls. You yourself say here that "functionality is nested within the odds", which is deterministic and totally at odds with Jonathan's notion of vertical causality, for example.
Life and consciousness is not sacred because it has a self-perpetuating function (so does a cloud or a crystal, if you really want another example) or because it is apparently "rare".
You kind of dodged the physical constraint challenge. This is a series of events that have to happen in the order they did because they have low tolerance. Any change in any of the steps would cause the stable structure to collapse. Many of these also happen in a timed sequence, where any other order would cause the stable structure to collapse.
Stephen and Jonathan, thank you for chaseth our OWN. As WHO chaseth ye! From Who am I? Time liken unto a messenger sent forth. Is like Jonathan and Stephen, who are you? Our names don't exist! Without thy shared "i" AM Jonathan and Stephen! Gratitude and Honor! Share
Great talk! Thank you so much! I have something to say in regards to the claim that the universe is composed of matter, energy and information. I will pose it as a question: what is information if not ordered energy? God bless you!
I wasn't done watching the whole discussion when I left the comment above but like Jonathan, my mind was flaring up and I had to say something. I am not done yet!
this guy has some serious ignorance of basic evolutionary theory.
No. Not THAT.
YEC: We are so back
Jonathan, how does this fit with the spiritual understanding of life?
I think it just helps explain the mechanism of the physical world and appreciate God's excellence all the more.
The main cut, I feel, is to hit back at Anti-theistic Atheists who've been dodging arguments made by Thomas Aquinas and perverting science to support their world view since Darwin. Shocker, material science doesn't support their world view.
@@sigurdholbarki8268 I have heard Anthony Bloom of Sourozh say something to the effect that the one does not have to be refuted by the other because they are two seperate means of acquiring knowledge. And I have heard it said its the limitations of our human minds to see beond some seemingly aparrent contradictions.
If you are no more than looped goop in a contained brain,
There is no basis for me to heed your retort or refrain.
Perfection! 😂
This is all fine, but unfalsifiable hypotheses do not avail themselves of scientific methodology. You are talking about philosophical questions, not scientific ones. Fine tuning is not really evidence, for example. In what universe would you expect to be in in order to be able to even ask such a question? And arguing things are “too complex” could just mean we simply don’t understand what’s going on yet. The problem is using these philosophical ideas to somehow justify belief in any one particular religion or even type of spiritual practice.
I agree, using this reasoning to back up your religious beliefs is disingenuous. However, materialistic methodology doesn’t prove or disprove the origin of the universe or life. People who think they know for sure the answer to the origin of the universe and life, whether through design or pure materialism, religion or atheism are both as ignorant as each other. It’s an age old mystery that I don’t believe will ever be answered.
@@dirtyharold7164
Nope
They know for sure it’s NOT a supernatural explanation because the supernatural has NEVER been demonstrated
Did Darwin provide a way to falsify his concepts? If so, has it been done? If his concepts can't be falsified, then are they scientific statements?
@captaingaza2389 Is it that the supernatural hasn't been seen, OR is it that many people refuse to see it?
@@roblangsdorf8758
It’s never been DEMONSTRATED
54:30 - Physics has this as a principle in quantum mechanics - the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You cannot know both the velocity and the position of an electron because the act of observing the electron will change its position and/or its velocity. And that's because for us to observe anything we require light (in any part of the spectrum) to bounce off of the electron which would mean the electron would absorb the energy from the light wave and thus change its position and/or velocity.
There's a lot of weird things like this in physics where we can never fully extract ourselves to observe reality as an outsider. The theory of relativity also shows that as well. Einstein was quite ahead of everyone when he asked "what would reality look like if I were traveling at the speed of light?" Many examples of relativity will show how bouncing balls look different to people based on where they are and what frame of reference they are in, ex. a moving train vs being stationary.
I think this is why physics in all its abstraction seems to always get people who are more faith-based than other sciences. When I was using complex calculus in my upper division physics courses, it always felt like I was sort of looking at the programming code of reality. It's hard to escape that it seems to have been written by God. I used to say I was looking at "the mind of God" when looking at upper division physics even though I was an agnostic at the time.
Hi Jonathan, I am a great fan of yours and also Bernado Kastrup. I would like to let you know you have misunderstood Kastrup.
Trying hard to keep listening, but so far it's sophistry, pseudo-science, cobbled together misunderstandings of many different fields, and lots of god of the gaps arguments.
Seems like both speakers have studied these fields only deeply enough to find any place that allows them to sow doubt, and immediately insert god.
I try to listen to all sides in order to be informed, but this seems like childish uninformed/underinformed wishful thinking.
Anyone with any expertise in biological evolution, information theory or software development could clear up most of these misunderstandings, so they cant be run away with and turned into this kind of techno/psycho-babble.
yes indeed ... his use of "highly improbably" gives the game away. Pageau's contributions concerning "mind" were better, but neither seemed to see that they were on different pages.
@Jonathan Pageau @Stephen Meyer, do you guys think there could be a “Post-Post-Modernism-Phase” coming up the next years?
It would certainly be termed a regression lol
It's the Enlightenment 2.0 as James Lindsay notes. We are in the transition to a new age. I doubt that it will use modern in the title because it will be so different.
Pageau's way of equating Bernardo Kastrup's Analytical Idealism with panpsychism makes me suspect that he has not fully understood Analytical Idealism.
I think evolution is the an information system that we do not fully understand but seems to be sound.
The information system (DNA) is in the cell...and the cell is the only place that it is manufactured...by the instructions of the info system (DNA). So which comes first?
The Programmer.
@@stevepaige7557 I agree. I guess I shouldve said the idea that life evolves from the poressures of survival seems to me to be right. How the instructions got into DNA and how they actually do change becuase of outside forces, to me, is where a programmer would come into play.
