The Real Reason Our Culture Is Falling Apart: Stephen Meyer (Transcript)

That’s still a fairly high number—eighty-one percent—but it was a very precipitous drop in a short period of time, driven by a particular cohort, a particular group of people in the population.

You can probably guess: it’s the Gen Zs, the eighteen to thirties. The young people are, even if they have been raised in a Jewish or Christian or religious home, walking away from traditional religious belief in very dramatic numbers.

Science as a Factor in Lost Faith

In a survey that we did, we found that sixty-five percent of self-described atheists and forty-three percent of agnostics affirmed the following statement: “The findings of science make the existence of God less probable.” This was one of the top factors cited. Science. Science undermines belief in God.

This wasn’t at all surprising to me. We’ve had many encounters with young people. We do a science and faith conference every year on the East Coast. Every year that I’ve gone, the same bereaved mother comes to give us an update on her formerly very devout son who went off to one of the great science universities in the United States, came under the mentorship of a prominent scientific atheist, and not only lost his faith, but had become a very hostile atheist who was hostile to everything his parents believed and stood for. And it made for a rift in the family.

A Personal Story of Cognitive Dissonance

We were at this event three years ago. Eric Metaxas and I were doing an interview—Eric was interviewing me. And it was kind of an interesting evening because as we were being interviewed, I could see stage left, and he was aware of this as well, that a young camera woman who was filming the event, about halfway through the interview, was seen to be visibly weeping. I mean, a little bit of shaking. It was a dramatic expression of emotion.

She was so embarrassed by this later, she wrote the film producer who had hired her to work the event and wrote a letter explaining what had been going on with her. She was learning in our interview about scientific evidence that supported belief in God. And she was so touched by this because she’d been living in a state of cognitive dissonance since graduating from college.

This is what she wrote in the letter: “Throughout my college career, professors would constantly lecture that based on the evidence they had provided, there should be no way that anyone in class could believe in God. They’d argue that the science was proven and God was hence a myth. I was not equipped to present a valid opposition in debate. I was desperate to find commonality between my beliefs and my scientific education, but I could find none.”

Apparently in her case, she did not entirely lose her faith, but she decided she didn’t want to do any more science. She would have otherwise gone to grad school in science. She decided to do film production instead, and had been living for several years in a state of cognitive dissonance, where she wanted to believe, but it seemed that the facts of the matter contradicted the very possibility of belief.

The New Atheist Movement

So many young people struggle from this very thing, and it’s not hard to see why. We’ve had a group of very prominent voices in our culture advancing the message that science, properly understood, undermines belief in God. Some of these folks you will know—there was a publishing genre that became the rage about 2007 and has lasted almost to the present day. I think it’s beginning to wane as far as its popularity in publishing, but it was called the new atheist genre.

You had figures like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye the Science Guy, or serious figures like Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg, the great physicist from the University of Texas who just passed away the summer before last. Weinberg was famous for saying, “The more things seem comprehensible”—meaning to our science—”the more they seem pointless.”

So this message is not only of just atheism, but a kind of atheistic nihilism: that there’s no meaning to life because how could there be an ultimate meaning? Meaning is something that derives from persons, and there is no ultimate person behind the universe such that when we die, that will be the end of things.

Richard Dawkins’ title was “The God Delusion.” These very popular books—Dawkins sold three million, Hawking’s “Brief History of Time” sold ten million copies. And the most famous line from that book was, “What need then for a creator?”

Evolution and Worldview Questions

One of the other things that we found when we did polling about what lies behind this shift in belief is another factor that was commonly cited. One of the top factors again was scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life. And this was cited again by a great number of people. More people cited this, more young people cited this than cited the problem of pain and suffering.

So you got a picture of young people who are fairly affluent, hadn’t suffered a lot themselves personally, but had deep intellectual doubts. The sense that the facts of the matter—the facts of the world, of science, of history—didn’t support the faith. So this made belief untenable.

This second factor is not surprising to me and to many of my colleagues who work on these topics of biological origins because we’ve understood for a long time that theories of biological origins and cosmological origins end up inevitably raising deep philosophical questions.

