Transcendent Intelligence - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 10/11/25

Guest host Ryan Wrecker and Dr. Stephen C. Meyer discuss the murky relationship between empirical science and intelligent design. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
I want to talk about viewpoint discrimination. And I thought
maybe the entry way into a show like this that
tries to not discriminate viewpoints, that tries to bring out
as many different viewpoints as possible, as silly or as
crazy or as wild as it seems to one person,
there could be a lot of legitimacy to it, so

(00:26):
you try to hear them out. Maybe that's the right
way to start, because in your career you found that
viewpoint discrimination is a mute point and non starter for
so many different points that you could make that are
scientific that kind of shut the door before you even
get into the house. And I love that there's shows
like this where you can talk about anything. And I'm

(00:49):
hoping that more people just get to the idea that
even if it's something they don't believe, they're open to
the idea without shutting it out altogether.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Absolutely. There's a method of reasoning that scientists use called
the method of multiple competing hypotheses, where scientists evaluate competing
hypotheses by their ability usually to explain the data well
or to predict new outcomes well and The key to

(01:18):
that method is you've got to be open to the
competing hypotheses. If you exclude some from consideration at the outset,
your conclusion is going to be compromised, and you may
not you may not get to the right answer if
you've excluded some possible answers from consideration. And we find
this this is one of the dynamics of the debate

(01:39):
about biological origins and cosmological origins for that matter. If
you decide in advance, as many scientists have done over
the last hundred and fifty years, that they must that
you must limit yourself to strictly materialistic explanations for everything,
irrespective of the evidence, irrespect of the kind of question

(02:01):
your answer are asking. You may be eliminating from consideration
one of the answers that's actually the provides the best explanation.
So we'll talk more about it, I'm sure in the show.
But one of the key evidences of intelligent design in
the living world is the presence of the digital code
that's at the foundation of life in the DNA molecule.

(02:23):
Our local hero in the Seattle area, Bill Gates, as
the DNA's like a software program, but much more complex
than any we've ever written. We know that software comes
from programmers, and so if we have something like that
at the foundation of life, it's at least a reasonable
thing to consider that maybe there was a master programmer
for life, that is an intelligence behind it. But that

(02:44):
answer has been excluded from consideration by a convention that
many scientists have accepted.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Whether that has a.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Big fancy name, it's called methodological naturalism, but it's the
idea that you have to explain everything materialistically, even if
you're looking at something that in any realm of experience
would point to a mind.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yeah, and there's a lot of things I think topic
matter on this show that people would hear and the
experiences people have had, and they would say, I believe
that even if there is no way to scientifically prove it,
because they may have a gut feeling. Sure, I understand that.
But I think a lot of ways people look at

(03:24):
God that way and they'll say, Okay, there's a certain
flaw in thinking that you could describe the creation of
the universe and you would have to include a higher
being in order to explain that. So there's a flaw
in your scientific thinking that way. So how do you
explain the universe in that God is not a flaw.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
Well, the concept of God is the concept of an
entity that has intelligence, volition, in fact, feel logically, people
think Theologians think that the capabilities that we have as
human agents reflect those of our creator. This is the

(04:10):
classic idea of being made in the image of God,
the imago dey. And so we know something about the
attributes of agents, persons who have the ability to choose,
the ability to think, the ability to reason. And there
are certain things that we know from our experience that

(04:31):
we know that minds can do that undirected material processes
can't do. And so if we see things in nature
that have the attributes that are associated with the mind,
with the causal powers, if you will, of intelligent agents,

(04:52):
and we know that our minds are not responsible, then
it raises the questions, well, which mind is And if
you're talking about something like the creation of the universe itself, well,
and we now have evidence that from the very beginning
of the universe. First of all, there was a beginning
to the universe. But secondly there's the universe was fine tuned,
is where the physicists put it to allow for the
possibility of life. Well, that fine tuning is the kind

(05:15):
of thing that we know that agents produce, that minds produced.
So it's a reasonable hypothesis to think that from the
very beginning or the beginning of the universe was the
product of an intelligence, and that intelligence wasn't our intelligence.
It's one that seemed to be necessary for the whole
of the universe to exist. So it seems to be
pointing to a kind of transcendence intelligence, which is one

(05:39):
way of thinking about the concept of God.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Right, So going back to the idea of a viewpoint discrimination,
when did there become this conflict when thinking this way
when you're trying to also explain a scientific nature to it,
as was there always a conflict between these type of
explanations in science and historians? Has it always been that way?

Speaker 3 (06:06):
No, that's really a studie question. I happened to be
up early in the morning here in Cambridge, England. And
if you go back in the history of science to
figures like Sir Isaac Newton or his mentor a man
named Isaac Barrow who was a very prominent mathematician in
the seventeenth century, or John Ray, the great biologists who

(06:27):
got the botany going. These early scientists were actually motivated
by a deeply religious belief that most of them were Christians,
and they believed that nature was in what the term
they used was intelligible. It could be understood because our
minds were made in the image of the same creator

(06:50):
who had made the world. So the creator built into
the world patterns of order, which they described with the
laws of nature and evidence of design. And because that
same creator designed our minds in his image, that we
could perceive the rationality and the design that he built
into the world.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
And when they.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
Looked at the world, they also saw evidence of that design.
Isaac Newton, in particular, in his great work The Principia,
wrote a theological epilogue called the General Scolium, in which
he made an elegant design argument based on the essentially
what we would now call the fine tuning of the
planetary orbits. He said, this most beautiful system of planets,

(07:33):
sun and comets could only proceed from the council and
dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And so the
idea of design being built into nature, our ability to
understand it and there being evidence of it, was part
of the foundation of modern science, and it was only
in the late nineteenth century when this kind of thinking

(07:56):
became stigmatized. Some of that came in the wake of
Darwin's work on the origin of species, but it wasn't
just that he had an alternative explanation for new forms
of life. It was he and other scientists around him
kind of established a convention that said, if we're going
to be scientists, we must limit ourself to materialistic explanations.