I highly recommend listening to the Hoover Institute discussion he mentioned. They have an ID biologist on the panel that will go into deeper discussion on the pitfalls of evolution. It is a very stimulating discussion.
intelligence comes form inter ligo = to connect between, to bond between anyway. but i get your point
No, it’s from inter-lego (to pick/choose/read) not -ligo. (To bind). That’s a totally different verb
Instead of ID for intelligent design, maybe now we need ID/PD, PD being purposive design..
Plutonic patterns seems to be a better description than Plutonic forms.
33:00 apples may look different but have same taste, except those who are bad. The accuracy and difference between the senses must be considered carefully
Brings to mind Rudolf Steiner's ,"spiritual science".
re: dna as data in binary format: alan watts said that leibniz developed binary from the 'book of changes' (bible)
" Among these were the Book of Changes, the importance of which was recognized early. This text sums up the system of the hidden mechanisms of the physical world, making visible the changes of the 'qi' which forms the physical world. Beyond the translation of the text, Chinese commentaries of it - a very important corpus - also came into focus. One of the interpretations of the Book of Changes was given by the Song Dynasty philosopher Shao Yong (a Neo-Confucianist thinker in European terms) who created a circular arrangement of the hexagrams. Leibniz, who was in correspondence with the Jesuits working in China received this chart and interpreted it as a natural representation of binary arithmetics. From a young age, Leibniz was interested in and systematically extending his knowledge of China, hence this chart was of a special inspiration for him. As he created his works on binary arithmetic before being introduced to the chart of Shao Yong, the circular representation was only a reinforcement of his mathematical system, but his philosophy was inspired by the concept of perfection that is both manifest in the world and hidden behind it."
Josh Rasmussen has interesting argument where he says you can't get reason from non reason
Jonathan, are you familiar with the work of Human Biologist Michael Levin. On your point about pattern organisation. "that to some extent the pattern should pre exists for the organization to happen". (might have butchered that) Anyhow his work is on how cells know to organise themselves to produce the particular biological structure/structure's that we see and well are. He has discovered that there is some unseen mover behind the bio-electrical signals that guides the electrical signals within cells so as to show them or make them gather in the desired pattern. That at the very least the electrical pattern for the cells exists before the cells move or become formed in there final way. Well wroth checking out. I believe he works with Harvard and Tufts. He also has much information online.
Beloved if silent! Remember no sound. Who can mimic? Without a sound. Yet knows HIS VOICE?
This problem goes away if quantum wave function collapse, like in genetic decay, is not random but rather governed by a tendency to create local representations of observed information. You'd get systems of particles constantly evolving to mirror their environment, much in the same way as animals do. Then animals would just be a localized participation in this higher tendency. If there's a tendency for local relations to look like observable relations, the particle states would seem statistical, as they do, but the relations between particle states would be increasingly predictable in that they tend towards Life.
53:40 made me LOL
Bernardo Kastrup is an idealist, not a panpsychist. He’s very critical of the latter. I think there’s more synergy between his form of idealism and theism than suggested here. Great interview though.
Excellent to see these two conversing. Intelligent design vs randomness. All observation points to intelligent design. Especially in our human experience.
All observation points to natural explanations
@@therick363 look around your own world. There is design everywhere. Even your thoughts and words you are conjuring up. That process is design - not random. Perhaps you have a different understanding of design. It looks like when you apply the idea of nature, that excludes or opposes design.
@@therick363 no, no it doesn’t.
@@antbrown9066I have looked around. I’ve investigated and studied. All I see is natural.
Give some good evidence of supernatural causes
@@dirtyharold7164sure it does. What are the supernatural explanations I’m ignoring?
If I understand the math, it’s unlikely that evolution through random mutation occurred in our time line, it’s also unlikely to have occurred at any time in the history of the universe.
What I would like to see from the leading atheist in this era is well formulated and coherent arguments that only concerns their position. Instead, most of the time is trying to debunk all Christian arguments or ridiculing them to earn sympathy from their audience. Contrast is mother of clarity.
That’s a fair ask. But I would also say it should go both ways yes?
@@therick363to be fair Christians have been this for nearly 2000 years, whether in scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, St Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton, through to C.S. Lewis and more modern authors.
On the other hand that courtesy has not been afforded by atheists from Rousseau and Voltaire to Hegel, Marx and Darwin. Even as recently as Richard Dawkins they've been arguing against an interpretation of Christianity of their own making.
I've not met a single atheist who has properly understood Christianity, even when I was an atheist! I do know plenty who have been perfectly respectful though.
On the flip side there are a lot of Christians who haven't been properly catechised and seem to have adopted positions that owe more to historic atheism than Christian thought (especially overly literal materialistic interpretations of Scripture)
Edit: to be doubly sure to reiterate I'm not trying to be a confrontational bell-end, I'm adding that I'd put a "Like" on your comment!
So I might be being a bell-end, but I'm at least trying hard not to!
I'd say it's because atheism can only come from Christianity. And because atheism refuses to acknowledge that its foundations are actually rooted in Christianity, it will always make arguments against Christianity to defend its position.
@@francestaylor9156what is atheism?
What is theism?
What are my foundations that I took from Christianity?
But their positions are directly related to NOT believing in ALL of man's religions, not just Christianity. An "atheist" of only Christ and his God Father exclusively sounds more like a pagan or Hindu than an atheist. As for atheists firmly positing their positions, I think that they are only comfortable doing so when there exists enough scientific evidence to confidently say something is so, as far as we can tell. Ideas and conclusions that lie beyond the currently knowable are met with an "I don't know." That's typically their positions. Religion is "untrue" in a material sense, and an objective truth exist in which all of existence with enough time would likely be explainable by scientific means.