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Speaker 1: Life audio.

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Speaker 2: The idea of fine tuning is that these these constants

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Speaker 2: and initial conditions had to be very precisely set in

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Speaker 2: order for a universe to do anything that would allow

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Speaker 2: for the existence of life. Think of it as a

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Speaker 2: sort of multi dimensional control panel, where all of these

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Speaker 2: different factors in the universe they had to be very

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Speaker 2: precisely set.

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Speaker 3: Been thirty years plus you've been tracking this. How have

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Speaker 3: you seen the arguments adapted or changed over that time.

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Speaker 2: Honestly, it's been iron sharpening iron for the last thirty years,

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Speaker 2: in which people on podcasts can critique these things. And

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Speaker 2: we've got, especially at the kind of level of the

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Speaker 2: local fine tuning, we have a whole lot more data.

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Speaker 2: I mean, I think there were one hundred or so

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Speaker 2: extra Shoulder planet discoveries when our book first came out.

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Speaker 2: It's over five thousand.

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Speaker 3: Now does the argument for fine tuning still stand or

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Speaker 3: has it been defeated.

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Speaker 1: Our guest today, doctor J.

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Speaker 3: Richards, is one of the world's foremost defenders of fine

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Speaker 3: tuning and the thesis that we live in a privileged planet.

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Speaker 3: Now we're going to dive into this argument, consider some

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Speaker 3: of the biggest objections against it, and then You're going

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Speaker 3: to come back live on Tuesday at four thirty Pacific

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Speaker 3: Center time to take questions, take objections. So if you

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Speaker 3: believe in fine tuning or reject it, write in your

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Speaker 3: question and comment and we will take the best ones.

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Speaker 3: But before we dive in, thanks for joining me here

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Speaker 3: at Tabsco Theology at Baiola to talk about this argument

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Speaker 3: and the new movie coming out called The Story of

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Speaker 3: Everything Seans.

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Speaker 2: So great to be with you. I mean, we've talked

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Speaker 2: and known each other for years, but I don't think

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Speaker 2: if I've ever been in the studio with you. So

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Speaker 2: this is a lot of fun.

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Speaker 3: This is the first time, which makes it cool in person.

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Speaker 3: So I appreciate you you making the trip. I'm eager

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Speaker 3: to dive in, and I want to start by asking,

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Speaker 3: as I said earlier, you've been one of the most

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Speaker 3: outspoken and articulate defenders of fine tuning. Take me back

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Speaker 3: to when you first kind of encountered an argument for

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Speaker 3: cosmic design and how did it affect you, if at all.

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Speaker 2: So I had studied philosophy and theology, a sort of

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Speaker 2: shameless mix of those things, so I knew about Saint

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Speaker 2: Thomas Aquinas's five Ways you Know one of those is

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Speaker 2: a design argument, and was really interested, honestly in arguments

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Speaker 2: for God's existence. C. S. Lewis's apologetics in college were

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Speaker 2: huge for me. Really, it's not that I fell away

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Speaker 2: from the faith. I just doubted it and needed some

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Speaker 2: serious answers, and Lewis provided that, like he has from

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Speaker 2: probably hundreds of millions of people. And then I was

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Speaker 2: doing a PhD in philosophy and theology at Princeton Seminary.

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Speaker 2: A guy named William Dempsky, who's known, you know, was

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Speaker 2: actually working on I don't know, like his twelfth degree

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Speaker 2: or something for going to Masters, and we got to

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Speaker 2: be friends, and weirdly, the very first article I ever

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Speaker 2: had published in an academic journal was about the fine

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Speaker 2: tuning argument. In fact, it was me strangely. I mean,

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Speaker 2: your audience will will know the references. But I was

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Speaker 2: taking Alvin Plantinga's ontological argument for the existence of God

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Speaker 2: in nessessity and these sorts of things and applying it

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Speaker 2: to the multiverse theory, the idea that, yeah, you can

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Speaker 2: sort of explain away the fine tuning by postulating, you know,

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Speaker 2: lots of universes, maybe infinitely many universes, And thought I found, okay,

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Speaker 2: a sort of problem that it ended up sort of

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Speaker 2: leading to theism whichever way you went, and so that's

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Speaker 2: what kind of got me interested in fine tuning. Well.

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Speaker 2: Bill Demsky was in this part of this nascent intelligent

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Speaker 2: design movement at the time. It was even it was

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Speaker 2: really before the program started at the Discovery Institute in

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Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six, and so really because of Bill, he

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Speaker 2: invited me to mere creation. I'm just realizing right here.

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Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety six at Yole University, that's where I

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Speaker 2: met David Berlinsky. I thought I had been Steve Is

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Speaker 2: all the people right might be he it was about

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Speaker 2: the time his book was coming out and ended up Honestly,

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Speaker 2: these kinds of encounters changed your life. And so that's

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Speaker 2: how I really ended up working on this really full

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Speaker 2: time for some years. It was that that kind of coincidence.

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Speaker 2: I don't remember who told me about the fine tuning areguy.

