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SARAH SALVIANDER: There are those in science
who say the exquisite nature of the universe,
the exquisite laws of the universe,
are evidence of a designer.
Does that view make sense to you?
[Music]
STEPHEN MEYER: For 2,500 years, there have been two great
competing stories about reality in Western culture.
According to one of these stories, the universe, our planet,
the life it contains, and especially all of us,
are products of a pre-existing intelligence,
a purposeful mind or creator.
JOHN LENNOX: People like Galileo, Kepler,
Newton were all believers in the existence
of an intelligent designer behind the universe.
GUEST: Newton, Boyle, Kepler, the great founders
of modern science, thought that nature had secrets to reveal.
There were patterns there to be revealed
that we could understand because our minds had been made
in the image of the same rational creator
who had built rationality and design
and lawful order into the world.
But according to another story, matter and energy interact
and evolve in a completely mindless,
undirected way and arrange themselves
into everything we see around us.
SPEAKER: World famous atheist Richard Dawkins inspired millions
by popularizing evolutionary biology.
RICHARD DAWKINS: Once you've got life started,
once natural selection,
Darwinian natural selection has got going,
then we pretty much understand the four billion year
history of what's given rise to us
and all other living creatures.
SPEAKER: And that's the story I want to tell you about.
The things that we hold dear, including our very existence,
are in a cosmic accident.
SPEAKER: It seems so obvious that if you've got a garden,
there must be a gardener.
But what science has now achieved is an emancipation
from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator.
STEPHEN MEYER: And this view became popular
because of scientific theories developed in the 19th century.
SPEAKER: Scientists like Pierre Laplace, Charles Darwin,
and Thomas Henry Huxley each tried to explain events
in the history of the universe, like the origin
of the solar system, the origin of new forms of life,
and even the origin of the very first life.
STEPHEN MEYER: By the end of the 19th century,
a seamless story of the origin of nearly everything
could be told as a consequence of slow, gradual,
and purely naturalistic processes.
JAY RICHARDS: By the 19th century,
science had come to be associated
with a larger philosophical idea called materialism,
in which you just presuppose that the material
universe is all there is.
STEPHEN MEYER: And that's why many leading scientists
have claimed that science undermines belief in any intelligent
or purposeful creator behind the universe.
SPEAKER: Yes or no to this statement.
Science refutes God.
SPEAKER: 500 years of science have demonstrated that God,
that vague notion, is not likely.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I have no problems if,
as we probe the origins of things,
we bump up into the bearded man.
If that shows up, we're good to go.
OK?
Not a problem.
There's just no evidence of it.
JOE ROGAN: How do you respond to that?
GUEST: It's not what Darwin thought in the 19th century.
It's a new day in biology.
Things are much more complex than people thought
when they formulated these evolutionary ideas.
JOE ROGAN: There's a lot of people
that adopt philosophies that mimic religions.
GUEST: If you can show that life arose
by a completely undirected evolutionary process,
you're going to be more inclined
toward a more materialistic worldview.
STEPHEN MEYER: And that view, if true,
has profound consequences for whether our lives
have any ultimate meaning or significance.
PIERCE MORGAN: Have you thought about what happens
when your life ends?
GUEST: Have I thought about what happens?
PIERCE MORGAN: Yeah. GUEST: Of course, I die.
PIERCE MORGAN: Yeah.
What do you think happens?
GUEST: I think I get buried or cremated.
PIERCE MORGAN: And that's it?
GUEST: Nothing after that.
You have a brain which decays.
There's just nothing.
SPEAKER: Here we are, like mites on a plum.
And the plum is this little planet,
and it goes around an insignificant local star.
And that star is on the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy,
which contains 400 billion other stars.
And this galaxy is just one of something
like 100 billion other galaxies.
So, the idea that we are central,
that we are the reason there is a universe, is pathetic.
STEPHEN MEYER: This bleak view of the universe
troubles many people.
If we are the products of purely impersonal materialistic
forces, and if eventually the universe will experience a heat
death, leaving only cold, dark matter as scientists tell us,
then there can't be any lasting meaning
or purpose to our existence.
DAVID BERLINSKI: But is that true?
How likely is it that this panorama
that appears to me every time I open my eyes
does not have some very good reason for its existence?
JAY RICHARDS: So, we have two great,
competing stories about reality.
One posits a purposeful creator behind the universe.
The other envisions mindless processes
producing everything we see.
But which of these stories is true?
What explains all of this?
What's the story of everything?
SPEAKER: You can say, "Look, you can go back as far as you want,
but somehow the stuff of the universe had to come
from somewhere, and isn't that what God did?”
But that's only true if the universe was created.
If the universe was always here,
if the universe was infinitely old,
then there's nothing for a creator to do.
STEPHEN MEYER: How did the universe start?
It's an ancient question that goes back all the way
to the ancient Greeks.
Has the universe always been here, or is it finite?
A philosophical question that science began to address
and answer in the beginning of the 20th century.
And it starts with a relatively unknown
astronomer named Vesto Slipher.
Slipher is looking through telescopes,
and he's looking at these nebular phenomena in the night sky.
ROBERT SHELDON: Fuzzy things that never focused
in your telescope.
STEPHEN MEYER: But what Slipher was able
to discover was that the light coming
from these nebulae is shifted in the red direction
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
You shine light through a prism,
it will separate into the different colors, red to violet.
The red light corresponds to light with longer wavelengths.
SARAH SALVIANDER: We call it redshift because light
that has a longer wavelength tends to be more red in color.
Let's say that you've got a firetruck going past you
with its siren on.
And as it goes past, the pitch changes.
So [imitates siren].
As something is moving away from you,
whatever kind of waves it's emitting,
whether it's sound waves or light waves,
are going to be stretched out.
So, since the nebula that Slipher observed was shifted
in the red direction, it meant that the nebula
was moving away from us.
STEPHEN MEYER: Now, a nebula, at the time,
was thought to be just a gas cloud within our galaxy.
There were some astronomers who thought it might be at a galaxy
beyond, but that was a debate.
Then, in 1924, the debate was effectively settled
when Edwin Hubble used some new techniques
for measuring astronomical distances.
Hubble started looking at the Andromeda nebula and realized
that it was at least 900,000 light years away from us,
and yet the distance across our whole
galaxy was only 300,000 light years.
And so, he realized that those nebulae
must be separate galaxies.
[Music]
And then, as he was looking at the galaxies
with this wonderful new dome telescope,
he was also then able to see the beautiful structure,
not just a gaseous smudge on a photographic plate.
And Hubble then began to study not just the Andromeda Nebula,
but many of these nebulae, i.e.
galaxies, and discovered they were all shifted
in the red direction, meaning they were all moving away from us.
ROBERT SHELDON: So, it looked as
if space-time itself was expanding and stretching--
STEPHEN MEYER: Like a balloon blowing up.
There's a uniform expansion of almost
all the galaxies moving outward.
SARAH SALVIANDER: But what do you do when you mentally run
that scenario in reverse?
STEPHEN MEYER: As we begin to wind that clock backwards
and think of what the universe would have been like a thousand
years ago, or a million years ago, or a billion years ago,
or however far back you go, eventually you're gonna get
to a place where all of that expanding material
would have congealed in the same place,
marking the beginning of the expansion.
And arguably, the beginning of the universe itself.
SPEAKER: But there was something else.
Several years earlier, the physicist Albert Einstein made
a breakthrough in our understanding of gravity,
one that also pointed to a beginning of the universe.
But he found this implication of his theory so disturbing
that he dismissed it out of hand.
STEPHEN MEYER: In 1915, he developed a revolutionary new theory
of gravity called general relativity.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: The largest change in man's view
of the universe since Isaac Newton.
