Can This Man PROVE God Built The Universe? Stephen Meyer Returns

0:00 What are we looking at here?

0:01 I mean, for those who are not as skilled in this kind of thing as as you are,

0:04 what are we looking at?

0:06 Molecular biologists will kind of start out wax lyrical

0:09 and describe the interior workings of the cell as something

0:12 like an automated factory run by digital code

0:15 in which the code is processed by little nano machines.

0:19 And it it's automated to a degree that it's just it's it's just mind-blowing.

0:23 The God hypothesis provides, in my view,

0:26 and that of many scientists and philosophers,

0:28 the best explanation of the origin of the universe.

0:33 It's fair to say that this moment of Russell Brand searching

0:36 for a Bible verse during my interview with him got a lot of pickup,

0:39 especially from those who are skeptical about

0:41 those who purport to believe in God.

0:43 However, a new movie might counteract such cynicism.

0:46 The story of everything features some of the world's most eminent

0:49 science brains who argue that far from being mere cosmic chance,

0:52 the universe has in fact been designed by an intelligent creator.

0:56 Here's a taster.

0:59 Today I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange.

1:08 Galileo, Kepler, Newton

1:11 each tried to explain events in the history of the universe.

1:14 Has the universe always been here or is it finite?

1:18 Is there something else that would lay these questions to rest?

1:21 It reopens that question of ultimate meaning.

1:25 How in the world did this start?

1:30 Well,

1:30 it's based on the New York bestselling book Return of the God Hypothesis by Dr.

1:34 Steven C.

1:35 Mayor, who I'm very pleased to welcome back to Uncensored.

1:38 Welcome back to you.

1:40 It's great to be back, Pierce.

1:41 I remember our previous conversation very fondly.

1:44 It's wonderful to be with you.

1:47 Well, over two million people watched our last interview which showed

1:50 the huge level of interest in what you have to say.

1:54 Um, and I was delighted that actually, not only is there that little clip of uh

1:59 of me at the start of that trailer of your movie,

2:02 but I later make a another appearance

2:04 with my big argument with Richard Dawkins on Uncensored, um,

2:09 where he got extremely triggered by my persistence in trying to explain

2:14 to him why I believed there was a greater power out there than us.

2:18 Why do you think this issue of whether there is a god uh winds up some people,

2:25 some scientists, atheists, whoever they may be to such an extraordinary degree?

2:30 Why do they care so much?

2:32 I think it winds us all up in a way because it has such profound implications.

2:36 On the one hand, there is a a motivation,

2:38 a desire to believe in God because it provides

2:41 the basis of belief in an afterlife and ultimate human meaning.

2:45 On the other hand, we all have a motivation not to believe in God because I

2:49 think we'd all prefer not to be morally

2:51 accountable to a a being uh beyond ourselves.

2:55 And so we have these conflicting motive

2:57 motivations in every every person's heart and mind.

3:01 And uh what we try to do in the film and what

3:04 my colleagues and I have tried to do in our scientific

3:06 and philos philosophical work on this topic is extract the motivational

3:11 questions and look and see what does the evidence actually say?

3:14 What have we discovered about the the the scientific questions that would

3:18 bear on the question of whether or not God actually exists?

3:24 What's really interesting is that there was

3:25 a recent Pew Center survey that pulled a random sample of 2533 members

3:32 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

3:35 And he came up with some pretty remarkable stats.

3:38 33% said they believed in God.

3:41 18% believed in a universal spirit or higher power.

3:44 41% stated they didn't believe in God or higher power.

3:48 Seven didn't know or refused to answer.

3:51 What What do you make of of those statistics?

3:56 Well, I don't think they're all that significant in that they

3:59 roughly reflect the kind of breakdown in the general public,

4:02 although I think they have skewed over the last century

4:05 in a direction that is more agnostic and atheistic than the general public.

4:10 But the story we're telling in the film is about is the story

4:14 of many scientists who are reconsidering and even rem reaffirming belief in God.