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Speaker 2: I think it was the anthropic cosmological principle by Barrow

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Speaker 2: and Tippler. I think I had read that, okay, now

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Speaker 2: that I'm thinking about it, But of course Demsky and

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Speaker 2: I being in the same place. I look back on

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Speaker 2: that unbelievably providential, and of course he was just sort

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Speaker 2: of focusing on the sort of formal structure of a

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Speaker 2: design inference. I was, honestly always very interested in these

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Speaker 2: cosmic arguments because you've got you know, there's I think

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Speaker 2: there's evidence for design and the origin of life and

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Speaker 2: the structure of life and the origin of the universe

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Speaker 2: sort across the created order. But I've always really been

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Speaker 2: interested in these cosmic questions honestly, just because I'm super

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Speaker 2: interested in astronomy.

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Speaker 3: That's a great reason to do so, that's one of

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Speaker 3: the best reasons you have a personal fascination of it. Now,

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Speaker 3: one more question before we dive into some of the

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Speaker 3: evidence in the case, it sounds like you grew up

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Speaker 3: in a Christian home with through your period of doubt,

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Speaker 3: so apologetics intelligent design was presumably not a piece of

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Speaker 3: the reason you were a believer, but maybe helped you

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Speaker 3: hold on your faith.

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Speaker 2: Is that That's right, That's a really good way to

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Speaker 2: say it. Until I would say anything, I had like

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Speaker 2: a lot of kind of Christian intellectuals. I think in

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Speaker 2: college I had come up with a way to sort

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Speaker 2: of explain, Okay, even if there's a kind of chemical

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Speaker 2: evolutionary story for the origin of life. Even if the

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Speaker 2: Darwinian story is sort of true insofar as it goes,

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Speaker 2: it doesn't explain lots of other things. And so I

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Speaker 2: didn't initially really even sort of look at those questions.

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Speaker 2: I was actually interested in things like the reliability of

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Speaker 2: the New Testament evidence for the resurrection. Dad. I'm old

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Speaker 2: enough that your dad evidence, it's a verdict. I was

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Speaker 2: at a very liberal college studying the documentary hypothesis and

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Speaker 2: for the Old Testament, and so really sort of a

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Speaker 2: reader of apologetics. But what it really did is that

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Speaker 2: it wasn't that I was an atheist and a materialist

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Speaker 2: and needed to be convinced of that. It's just that

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Speaker 2: you end up in an academic setting where you sort

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Speaker 2: of take the truths of the faith. Sure, granted, I'm

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Speaker 2: saying the apostles creed every week, and then all of

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Speaker 2: a sudden it's like, well, wait, maybe that's just because

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Speaker 2: I happened to grow up with this, but is there

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Speaker 2: any sort of good evidence for it? And somebody gave

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Speaker 2: me that six pack of books by C. S. Lewis,

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Speaker 2: and that played a crucial role. And then you know,

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Speaker 2: more than a Carpenter. I'm sure you've been told this,

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Speaker 2: but it's just now occurring to me. It was actually

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Speaker 2: some of your nast books that really shored up the

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Speaker 2: questions about the reliability scripture.

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Speaker 3: Oh, that's super encouraging, and other people have told me that,

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Speaker 3: but every single time it gives me goosebumps. So there's

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Speaker 3: a lot of design arguments you could have leaned into,

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Speaker 3: could have developed and right that conference here in nineteen

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Speaker 3: ninety six. I was a student in ninety six. I

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Speaker 3: wasn't at that conference. I just wasn't there. I was

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Speaker 3: probably playing basketball and doing whatever I was. It's amazing

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Speaker 3: I missed it. But like, why did you lean into

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Speaker 3: the fine tune and argument? And the Privileged Planet will

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Speaker 3: unpack a little bit more with that is sure, But

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Speaker 3: why did you say this is my contribution I want

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Speaker 3: to develop and defend this argument.

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Speaker 2: Okay, So I would say it's probably several things. One

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Speaker 2: is honestly providence and just sort of connecting with a

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Speaker 2: guy named Geril Gonzalez, this astronomer. Yeah, it turns out

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Speaker 2: the garmun I did not meet into Hill about nineteen

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Speaker 2: ninety nine in person, but he was present at that

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Speaker 2: mere creation conference as a postdoc, very quiet, introverted, So

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Speaker 2: of course we didn't meet. And I was always interested

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Speaker 2: in the fine tuning argument, and especially the sort of

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Speaker 2: cosmological argument, because it holds whatever your theory of the

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Speaker 2: sort of origin and history of life is, right, it's

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Speaker 2: like the whole show.

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Speaker 1: Like the Age of the Years.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like you know, it's like whatever you want

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Speaker 2: to think about that. This one's really generalizable, I think

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Speaker 2: is why I was really attracted to it. And I

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Speaker 2: thought the argument was just was great. I thought he

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Speaker 2: could use some shoring up philosophically and have worked on

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Speaker 2: that over the years, but really wanted to sort of say, okay,

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Speaker 2: is there something new here? And then I actually I

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Speaker 2: read an op ed by this the time. I think

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Speaker 2: he was a postdoc at University of Washington named Germo Gonzalez.