Nobody could foresee its implication.
STEPHEN MEYER: It implied that massive bodies
in space literally curved space itself...
in much the same way that a bowling ball changes the shape
of a trampoline.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: The distortions of space due
to a massive body like the sun shaped the course
of lesser objects like the planets.
ROBERT SHELDON: That discovery was so powerful
that Einstein went from being a nerdy physicist
to a worldwide sensation.
STEPHEN MEYER: His theory not only changed our understanding
of the present structure of the universe,
it also had profound implications for a long-standing question
about the origin of the universe.
ROBERT SHELDON: Einstein's theory implied
that in addition to gravity, there
must be an outward pushing force.
STEPHEN MEYER: Because if gravity were the only force
in the universe, everything would have congealed
into one big black hole.
But we don't live in that kind of universe.
We live in a universe where there is empty space
between massive bodies.
There must be some sort of anti-gravity force
or some sort of outward pushing force
that creates the empty space.
ROBERT SHELDON: He struggled and struggled with it.
And finally, he said, "I'm going to need to put
in an anti-gravity term into my general equation of relativity,”
and he called it the cosmological constant.
STEPHEN MEYER: And physicists today accept
that there is a cosmological constant.
There is an outward pushing force.
But Einstein made a further move.
He simply chose an arbitrary value
for this outward pushing force, one
that was exactly balanced to the force of gravity,
to suggest that the universe was static,
neither expanding nor contracting,
and is therefore eternal and self-existent.
However, theoretical physicists began
to work with Einstein's equations.
And one of the physicists was the Belgian priest,
Georges Lemaître.
They realized that the most natural implication
of Einstein's equations was that the universe was expanding.
But Lemaître was also aware of the data coming
from Vesto Slipher about the red shift.
So, Lemaître pulled those two lines of evidence together
and formulated what is now known as the Big Bang Theory.
JAY RICHARDS: Einstein, for various philosophical
or theoretical reasons, was trying
to avoid the implications of his theory.
STEPHEN MEYER: But Lemaître and Einstein met
at a conference in 1927.
They had shared a taxi cab ride together,
where Lemaître apparently informed Einstein
about the redshift evidence that the universe was actually
expanding despite Einstein's attempt to depict it as static.
Einstein tells him that your mathematics is impeccable,
but your physical intuition is abominable.
Einstein accused him of formulating this, deductively drawing it
from the Christian doctrine of creation rather than
from the evidence.
Lemaître bristled at that, showed, no, actually,
I have the evidence on my side.
The universe is expanding.
And your equations, when solved, point to a beginning.
And so, in 1931, Einstein went out
to the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson...
and viewed the evidence of the expanding universe
through Hubble's telescope.
And then, a week or two later, he does an interview
with the New York Times and acknowledges that Hubble
and his colleague Humason had shown
that the universe is not static.
And later, he acknowledged that his fine-tuning
of the cosmological constant...
was the greatest blunder of his scientific career.
BIJAN NEMATI: From roughly the 1920s till the 60s,
astrophysics proceeded with a lot
of brilliant people doing a lot of great work,
but a lot of it was focused on avoiding the notion
of a beginning.
ROBERT SHELDON: That view of the universe was debated,
and many people argued against it.
Fred Hoyle was a famous physicist who said, "I'm a Democritean.”
He said, "I believe nothing comes from nothing.”
His argument was there can't be a beginning to the universe
because that would be something coming from nothing.
FRED HOYLE: I don't like the idea
that something is dependent on a cause that I can never verify.
BIJAN NEMATI: Hoyle was, in fact,
so opposed to the notion of a beginning
that I think he was the one who coined the name
Big Bang as a sort of a derogatory name.
BRIAN KEATING: Fred Hoyle, who was, for much of his life,
a secular atheist, he believed that cosmologists
were being too influenced by the Genesis 1:1 narrative.
STEPHEN MEYER: And so, he formulates another model.
It's called the steady state.
He imagines there's always been matter,
there's always been energy, there's always been space and time.
The universe is infinitely old and
has been creating matter continually.
BRIAN KEATING: So, in the mid-1900s,
there was really a battle between two rival cosmologies.
ROBERT SHELDON: Both theories make predictions,
and Hoyle's prediction was that no matter how far back
in time you look, it will look exactly the same.
STEPHEN MEYER: If the universe was eternal in time and space,
then there was no beginning and no time
when all of the galactic material would have been concentrated
into a single, hot, dense point.
But the Big Bang predicts that there
would have been such a point.
BRIAN KEATING: When that Big Bang exploded,
the universe was in a very dense and hot state.
And as it got bigger, it cooled.
And when it cooled far enough, light was allowed to escape.
SARAH SALVIANDER: So, if the Big Bang theory was true,
there should be some evidence of this light in the form
of leftover radiation spread throughout the universe.
BRIAN KEATING: You can think of it as a glow,
as a fossil left over from the creation process.
ROBERT SHELDON: People looked for this radiation,
couldn't find it.
But then, two Bell Labs physicists were trying
to create a microwave link from the ground to a satellite.
They'd point this big horn antenna at the satellite
and record the data.
Well, they were getting noise and static
and couldn't explain it.
And wherever they pointed their horn antenna,
they got the static, and they said,
"There's something wrong with our antenna.”
SARAH SALVIANDER: In their desperation to figure out the source
of this signal, they thought it might have come
from pigeon droppings that were on this antenna.
They're scraping it off.
Nothing works.
ROBERT SHELDON: And then, one of them went to a seminar down
at Princeton by a physicist named Robert Dickey.
And Robert Dickey said, "We're looking
for the glow of that Big Bang radiation.
And today, it would have cooled down into the microwave.
That would be the wavelength of light corresponding to that.”
Penzias and Wilson looked at each other and said,
"I think we found it.”
They wrote up a paper that they had discovered the radiation
left over from the Big Bang, and it was such a sensation.
They got the Nobel Prize, and I would say at that point,
90-some percent of the physicists all agreed
that the Big Bang model was the working one.
Hoyle never did.
He insisted that the steady-state model was better,
and he was going to get it fixed one of these days.
BIJAN NEMATI: We scientists have our predispositions.
And in this case, the predisposition was to avoid a beginning
to the universe.
And that has been going on for about a century now.
And yet it's as if, you know, we are being forced to accept,
by the observations, that the universe is evolving
and it had a beginning.
STEPHEN MEYER: Now, in the 1960s,
this whole question of the implication of general relativity
for the beginning of the universe was revisited.
And it starts with Stephen Hawking.
[Music]
He's studying in Cambridge.
And in the middle of the PhD, he is diagnosed with ALS,
Lou Gehrig's disease.
Debilitating neurological disorder.
He's so discouraged that he might just quit the PhD,
but he's encouraged by people near him to press on, and he does.
Quite a heroic story, actually.
He's working on black hole physics.
SARAH SALVIANDER: Black holes, extremely massive,
but compressed down into an unimaginably small amount of space.
These things are warping space and time in ways
that you can't even imagine.
STEPHEN MEYER: It's causing space around that matter
to curve so tightly that even light can't get out.
But then, Hawking's thinking about the history
and origin of the universe itself.
He realizes that if the universe is expanding outward
in the forward direction of time,
then matter is getting more and more spread out.
And he starts thinking about, well,
what happens in the reverse direction of time?
If the matter is more diffused in the forward direction of time,
it means it's more concentrated in the reverse
direction of time.
Then, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity,
the space around matter should get more tightly curved.
So, as you go back in time, as matter gets more densely
concentrated, the space gets more tightly curved,
and you eventually get to a limiting point
where the matter gets so densely concentrated
that the space gets so tightly curved
that eventually you can't go back any further.
And this, Hawking calls the singularity,
a point of infinite density and infinitely tight curvature.