4:19 Not in spite of the scientific evidence

4:21 but because of new scientific discoveries especially about

4:26 biological and cosmological origins about where the universe

4:30 came from and where life came from.

4:31 These are unanswered questions from within a materialistic framework.

4:36 And this is the way we contrast this is

4:38 the kind of the explains the title of the film.

4:40 We contrast two competing grand narratives two stories of reality.

4:44 The one affirms that life and the universe are

4:48 that the universe is eternal and self-existing and self-organizing

4:53 and self-creating so that everything both life can be

4:57 explained as a result of an unguided undirected purposeless process.

5:02 And the other story is the is the equally ancient story.

5:05 It goes back at least to the ancient Greeks that there is a great

5:09 mind behind the universe that is responsible for the creation of the universe

5:12 and for shaping matter and energy to bring into existence all the intricate

5:17 things that we see around us especially those in the living world.

5:20 So we've got these two competing

5:21 narratives or essentially worldviews or philosophies.

5:25 And so I think the the uh the stats about

5:28 the scientists just reflects that reflects the fact that since the 19th

5:31 century the 19th the materialistic narrative has been dominant but the story

5:35 of the film is that that's shifting and shifting very rapidly.

5:38 I think that's actually one of the reasons that you're seeing so

5:40 many high-profile people in our culture begin to reconsider the God question.

5:45 It's bubbling up to the surface as your last segment indicated.

5:50 Yeah.

5:50 I mean it always for me it you know I

5:54 was raised a Catholic I remain a Catholic it I've

5:57 never had any doubt that there there is a god

5:59 but then my kind of scientific brain if you like is

6:03 just computing the reality that if we are this tiny

6:07 pimp prick in the universe and there are gazillions of galaxies

6:10 and all these things the idea that a we're

6:13 the only people that exist in the whole thing is preposterous.

6:17 I think there obviously must be other stuff out there.

6:20 But secondly, no scientist, no atheist,

6:23 nobody I've ever spoken to from Richard Dawkins to anybody else

6:27 to Ricky Jes whoever it may be to Professor Steven Hawking,

6:31 no one can ever explain to me what was there before nothing.

6:36 And because the human brain cannot answer that question, to me self-evidently,

6:42 there must be something more powerful than a human brain,

6:45 a greater entity than a human brain that could at the very least

6:50 answer that question or clear up that that quandry because we can't do it.

6:54 Our brains can't can't answer that question.

6:58 Well, it goes back to that very fundamental philosophical question.

7:01 Why is there something rather than nothing?

7:04 And the the answer that the materialist scientists gave for a very

7:08 long time was that there has

7:10 always been something something material something physical.

7:15 And the assumption was that the universe

7:17 the physical universe was eternal and self-existent

7:19 and therefore did not need an external creator because it had always been here.

7:25 Alas, beginning about a century ago

7:29 with uh discoveries in observational astronomy

7:31 and then subsequent developments in theoretical physics

7:34 and then more discoveries in observational astronomy,

7:37 we've discovered that the universe itself,

7:39 as best we can tell from these multiple

7:41 lines of evidence and inquiry definitely had a beginning.

7:46 And that raises that fundamental causal question all over

7:49 again because we can no longer say the universe is

7:51 the eternal self-existent thing in the way that theists

7:54 have long affirmed that God is the eternal self-existent thing.

7:56 Instead, the universe had a beginning and therefore

7:58 requires some sort of external cause or creator.

8:02 And and I think I I saw your interesting uh uh interview

8:06 with Richard Dawkins responding to the conversation that you and I had before.

8:10 And Dawkins said, "Well, because time itself began,

8:13 we can't really talk about what came before the beginning of the universe."

8:17 Well, okay, fair enough.

8:19 But that doesn't make the causal question go away.

8:22 What caused the universe to come into existence?

8:25 What could have caused time itself to come into existence?