The Prime Reality Question

Sometimes in philosophy, scholars will talk about the concept of a worldview—a comprehensive belief system that people have whether they know it or not, a kind of default way of thinking. And the most important worldview question that every worldview has to answer is the question of what one worldview writer James Sire calls the prime reality question: What is the thing or the process from which everything else comes?

Of course, in traditional Judeo-Christian religious belief, that thing or entity, that prime reality is God—a personal God. But a common thought form in the elite universities and the knowledge culture today is a thought form or worldview known as materialism or sometimes called naturalism. The idea that nature is all there is and there’s nothing beyond nature. No God, no creator, no designing intelligence.

Stephen Jay Gould has made it very clear the importance of, for example, Darwinian evolution in support of this materialistic view. He said that Darwin developed an evolutionary theory based on chance variation and the process of natural selection. And then he goes on to explain “a rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic version of evolution.”

Understanding Darwinism vs. Evolution

Many of you are aware that the term evolution can mean lots of different things. Its most basic meaning just means change over time. But Darwinism isn’t just about change over time—it’s about an undirected, unguided mechanism that produces the appearance or the illusion of design without itself being guided or directed in any way.

And so Gould and many other leading evolutionary biologists have been very explicit about the way in which Darwinian evolution supports a materialistic worldview and undermines belief in God. And that’s showing up in the polling data that we’ve seen. It is a major factor in causing young people in particular to think that there is no scientific basis, no evidential basis, no factual basis for faith because what we know about the prime reality question—the process from which everything else came—is that it was purely undirected and unguided. There was no divine hand or intelligence or creative intellect behind it all.

The Materialistic Worldview

This worldview has become very dominant in our knowledge culture, in the media, in the law schools, in the courts, in the permanent bureaucracy, and especially in the universities, particularly in the sciences from which it seems to have emanated going back to the nineteenth century.

Materialism has many tenets, not just that we are the product of unguided, undirected processes, but also things like: human beings have no intrinsic value; free will is an illusion; objective morality is an illusion; life has no ultimate purpose; and when we die, we rot. There is no possibility of an afterlife.

Ideas Have Consequences

We’re talking tonight about the concept or the enterprise of apologetics. And we’re going to be talking about why apologetics matters, why making a case for faith based on the facts around us is an important thing to do. There’s a biblical passage about this, a Hebrew proverb that says what many people in our political discourse will often say: ideas have consequences. The biblical way of saying that is, “As a man thinketh, so is he,” or in older translations, “so shall he act.”

This is what’s true of individuals, it’s true of the culture, that our fundamental thought forms, our guiding worldview will affect the decisions we make in our life, and sometimes, alas, tragically so.

A Tragic Example

A few years ago, some of you may know that we had a film called “Expelled” that was out in the theaters, and over a million people saw it. It explored some of the ideas surrounding the concept of intelligent design. A year or so after the film came out, we got a call from a bereaved father whose son had committed suicide.

The son’s name was Jesse Kilgore, apparently a fine young man. He’d been in the military, he got out, and he went back to university. He was taking biology courses, and he ran into a buzz saw of an aggressive proselytizing scientific atheist, and he was challenging the students to read some of the works of the scientific atheist that I mentioned earlier.

After Jesse’s body was found, they also found in his bedroom under his bed an annotated copy of “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. And you could see in the annotations, according to his dad, the progression of his thought. First there was a sort of outrage and anger at Dawkins’s thesis, and then there was some sort of creeping doubts as he didn’t really know how to answer some of the arguments. And then there was some soul searching, and eventually it became clear that he had lost his faith, and very soon after kind of lost his hope.

Not everyone who loses belief in God takes their own life. I’m not trying to imply that. But some people take ideas very seriously and think through their implications.

The Personal Impact of Meaninglessness

And I’m very sensitive to this because as a young person, as a fourteen year old, I had a severe case of what I would now term metaphysical anxiety. I was asking questions about, well, what’s it going to matter in a hundred years? I couldn’t come up with an answer to that. It seemed like no matter what I did, it wouldn’t matter, that when you die, you rot indeed.

And then there’s this great quote from Bertrand Russell when he talks about all the highest human achievements will be lost in the heat death of the universe. And there’s nothing that will have lasting value.