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Speaker 2: This is so, this is the nineties when we just

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Speaker 2: started detecting extrasolar planets, and so every extrasolar planet that

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Speaker 2: would be discovered, there would be a news push, probably

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Speaker 2: you know, controlled by the communications up at NASA, about

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Speaker 2: the possibility of extraterrestrial life. And it just made Geramel

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Speaker 2: grumpy because he said, look, it takes a lot more

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Speaker 2: than just a sort of ball around a star to

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Speaker 2: get a habitable planet. So he wrote this piece in

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Speaker 2: the Wall Street Journal. I happened to read it the

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Speaker 2: University of Washington that was literally three miles from where

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Speaker 2: I was in downtown Seattle working, yep, And so I

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Speaker 2: slipped up his number and I called him and he said, well,

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Speaker 2: you know, I've actually been wanting to call you guys

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Speaker 2: at some point I don't know, you know. And so

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Speaker 2: he said, hey, I've got this cool article about eclipses,

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Speaker 2: and so I went down to the University Washington. We

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Speaker 2: had lunch. I still remember this vividly, and it was

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Speaker 2: an article called Wonderful Eclipses in Astronomy and Geophysics, and

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Speaker 2: it was just about this interesting study that he had done.

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Speaker 2: He thought, it's weird that from the surface of the

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Speaker 2: Earth we can see perfect solar eclipses. So this needs

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Speaker 2: a little setup. So an eclipse, of course, it'd be

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Speaker 2: you know, solar eclipses where you're just basically looking at

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Speaker 2: the Sun. You're on a platform. Something passes in of

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Speaker 2: the Sun in our case of the moon, and it

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Speaker 2: blocks out the light. People don't often think about it,

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Speaker 2: but there's this weird coincidence that the Moon and the

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Speaker 2: Sun have the same shape and size in our sky,

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Speaker 2: even though they're totally different sizes and distances and all

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Speaker 2: these things. And he just thought, well, that's kind of weird.

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Speaker 2: Astronomers had noticed this, but just they short treated it

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Speaker 2: as weird.

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Speaker 3: He thought, how is the Sun four hundred times the size,

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Speaker 3: but four hundred times it is exactly remember.

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Speaker 2: Exactly exactly. And they're both really, you know, quite spherical,

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Speaker 2: at least to the naked eye, and so there's just

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Speaker 2: this weird sort of alignment. And he thought. At the time,

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Speaker 2: of course, he developed software that made these kind of

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Speaker 2: calculations easier, and he thought, I wondered what eclipses would

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Speaker 2: be like from the other planets, and so he did

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Speaker 2: this calculation. I think it was sixty five of the

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Speaker 2: major moons initially, so Mercury and Venus don't have moons.

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Speaker 2: The Earth the closest planet to the Sun with the Moon,

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Speaker 2: and then you've got Mars, which has a couple of

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Speaker 2: little kind of probably captured asteroid moons, not very spectacular.

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Speaker 2: It's really the giants. When you get out to Jupiter

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Speaker 2: and Saturn that you get a lot of moons and

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Speaker 2: then the outer planets, and the long and the short

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Speaker 2: of it is he discovered if you look at the

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Speaker 2: sixty five major moons, the one place where you really

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Speaker 2: get perfect eclipses is the one place where there are

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Speaker 2: observers that is earth amazing. There's this one kind of exception.

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Speaker 2: It's Prometheus, a potato shaped moon, and I think it's

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Speaker 2: around Saturn, but it only lasts about a second and

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Speaker 2: it hardly counts, and so that's just weird. And he

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Speaker 2: was talking about we were talking about this idea that well,

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Speaker 2: you know, we know about this fine tuning argument that

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Speaker 2: things have to be very precisely set up in the

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Speaker 2: universe in order for life to even be able to exist, right,

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Speaker 2: to even have a planet where a life can exist.

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Speaker 2: But Germa, I mean he was for speculating, But what

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Speaker 2: if the universe is also fine tuned for science itself,

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Speaker 2: for discovery, wouldn't you expect something like this? And what

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Speaker 2: he was thinking was he was thinking as an astronomer

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Speaker 2: about how the existence of perfect eclipses had been very

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Speaker 2: important in the history of scientific discovery. It's like a

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Speaker 2: natural experiment set up made it much easier to figure

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Speaker 2: certain things out. That we couldn't have otherwise. And so

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Speaker 2: we thought, what if those things that are needed in

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Speaker 2: a planetary environment, so the so called local fine tuning, right,

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Speaker 2: the type of star year round, the size of your planet,

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Speaker 2: stuff like that that's really important for life in a

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Speaker 2: planetary environment. What if those things also set up the

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Speaker 2: best conditions overall for doing science. That would be a

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Speaker 2: new argument, right, It would be a new thing, a

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Speaker 2: new set of data. And that was probably more than

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Speaker 2: anything I thought. Okay, that would actually supplement all these

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Speaker 2: other design arguments that are being developed, and it would

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Speaker 2: actually it works itself around, it circumvents certain objections that

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Speaker 2: people make against the regular fine tunting argument that maybe

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Speaker 2: we'll talk about it in a minute, but that was

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Speaker 2: really it. I mean, so in some ways we were

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Speaker 2: at the right place at the right time. I mean,

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Speaker 2: other people could have figured out this argument. And when

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Speaker 2: you do that, when you have what you think is

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Speaker 2: an original idea, one day you're excited, one day you

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Speaker 2: think you're crazy. That's why nobody ever thought of it, right,

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Speaker 2: And so you go back and forth or you think

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Speaker 2: of this is obvious because I've been thinking about it

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Speaker 2: for five years. Well, we found that Kepler, Johannes Kepler,

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Speaker 2: who was crucial figure in the history of astronomy, had

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Speaker 2: suggested this too, that it was important that the Earth

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Speaker 2: rotate around the Sun because it gives us this ability

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Speaker 2: to calculate the parallax. It's this kind of mathematical calculation

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Speaker 2: to be able to measure the distances to some nearby stars.