8:28 Well, clearly the kind of cause you would need,

8:30 what would need to be postulated to explain the origin of matter,

8:34 space, time, and energy is something

8:36 that is separate from or which transcends matter,

8:41 space, time, and energy.

8:42 And as you survey the the the available candidates,

8:46 it turns out that the God hypothesis provides,

8:49 in my view, and that of many scientists and philosophers,

8:51 the best explanation of the origin of the universe.

8:54 And that's one of the one of the three big

8:56 discoveries that we look at in the film is the discovery

8:59 of the beginning of of everything and why that is

9:02 bringing back consideration of what we call the God hypothesis.

9:08 Yeah.

9:08 Fascinating.

9:09 Um let's talk about some other aspects to the film.

9:12 Um it features many prominent scientists from across

9:15 the major uh disciplines of of uh physics, chemistry, biology.

9:19 Let's talk about physics first and the uh cosmic fine tuning argument.

9:26 What is that for the layman?

9:31 Yeah, thanks.

9:31 That's a that's a fascinating uh set

9:34 of discoveries and a fascinating ongoing discussion.

9:37 Uh beginning in about the 1950s and60s uh physicists began

9:42 to discover that the very most fundamental parameters of physics,

9:46 the strength of gravitational attraction,

9:49 the strength of electromagnetic attraction

9:51 and of the other fundamental forces in physics,

9:53 the masses of the elementary particles, the expansion rate of the universe,

9:58 and the outward pushing force called

10:00 the cosmological constant responsible for that.

10:03 and even and maybe even especially the configuration of the matter and energy

10:08 the arrangement of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe.

10:11 All these parameters are what physicists will call they

10:17 call them finely tuned meaning they fall within very

10:20 narrow ranges outside of which there would life

10:25 in the universe and even basic chemistry would be impossible.

10:28 And the collective probability of getting all those parameters

10:32 to fall in each of those sweet spots is infantesmly small.

10:37 And consequently, many physicists have come to the conclusion

10:40 that as f Sir Fred Hy put it,

10:43 a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests

10:46 that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics

10:49 and chemistry to make life possible and that there

10:52 are no blind forces in nature worth talking about.

10:54 Now, that's an especially telling quotation because Hy was

10:59 early in his career a rather strident scientific atheist.

11:02 He even coined the term the big bang to kind

11:05 of stigmatize the idea that the universe had a beginning.

11:08 And in the end he ended up coming around to some

11:12 kind of uh to an affirmation of some kind of intelligent design

11:16 behind the universe because of this fine-tuning that he and now

11:20 many other physicists have discovered

11:21 and ex explicated with with further inquiry.

11:27 On a personal level, what is the kind of unfulfilled Eureka moment

11:32 for you that you dream about happening in your lifetime?

11:38 a discovery.

11:39 What is the thing that would be most exciting to you?

11:42 Well, I think the thing that that that first

11:45 gave me a Eureka and which would just absolutely

11:48 has fascinated me for now nearly 40 years is

11:52 the discoveries that were being made in molecular biology.

11:56 uh that started in the 1950s and60s

11:59 with Watson and Crick elucidating first the structure

12:02 of the DNA molecule and then Francis Crick

12:05 five years later realizing that along the spine

12:08 of the DNA molecule there is a that there

12:11 there are chemical subunits that are functioning

12:14 like alphabetic characters in a written text or like

12:17 digital characters in a section of machine code.

12:20 In fact, one of the great physicists at the time, George Gammo,

12:24 looked carefully at the the the Watson

12:26 and Crick model and realized that these these uh

12:29 so-called bases that contain the information

12:33 were functioning like like a digital bitstring.

12:36 And so the information revolution came into biology in the late 1950s and60s.

12:41 And since then it has absolutely changed our understanding of the of the nature

12:46 of life and posed a fundamental challenge

12:48 to the origin of life uh studies as well.

12:52 In the 19th century around the time of Darwin uh his great bulldog

12:56 Thomas Henry Huxley said the cell is

12:58 a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.

