Dr. Stephen C. Meyer is the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based policy research organization. He received his PhD from Cambridge University and is the author of The Return of the God Hypothesis.
Federal Newswire:
Dr. Meyer, what was the field of research for your PhD?
Stephen C. Meyer:
History and philosophy of science. I did my PhD in a subject called origin of life biology, so I'm all mixed up. A bit of a scientist, a bit of a philosopher, all mixed together.
Federal Newswire:
How did you make the transition from science to philosophy, and to the philosophy surrounding life sciences?
Stephen C. Meyer:
I've always been interested in the sciences from a very young age, but I was especially interested in the intersection of science and philosophy. So I've written on the question of the origin of life, and on the question of Darwinian evolution and the origin of animal life. In my most recent book, I addressed issues about the origin and structure of the universe, issues in cosmology.
In the time of the scientific revolution, before the term scientists was coined, scientists [such as] Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and Galileo were called natural philosophers. There wasn't a firm demarcation between what constituted science and what constituted deeper deliberations the early scientists were finding.
Federal Newswire:
How do you believe ethics and philosophy should inform our scientific research?
Stephen C. Meyer:
There's a key issue right now in the public sphere about the nature of science itself. There are two different concepts of science afoot.
One is that science is a set of conclusions that are the consequence of an agreed consensus of a body of experts, and so you have a lot of appeals to settled science, or consensus science– “the science says,” with the definite article, "the science."
The other conception is that science is a dynamic enterprise in which often competing groups of scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence, and that therefore our scientific perspectives can become very settled. But they very often are not settled, and they are a part of a dynamic process of iterating between interpretation and new data, and refining our perspectives.
There's a wonderful Italian philosopher of science named Marcello O'Pera who says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence.
The problem with appeals to consensus science, and especially as they intersect with public policy, is they subvert that process of argumentation by appeals often to a consensus that doesn't yet even exist. And one thing I often tell listeners is that when people appeal to consensus, you can almost be certain there isn't one, because you appeal to consensus to shut down dissent.
You don't need to appeal to consensus to establish that the formula for water is H2O or the formula for salt is NaCl, there actually is a consensus among chemists about those basic facts of chemistry. When we appeal to consensus, it's usually to suppress a dissenting minority or maybe even a dissenting majority who doesn't have the same access to media that an alleged elite and consensus and authoritative group may have.
So I think this concept of science as consensus is extremely deleterious for the practice of science itself, but it's also dangerous for public policy because when you have a false consensus being proffered onto the public, then you end up inevitably getting, A, bad science, and B, ruled by scientific experts rather than a genuine democratic process where we can weigh the competing arguments and weigh what they mean for public policy.
Federal Newswire:
There are competing theories about how life on earth began. What are your thoughts on these theories about the origin of life?
Stephen C. Meyer:
The real problem is explaining the origin of the first life. This is what my PhD dissertation was about, and my first book, Signature in the Cell. If you have gone through college biology courses, you'll see the experimental apparatus of two scientists from the 1950s named Miller and Urey, and this is their famed spark discharge chamber where they zapped some gases that allegedly resembled the atmospheric gases on the early Earth.
Federal Newswire:
Are you referring to the primordial soup theory?
Stephen C. Meyer:
It's something to do with the primordial soup theory. They were able to produce a few, two or three, of the protein forming amino acids, of which there are 20 total. Neither they nor anyone subsequent to them has been able to get those amino acids to link together to form what are called polypeptides under prebiotic conditions. Actually, it's hard to form a polypeptide or a protein in the presence of water.
So we have this problem. If you're thinking that life arose in a prebiotic soup, how do you get to the next stage? Because proteins are big, complicated molecules, and they perform all the important jobs in cells by virtue of their three-dimensional shapes.
So if you think of a toolbox, you've got your hammer, your saw, your wrench, each of those have different shapes, and they can perform different functions in virtue of those shapes.