And I saw a little video the other day of a campus event where it was one of these “God’s not dead” events. And they did man on the street interviews with students before the event and afterwards. And they were asking students, “Do you believe in God?” And one of the students said, “You know, I’m probably the wrong person to ask because, just to be honest, I’m having some problems with mental illness because I can’t find any meaning in life.”

And it was the most bracing and honest response. I was really taken with it. I thought, well, that was me at fourteen. And so when I heard the story of Jesse Kilgore, I thought, not everyone takes things that much to heart, but here’s a young man who did. And we have this problem with teen suicide and it’s often with kids from very affluent families. It’s not a matter of lack of resources or opportunities.

The Dark Consequences of Materialistic Thinking

Here’s just another example. It’s very, again, very personal, but we had these mass shootings. And John West has often dug into this and documented this. In many, many cases with the mass shootings, there’s an underlying philosophical materialism that’s involved or a Darwinian rationale.

One of the first major ones that came into the media was the Columbine case in 1999, where twelve students and a teacher were killed by two students who were deeply depressed, and they wrote a manifesto. The media was asking, well, why would they do this? And all the various left and right political debates were all being debated. But no, it was actually something deeper. It was that they believed that they were helping natural selection along.

They were committed Darwinian nihilists. And of course, not all Darwinists are nihilists, not all Darwinists would endorse such an action. But these guys were taking the idea very seriously that natural selection culled the herd and we needed to get rid of the weak and the biologically failing. And so this was part of their manifesto: “Natural selection is the best thing that ever happened to the earth, getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms. But it’s all natural. Yes, it’s good.”

Ideas Have Consequences

And so we could go on. And one of the people on the panel tonight is Nancy Pearcey. And I’ve had a long admiration for her work because one of the things that Nancy does so well is show the connection between ideas and how ideas have consequences and how these fundamental ideas about reality and our basic worldview end up affecting many, many different aspects of life. If we had more time, we could map all of them, but we’re going to talk more about that in the conversation that follows.

Just one more example, the sanctity of life, the whole issue of abortion. You’ve got two different views. If you’re a theist, you think of the developing fetus as a human being made in God’s image. If you’re a materialist, you think of the developing fetus as a lump of tissue, as a group of cells. And that makes all the difference in the position you take on this contentious issue. The underlying worldview has a profound influence on the way you’re going to think about that political and social issue.

The Materialistic Trinity

Now, nineteenth century, as I said, was where most of this started. Darwin told us where we came from. Marx had a utopian and materialistic vision of the future about where we were going to end up. And Freud, early in the twentieth century, told us what to do about our guilt.

And so between these three great materialistic scientists, philosophers, or scientific philosophers, these different theories were answering all the basic questions that traditional Judeo-Christian belief had always answered, but in materialistic terms. And I think it’s fair to say that we have seen the consequence of that through the twentieth century and now into our own.

Okay. I told you it was a somber opening, but now here’s the good news.

A Scientific Revolution in Progress

There is a tremendous change taking place in science and philosophy, and it’s taking place at the highest levels of scientific and philosophical discourse. It’s still controversial, it’s still contentious, but what’s driving it are major changes in philosophical thinking and also major discoveries that have been made in science. And I just want to tick off three with a brief description of each to get our conference going. Some of you who have read some of our books from Discovery Institute, if you’ve been kind enough to pick up a copy of my book at one point, you will be familiar with these three discoveries.

Discovery One: The Universe Had a Beginning

The first is, and most unexpected, that the material universe had a beginning. You may remember the quotation from Richard Dawkins where he says, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Blind, pitiless indifference is shorthand for materialistic worldview. So he’s saying the universe we observe has exactly the properties that we should expect if the materialistic worldview is correct.

Well, that has in three very important respects proven to be incorrect. One of the great discoveries of twentieth century science was that the material universe had a beginning.

You may know something of the story that started in the 1910s and twenties. Astronomers began to use these great big dome telescopes. Edwin Hubble was one of the first and he was using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson in California. And through that telescope and with the use of new photographic plate technology, he was able to resolve little tiny points of light in the distant night sky, which had been somewhat mysterious before. Astronomers didn’t know whether they were stars with gas around them within our galaxy or whether they might be galaxies in their own right.