13:04 And when scientists thought that the cell was a simple enclosure of jell-o like

13:08 that, it was pretty easy to imagine

13:10 how with one or two simple chemical reactions,

13:13 that protoplasmic substance that was they thought the essence of life

13:18 might have come into existence in a completely undirected way.

13:22 But as we've learned more and more about the interior

13:25 workings of the cell and there's much more to discover

13:28 and that would be some of the the eureka things

13:30 that I' I'd hope to learn about uh in the future.

13:34 But we've now learned that the cell is not only contains digital information.

13:39 It's that digital information is part of a complex information storage,

13:44 transmission, and processing system that rivals,

13:48 in fact, exceeds anything we've developed

13:50 in our own high-tech digital computing world.

13:52 A couple years ago, our our our uh

13:55 uh friend opposite uh professor Dawkins said that he

13:59 was knocked sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy

14:05 of the data processing system inside the living cell.

14:08 Now, that's not the kind of thing that you

14:10 would expect to arise by undirected chemical processes.

14:14 And in fact, there is an impass in what's

14:16 called origin of life research today precisely because no one

14:19 can explain how you get from chemistry to that kind

14:22 of intricate code and the whole system for processing it.

14:25 Now, as far as what I would hope to see in the future,

14:27 we've now learned that the information in DNA is not in any way the whole story.

14:32 There must be other information inside living cells and inside

14:35 the the whole process by which animals are developed.

14:38 And so I'm very eager to see what we we

14:40 discover in the future about the higher levels of information.

14:44 We do know that life represents a hierarchically

14:47 organized system of information storage and processing,

14:51 but we don't know where all the necessary

14:52 information is to for example build an animal form.

14:57 Right?

14:58 So talking of cells, Cambridge University scientists only this week

15:02 actually released an incredible image uh showing

15:06 one of the most detailed 3D reconstructions of a human cell ever produced.

15:10 And people say that this points

15:13 towards intelligent engineering rather than random chance.

15:18 Um what are we looking at here?

15:21 I mean for those who are not as skilled in this kind of thing as as you are,

15:25 what what are we looking at?

15:27 Well, it looks like we have a cross-section

15:30 of the cell and and in that cross-section,

15:33 we're able to see a dynamic representation

15:36 of the movements of the various cellular organels.

15:40 And the organels are structures within the cell.

15:44 Uh but at an even more at an even more fine grain level,

15:47 if you go down further and that this looks like a ukareotic cell.

15:51 So this one would have a nucleus.

15:53 inside the nucleus would be that DNA

15:56 uh protein synthesis system whereby the instructions

16:00 on the DNA would build the molecular machines made of proteins and the protein

16:07 enzymes that are necessary to process

16:09 the information in DNA but also to catalyze

16:13 at very rapid rates all the necessary uh reactions that keep cells alive.

16:18 So you you you now uh molecular biologists will very quickly and cell

16:23 biologists will kind of start to wax lyrical and describe the interior

16:27 workings of the cell as something like an automated factory run

16:30 by digital code in which the code is processed by little nano machines.

16:35 Uh so it's information information processing miniature machinery and it's

16:41 automated to a degree that it's just it's just mind-blowing.

16:45 So the idea of the simple homogeneous or homogeneous glo

16:50 of goo is long long ways back in the rearview mirror.

16:54 It's a it's a completely new day in biology.

16:56 And of course when the main evolutionary ideas of Darwin and others were were

17:00 formulated first formulated in the late 19th

17:03 century they knew of nothing of this.

17:05 And so this is especially for the field known

17:07 as chemical evolution or the theory known as chemical evolutionary theory.

17:12 The theory that purports to explain how we got from the simple

17:16 chemicals in a alleged prebiotic environment

17:20 or soup to the first self-replicating organism.

17:23 There those theories are at a state

17:26 of complete impolutionary biologist has a a compelling

17:30 persuasive or even plausible theory of how you

17:33 get from chemistry to a full living cell.