Proteins, similarly perform all the different, or the most important jobs in cells by virtue of their three-dimensional, what are called, confirmations. But they only get those three-dimensional confirmations if the amino acids out of which they're arranged fold into very specific shapes.
So the amino acids form chains, if they fold properly, they'll do a job. If they don't fold properly, [then] they won't. Well, the Miller-Urey experiment, in the best possible interpretation, just produced a few of the beads on the chain, but didn't tell how the chain got linked together, or how it would get to fold properly.
To do that, we know in biology you need the information that's stored in the DNA molecule, which provides the instructions for arranging the amino acids to cause the proteins. So we were so far away from building anything that resembled a living cell in that experiment, but yet there it is in all the textbooks, and it's presented as support for the dominant chemical evolutionary model, which as it now happens, almost no scientists think works, including the people working in origin of life research.
But it's presented as a consensus view such that it's in the textbooks for high school and college students and so you have this huge disparity between what people working in the field actually know about the relevance of that experiment, which is basically it has no relevance, and how it's presented to the public. This type of disparity exists in many, many fields, especially if there's a philosophical or political dimension to the scientific discussion.
Federal Newswire:
Has lack of public understanding and political tribalism caused more people to be labeled as science deniers?
Stephen C. Meyer:
A little bit less so with this debate, because even the leading scientists in the field are now acknowledging that, in effect, we got nothing. We don't have a theory of the chemical evolutionary origin of life that works, but still the depictions of the experiments and the description of its supposed relevance is right there in the textbook.
Professor James Tour, a great organic chemist from Rice University, has been putting out a lot of videos, and he's shown that there's a huge percentage of the public that think that we have made life in the laboratory. We have not [and] nothing close to that. Even if we had made life in the laboratory, it wouldn't show that life had arisen by an undirected process because after all, it would be we who were making the life.
Federal Newswire:
Is this the concept of Intelligent Design?
Stephen C. Meyer:
Yes. You asked earlier how I got into all this. I attended a conference in my twenties when I was a young scientist. I was working as a geophysicist doing digital signal processing for an oil company. A big conference came to our city, and one of the topics at the conference was the origin of the first life.
The conference was divided between those who affirmed the standard evolutionary model and those who were skeptical of it. I found by listening to this that the skeptics had much better arguments. In fact, even the people who were affirming the model acknowledged that the model didn't work, and that the big reason that the model didn't work was the presence not just of the molecules that we've heard of–the DNA and the RNA and the protein– but that the DNA and RNA in particular contain information.
They contain information in a digital form and this goes back to a discovery that was made by not just Watson and Crick, but later Crick working more on a solo basis.
Watson and Crick elucidated the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. But in 1958, Francis Crick formulated something called the sequence hypothesis in which he proposed that the four chemical subunits that run along the interior of that famed double helix, these chemical subunits are called bases or nucleotide bases. These subunits are functioning like alphabetic letters in a written language, or like digital characters in a section of software.
That is to say, it's not their physical or chemical properties that gives them their function, but it's their precise sequential arrangement in accord with a code, later elucidated and now known as the genetic code.
So you had genetic text functioning as representational information in accord with a code. Now, that was a mind-blowing discovery, and it turns out that that's the big problem in explaining the origin of life, because the chemistry does not want to produce the code.
Simple chemicals do not move in an informational direction in that way. So this was the big problem, and I got intrigued with this.
As I began, I studied the different attempts to explain the origin of information, it was clear that they all failed except for one type of explanation of which we know, which is that whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, we always come to a mind, not an immaterial process. There was one of the great information scientists who was applying information theory to molecular biology, and he said the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. I got to thinking, well, if that's true, then perhaps the information we're seeing in the DNA molecule is evidence of conscious activity.
After all, if we see a paragraph, [we know] there was a writer. If we see a radio signal with information in it, we know it goes back to a broadcaster. If there was a hieroglyphic inscription, it goes back to a scribe. Perhaps the information in DNA is pointing back to a designing intelligence.
Federal Newswire:
It seems like we can't leave Earth and the origin of life on Earth up to cosmic chance, can we?