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Speaker 2: And so his point was that God sort of set

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Speaker 2: us up so that we could do science. So there

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Speaker 2: were glimmers of this idea, but nobody had really developed

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Speaker 2: the argument in detail, in part because a lot of

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Speaker 2: the evidence that we talked about in this book that

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Speaker 2: came out the Privileged Planet was it was new. You know,

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Speaker 2: we didn't have data about extra solar planets until about

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Speaker 2: the time we started writing.

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Speaker 1: I think I've told you this.

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Speaker 3: We first met in two thousand and four at the

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Speaker 3: Case for Creator conference. I remember that and it was amazing.

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Speaker 3: Hosted it when I was teaching high school full time.

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Speaker 3: But The Privileged Plant is one of my favorite books.

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Speaker 3: Was game changing for me. It's one thing to argue

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Speaker 3: that the laws of physics are fine tuned to enable

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Speaker 3: there to be life, yep, but then our place in

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Speaker 3: the universe. We have to have the right kind of sun,

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Speaker 3: of the right distance, of the right age. We have

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Speaker 3: to have surrounding planets. We have to have the right core,

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Speaker 3: we have to have a moon and a certain till

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Speaker 3: like all these things added up mathematically becomes impossible. But

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Speaker 3: then you add the piece that says, wait a minute,

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Speaker 3: these factors that enable us to survive also enable us

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Speaker 3: to be in the best or an optimal position to

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Speaker 3: make discoveries about the universe. That's where I was like,

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Speaker 3: wait a minute, here, this is like a tangible evidence

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Speaker 3: for design. I think it's so compelling. Now that's a

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Speaker 3: whole conversation. Yeah, we could have about that, and I

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Speaker 3: love that, But maybe tell me before one more question

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Speaker 3: before I'm going to ask you to explain fine tuning

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Speaker 3: to us. Sure, how have you seen the arguments in

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Speaker 3: about You said about this, so nineteen ninety six, so

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Speaker 3: it's been thirty years, yes, plus you've been tracking this.

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Speaker 3: How of the arguments maybe is a whole bit more,

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Speaker 3: particularly in astronomy, cosmology, and in physics adapted or changed

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Speaker 3: over that time.

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Speaker 2: So I would say, like the kind of the philosophical

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Speaker 2: precision of the argument has gotten better. In fact, a

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Speaker 2: lot of people to right say on our side, like

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Speaker 2: intelligent design friendly philosophers pointed out some there's some weaker

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Speaker 2: and stronger ways to sort of formulate the argument actures.

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Speaker 2: And so I think that's gotten much better. I would say,

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Speaker 2: if anything, the evidence has gotten much more solid. It's honestly,

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Speaker 2: it's been iron sharpening iron for the last thirty years,

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Speaker 2: in which you know, people on podcasts can critique these things,

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Speaker 2: and we've got, especially at the kind of level of

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Speaker 2: the local fine tuning, we have a whole lot more data.

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Speaker 2: I mean, I think there were one hundred or so

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Speaker 2: extra Shoulder planet discoveries when our book first came out,

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Speaker 2: and it's over five thousand now, so you know, it's

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Speaker 2: a huge number. That's a lot of additional data. And

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Speaker 2: we made risky predictions in the two thousand and four edition,

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Speaker 2: you know, so they say, okay, look, well you've got

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Speaker 2: to prove that it's testable, right, And so I would

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Speaker 2: say that's changed. There is a period of time in

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Speaker 2: which publicly making intelligent design arguments, especially in biology, was

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Speaker 2: extremely risky. In fact, if you're not tenured, it's usually

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Speaker 2: a bad idea to talk about it. But now, I

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Speaker 2: mean there are reasonable and respectable people that talk about

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Speaker 2: these things. There are people that, you know, it's almost

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Speaker 2: don't want to mention names, but you know, tenured professors

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Speaker 2: of cosmology that are sympathetic and make these arguments. I

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Speaker 2: don't think that was really true thirty years ago. What

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Speaker 2: happened is you'd get academics or philosophers who are maybe

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Speaker 2: a little always a little safer to talk about these things.

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Speaker 2: But it's I think it's much more in the general public.

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Speaker 2: So that one example, Charles Murray is a well known

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Speaker 2: conservative interview of decades. Okay, oh yeah, and so you know,

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Speaker 2: he was a well known kind of conservative libertarian atheist,

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Speaker 2: basically just whole materialist and atheist over the decades. He

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Speaker 2: has this amazing story, of course of just realizing there's

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Speaker 2: a heck of a lot more to the existence of

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Speaker 2: God and to the claims of Christianity. And in his

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Speaker 2: in his new book where he talks about taking religious seriously,

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Speaker 2: he actually cites Steve Meyer's book The Return of the

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Speaker 2: God Hypothesis. In the book he says, oh, if you

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Speaker 2: want to see some good arguments on this, here you go.

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Speaker 2: Famous years ago. Of course, Anthony flew a long time

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Speaker 2: atheist that became I would say, a kind of a

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Speaker 2: deist or a theist before he died really because of

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Speaker 2: these design arguments. And then people like Thomas Nagel another atheist.