And Hubble discovered, to make a long story short, they were not only galaxies in their own right, but they were galaxies that were expanding outward in every direction of the night sky. And I had the opportunity here in Dallas in 1985 when I was very early in my career to attend a conference that discussed the evidence about the origin of the universe, and one of the scientists there was Alan Sandage.

Sandage was a student of Edwin Hubble. He’d been very involved in verifying the expansion of the universe outward from a singular beginning point, from a creation event. And at the conference, he announced that he had become a Christian, which was shocking to the audience there. Included some of the other cosmologists and astrophysicists were people like Carl Sagan’s science advisor, Donald Goldsmith.

And Sandage explained how the evidence of a beginning to the universe had shaken his materialistic faith. And eventually, that led him to soul searching and to a full religious conversion. And what he said about it was extremely memorable to me. At the time, he was describing all the evidence for this beginning point past which you could not go any further back. And he said, “Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There’s no way this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.”

Hard bitten scientific materialist changed his worldview in response to one of the great discoveries of twentieth century science: the universe had a beginning.

Discovery Two: Fine-Tuning of the Universe

Second great discovery, this in physics more than just astrophysics or cosmology, and that is that from the very beginning of the universe, the fundamental physical parameters of the universe, the laws of physics, what are called the constants of physics, and the initial condition of the matter and energy at the beginning of the universe, all these fundamental factors were very, as the physicists say, finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life.

By fine tuning, they mean that these physical parameters are balanced on a razor’s edge. They fall, if you’re an engineer, within very fine tolerances outside of which life would be impossible and even basic chemistry would be impossible. Such that you can’t say that the evolutionary process evolved to take advantage of the finely tuned parameters. We had to have fine tuning for any kind of evolution of any kind to be possible at all, and still more for there to be life.

And so many of the great physicists of the twentieth century and our century have been talking about our universe as a kind of Goldilocks universe. There’s a major book out right now by a young astrophysicist named Luke Barnes called “The Fortunate Universe.” And the idea is that all these different parameters, and you could think of a kind of universe creating machine with dials and knobs to get the idea across, each one representing one of the physical parameters. Each one of those dials, knobs, or sliders is set to a very precise value, again, such that if you moved it one click this way or that, you’d get a catastrophic consequence that would make life impossible, a heat death or a collapse into a giant black hole, that sort of a thing.

So one of the physicists who discovered some of these parameters, Sir Fred Hoyle, said “a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology to make life possible.” You may have heard me say before that I always love the way the monkeys make it into the origin scenarios, even in physics.

Discovery Three: Digital Information in DNA

Okay, last big discovery, third big discovery, and that is, we’ll talk a lot about this tomorrow morning, so I’ll cover this very quickly. But to me, this was the one that rocked my world. It was the discovery of the digital code stored in the DNA molecule, that at the foundation of life, we have a molecule that literally stores information.

And you may know a little bit of the story. Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. In 1957, 1958, Francis Crick, working on his own, formulates something called the sequence hypothesis in which he realizes that the chemical subunits running along the interior of that famed and beautiful double helix molecule, those subunits are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters in a section of machine code.

And that has raised an extraordinary question, which is where did all that digital information come from? Bill Gates has said that “DNA is like a software program, but much more advanced, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” That’s a highly suggestive remark because we know that software comes from programmers.

And in fact, whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we’re talking about a hieroglyphic inscription, or a paragraph in a book, or a headline in a newspaper, or information embedded in a radio signal or built into a software program, that information has always come from a mind, from an intelligent source, not an undirected material process.

So, of course, I’ve developed this argument in about 500 pages. We’re just sketching it right now, but it’s one of the three big factors that suggests that a designing intelligence has indeed played a role in the origin of life in the universe.

A New Renaissance

So three big discoveries: the material universe had a beginning, the universe has been fine tuned for life from the very beginning, and there is evidence of design in life, in particular, the big infusions of digital information that have been infused into our biosphere since the beginning of the universe.

One great historian of science says that the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than any time in the last hundred years. In my book, I go a little further than that and say that the postulation of a transcendent, intelligent and active creator, the kind of creator we find in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, provides the best overall explanation for biological and cosmological origins, where everything came from. And I think that is creating a kind of renaissance in the field of apologetics.

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