[Music]
In his PhD thesis in 1966, Hawking presents
an initial defense of that idea.
He gets incredible praise from his examiners.
The idea of a space-time singularity,
a beginning to the universe, that's a mind-blowing conclusion.
But there's a problem.
FRANK TIPLER: As you're going back toward the very beginning
of time, the volume of the universe is going to zero.
There's no space to put anything.
Zero size is not something that can exist in space and time.
Rather, the singularity is the point outside of space and time.
It's not in space and time.
STEPHEN MEYER: Before the beginning of time,
there's no universe.
The universe comes into existence out of the singularity.
There is no matter.
There is no space.
There is no time.
There is no energy.
There's no material stuff there to do the causing.
JAY RICHARDS: Physicist Robert Dickey said,
"An infinite universe would relieve us of the necessity
of understanding the origin of matter
at any finite time in the past.”
Notice that verb, relieve.
That's not a scientific term.
What does Dickey mean?
Well, if the universe is eternal and infinite,
then we don't even have to ask the question where it came from.
So, if an infinite universe relieves us of the necessity,
what does a finite universe do?
TIMOTHY MCGREW: We now know the universe began
to exist finitely long ago, but whatever begins
to exist is caused to exist by something else.
STEPHEN MEYER: Now, because we're talking about the origin
of the universe itself, by which we mean the origin of matter,
energy, space, and time, any entity capable
of causing the universe to come into existence must be external
to or separate from the universe itself.
It must exist independently of matter
and transcend space and time.
JAY RICHARDS: And so, whatever explains the finite
physical universe must be itself non-physical.
Whatever explains the finite material
universe must itself be immaterial...
to get in this way to the philosophical stopping point
of the first cause.
STEPHEN MEYER: I first witnessed astronomers
and cosmologists wrestling with this problem of the first cause
at a conference early in my career.
SPEAKER: It may not be the ultimate truth.
STEPHEN MEYER: At that conference,
I encountered the work of a great
cosmologist named Allan Sandage.
He was well known for being a hard-bitten
scientific materialist.
But he'd worked closely with Edwin Hubble
on verifying the expansion of the universe
in all quadrants of the sky.
And at this conference, he announced
that he had come to a theistic belief,
not in spite of, but because of the scientific discoveries
concerning the origin of the universe and its fine tuning.
And I can remember him looking into the camera and saying--
ALLAN SANDAGE: Here is evidence for what can only
be described as a supernatural event.
STEPHEN MEYER: Super natural event.
And there was a kind of a beat, a pause
between the words super and natural.
ALLAN SANDAGE: There's no way that this could have been
predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.
STEPHEN MEYER: Another astronomer at the conference
who was particularly distressed by the problem
of the first cause was Robert Jastrow.
ROBERT JASTROW: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
STEPHEN MEYER: Though he was an agnostic,
he had recently published a book called
"God and the Astronomers".
Later, he did a number of interviews
about the conclusion of his book.
ROBERT JASTROW: One of the things that interests me
that I find most puzzling in this astronomy we've
been discussing is the fact that there was a beginning.
The mystery of creation.
If there were no beginning, we wouldn't have to ask
what happened before the beginning.
And we wouldn't have to worry about who created the universe.
But the fact the universe sprang
into being at a definite moment seems to me theological...
and nothing that could be answered within science.
SPEAKER: There always has to be a cause for any effect,
and then that cause becomes an effect of a cause underlying it.
But in the case of the Big Bang,
that calls for an uncreated creator,
and that would answer to some people's definition of a god.
ROBERT JASTROW: I'm an agnostic, not a believer,
but not an atheist.
Suppose you try to get away from the theological explanation.
Is there something else that we can imagine
that would lay these questions to rest?
Some--
I can't see it.
ROBERT SHELDON: The last paragraph of Jastrow's book says
that the natural scientist or the physicist
has scaled the peak of ignorance.
As he pulls himself over the last boulder,
he finds the philosophers and the theologians
sitting there waiting for him.
The point Jastrow is making is no scientist wanted there
to be a creation to the universe.
He wanted it to be eternal.
But that was inevitably where science was taking us
to, that point where we had to acknowledge
there was a beginning.
STEPHEN MEYER: Hawking proves the singularity,
doesn't much like its implications,
because it seems to point to a kind of creation event.
So, he spent much of the rest of his career attempting
to circumvent the conclusion of his own proof.
And in the process, he developed these quantum
cosmological ideas through a tiny loophole.
Hawking and other physicists recognize
that they can only back extrapolate to almost the singularity.
They can get to 1E-43 of a second
after the beginning of the universe.
To say it's a blink of an eye is a huge exaggeration.
Before that time, they thought gravity might have worked
differently, according to quantum mechanics,
the physics that applies to the tiny subatomic realm.
So, they attempted to develop an alternative cosmological model
that they called quantum cosmology.
The hope among some of those cosmologists is that this model
would eliminate the need for a beginning of the universe
or would somehow explain the origin of the universe
without any need to posit an external creator.
JOHN LENNOX: I can recall Stephen Hawking at Cambridge,
just when the beginnings of Motor Neurone Disease
were being seen in his difficulty in walking.
When I was given a pre- publication edition of his book,
"The Grand Design", I was quite amazed to come
across what appears to be a central statement.
STEPHEN HAWKING: Because there are laws, such as gravity,
the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
JOHN LENNOX: I had an immediate visceral reaction.
What could that possibly mean?
Because there is a law such as gravity,
that is because there is something,
the universe can create itself from nothing.
And that appears to me to be a flat contradiction.
Nothing is certainly not nothing.
STEPHEN MEYER: Hawking is saying that the universe
has come out of some sort of pre-existing laws
of physics that are expressed as mathematical equations.
The implication of this is that out of math comes matter,
space, time, and energy.
But these mathematical equations don't describe anything
yet because there is no universe yet to describe.
Math has no causal power by itself.
And one of the developers of quantum cosmology,
the Russian physicist Alexander Volinkin,
has reflected deeply on this kind of paradoxical result.
He says, "In the absence of space, time,
and matter, what tablets could these laws be written upon?”
Hawking was sensitive to the same concern.
He said, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations
and makes a universe for them to describe?”
In our experience, math is conceptual.
It exists in a mind.
So, if we're saying the material universe came out of a set
of mathematical equations, are we really saying
that the material universe came out of a mind?
[Music]
JAY RICHARDS: The basic idea of fine-tuning is that the universe
is just so, that its properties, the initial conditions,
the so-called constants of physics, the laws of nature,
rest on a razor's edge so that if they were slightly different
than they are in the actual universe,
the universe would not be habitable.
That is, it would not be compatible with life.
STEPHEN MEYER: Physicist Sir John Polkinghorne used
to have an excellent visual illustration
to convey the idea of the fine-tuning.
He used to ask people in the audience to imagine
that they were on a spaceship that had docked
at a space station.
And upon entrance to the space station,
they discovered there was a great room
with a huge universe-creating machine inside.
And it had dials and knobs and sliders,
each representing one of the fundamental physical parameters,
where each one of the dials was set to a very precise value.
Imagine what would happen if you changed one
of the dials one click this way or
that, or move a slider one notch this way or
that, that life in the universe would suddenly
become impossible.
But it was none other than Fred Hoyle who first discovered
that our universe is actually fine-tuned for life.
FRED HOYLE: I'm going to tell you today a story which,
if you hear it, may seem very strange to you.
STEPHEN MEYER: Hoyle was trying to show,
as part of his work on the steady-state cosmology,
where carbon could have come from.
FRED HOYLE: And certainly it would have seemed strange to me,
some 20 years ago, when the path
which led to this work began to be followed.