17:36 I know your producers been also seeking an interview

17:41 with my colleague James Tour who is in the film.

17:44 Uh, Professor Tur has over 850 peer-reviewed publications.

17:48 He's one of the top organic synthesis experts in the world.

17:51 also a specialist in nanotechnology and he's been a very outspoken

17:56 uh critic of of scientists who present to the public the idea

18:00 that we understand how the living cell came about through undirected

18:04 chemical processes when in fact no such thing is the case.

18:07 So uh that that that little snapshot you just

18:10 showed uh gives just a flavor of the complexity.

18:14 In the film we go a little a little bit deeper to the nano

18:17 scale and show the way the information on DNA is being processed.

18:21 We show the machines that are being built.

18:22 And once you see this, you can't unsee it.

18:25 You realize u you almost don't need

18:27 to make an argument for intelligent design because

18:29 you can see that this is obviously

18:31 an intricately designed uh system on a miniaturized scale.

18:37 I mean the the human body in all its complexity with everything

18:42 that's involved is unbelievably brilliant and complex

18:47 and a stunning piece of engineering.

18:50 never mind anything else.

18:52 Um can you see a situation where artificial

18:55 intelligence which is obviously developing at a ferocious

18:58 rate at the moment where rather like with when

19:02 they bought out chess computers and they were

19:03 these gigantic things and a human could beat

19:06 them and then very quickly I think Gary Kasparov

19:09 who was a world champion lost to one of them deep blue and then that was it.

19:12 Now nobody can beat a chess chess computer.

19:15 Are we going to see a situation do you think in two,

19:18 three, maybe five years, whatever it may be,

19:20 where artificial intelligence can solve all the problems about

19:24 the human body that we are currently incapable of solving,

19:28 including, for example, cancers, diseases and so on?

19:34 Well, it's a fantastic knowledge and I think it obviously uh augments

19:38 our human intelligence beautifully and we can use it for good or for ill.

19:42 But there's an interesting problem.

19:44 that's development developed with these large language mo models

19:47 or the the kind of uh chat GPT style you know

19:52 latest generation AI and I think it's a it's a really

19:56 interesting tell it's called a the problem of model collapse

19:59 and the idea is that if you feed into the AI

20:03 system a body of text that's written by conscious intelligent

20:08 agents and then you quer use the AI system the LLM

20:12 and the something like chat at GPT to query that system,

20:16 ask it a question, you'll get an output.

20:18 You'll get a an amazingly coherent answer.

20:21 But if you use the output as data, what's called artificial data,

20:26 and then you query that output,

20:29 the next output ends up being quite a bit less coherent.

20:33 And if you keep doing that over multiple iterations,

20:36 the whole thing breaks down.

20:38 you get what's some what there's a parallel problem in origin of life

20:41 research when people have attempted

20:42 to simulate the origin of genetic information

20:45 with various physical processes is a problem known as error catastrophe you have

20:49 this buildup of incoherence over time and I think that shows that the system

20:54 as a whole there's there's a fundamental asy symmetry the system as a whole

20:57 the artificial intelligence is fundamentally dependent

21:01 on the initial input of meaningful or functional information from a conscious

21:05 intelligence and that's one of the key

21:07 principles that allows us to detect design in living systems as well.

21:11 We see a large amount of functional or what we call specified information

21:17 in DNA and RNA and other these other

21:19 large information bearing macroolelecules in the cell.

21:23 And we know from our experience that that type

21:25 of information always arises from a conscious intelligence.

21:28 In fact, there's a an early pioneer

21:30 in the application of information science to molecular biology,

21:34 a man named Henry Quasler who said that the creation

21:37 of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.

21:41 So when we find that kind of information at the foundation of life,

21:46 something like digital code in a computer program,

21:48 it is in fact very reasonable to infer

21:51 that a conscious intelligence was ultimately responsible for that information.

21:56 in the same way that our AI systems won't work if

21:58 we don't have that initial input from from conscious agency as well.