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Speaker 2: I'd say, he would say at least a philosopher, yeah,

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Speaker 2: or at least a naturalist who both critical and skeptical

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Speaker 2: of Darwinian materialism and also sort of realizes the force

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Speaker 2: of this. And so I just think it's found its

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Speaker 2: way into the culture much more deeply than it was before.

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Speaker 2: It was just sort of highly risky. It was like

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Speaker 2: this loyal opposition of crazy academics, you know, that are

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Speaker 2: missing the gene that causes them not to take risks.

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Speaker 2: Now it's i'd say, it's it's much more common to

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Speaker 2: hear those kinds of things. Though. I do think the

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Speaker 2: kind of Citadels, the official spokesman for science, you know,

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Speaker 2: they still I think feel like they kind of have

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Speaker 2: have to maintain the materialist thing. But I just don't

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Speaker 2: think the evidence is going in their favor.

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Speaker 3: We'll get into some of that evidence. I just realized

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Speaker 3: that my son is a sophomore here. He's twenty two

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Speaker 3: this month, and I have a picture holding him on

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Speaker 3: my right arm and the privileged planet in my left hand.

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Speaker 3: Reading it before that conference just brought that back to me.

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Speaker 3: But I want to make sure people know. We just

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Speaker 3: had doctor Meyer a couple fridays ago, yep, and then

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Speaker 3: we did a livestream responding to objections to his case

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Speaker 3: for cosmology. It was myself in a philosopher, so we

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Speaker 3: didn't lean into some of the scientific issues. We had

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Speaker 3: dug acts of Friday. After that, Yeah, came back and

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Speaker 3: he addressed some of the tough scientific issues. You are

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Speaker 3: going to come back Tuesday. So writing you are philosophical

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Speaker 3: objections right in the toughest objections you have for fine

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Speaker 3: tuning or the privileged planet themes, we will not ignore

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Speaker 3: any that are stated coherently and relevant to fine tuning.

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Speaker 3: Will take the best objections, sure, so please list them

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Speaker 3: in there. All right, We're like halfway in this interview

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Speaker 3: and I'm finally asking you to define what's meant by

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Speaker 3: fine tuning and maybe how you uniquely formulate the argument.

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Speaker 2: Absolutely, so fine tuning is pretty basic ideas. Just to

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Speaker 2: imagine that they are all these things at the cosmological level.

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Speaker 2: So the cosmological fine tuning factors they involve things called

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Speaker 2: initial conditions, which has to do with, okay, what would

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Speaker 2: the state of the universe at the very beginning need

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Speaker 2: to have been like in order to be where we

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Speaker 2: are now. Those are initial conditions, and you've got these constants,

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Speaker 2: which are these numerical values like G or C the

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Speaker 2: speed of light that take particular values within things that

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Speaker 2: we call laws usually, which are usually formulated as differential equations,

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Speaker 2: and the laws. The laws sort of just okay, take

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Speaker 2: for granted the universe and say, here's how things will

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Speaker 2: change over time given the conditions and these constants. The

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Speaker 2: idea fine tuning is that these these constants and the

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Speaker 2: initial conditions had to be very precisely set within very

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Speaker 2: narrow requirements in order for a universe to do anything

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Speaker 2: that would allow for the existence of life. So I'm

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Speaker 2: not talking about okay, well, maybe there'd be fewer planets

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Speaker 2: or something like that. Insofar as by life, we mean

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Speaker 2: chemical life. So organisms that are made of chemicals that

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Speaker 2: can transmit information, we can reproduce, we can build large

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Speaker 2: three dimensional molecules that code information, or proteins things like

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Speaker 2: that that build our bodies. That's going to require certain things.

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Speaker 2: And so if you have something that's off. Let's say

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Speaker 2: that G is too low and so that gravity is

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Speaker 2: not sort of strong enough, so that the beginning of

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Speaker 2: the universe, the universe just does never hold together, right,

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Speaker 2: So I can't form planets or stars or elements. You're

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Speaker 2: not going to get life in that universe. That's the

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Speaker 2: idea of fine tuning. Think of it as a sort

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Speaker 2: of multi dimensional control pay where all of these different

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Speaker 2: factors in the universe that had to be very precisely set,

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Speaker 2: and if they were slightly different in various ways, you

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Speaker 2: it's not that you just get a kind of different

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Speaker 2: universe with a different kind of life. You wouldn't get

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Speaker 2: a universe that could host life at all. That's the

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Speaker 2: idea of finding.

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Speaker 3: Okay, So before we get to an explanation about what

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Speaker 3: best accounts for fine tuning, is the way you describe

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Speaker 3: this about, say gravity needs to be fine tuned one

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Speaker 3: times ten to the fortieth power or so. Is this

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Speaker 3: largely and generally accepted within the scientific community. So the

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Speaker 3: debate is over what explains it not is it that's

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Speaker 3: right now?

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Speaker 2: You might have a technical debate about some particular case,

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Speaker 2: but there are really really well established cases be able

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Speaker 2: to talk about it in a minute. That, so far

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Speaker 2: as I know, no no one seriously disputes the question

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Speaker 2: is Okay, what's the best explanation for it? Now? If

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Speaker 2: you were to look at the literature for a long time,

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Speaker 2: it would often be called the fine tuning problem, which

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Speaker 2: is sort of funny. Oh yeah, So it wasn't interesting.