STEPHEN MEYER: When he himself made a discovery
that shook his personal philosophy.
FRED HOYLE: So, let me begin then without more ado.
STEPHEN MEYER: So, Hoyle is trying to explain the abundance
of carbon in the universe because he recognized
that you needed carbon to build life,
but he can't figure out for the life
of him how it could have been built.
BRIAN KEATING: Hoyle reasoned that the Big Bang couldn't do it,
the Quasi-Steady State universe couldn't do it,
and the only other laboratories for doing
so were in the bellies of stars.
DAVID SNOKE: The understanding now is that all of the elements
that we have, carbon, oxygen, so on, were synthesized
inside of stars.
When that star exploded, goes supernova,
then that gets spread throughout the universe.
Then, that gets to be re-accumulated back
into new stars and planets.
STEPHEN MEYER: He developed numerous ideas
about how carbon might form from simpler atoms inside stars.
But for various reasons, none of them would work.
But then, he comes up with a theory that works with the physics.
His theory envisions two elements,
beryllium with an atomic weight of eight
and helium with an atomic weight of four,
combining to make carbon with an atomic weight of 12.
But there's a catch.
When he did the math, the resulting carbon would have a higher
energy state than the ordinary carbon
that we have around us in our solar system.
And this higher energy version of carbon would have to exist
for beryllium and helium to come together
to form carbon in the first place.
LUKE BARNES: So, if you have a wine glass and you flick it,
it will have a certain note that it puts out there,
a certain frequency.
If I sing that frequency back at the wine glass,
it will absorb that sound much more effectively than
if I just sing some other random note at the wine glass.
There's a way that a carbon nucleus could sing,
could wobble around, could vibrate
and oscillate in just the right way...
that it would live long enough to sort of hold itself together
in time to make a stable carbon nucleus rather than a couple
of things falling apart.
Without this singing frequency in a carbon atom,
the process just won't work.
[Music]
STEPHEN MEYER: Hoyle realized that there must be a version
of the carbon atom capable of vibrating at a precise frequency
that would allow it to absorb the combined energies
of the beryllium and helium so that carbon could form.
After which time, it would settle into the stable form of carbon
that we see all around us today.
LUKE BARNES: Now, what Hoyle did was to say, "All right, well,
if that's the way that carbon's got to be made in the universe,
carbon better sing at just this energy level,
otherwise this whole thing's not gonna work.”
STEPHEN MEYER: So, he contracted with a physicist out
at Caltech named Willie Fowler.
WILLIE FOWLER: So, Hoyle was invited to Caltech
to give a lecture on the steady state theory.
The next day, he came into the laboratory
and began asking us questions about the energy levels
of the carbon-12 nucleus.
And we kind of gave him the brush off.
"Get away from us, young fellow.
You bother us.”
See, we didn't know him all that well.
And there was this funny little man who thought
that we should stop all this important work
that we were doing otherwise and look for this.
He convinced Ward Whaling, who was an assistant
or associate professor at that time, to give it a whirl.
And sure enough...
the energy he got was almost exactly what Hoyle had predicted.
It was really quite a tour de force
that a man had walked into the lab,
predicted the existence of an excited state
of a nucleus from astrophysical arguments.
We then took Hoyle very seriously.
STEPHEN MEYER: That confirmed Hoyle's suspicion
about how carbon might have been made,
but it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg
of a deeper problem.
LUKE BARNES: The fact that carbon sings
at just this energy level itself depends on other properties.
STEPHEN MEYER: The fine-tuning of the energy levels
was the whole cascading effect of other fine-tuning parameters
that were discovered that had to be just right.
Each one of these different parameters falls
within a very narrow tolerance.
SPEAKER: We can put fairly precise values
on how finely tuned they have to be.
The probability of the strength of gravity being just right,
one part in 10 to the power of 35.
SPEAKER: The odds of the weight of a proton to an electron.
SPEAKER: One part in 1,000.
SPEAKER: The ratio between the gravitational attraction
and the electromagnetic attraction.
SPEAKER: One part in 10 to the power of 4.
SPEAKER: The gravitational force compared
with the weak nuclear force.
SPEAKER: One part in 10 to the 10,000.
SPEAKER: One part in 10 to the 21st power.
SPEAKER: Initial expansion rate of the universe.
SPEAKER: One part in 10 to the 17.
STEPHEN MEYER: Not too strong, not too weak, not too fast,
not too slow, not too heavy, not too light.
Everything's got to be just right.
The Goldilocks universe.
JAY RICHARDS: It's not just that life would be different or
that history would be different,
but that the universe would not be compatible
with any sort of chemically based life.
STEPHEN MEYER: The probability of getting these specific
parameters right is infinitesimally small.
FRED HOYLE: Unless it's also claimed
that instruction happens by sort of divine providence,
ex machina, to be just such.
I felt obliged to take seriously the proposition
that life is a cosmic phenomenon.
STEPHEN MEYER: By a cosmic phenomenon,
Hoyle meant that life in the universe was a consequence
of the precise fine-tuning of the physical parameters
of the entire universe.
FRED HOYLE: So, the concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon,
if it's correct, should have many consequences.
The question then was what does one do about it?
STEPHEN MEYER: And at the end of this investigation,
Hoyle shifted.
And he attributes his conversion from an aggressive form
of scientific atheism to affirming some kind
of intelligent design behind the universe,
to his discovery, his own discovery
of these fine-tuning parameters.
He's later quoted as saying that a common-sense interpretation
of the evidence suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed
with physics and chemistry to make life possible.
[Music]
LUKE BARNES: Think of it like this.
Suppose that I'm a detective arriving on the scene of a crime.
I'm at a bank, and there's been a heist, OK?
The safe is open, all the money is gone,
and I say, "All right, let's have a look at security footage.”
And I'm watching on the little screen,
and the burglars come in, and they walk up to the safe,
and there is a 12-digit code, and they walk up
and punch in the correct code.
Opens up, and off they go.
Here's two possible explanations.
Maybe these are really lucky robbers,
but they just guess the first 12-digit code that comes to mind,
and hey presto, they take the money.
Here's another option.
It's an inside job.
Someone who already knew the code told
the robbers what the code is.
Let's pause the video just as the lead thief puts his finger up
in order to put the code in.
What would we expect to happen according
to the first hypothesis, the they got lucky?
Well, if they're just guessing the code,
then we'd expect them to put in the wrong code.
We can't really predict what code you would put in,
but we can predict with a high degree
of certainty you put in the wrong one.
And so, our expectation there that naturally forms
from that scenario doesn't match with what actually happens.
On the other hand, if we knew it was an inside job
and we stopped the video just before they put in the code,
we would expect them to put in the right code
and get into the vault.
STEPHEN MEYER: It's possible by random means
that some process would have stumbled
on exactly the parameters needed
to create a life-friendly universe.
But our overwhelming expectation,
if we consider the odds, is that without guidance,
we would get a life-unfriendly universe.
But that's not the kind of universe we see.
Instead, we see the kind of universe we would expect
if it had been intentionally set up for life,
suggesting that it was intended.
Fine-tuning implies a fine-tuner.
JAY RICHARDS: But there's another type of fine-tuning.
And that's the fine-tuning of the initial arrangement
of matter at the very beginning of the universe.
If you thought the idea of a Big Bang was one of order emerging
from chaos, get that out of your mind.
It's exactly the opposite.
What we have is an initial moment
of exquisite precision and order.
LUKE BARNES: One of the remarkable things about the universe we
see around us is there's a direction, so to speak, of time.
This fact that processes go one way
but not the other is captured in a physical quantity called
entropy, which very roughly, in a sort of hand-wavy way,
measures the amount of disorder in a system.
BRIAN KEATING: The more chaotic,
the more random the distribution, the higher the entropy.