22:04 Fascinating.

22:05 Let's just turn quickly to arguments against God.

22:08 One is that the universe is so large 93 billion

22:11 light years in diameter and so old 13.8 billion years

22:16 that mere probability dictates that life has to exist somewhere

22:21 and we just happen to have won the cosmic lottery.

22:24 What do you say to that argument?

22:26 Well, uh, I'm completely agnostic as to whether

22:28 life exists elsewhere in the cosmos.

22:30 We just don't know at this point.

22:32 What I would say is that u well, two things.

22:35 First, if you run the probabilities,

22:37 it's it's not a slam dunk that life must exist anymore.

22:40 People used to think that making calculations on something

22:44 on the basis of something called the Drake equation

22:46 and on the basis of the number of G

22:50 that there are in the univer about two trillion.

22:53 It's an amazingly vast expanse we live in.

22:57 But the number the improbability associated with getting all the par

23:01 the parameters right both at the cosmological level and in the local

23:06 level of a that are necessary to build a life-

23:09 friendly solar system are equally daunting in the other direction.

23:13 So it's not clear.

23:14 But but what we do know for sure is that to build life,

23:19 you don't just need a a friendly planetary system.

23:24 You've got to create something has to create

23:26 the information necessary to create self-replicating organisms.

23:31 And in our experience, again, information is the product of mind.

23:34 So my argument would be if life exists elsewhere in the cosmos,

23:38 odds are it was also it was produced by an intelligent

23:41 agent as indeed I think the life that we know of must

23:44 have been based on the features that it possesses that are

23:48 that are invariably indicators of the activity of a designing mind.

23:54 What about this bonkers theory?

23:56 But then it was bound to be bonkers and some of the best

23:59 theories in the world turn out to be true when they're bonkers.

24:01 What if it's not God,

24:03 but it's an advanced alien scientist who was designed a simulation that we're

24:08 all living in, and he sort of rather he rather enjoys the suffering.

24:15 The fact of that uh postulation having been uh

24:19 floated by very prominent scientists uh including no less

24:23 a personage than the great Francis Crick even

24:26 our our a friend and colleague Richard Dawkins who's been

24:29 on your program floated that idea of what's it's

24:32 called panspermia the idea that life was either designed elsewhere

24:36 by an intelligent alien or it evolved elsewhere and then

24:39 was transported here to earth by the intelligent agent.

24:42 Now, in fairness, I think Professor Dawkins later disclaimed

24:45 that that speculation that he made in a in a documentary,

24:49 but uh the fact that that scientists have had to go there

24:53 shows just how difficult the problem of the origin of life is.

24:57 Um, and notice too that that is actually an intelligent design hypothesis,

25:02 but the the the designer being postulated is an intelligent alien rather than

25:06 rather than than something like a transcendent

25:09 intelligence that we would associate with God.

25:11 Couple things to say about that.

25:13 First of all, it doesn't really solve the ultimate problem

25:16 of the origin of the information necessary to produce life,

25:18 which is the fundamental uh unsolved problem in origin of life research.

25:23 Uh it it it merely kicks the problem not down the road,

25:27 but but boots it out into space.

25:29 But even more fundamentally, the alien designer hypothesis doesn't account

25:35 for the origin of the fine-tuning of the laws

25:38 and constants of physics and initial conditions

25:40 of the universe that we were talking about.

25:42 That fine-tuning has been present from the very beginning of the universe.

25:45 And clearly, no alien being or any other being within the cosmos could explain

25:50 the origin of the finetuning that would

25:52 allegedly make its future evolution and origin possible.

25:56 So there's a huge unsolved problem

25:58 with the the the uh find with the alien designer hypothesis.

26:04 Uh and one other and that is that no alien intelligence

26:07 within the cosmos can explain where the cosmos itself came from.