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Speaker 2: It wasn't like, Okay, how do we sort of mess

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Speaker 2: this thing up? It's sort of it's a problem because

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Speaker 2: it seems intuitively like if the universe is fine tuned,

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Speaker 2: maybe it needed to fine tune or it was fine

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Speaker 2: tuned right, And that's a problem for a certain perspective.

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Speaker 2: But the basic idea of fine tuning is overwhelmingly and

433
00:21:15,480 --> 00:21:19,320
Speaker 2: broadly held, certainly by astronomers and physicists and cosmologists.

434
00:21:19,800 --> 00:21:22,600
Speaker 3: So I did a video with one hundred apologists, and

435
00:21:22,640 --> 00:21:24,359
Speaker 3: I think we interviewed you now to think about it.

436
00:21:24,359 --> 00:21:26,760
Speaker 3: Ask them what they thought was the best argument for

437
00:21:26,800 --> 00:21:31,119
Speaker 3: God creation was number one, and that includes different arguments,

438
00:21:31,119 --> 00:21:33,600
Speaker 3: but fine tuning was one of the top. Second was

439
00:21:33,640 --> 00:21:36,760
Speaker 3: the moral argument. I've wanted to do a video asking

440
00:21:36,880 --> 00:21:41,480
Speaker 3: one hundred atheists what argument They obviously don't believe the

441
00:21:41,600 --> 00:21:44,399
Speaker 3: argument works, but if you had to pick one argument,

442
00:21:44,440 --> 00:21:46,920
Speaker 3: which one maybe gives you pause.

443
00:21:46,640 --> 00:21:49,119
Speaker 1: And suggest God to you the most.

444
00:21:49,160 --> 00:21:51,920
Speaker 3: And I think it probably would be fine tuning, just

445
00:21:51,960 --> 00:21:55,000
Speaker 3: based on my experience and hearing some people talk. If

446
00:21:55,040 --> 00:21:57,199
Speaker 3: atheists are watching and you have a different take, tell me,

447
00:21:57,240 --> 00:21:58,520
Speaker 3: I want to know. I want to get it right.

448
00:21:59,040 --> 00:22:01,600
Speaker 1: But people like Christopher.

449
00:22:01,320 --> 00:22:04,879
Speaker 3: Hitchins just like fine tuning. So first off, it sounds

450
00:22:04,920 --> 00:22:06,480
Speaker 3: like you agree with me. If so, what do you

451
00:22:06,520 --> 00:22:09,720
Speaker 3: think it is about the fine tuning argument that even people.

452
00:22:09,520 --> 00:22:12,359
Speaker 1: Who don't believe maybe gives them a little bit of.

453
00:22:12,359 --> 00:22:14,600
Speaker 2: Possible Yeah, and you're right about Hitchins in fact, I

454
00:22:14,640 --> 00:22:16,359
Speaker 2: mean I debated him in two thousand and eight. It

455
00:22:16,400 --> 00:22:19,040
Speaker 2: was about God and science, and I camped out because

456
00:22:19,040 --> 00:22:21,040
Speaker 2: he's very rhetorically gifted, so I'm not going to beat

457
00:22:21,119 --> 00:22:23,159
Speaker 2: him there. So I just sort of camped out on

458
00:22:23,359 --> 00:22:27,200
Speaker 2: like these these empirical arguments, and he actually conceded, Yeah,

459
00:22:27,359 --> 00:22:29,560
Speaker 2: maybe there's something to that, maybe deism is true. I

460
00:22:29,600 --> 00:22:31,440
Speaker 2: mean it was like, you know, right, so that's a concession.

461
00:22:31,680 --> 00:22:34,159
Speaker 2: I think Richard Dawkins has admitted at different times that

462
00:22:34,240 --> 00:22:37,200
Speaker 2: this is the one that maybe you know is if

463
00:22:37,200 --> 00:22:39,160
Speaker 2: you were going to have to pick away right. I

464
00:22:39,280 --> 00:22:42,560
Speaker 2: think it's probably first of all who discovered it, right,

465
00:22:42,640 --> 00:22:44,760
Speaker 2: So it's not like it was a bunch of Christians

466
00:22:45,480 --> 00:22:49,240
Speaker 2: looking for evidence of you know, God's activity. It was

467
00:22:49,359 --> 00:22:52,440
Speaker 2: just physicists or atheists, people like you know, Sir Fred

468
00:22:52,480 --> 00:22:56,760
Speaker 2: Hoyle that actually were able to anticipate and predict certain

469
00:22:57,480 --> 00:23:00,840
Speaker 2: features of fine tuning based upon his observation. And so

470
00:23:00,880 --> 00:23:03,560
Speaker 2: there's that it ends up being sort of at the

471
00:23:03,560 --> 00:23:06,120
Speaker 2: bottom of what most people take to be in some ways. Yes,

472
00:23:06,160 --> 00:23:09,160
Speaker 2: the most abstract and reductionist in a certain sense right

473
00:23:09,200 --> 00:23:13,160
Speaker 2: as particle physics or cosmology, but also really mathematical what

474
00:23:13,240 --> 00:23:16,760
Speaker 2: people think, in the kind of public imagination, the best

475
00:23:16,920 --> 00:23:20,160
Speaker 2: kind of science would be something that's really robust mathematically

476
00:23:20,200 --> 00:23:22,160
Speaker 2: that you can build a model that can be tested.