The more ordered the system, the lower the entropy.
You have a glass of coffee, and you have a glass of milk.
It's highly ordered.
Then, you mix them together.
They're completely disordered and random.
We see things happening seemingly only in a way
that entropy increases.
LUKE BARNES: No one has ever put a spoon into coffee
and stirred it and separated the milk out from the coffee.
Never happened.
What's going on with all of this?
DAVID SNOKE: Since entropy is increasing continuously,
that means that if we go into the past,
entropy had to be decreasing.
JAY RICHARDS: To allow things to be this orderly now,
how orderly must the universe have been at the beginning?
LUKE BARNES: This is where a very interesting argument
from Roger Penrose comes in.
What Penrose worked out was, OK,
if we consider the full set of possibilities
for the way you could start a universe,
our sort of universe is an extraordinarily small piece
of that set of possibilities.
STEPHEN MEYER: He has calculated
that initial entropy fine-tuning as one chance
in 10 to the 10th power raised again to the 123rd power.
It's called a hyper-exponential number.
LUKE BARNES: What that's telling us is there's something
remarkably special about the start of our universe.
There has to be something about the arrangement of the stuff,
whatever the stuff was, very early in the universe,
which is not the typical way you
would expect a universe to start.
STEPHEN MEYER: You could understand this by analogy.
In the old days, when civil engineers were building a tunnel
through a mountainside, they would configure a charge just right
to make sure that the blast removed the rock
where they wanted it to be removed.
And very small adjustments in the initial positioning
of those explosive charges would make very big differences
in where the hole appeared in the mountainside.
Analogously, that's what's going on with the fine-tuning
of the initial entropy of the universe.
You can just think of it this way.
The amount of disorder is so small that it's nearly perfect.
There's a famous passage in the
"General Scholium to the Principia",
which is an epilogue
that Newton wrote in one of the later editions
to his great work on universal gravitation.
He's describing the beautiful balance of the planets,
the sun, the comets that create this stable order.
In this passage, he says, "This most beautiful system of sun,
planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel
and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”
JAY RICHARDS: Even in a highly fine-tuned universe,
you still need a heck of a lot more to go right
in a planetary environment in order for not only complex life
in general, but human life in particular to exist.
BIJAN NEMATI: Our solar system, especially in view
of what we now have learned about other solar systems,
really ends up looking quite remarkable.
Our solar system has terrestrial planets...
in neat, circular orbits.
And then, you get to these gas giants...
that are also in neat, circular orbits.
JAY RICHARDS: They serve as guards.
They serve as sentinels for our solar system so that they,
very often, take hits for us from these comets...
that if they were not there would find their way
into our neighborhood and have an unfortunate tendency
to sterilize life on our planet.
BIJAN NEMATI: For example, the comet Shoemaker-Levy,
it ended up in Jupiter.
JAY RICHARDS: Jupiter and Saturn,
these planets that for a long time were associated with Greek
and Roman gods, actually do play a role in protecting us.
BIJAN NEMATI: And all of this around a stable,
energetic, metal-rich star.
Just these makes the solar system pretty unique.
Beyond that, our own planet within the solar system is situated
in what we call the circumstellar habitable zone.
BRIAN MILLER: If we were too close, radiation would kill us.
If we were too far away, our planet wouldn't have the right
materials to support life in the way it does.
It's the right tilt and has the right
rotation rate so that we have seasons.
JAY RICHARDS: You need a large moon in order
to stabilize the planet's tilt on its axis.
BRIAN MILLER: In addition, what the moon
does is that recirculates the ocean through the tides
to allow oxygen to get to deeper levels.
JAY RICHARDS: You need the right kind of atmosphere,
the right thickness of the atmosphere,
the right mass for the planet in order to hold the right kind
of atmosphere in place, and then you
need the right kind of geology.
BRIAN MILLER: We have a molten magma in the Earth that rotates.
That creates a magnetic shield.
That has an important consequence
because the magnetic field of the Earth is our blanket,
our shield against dangerous, deadly cosmic radiation
that would otherwise modify our DNA,
preventing us from perhaps ever coming to exist.
JAY RICHARDS: It's not at all obvious
that that necessarily has to happen.
In some ways, Mars is the perfect example
of how precisely things have to be fine-tuned
at a local level in order to have life.
Remember, Mars is the most Earth-like planet known
in the universe.
Mars is in an otherwise habitable solar system.
It's very close to the Goldilocks zone in its orbit.
It's close to the same mass as Earth.
It has many of the same materials.
And yet a few things didn't go quite right.
And as a result, it's lifeless while
Earth is suffused with life.
It's a remarkably exquisite system of design
in which all of these pieces have to work together in order
to produce a small abode on the surface of a single small planet
where life can exist.
[Music]
TIMOTHY MCGREW: One of the most curious attempts
to get a round inference to design
in the universe is to push it all off onto the concept
of a multiverse.
STEPHEN MEYER: The idea that there are billions and billions
and billions of other universes out there,
which had different combinations
of fundamental physical parameters
and different initial conditions,
and we just happen to be in the lucky one.
JAY RICHARDS: Given enough universes,
presumably at least one or a few of those universes will exist
in such a way that complex life can exist.
LUKE BARNES: The nice thing about the multiverse explanation
is it shows that this fine-tuning business seems
to be pointing beyond the universe as we know it.
There's got to be something else.
There's got to be a bigger story out there.
BIJAN NEMATI: The multiverse, as an appeal to a materialistic,
naturalistic explanation, loses any of its original attraction.
Anything that's outside of this nature is essentially,
manifestly supernatural.
And so, we're appealing to something supernatural
to avoid the supernatural.
STEPHEN MEYER: Leonard Susskind,
a prominent physicist at Stanford, says, "Look,
if we don't posit this kind of a multiverse model,
we're hard pressed to answer the arguments
of the ID proponents as to how to explain the fine-tuning.”
But there's a problem with that.
For the multiverse explanation to work,
there must be some kind of universe-generating mechanism,
a kind of common cause of all the universes so that we
can portray each of the universes as the outcome
of a kind of cosmic lottery.
And these universe-generating machines,
where they're constantly generating universes
with slightly different parameters and laws of physics.
And this is the sleeper.
All the speculative cosmological models
that have been invoked to explain how you might generate new
universes, whether those models are based on string theory
or something called inflationary cosmology,
all those models require exquisite,
prior fine-tuning in the universe-generating mechanism
that is proposed.
JAY RICHARDS: If a monkey clicked on a typewriter
for an infinite amount of time, in theory
it would eventually type out Hamlet.
But if the typewriter didn't have the letter H,
then it wouldn't stand a chance.
Just as the parts of the typewriter need to be fine-tuned
to include all the letters of the alphabet
to make possible typing different words and sentences,
so too, all proposed universe-generating mechanisms
would require fine-tuning to make it possible
to generate different universes with different
initial conditions and laws of physics.
STEPHEN MEYER: The multiverse doesn't actually get rid
of the fine-tuning or explain the origin of the fine-tuning.
You really just push the fine-tuning problem back one generation
without solving it.
And yet we know of one cause that does produce fine-tuning
in our experience.
Whenever we see what we call fine-tuning,
we always trace that type of a system back to a mind,
whether we're talking about a finely tuned French recipe,
a finely tuned internal combustion engine,
or a finely tuned radio dial.
LUKE BARNES: The ability to look at a set of possibilities
and to choose an outcome is almost by definition intentional.
It's something that a mind does that sort
of mindless matter doesn't do.
STEPHEN MEYER: So, given that the multiverse doesn't actually
provide an ultimate explanation for fine-tuning,
the best explanation for fine-tuning
is still intelligent design.