26:11 So I've argued in Return of the God hypothesis,

26:16 my book, which is the basis of the new film, The Story of Everything,

26:19 that the theistic design hypothesis does the best overall job,

26:23 the best job of explaining all

26:25 the evidence we have about both biological origins,

26:28 but also physical origins, the finetuning,

26:30 and the origin of the universe itself, the cosmological origins.

26:35 I I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson recently who

26:37 was the the greatest scientist there's ever been

26:41 that we know of and he said Isaac

26:43 Newton who would your candidate be for that title

26:47 it's hard to beat Isaac Newton but uh

26:49 James Clark Maxwell and Einstein are Newton

26:53 Clark James Clark Maxwell and Einstein are generally

26:55 generally regarded as as the three greatest physicists.

26:59 Einstein said he stood on the the shoulders of Maxwell.

27:03 Um Newton also used that same quote

27:05 to talk about the importance of Galileo and Kepler.

27:08 So a lot of great scientific minds.

27:10 Um I was very fortunate to get to study at Cambridge University and a lot

27:13 of those people were there in in the the history of science at Cambridge.

27:17 I wasn't there with Maxwell.

27:18 He predated me.

27:19 But uh he had inscribed on the great

27:22 Caendish laboratory a psalm uh psalm 111 which

27:26 says great are the works of the lord

27:28 sought out by all who take pleasure therein.

27:30 I used to gain a lot of uh uh sort of uh confidence

27:35 in my own developing thought to realize

27:37 that many of the great scientists from who

27:40 got science going back to Newton and Bole and and Kepler but right

27:45 through to Maxwell and beyond were men of deep religious faith and they saw

27:49 that in they they felt that what they were doing in studying nature was

27:52 was explicating the work of a great mind that lay behind the the physical

27:57 universe they studied and that's that's uh in inscribed there for all to see

28:02 on the on the entrance

28:03 to the the historic Caendish laboratory there in Cambridge.

28:09 Um let's just quickly reference a report on the today's show

28:13 about the possible discovery of a very famous biblical artifact, Noah's Ark.

28:19 Let's take a look at this.

28:21 Imagine these mountains millennia ago submerged by floods and in this beautiful

28:29 biblical landscape named in the Old Testament the shape of a ship.

28:34 The book of Genesis says Noah landed here in the mountains of Ararat.

28:40 So could this really be Noah's ark?

28:48 What do you think of that?

28:49 Do you think Noah's ark existed and that's some evidence towards it?

28:57 I am I am uh again I'll plead agnosticism.

29:00 I do not know what to think of that particular discovery.

29:03 I know archaeologists on both sides of that uh debate,

29:07 but um I would tell you that the gen

29:09 the trend line in archaeological discovery over

29:12 the last 100 to 150 years has been

29:15 to repeatedly confirm the historical reliability of the biblical text,

29:20 both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

29:23 Many of the figures that were uh described

29:25 in the gospels as having been present in the trial

29:28 of Jesus have been independently attested by archaeological inscriptions most

29:33 prominently Pontius Pilate and and Caiaphas the Jewish high priest.

29:37 If you go to the British Museum in London,

29:40 the whole story of the interaction between the Empire,

29:46 Kingdom of Judah under Sekcharb on the Assyrian side and and uh and Hezek

29:52 on the on the on the Jewish side is attested in the Assyrian record.

29:57 So you have this external corroboration of the biblical text.

29:59 So that's something that fascinates me on an avocational level.

30:03 don't know about the recent uh discovery that you just highlighted,

30:06 but I do know that there's an awful lot of archaeological evidence,

30:09 surprising amount and and that many people

30:12 just don't know about that has confirmed

30:14 the historical reliability of of the narratives

30:17 that we find in those ancient scriptural documents.

30:22 Well, that brings me neatly to a conclusion.

30:24 Poly market, the prediction market says there's over $60

30:28 million currently invested in the return of Jesus by 2027.

30:33 So, a 4% chance that it will happen.

30:36 Biggest spikes seen since last November and in early February this year.