477
00:23:22,960 --> 00:23:27,040
Speaker 2: That's physics and astronomy or physics and cosmology, for sure.

478
00:23:27,800 --> 00:23:30,280
Speaker 2: And so I think that's probably at more than anything else.

479
00:23:30,920 --> 00:23:32,840
Speaker 2: Is they realized, okay, this is we call these the

480
00:23:32,880 --> 00:23:37,360
Speaker 2: hard sciences people, and these are discoveries from hard science,

481
00:23:37,680 --> 00:23:40,320
Speaker 2: and they were discovered in the twentieth century. They were

482
00:23:40,320 --> 00:23:43,080
Speaker 2: literally new discoveries. They weren't some you know, it wasn't

483
00:23:43,160 --> 00:23:45,240
Speaker 2: just some kind of premise that people had always held

484
00:23:45,400 --> 00:23:48,399
Speaker 2: nobody knew about the carbon resonance right in in the

485
00:23:48,440 --> 00:23:52,439
Speaker 2: seventeenth century, or you know, or the initial conditions. I mean,

486
00:23:52,480 --> 00:23:54,840
Speaker 2: even the idea wouldn't have made sense. So I think

487
00:23:54,880 --> 00:24:00,480
Speaker 2: that's probably recent discoveries, generalizable based on hard science, and

488
00:24:00,640 --> 00:24:03,639
Speaker 2: discovered by people that clearly didn't have any kind of

489
00:24:03,680 --> 00:24:06,840
Speaker 2: theological agenda, at least any pro theological agenda.

490
00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:09,560
Speaker 3: That makes total sense. I'd never pieced some of that together.

491
00:24:09,600 --> 00:24:11,480
Speaker 3: So again, if you're an atheist and you're watching, you're

492
00:24:11,520 --> 00:24:14,920
Speaker 3: listening to this way in tell us, do you find

493
00:24:14,920 --> 00:24:17,679
Speaker 3: it compelling at all? Would you add anything to the

494
00:24:17,680 --> 00:24:20,000
Speaker 3: list of what doctor Richard said? Take things away? But

495
00:24:20,040 --> 00:24:23,560
Speaker 3: that makes sense. It's discovered by science. It wasn't Christians

496
00:24:23,560 --> 00:24:25,480
Speaker 3: looking for it. In fact, tell us a little bit

497
00:24:25,520 --> 00:24:27,440
Speaker 3: more about that. You said Fredick Coyle was one of

498
00:24:27,480 --> 00:24:30,760
Speaker 3: the first Yeah, what was some of the first discoveries,

499
00:24:31,600 --> 00:24:34,520
Speaker 3: and like, how were people framing this when they first

500
00:24:34,600 --> 00:24:37,080
Speaker 3: underalized Wait a minute, what's.

501
00:24:36,840 --> 00:24:39,240
Speaker 1: Going on here? And maybe why was it so surprising?

502
00:24:39,520 --> 00:24:42,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Hoyle, this is probably my favorite story on

503
00:24:42,920 --> 00:24:44,960
Speaker 2: the fine tuning and so in a game fifty three,

504
00:24:45,240 --> 00:24:49,280
Speaker 2: So this idea of cosmic nucleosynthesis. So the basic idea

505
00:24:49,359 --> 00:24:51,960
Speaker 2: is that you can get the elements that we learn

506
00:24:52,040 --> 00:24:54,639
Speaker 2: in the periodic table as long as you assume a

507
00:24:54,640 --> 00:24:57,080
Speaker 2: few things about the sort of initial conditions that the

508
00:24:57,080 --> 00:25:00,159
Speaker 2: Big bang, right, and then the formation of stars and

509
00:25:00,240 --> 00:25:02,159
Speaker 2: things that happen in side stars. So you know, like

510
00:25:02,200 --> 00:25:05,960
Speaker 2: our sun is using up hydrogen atoms and fusing them

511
00:25:05,960 --> 00:25:08,359
Speaker 2: into helium atoms in its core, and it eventually runs

512
00:25:08,359 --> 00:25:10,359
Speaker 2: out of helium and it works its way up the

513
00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:13,240
Speaker 2: periodic table. But depending upon the size of the star,

514
00:25:14,440 --> 00:25:16,320
Speaker 2: they can only do so much of this, and then

515
00:25:16,359 --> 00:25:19,199
Speaker 2: you just the elements get heavier and heavier, and this

516
00:25:19,320 --> 00:25:21,760
Speaker 2: kind of process of fusion doesn't work, and so then

517
00:25:21,800 --> 00:25:25,879
Speaker 2: you need other things like neutron stars and supernova and

518
00:25:25,880 --> 00:25:28,359
Speaker 2: things like that in order to create these kind of

519
00:25:28,400 --> 00:25:31,919
Speaker 2: physical conditions that can build the heavier elements in the

520
00:25:31,960 --> 00:25:35,000
Speaker 2: periodic table. Right. So that's the idea of cosmic nucleosynthesis.

521
00:25:35,240 --> 00:25:36,800
Speaker 2: And so if you look at the universe, it's actually

522
00:25:36,800 --> 00:25:40,359
Speaker 2: mostly hydrogen and helium and then the other stuff, you know.