PETER THIEL: The multiverse is like this gateway drug.
Once you're lost in the multiverse,
you might as well be in a simulation.
BRIAN MILLER: Some people have argued
that our universe is actually a simulation,
that there's perhaps some extraordinary
computer that's running a simulation.
We're part of that simulation.
DAVID BERLINSKI: The simulation theory?
That belongs in the movies.
Come on, that's ridiculous.
We're not living in a simulation.
There's no evidence of a discrete film being run
in the background.
This is not what I would consider,
or what you would consider, sophisticated discourse.
Has nothing to do with science.
PETER THIEL: I think what all these things have in common,
the simulation theory, the multiverse,
you can't trust what's in front of your eyes.
DAVID BERLINSKI: The multiverse, simulation hypothesis,
we're living in a computer, all those sorts of things,
there's nothing wrong with any of this.
It just shouldn't be mistaken for anything serious.
STEPHEN MEYER: We're not only seeing evidence of design
at the macroscopic scale of the entire universe
and in the fundamental parameters of physics
that affect the whole of the cosmos,
but we're now seeing design in the microcosm
and the tiny recesses of living cells.
[Music]
MICHAEL BEHE: Back in the middle of the 19th century,
the cell was thought to be a little piece of jelly,
so it seemed to be pretty simple.
STEPHEN MEYER: Thomas Henry Huxley said
that the living cell is a simple,
homogenous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
It's just a simple enclosure with some Jello
or goo on the inside.
MICHAEL BEHE: But modern science has shown
that the cell is an enormously complex nanoscale factory.
And when you study biochemistry, you come across machinery,
literally molecular machines.
One of my favorites is the bacterial flagellum.
It is quite literally an outboard motor
that bacteria use to swim.
It's got a propeller, this long whip-like strand.
And the propeller is attached to the drive shaft
by something called the U-joint, which is attached to the motor.
And the motor is hooked onto the cell membrane
by something called the stator.
The stator requires bushing to push up
through the membrane of the cell.
And altogether, there are 30 parts that are needed for it.
STEPHEN MEYER: In some species, the flagellar motor is rotating
at 100,000 rpm, and it can change direction
in a quarter of a turn.
It's an absolutely amazing piece
of high technology in a low form of life.
MICHAEL BEHE: Another great example of a molecular machine
in the cell is the ATP synthase.
STEPHEN MEYER: It's a true turbine
that generates energy for use in the cell
in much the same way a turbine in a dam generates electricity.
MICHAEL BEHE: It's an engine with a barrel-shaped rotor made
of protein subunits.
As the rotor spins, it turns a drive shaft with a specially
placed bump that opens a specifically shaped compartment.
Once opened, this compartment receives two molecules
and combines them to form another energy-rich molecule
called ATP, the power plant for the cell.
SPEAKER: And there's a whole host
of molecular machines inside cells.
turbines, rotary engines, sliding clamps,
machines for copying digital information.
We've got kinesin motors that are running
along that are basically UPS trucks that are delivering things.
Motor proteins that walk step by step as they tow vesicles
of material along tracks made of other special proteins.
MICHAEL BEHE: Darwin knew nothing
of these sophisticated multi-part machines in the 19th century,
and his theory is not equipped to explain them.
Darwin himself said, "If it could be demonstrated
that there was any system that could not be put together
by numerous, successive, slight modifications,
my theory would absolutely break down.”
In the bacterial flagellar motor,
if you take away the drive shaft or
if you take away the propeller or the U-joint, it's broken.
If any key component of the flagellar motor is removed,
it stops functioning.
This means simpler evolutionary precursors wouldn't have worked.
So, natural selection wouldn't have preserved them,
halting evolution before the fully
functional motor could develop.
On the flip side, when you see a system that's put together
with a number of components matched to each other,
you recognize that's the product of a mind.
STEPHEN MEYER: The Darwinian mechanism of mutation
and selection, which has long been posed as a kind
of designer-substitute mechanism, cannot build those systems.
Then, perhaps they look designed
because they really were designed.
But there's an even deeper consideration
that points to intelligent design and biology.
SPEAKER: One of the most brilliant theories
of modern science was formulated by an American, JD Watson,
and an Englishman, FHC Crick.
FRANCIS CRICK: As soon as we met,
we found that although we had very different backgrounds,
we had a lot of things in common.
STEPHEN MEYER: Francis Crick was a PhD student
at Cambridge University, working in physics,
not even in biology.
He teamed up with a 23-year-old American named James Watson.
JAMES WATSON: Neither of us were trained
for what really interested us now.
We both wanted to find the gene.
We weren't organic chemists.
We weren't anything else.
STEPHEN MEYER: And they began to work on what was at the time
deemed to be kind of the holy grail of biological research.
By the early 1950s, many scientists were suspecting
that DNA had something to do with the transmission
of hereditary information, but didn't know
what the structure of DNA was.
And so, Watson and Crick began a kind of odyssey
to try to crack this problem.
And by the spring of 1953, they had actually formulated a model
that elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule.
They showed that it had a beautiful double helix structure.
And along the spine of the molecule,
on the interior, there were chemical subunits, four of them.
SPEAKER: One, two, three, four.
STEPHEN MEYER: Now represented with the letters A, T, G, and C.
SPEAKER: A would pair with T.
And then, you have two other genetic letters.
C would pair up with G.
So, you had the double helix.
So, the discovery of the structure suggested
that one strand of DNA had a complementary strand...
that could in turn function as a template for rebuilding
or copying the original strand.
And this suggested a duplication process.
[Music]
FRANCIS CRICK: I don't think I worried too much about what
the structure might tell us.
I just thought we ought to find out.
And when we had found out, of course,
it struck us with a tremendous impact,
just how beautiful and exciting it was.
Because there before us was the answer to one
of the fundamental problems in biology, how do genes replicate?
And it was very simple, and you couldn't miss it.
We used to occasionally just, Jim and I,
just sit and look at the molecule
and think how beautiful it was.
STEPHEN MEYER: Interestingly, Crick had been a code breaker
in World War II.
In 1957, he then formulates something called the sequence
hypothesis, which in many ways, I think is a more significant
achievement than even the original elucidation of the structure.
Crick realizes that the four chemical subunits along the spine
of the double helix, on the interior of the helix,
are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text.
That is to say that it's not the physical properties
of these subunits.
It's not their molecular weight or their shape,
but rather it's their arrangement in accord
with an independent symbol convention
that molecular biologists eventually elucidate,
called the genetic code, that gives them their ability
to transmit information.
RICHARD STERNBERG: What also happened
around the same time was Gamow had shown
that you could take those letters, As, Cs, Gs, and Ts,
and you could represent them in binary code, zeros and ones.
So, it had an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string.
It looked very much like an information carrier.
But for what?
DOUGLAS AXE: Crick anticipated this, too.
He thought these bases were carrying information
for the construction of proteins.
A cell is filled with proteins that are performing the tasks
inside the cells.
STEPHEN MEYER: They're like the tools in a toolbox.
You have a hammer, a wrench, a saw.
Each of those different tools perform different functions
because of the different three-dimensional shapes
that they have.
The same thing is true of proteins.
Proteins catalyze reactions at super-fast rates,
those are called enzyme proteins,
they build the structural parts of molecular machines,
and they also help to process information on the DNA molecule.
So, proteins do all these important jobs,
but they do those jobs because they have very specific
three-dimensional conformations or shapes.
Now that raises the question, how do they acquire those shapes?
Well, they get those precise shapes if and only
if the amino acid subunits, the constituent parts out
of which they're made, are arranged in very specific ways.
BRIAN MILLER: And there's 20 amino acids in the same way
that you've got 26 letters in the alphabet.
So, the order of the amino acids
in a protein is like the letters in a sentence.