30:40 So, a lot of money coming in on Jesus potentially reappearing on this planet.

30:47 What do you feel about that?

30:50 Well, I wonder if if their predictions come true, who will get the payoff?

30:55 But uh uh I think I I I think wars and rumors of wars tend to tend

31:02 to do that to people and get esqueological

31:06 intuition focused on the other end of the timetable.

31:12 Uh where did everything come from?

31:13 And that's of course what our our film is about.

31:15 You've been so kind to let us let us share some of that with your audience.

31:21 the um I interviewed Russell Brand uh last week in and several clips went

31:26 viral including him spending several minutes trying

31:29 to find a Bible passage from there.

31:32 Do you think we are in this era

31:34 slightly prone to a new phenomenon of performative

31:38 religious conviction where people adopt it late in life as a bit of a PR crutch?

31:46 I I'd like to dodge that question

31:48 because I never like to speculate about motivations.

31:51 But what I would say is that we certainly are in the last seven or eight

31:56 years in a period where first of all I think the new atheism has run its course.

32:01 I think it overplayed its hand and I think there's a renewed interest

32:05 in the God question and it and it is bubbling up to the top of the the culture

32:09 in the form of discussions with many surprising people.

32:14 I think of Ayan Hersy Ali in your country uh

32:18 Tom Holland uh the great historian uh in our country

32:23 the social scientists Charles Murray who's re recently written a book

32:27 called taking religion seriously some of the the leading uh

32:31 talk uh podcasters are are discussing this I've been on Wikipedia

32:36 described as a pseudocientist because uh in challenging the strictly

32:42 materialistic definition of science science by posing the the idea

32:46 of intelligent design or developing and arguing for the intelligent design.

32:50 I'm violating a convention that many atheistic scientists believe

32:55 is normative uh for for scientists to to accept.

32:59 Uh we're challenging that uh assumption

33:02 or that normative prescription because we

33:04 think it prevents scientists from following the evidence wherever it might lead.

33:08 And it was certainly never a normative prescription in the time

33:10 of Newton and the great scientists who got science going.

33:13 Putting all that aside, it's interesting that the founder

33:16 of Wikipedia has recently announced a Christian

33:20 conversion experience and he cites our work on intelligent design u

33:24 the alleged pseudocientific perspective that the the site still stigmatizes

33:30 as a as a big factor in his in his conversion to Christianity.

33:33 So um it's at least opening.

33:36 I think we have a lot of things going on in science, philosophy,

33:39 and culturally that are opening people's minds to the God

33:42 question and in a way that even five, six years ago was not was not happening.

33:48 Yeah, 100%.

33:49 I think that's the purest definition of irony you just laid out there.

33:52 Uh Dr.

33:53 Steven C.

33:53 May, great to talk to you again.

33:55 Uh I could talk to you for hours, but we sadly run out of time.

33:58 The story of everything, this movie based on your bestselling book,

34:01 Return of the God Hypothesis.

34:03 How do people get to see it?

34:04 I know it's out today, Friday.

34:06 How do people get to see it?

34:08 Yeah, thanks.

34:08 Thank thanks for asking.

34:09 It's uh people can get tickets in the US.

34:13 It's out in US theaters right now.

34:15 People in the US can get tickets by going to a site, the storyofthing.

34:22 Filmm for film.

34:24 The storyof everything.

34:25 And it will be out later in the summer on digital platforms,

34:29 but I would recommend seeing it on the big screen.

34:32 It's visually stunning.

34:33 The producers have done a great job.

34:35 There are 400 visual effects.

34:36 They take you way out into space to see the galaxies close up and deep

34:41 into the interior of the cell to see

34:42 all that digital and nanotechnology we've been talking about.

34:46 So, it is a a visually stunning cinematic experience.

34:51 Brilliant.

34:51 Dr.

34:52 May, great to see you again.

34:53 Thank you very much indeed for taking the time for uncensoring.

34:57 Thank you for having me again.

34:58 It's always always a pleasure.

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