Stephen C. Meyer:
Well, first of all, we don't have an infinite universe anymore. We thought we did through the 19th century, but this was one of the other big discoveries of the 20th century, is that the universe had a definite beginning.
One of the things I do in Signature in the Cell is I run the math. You can calculate how difficult the probability problem is in relation to the number of opportunities you have to solve the probability problem, the number of trials. It could be run since the beginning of the universe until now. It turns out that it's a smidgen, a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of opportunities you would need to have a reasonable chance of generating even one functional DNA molecule with a section of code that would be capable of building a protein. I go through all the math on that.
By the way, this is not even in dispute in origin of life research. Nobody thinks the chance hypothesis works. There's just way too much complexity for any reasonable random assortment of molecules to generate what's on the early Earth. The organic chemist James Tour also shows that time is not your friend in this, because if the chemical reactions are left on their own, they run towards biologically inert compounds and they don't move in a life-friendly direction. So you have to continually intervene as an experimentalist to get the chemistry to move in [an] even remotely life-friendly direction. Time isn't your friend in prebiotic simulation experiments.
Federal Newswire:
How does the multiverse play into the issue of the “God hypothesis?”
Stephen C. Meyer:
It's a slightly different context for that discussion because the other big thing. What I've been talking about is the discovery of the digital code in DNA. Bill Gates says it's like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.
Well, we know that software comes from programmers, so you have a kind of initial reason to consider the Intelligent Design hypothesis. I developed the argument in a lot more detail, concerning biology. But there's also a huge discovery in physics that's been made in progressive waves since the 1950s and '60s. That is, the basic parameters of the universe– the basic physical parameters of the universe, the masses of the elementary particles, the strength of the force of gravitation or electromagnetism, and the other fundamental forces of physics. The force that drives the expansion of the universe outward from the Big Bang called the cosmological constant.
All these forces and factors are what physicists term as 'finely tuned', which means that they fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances outside of which life in the universe, even basic chemistry in the universe, would be impossible.
It turns out that each of these factors is balanced on a kind of razor's edge, that very small differences in the masses of elementary particles or the force driving the expansion of the universe or the ratio of the gravitational force to the electromagnetic force, et cetera, would result in a life-unfriendly universe. So we live in a universe that is kind of falls in a Goldilocks Zone–just right, not too strong, not too weak, not too fast, not too slow.
Federal Newswire:
Is that for the entire universe?
Stephen C. Meyer:
That's for the entire universe. It also applies to our local planetary system as well. There's fine-tuning at that level.
So the question is how do you explain the origin of this fine-tuning? One of the scientists who first started discovering these fine-tuning parameters was a hard, bitten scientific materialist/atheist named Fred Hoyles or Fred Hoyle, a great, British astrophysicist. He had resisted the conclusion of the Big Bang because he thought it supported the Genesis account. So he came up with another theory called the Steady State, which was eventually refuted.
Federal Newswire:
The Steady State means that the universe is and has always existed the way that it is?
Stephen C. Meyer:
Yeah. It's neither expanding outward from a beginning nor contracting inward towards an end. It's static.
Hoyle ended up rejecting his own scientific atheism and adopted a kind of quasi-theistic view of the world, certainly one that affirmed Intelligent Design on the basis of discovering these fine-tuning parameters. He was quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the fine-tuning data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry.
“Fine-tuning,” he said, obviously suggests a “fine tuner.” So that's formulated the basis of another design argument in physics. In response, some physicists have proposed the multiverse–the idea that, yes, things look extremely improbable here.
There is no underlying physical reason for those parameters to exist for the fine-tuning of the universe. But it may be that there are billions and billions and billions of other universes out there that we are not aware of, and we just happen to be the lucky one.
That's the multiverse concept. It's obviously in all the Marvel movies, but it's actually been formulated by serious scientists as a way of explaining fine-tuning without reference to a designing intelligence. But there is a problem with it.
Federal Newswire:
Which is?