(08:18):
And so no matter how strong the evidence of design
has been since then, scientists have been reluctant to acknowledge it.
But that's beginning to change, and I think that's what's
exciting about our time.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
One of the fascinating things if you had a time
machine or kind of like Bill and Ted's excellent Adventure,
you had a phone booth and you can go back
and grab historical figures and bring them back on stage.
Imagine if you had Darwin in Newton on the same
stage and you said you have to pick one or
the other. Neither it's not you can take viewpoints from

(08:54):
either of them and understand they could be right. No,
you have to side with one of them and the
other ones discredited. Immediately, Imagine if that's how we treated
the two figures on the stage together, but that's how
we kind of treat science today, in a way where
you can take two different viewpoints and you can look
at them and say, well, if one sounds more credible
than the other, then you have to throw away everything

(09:17):
on the other side. And that's just a silly way
because you're going to exclude a lot of truth.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
Well, yeah, this is just a wonderful question you're asking
because of where I happen to be right now. Just
yesterday I did a little walking tour of Cambridge, walk
someone by Newton's old rooms in Trinity College, and then
a few minutes later we walked by a house has
a little plaque on it where Darwin lived in eighteen

(09:43):
thirty six, in eighteen thirty seven. So this is a
city where a lot of that scientific history has taken place,
and there has been an ongoing discussion, I think, right
up to the present time about whether this design perspective
or the no design perspective makes more sense of the
data we have in modern science, and there have been

(10:07):
great scientists on both sides of that, but that I
think underscores your point that it's important to keep an
open mind and to have a form of inquiry that
allows for competing hypotheses to be evaluated. There's a great
Italian philosopher of science named Marcello Para. Rather Marcello Para,

(10:28):
he's not Irish, he's Italian, and he says that science
advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence.
And that means that if you shut down argumentation by
just appealing to quote does science and not acknowledge the
competing hypotheses that are out there, you may end up

(10:49):
with an impoverished form of inquiry where you're missing out
on the best explanation because you've committed yourself to an
explanation within a limited framework of possibility. Least so, I think,
especially with the big questions that science raises about where
did the universe come from? Why does it have the
exquisite structure that it has, Where did life come from?

(11:12):
Why does why do we see at the foundation of
life things like digital code and circuitry and that complex
information processing system. In my view, all of these features
are things that are better explained by the action of
a pre existing intelligence than they are by undirected material processes,

(11:33):
because again we know that mind has minds have powers
that undirected matter doesn't have, and we're seeing at the
foundation of life features that we know from our ordinary
experience only arise from an intelligent agency.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Doctor Steven Semeyer joining us here, and I think about
in recent years, not in a political way, but you
think about what happened with COVID and everything else in
the world, and generally speaking, what you found was that
if there was some sort of disagreement, you were called
anti science. And I thought, while you're shooting yourself in

(12:14):
the foot, if you take a viewpoint that's not yours,
you label it something along the lines of anti science
in order to try to win an argument. Because what
you're going to do again, you're going to throw away
perhaps something that may very well be true. So in
the modern times, when we start labeling things anti science,

(12:36):
and I'll go back to the viewpoint discrimination, how dangerous
is that when you stifle innovation, you stifle scientific progress
by just throwing out things like anti science, and then
the crowd gets behind it and the next thing you know,
we're in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:54):
Well, I think oftentimes, well people will appeal to a consensus.
There are many issues in science or many theories or
ideas and science that do have the support of a consensus.
But oftentimes when you're in if people appeal to a consensus,

(13:15):
it's usually because there isn't one. If you appeal to
a consensus to settle an argument, it's often because there
isn't one. Nobody says, you know, you're bad for questioning
that the formula for water is H two oh. There's
a consensus that says that it's H two oh. Stop,
you know, stop pushing the alternative view. You don't have

(13:36):
to make that argument because there really is a consensus
about the formula for water. But typically people appeal to
consensus to shut down a discourse or disagreement when there
actually is disagreement and therefore not a universal consensus. So
I think there's a kind of an important happy medium

(13:56):
here where we have to recognize that the scientific process does,
over time often settle on very solid conclusions, and at
the same time, uh, the process of getting there involves
open debate that and and the need for that kind
of openness so that that the competing views are aired

(14:17):
out and the evidence is evaluated in relation to competing hypotheses,
and we're not shutting down that scientific process. It's very
important not to shut down that process of evaluation prematurely.
So we need we need to be able to trust science,
and but we also need to trust the scientific process,
which involves an openness to competing views. And and in

(14:39):
the in the field where we work, there's actually convention
that is excluding a view in advance, a view that
has a venerable intellectual tradition, that being the idea of
design or intelligent design being part of the scientific enterprise
that we pursue the insight into nature. We pursue science

(15:03):
because historically scientists thought there was a design there to
be discovered.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
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