They have to be in the right order to work.
STEPHEN MEYER: But what causes the amino acids
to get arranged properly so that they will fold properly
into the right shapes?
And the answer to that was the discovery
that the DNA molecule contains information...
instructions for directing the construction
of those protein molecules that do all those important jobs.
DOUGLAS AXE: In those stretches of DNA,
you have very particular sequences of A's, C's, G's,
and T's that tell cells how to make amino acid sequences
that fold and become functional proteins.
And molecular biologists now have a very good understanding
of how the information in DNA directs the process
of protein synthesis.
First, the cell uses a large protein machine called a polymerase
to make a copy of the information on the DNA.
The polymerase separates the DNA into two strands.
One strand serves as a template for creating
a complementary RNA copy.
The resulting copy, called a messenger RNA transcript,
detaches and then approaches and passes
through the nuclear pore complex.
Then the transcript with the genetic assembly instructions
arrives at a two-part chemical factory called the ribosome,
the site of protein synthesis.
As the messenger RNA transcript passes through the ribosome,
a mechanical assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain
of amino acids using the instructions on the transcript.
These amino acids are transported to the ribosome
by molecules called transfer RNAs,
which link specific sequences of bases
to corresponding amino acids in accord with the genetic code.
The sequential arrangement of the amino acids determines
whether the chain will fold into a functional protein,
and if so, which type.
Once the chain is folded into a functional protein,
it is ready to perform its job inside the cell.
That's in fact what's going on inside cells.
STEPHEN MEYER: The discovery meant
that you had to explain not just the origin
of the cell viewed as a kind of amorphous blob,
but rather as an enclosure of a sophisticated information
storage device and a sophisticated information transmission
and processing system.
SPEAKER: They inherited all the traits
of the cell they came from.
And this same sort of process goes on in all living creatures.
JAMES TOUR: It's not just a bunch of protoplasm anymore.
The cell is utterly amazing.
How can you look at this and not think,
how in the world did this start?
Because molecules don't come together to do that on their own.
SPEAKER: OK.
But what I'd like to know is, where'd the first cell come from?
SPEAKER: In a way, you're asking where life itself began.
We don't know that.
STEPHEN MEYER: I first encountered the mystery about the origin
of the first life at a conference that I attended
when I was a young scientist.
There was a discussion between scientists
who were committed to the standard chemical evolutionary model
for how life arose from simpler chemicals
in the so-called prebiotic soup,
and other scientists who had become skeptical
of the standard model.
One of those scientists on the panel was a man named Dean
Kenyon, a biophysicist with a Stanford PhD, he'd worked at NASA,
and he'd written the best- selling advanced graduate-level
textbook on how life first arose from these prebiotic chemicals,
"Biochemical Predestination".
But leading up to the conference,
he began to doubt his own theory.
DEAN KENYON: My own research work on origin
of first life was one of the main factors
that led me to begin to question this general viewpoint
about origins.
As time went on there, I began to be more aware
of some of the problems involved.
Actually, some students brought me a book in which my own work,
"Biochemical Predestination", was critiqued.
I thought I could easily refute this refutation of my work.
And so, I said, "Well, I'll take the summer
to look at this material.
It looks very interesting.”
Here, the question of origin of genetic information
looked increasingly problematical.
By the time the summer was over, I had decided
that I could not refute this criticism.
Things added up to the time for a critical reexamination.
STEPHEN MEYER: And his old idea was that the subunits
of the large information- carrying biological molecules,
like the proteins and the DNA, would have self-organized
because of forces of attraction between the constituent parts
of those large molecules.
In chemistry, sodium and chloride combine to form salt.
NA has a plus charge.
Cl has a minus charge.
They attract, and they form a nicely ordered crystal lattice.
However, as he got deeply into the chemistry,
Kenyon realized that DNA wasn't that kind of molecule.
DEAN KENYON: In the DNA molecule, we have A, T, C, and G.
And the specific order in which they occur does not depend
on the chemical binding affinities
between or among those various bases.
STEPHEN MEYER: I used to use a visual illustration
with my students to get the idea across.
I would use a little magnetic chalkboard
and stick letters to it, magnetic letters.
In the case of the magnetic letters in the chalkboard,
there were magnetic forces that explained
why the letters stuck to the backboard.
But those forces didn't explain the arrangement of the letters
that spelled out some message.
Instead, that was explained only by an exogenous source
of information, namely, I had arranged the letters.
So, the magnetic forces explain why the letters stuck
to the backboard, but not their arrangement.
And in the same way, there are forces of attraction in DNA
that explain why the bases stick
to the sugar phosphate backbone,
but not forces that explain the arrangement of the characters.
DEAN KENYON: And so, my doubt just reached, I guess,
for me, the intellectual breaking point.
If one could get at the origin of the messages,
the encoded messages within the living machinery,
then you would really be on to something far more intellectually
satisfying than this chemical evolution theory.
STEPHEN MEYER: And at this conference,
he publicly repudiated his own theory.
DEAN KENYON: I don't think you have to jump off the end
of the rational world to move in the direction
of a frankly theistic understanding of the origin of life.
JAMES TOUR: Since Kenyon announced his doubts,
there have been many other attempts
to simulate how the molecular compounds necessary for life,
like proteins and DNA, or even simpler chemical building blocks
of those compounds, might have evolved
under realistic prebiotic conditions on the early Earth.
But those laboratory simulations invariably require a cheat.
Human interference.
When you do organic synthesis, when you make a compound,
you need to generally start with pure compounds
because the impurities cause a lot
of deleterious reactions to occur.
Once you've made your compound, you've got to stop it
at exactly the right time before it decomposes,
more human interference.
Now, what you have to do is you have to separate it
from all the other compounds that formed.
Separations are really hard, really hard.
Huge human involvement.
Now you have to identify it.
You have to know what it is and characterize it
in order to bring it on to the next step.
How do you go on?
And the poor early Earth was mindless.
It didn't know what it was supposed to make.
Molecules have never been known to move toward life.
Never, ever, ever.
Molecules don't evolve toward life. They don't.
STEPHEN MEYER: Attempts to simulate how life could have arisen
from a prebiotic environment involve an element
that never gets acknowledged.
And that element is intelligence.
JAMES TOUR: We need to address more fundamental questions.
What's the origin of the code?
JOHN LENNOX: And I know that philosophers of science
and scientists find it difficult to really grasp what
information is because it has a couple of levels.
STEPHEN MEYER: In classical information theory,
there isn't a way to distinguish a series of symbols
that are merely improbable from a series of symbols
that are improbable and also functional.
[Music]
The difference between the monkey typing out random gibberish,
which would be a highly complex arrangement of characters,
but not one that conveys any meaning
or performs a communication function,
and, say, a line of poetry, like,
"Time and tide wait for no man.”
If you compare those two symbol strings side by side,
you'll see that they both are highly improbable.
But something is present in the one string
of characters that's not present in the other.
And that's what we call specificity.
Or sometimes it's called specified complexity.
The arrangement of the characters is specific
to perform a function.
DOUGLAS AXE: Now, what's interesting in life,
you have things that are not just complex and
that there's lots of parts, it's
that they're arranged in a particular way
that allows them to do something remarkable.
And that is the thing that makes the complexity
not just ordinary complexity...
but specified complexity.
And DNA is a great example of specified complexity.
JOHN LENNOX: And when we're talking about information contained
in the genetic code in DNA, we are talking
about a level of semantic information.
Because in DNA, the sequence is coding for something.
In that sense, it has meaning.
STEPHEN MEYER: A scientist named Henry Quastler,
who was one of the pioneers in applying the information sciences
to analyzing the information that's stored in DNA, he says,
"The creation of new information is habitually associated
with conscious activity.”