Stephen C. Meyer:
Well, it turns out that if you just have all these other universes out there, but they're causally disconnected from our own, then their mere existence does nothing to change anything in this universe, including the probabilities, or including the probability of whatever processes set the fine-tuning parameters.
So the mere existence of other universes doesn't solve the problem. In virtue of that, the multiverse advocates propose that there's an underlying universe generating mechanism or mechanisms that spit out these new universes, including ours, so they can portray our universe as the kind of lucky winner in a giant cosmic lottery.
That's where the rub comes in, because it turns out that these universe generating mechanisms themselves require prior, exquisite, unexplained, fine-tuning, and they've just pushed the fine-tuning problem out of view from our universe to the universe generating mechanisms.
Federal Newswire:
Do you think this explains the various theologies that believe in an afterlife or another plane of existence?
Stephen C. Meyer:
Ultimately, you can provide a physical description of them with mathematics. But I think at the end of the day, most likely the multiverse is an exercise in generating mathematical castles in the air.
But my argument in my new book, Return of the God Hypothesis was that even if the multiverse models are correct, they imply prior Intelligent Design, because the universe generating mechanisms have to be finely tuned themselves to spit out all the new universes. So you don't get away from the problem.
Federal Newswire:
Do you believe you can demonstrate there are multiverses or does there have to be a certain act of faith to say that they exist?
Stephen C. Meyer:
Oh, no, I don't think they can be demonstrated. I think they are plausible. There are certain interpretations of physics equations that would suggest, okay, well, maybe the reason there are all these possibilities implied in the equation is that there are other universes. But that's just math, it doesn't really mean that the things exist, it's just the math of possibility space.
So there's all these possibilities, and we happen to be in this possibility, but it doesn't mean the other possibilities exist. That's why I say that I think most likely they're mathematical castles in the air. But even if true, the multiverse models would imply prior fine-tuning.
Federal Newswire:
What are the possibilities with life on other planets or other planets that would be capable of supporting human life?
Stephen C. Meyer:
We really don't know. For a long time, it was assumed that because of the vastness of the universe, something which we've come to appreciate in much more detail since the 1920s, the current estimate for the number of galaxies in the universe is now two trillion, which is unbelievably big. So the sense is, with all those galaxies, there must be some planetary systems where you have planets with the right conditions to host life, and therefore life would inevitably evolve on those planets. That's one view.
But the other view is, there are a lot of planets, but how probable are the conditions in relation to all those planets when you consider how many conditions have to be met and how improbable those conditions are arising in any of these extrasolar planetary systems?
There was a book written in '05 or '06 by two University of Washington astronomers titled Rare Earth, in which they [essentially] said, ‘we used to think that the numerator dwarfed the denominator. But now the denominator looks really [big]. The number of things that have to go right is so big and so improbable that even with all those star systems, we're not sure that you would get the right conditions.’
Of course, that still only addresses getting the right environment for life. It doesn't explain how you would get the digital code. Because inevitably, to make a living system, you need information. It's just like in our computer world, if you want to give your computer a new function, you've got to provide new code. To build molecules that could perform life relevant processes, you have to have an exquisite amount of information.
So I'm agnostic on the question. I'm a little bit more skeptical that it exists anywhere else than I was before. But if it does exist, I am convinced it would require Intelligent Design. I don't think theologically, if you are a Christian or a Jew or a traditional theist, a lot hangs on it, because theism, I think, is compatible with both life here and life elsewhere as well.
I think there's been this assumption that it's inevitable from the standpoint of chemistry and physics, and that I think our own research on origin of life here shows that that's not true. It's very hard to build a cell.
Federal Newswire:
The author Douglas Adams has said that “essentially the population of the universe is zero,” because if you divide a trillion by more than a trillion in terms of these chances, ultimately your answer is so small that it might as well be zero. What is your take?
Stephen C. Meyer:
If you just look out in our own solar system, you have big gas giants out there, [that are] completely inhospitable. Anything closer to the sun than our planet, very inhospitable. The closest planet to our system is Mars–it's roughly the same size, a bit smaller. But a few things there just didn't go right.