JOHN LENNOX: We associate information
with a rational intelligence behind it.
That's true at all levels.
And as we grow up, we learn.
We read books.
We see words.
We learn language.
And everything points towards the fact
that this does not arise spontaneously.
STEPHEN MEYER: Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software
program, only much more complex than any we've ever created.
What do we know about the origin of software?
It always comes from a mind, from a programmer.
In fact, whenever we see information
and we trace it back to its source,
whether we're looking at a section of software code
or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book
or information embedded in a radio signal,
if we trace the information back to its ultimate source,
we always come to a mind, not a material process.
So, the discovery of information in a digital
or alphabetic form at the foundation of life
in molecules like DNA and RNA is a powerful indicator
of a designing intelligence playing a role in the origin
of that information, and therefore in the origin of life itself.
JOHN LENNOX: That's where all our experience
of the universe points.
We see the word exit, immediately we infer to a mind behind it.
A Chinese archaeologist sees a couple of strokes on the wall
of a cave and says, "Human intelligence.”
And I say, "Don't be so stupid, two strokes.”
Ah, yes, but they are the Chinese symbol for a human being.
And so, there must have been an intelligence behind that.
WILLIAM DEMBSKI: We look inside the cell.
We have a whole theory which describes
these controlled transfers of information.
And the only examples we know of this sort
of controlled transfers of information is systems
that intelligent agents have developed.
BRENDAN DIXON: When we look at how information gets processed
in the cell, you get the string of information being ejected out
of the nucleus, but that string of information
on its own does not give you, in any way, shape,
or form, the product we need to get work done.
It has to be picked up by another mechanism
that knows how to read that string
and convert what it sees there into what is needed over here
to get the work done that that thing over there needs.
That gave me pause and made me go,
"Wait a minute, I've seen this before.”
We do this all the time in computer science.
Some of the ideas that we were seeing in biology
that resonated with me were such notions as error correction.
RICHARD GUNASEKERA: By any chance,
if there's something that is done incorrectly,
there's even another protein that's able
to proofread and fix this.
[Music]
STEPHEN MEYER: The existing code can be recoded,
it can be rewritten, it can be edited on the fly.
The information processing system
in the cell uses design strategies reminiscent
of high-tech digital computing with one key difference.
The design logic in the cell exceeds anything
human engineers have produced.
BRENDAN DIXON: We know now that DNA,
you can read it once in one direction.
You can read it in that direction again,
but if you start here, you get a different gene expressed than
if you start here, even though those overlap.
WALTER MYERS: You can read the same segment of DNA forward
to get one protein and backwards to get another.
BRENDAN DIXON: We've never been able to yet make anything like
that happen with computers.
WALTER MYERS: The code in the computer program,
it only does one thing.
You can't read it back and forth.
You read it one way, and that's what it does.
That's all it does.
ROBERT SHELDON: In DNA, we have codes within codes within codes.
They're interdigitated.
They are multi-level, overlapping.
We're dealing with a system that exhibits
a manifold complex design.
BRENDAN DIXON: The level of complexity that we see,
I stand back and go, "Wow, that's really elegant.”
DAVID BERLINSKI: As soon as the immense miracle
of the cell is exposed, it's an ongoing process.
We're far from a complete description of even the simplest cell.
We see these are not random structures.
They haven't been cobbled together.
They haven't been pieced together
by some sort of stochastic mechanism.
They're exquisitely and ingeniously put together
in a certain way, and if they're not put together
in that certain way, they don't work.
STEPHEN MEYER: Let's take a look at what's
around us on planet Earth.
Do we see what looks like the bare bones, minimalistic,
cobbling together something by accident
for the sheer purpose of ruthless survival?
Or do we see something much more extravagant,
beautiful in its expression?
This is actually a big problem in evolutionary biology.
It's called the problem of gratuitous beauty.
Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that's relevant
for their survival.
ROBERT SHELDON: This deserves an explanation.
Many people have tried to give a utilitarian explanation.
Oh, yeah, well, it's some adaptive reason,
or there's some sexual selection.
But I think the answer requires something more.
The one who realized the answer requires
something more was Aristotle.
He said, "No, it's the result of some kind of rational structure
to the universe, dare say even an intelligence.”
So, the exuberance is one that appears
to be designed to elicit our attention.
[Music]
It's one that seems to be reaching out to us.
Now, here I am waxing.
It would seem to be mystical.
DAVID BERLINSKI: I must say that these are observations,
they're appeals to intuition, but not to be dismissed
for that reason.
Not to be dismissed.
There's something interesting going on.
STEPHEN MEYER: There's something in science
called the beauty principle
that says true theories often convey a mathematical beauty
or structural harmony.
Upon looking at their model of the DNA molecule,
Francis Crick was quoted as saying,
"It's so beautiful, it's got to be right.”
ROBERT SHELDON: You find that all the time in the literature
today, people saying, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.”
If we find a set of equations that is just beautiful,
then it must be true.
SPEAKER: Sometimes the path toward the truth leads
through beauty.
And that is an important window.
We need to be willing to open that.
JAY RICHARDS: There's really two fundamental hypotheses
about reality.
One is that the story of everything is purpose,
that behind everything there is an author.
The alternative is that none of that is true.
We're the result of blind and impersonal processes
that did not have us in mind.
So, ultimately, these questions about the origin of matter,
the origin of life, the origin of the universe,
come down to that fundamental question and those two options.
TIMOTHY MCGREW: Richard Dawkins has very famously said
that the universe has, at bottom,
just those properties one would expect if there were no design,
no purpose, only blind, pitiless indifference.
That's an interesting claim.
What I find interesting about it is that it's the right kind
of claim to be trying to make.
We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses
and see what consequences they have, what they point
to, how well they account for various things.
One of the most important questions any of us can ask,
when should I change my mind?
Or to put it a little bit differently,
if I am wrong, how am I going to find out?
Consider you're walking through the woods.
In a stretch of woods that you had thought totally uninhabited,
you stumble upon an old, sort of rundown cabin.
Looking at it, you think it's just a relic left
over from a long time ago.
Then you go up to the door, and you push it, and it opens.
And as you step inside, you see a cup of tea,
still hot, steeping on a little table
in the middle of the cabin.
When Richard Dawkins says the universe has exactly the features
that we would expect if there were at bottom no reason,
no purpose, what he's saying is that there should be no signs
of intelligence in the universe.
Where Dawkins goes wrong is that there actually is a cup
of tea on the table.
JAY RICHARDS: And so much more.
Recent scientific discoveries point in the direction
that none of the leading scientific materialists expected.
STEPHEN MEYER: No one expected that the physical universe
of matter, space, time, and energy
would have a definite beginning.
No one expected that the universe would be finely tuned
against all odds to make life possible.
Dawkins himself has confessed to being knocked sideways
with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy
of the data processing machinery inside the cell.
We're not living in a vast, meaningless universe.
From the forces holding the cosmos together to the instructions
in the DNA in our own bodies, we see evidence
that everything was intended for a purpose,
that the story of everything is not blind,
pitiless indifference, but the unfolding of a grand design
that all of us are part of.
And surprisingly, perhaps, it is science that has revealed this.
[Music]
ALLAN SANDAGE: Here is evidence for what can only
be described as a supernatural event.
DEAN KENYON: I don't think you have to jump off the end
of the rational world to move in the direction
of a frankly theistic understanding of the origin of life.
ROBERT JASTROW: Is there something else that we can imagine
that would lay these questions to rest?
I can't see it.
FRED HOYLE: The question then was what does one do about it?
SPEAKER: We might rethink the story of everything.
The universe does not look like it's been left to itself.
It bears everywhere the fingerprints of its creator.
[Music]