[On earth], we are just the right axial tilt, just the right distance. We've got the right kind of geology that allows for plate tectonic activity. We have a moon that stabilizes our axial tilt and creates tides. All these things are very advantageous to life. So there's a lot of factors that have to go right and another planet very close to us in the same solar system didn't get all those things right, and it's completely lifeless, whereas our planet [is] suffused with life.
Federal Newswire:
What are your thoughts on climate change and if it’s anthropogenic in nature, that man is driving it, and yet that still doesn't tell us exactly what we ought to be doing as a planet to deal with it?
Stephen C. Meyer:
The first thing I would say is that there's a lot more dissent about the standard anthropogenic global warming hypothesis within the scientific community than the public has learned about from media reports.
We have scientists within our network of Intelligent Design researchers, scientists that are favorable to the thesis of Intelligent Design, who have different opinions about that. But it happens that there are different opinions about whether or not there is anthropogenic global warming within the larger scientific community, including within the scientists who work on climate change.
So I think it’s very important if we're going to have a good public policy discussion about what to do to make sure that we hear the voices on all sides of this question with relevant expertise.
We all know the scientists who have argued for the standard models of sometimes catastrophic global warming, but there are other scientists like Richard Lindzen at MIT, endowed chair in atmospheric physics or climate science, Will Happer at Princeton, Richard Spencer at NASA.
What kind of a consensus is it when you have voices like that who are saying, hold on, there's something wrong with the standard view.
There's also a website in Portland that has, I think, over 30,000 scientists who have signed a statement of dissent expressing their disagreement with the standard claims about human-caused global warming.
There are a number of issues that need to be teased apart. Is global warming [resulting from] a long cycle timetable? How significant is the effect? Is it modest or is it actually catastrophic? Is it caused by human activity, or is this a solar cycle or something that's completely natural? Given the size of the effect, is it actually harmful to the prospects for human flourishing on the planet?
Then there's a policy question, in light of whatever you decide about the first three questions, what do we do about it?
All those things have to be teased apart and I'm not an expert in this, but I have watched the way consensus has shut down debate about Darwinism. I know that there are very good arguments and very good reasons to be skeptical about Darwinian evolution.
My main point is I like to see this debate aired out in a much more open way without the claim that the science has settled it, because science doesn't always come with the definite article. There are differences of opinion among scientists that need to be adjudicated with open debate.
Federal Newswire:
What is the implication if you shut down debate on science-based public policy?
Stephen C. Meyer:
You end up with technocracy or scientocracy ruled by the scientists who happen to be closest to power at the time, and who have the ability to impose their view on the wider culture and to tell the politicians, "Hey, this is what the science says."
We saw that a bit with the lockdown policies on COVID and now there's quite a lot of information coming out that suggests that maybe those weren't so effective after all.
One of the reasons we elect politicians in a democracy is for them to weigh the competing interests and potential goods or ills that may be at stake in any given debate, including debates about science. The scientists can tell us, sometimes, what the facts are, and sometimes they can also tell us the best interpretation of the facts. Although oftentimes there can be debates about what the facts are, and also debates about how to interpret the facts, among the scientists themselves.
So, we need people of judicious political mindset to weigh the competing arguments and then come up with decisions that are in the best interest of the public, and remain accountable to the public once those decisions are made.
If we offload all decisions that have scientific elements to a group of scientists who claim to represent “the science,” we will get ruled by elites and democracy will be subverted.
Federal Newswire:
Similar to Dr. Zaius from the original Planet of the Apes, who is the Minister of Science, but also the Protector of the Faith?
Stephen C. Meyer:
I had forgotten that. But that's what you get. You end up getting dogma. You get ruled by a dogmatic elite if you have the wrong conception of science. It's not that science is bad, but if we have the wrong conception of science as ruled by a consensus of a small group of elites, we will end up subverting democracy.