523
00:25:41,280 --> 00:25:44,359
Speaker 2: And so Hoyle was thinking about this. They sort of

524
00:25:44,440 --> 00:25:48,320
Speaker 2: had a fairly strong understanding of the math that would

525
00:25:48,320 --> 00:25:51,520
Speaker 2: be required sort of in stars, the kind of astrophysics

526
00:25:51,520 --> 00:25:55,280
Speaker 2: that would be required for this. But then he noticed

527
00:25:55,400 --> 00:25:57,480
Speaker 2: essentially that, okay, in order to have a universe with

528
00:25:57,560 --> 00:25:59,399
Speaker 2: a lot of life in it, you need carbon. Carbon

529
00:25:59,440 --> 00:26:01,960
Speaker 2: has these very particular properties. There's just nothing else will

530
00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:04,320
Speaker 2: like it. And there seems to be a heck of

531
00:26:04,320 --> 00:26:07,520
Speaker 2: a lot more carbon in the universe than there would

532
00:26:07,560 --> 00:26:09,639
Speaker 2: be sort of in terms of common sense. And the

533
00:26:09,680 --> 00:26:12,680
Speaker 2: reason is to get from helium and then you get

534
00:26:12,720 --> 00:26:17,439
Speaker 2: beryllium and lithium and boron to carbon. It's in the

535
00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:21,040
Speaker 2: periodic table. So what happens is you need something to

536
00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:25,040
Speaker 2: happen inside stars or these kind of stellar activities in

537
00:26:25,160 --> 00:26:28,800
Speaker 2: order to fuse certain parts of atoms to get carbon.

538
00:26:29,119 --> 00:26:31,880
Speaker 2: And so what you can get is you've got helium,

539
00:26:31,880 --> 00:26:35,680
Speaker 2: all right, and so you can sometimes get two helium nuclei, right,

540
00:26:35,800 --> 00:26:40,320
Speaker 2: So that's this middle part of you know, of these atoms,

541
00:26:40,440 --> 00:26:42,360
Speaker 2: you can get two of them to kind of hang

542
00:26:42,359 --> 00:26:45,520
Speaker 2: out together, but it's very very unstable, and they will

543
00:26:45,560 --> 00:26:48,800
Speaker 2: form something called brillium eight all right, doesn't last very long,

544
00:26:49,040 --> 00:26:52,160
Speaker 2: and so you need a series of jumps in order

545
00:26:52,200 --> 00:26:54,320
Speaker 2: to get carbon. Because to get carbon, you actually need

546
00:26:54,560 --> 00:26:57,560
Speaker 2: three helium nuclei to hang out together for a long

547
00:26:57,600 --> 00:27:01,560
Speaker 2: period of time, okay, And Hoyle said, okay, that's just

548
00:27:01,680 --> 00:27:03,960
Speaker 2: not going to happen very often, and so you're not

549
00:27:03,960 --> 00:27:06,800
Speaker 2: going to get very much carbon. There must be a resonance,

550
00:27:06,840 --> 00:27:09,440
Speaker 2: and so the resonances there's this kind of particular property

551
00:27:09,800 --> 00:27:13,480
Speaker 2: in which, like imagine when you're you're swinging your child

552
00:27:13,520 --> 00:27:15,880
Speaker 2: in a swing, right, and so if you figure out, okay,

553
00:27:15,920 --> 00:27:18,119
Speaker 2: they're moving this fast. If you do it right and

554
00:27:18,160 --> 00:27:19,720
Speaker 2: you push them at the right speed, they go higher

555
00:27:19,760 --> 00:27:21,680
Speaker 2: and hire, whereas if you're off right, you can mess

556
00:27:21,720 --> 00:27:24,120
Speaker 2: it up. That's a residence, okay. And so imagine there's

557
00:27:24,119 --> 00:27:27,240
Speaker 2: this thing that sort of property of carbon in which

558
00:27:27,280 --> 00:27:30,000
Speaker 2: there's a resonance in which things will happen more quickly.

559
00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:33,760
Speaker 2: It's like a sweet spot. He predicted ahead of time.

560
00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:37,040
Speaker 2: He said, given the amount of carbon that we have,

561
00:27:37,320 --> 00:27:40,800
Speaker 2: there must be a carbon resonance at this particular spot,

562
00:27:41,320 --> 00:27:43,520
Speaker 2: all right. So he predicted it just based upon what

563
00:27:43,560 --> 00:27:47,040
Speaker 2: would have to be given the theory. Guess what they

564
00:27:47,040 --> 00:27:49,240
Speaker 2: did that They checked it in the lab and he

565
00:27:49,359 --> 00:27:51,760
Speaker 2: was exactly right. So he discovered and in'sact there's several

566
00:27:51,840 --> 00:27:55,600
Speaker 2: of these residents. It's the problem with this the example

567
00:27:55,680 --> 00:27:58,159
Speaker 2: is that it's so complicated, you know, you kind of

568
00:27:58,200 --> 00:28:01,440
Speaker 2: have to get chemistry and physics, but it's unbelievable, and

569
00:28:01,840 --> 00:28:04,960
Speaker 2: astronomers and physicists know this story. And by the way,

570
00:28:04,960 --> 00:28:07,600
Speaker 2: Fred Hoyle was an atheist who sort of later admitted

571
00:28:07,640 --> 00:28:10,240
Speaker 2: it looked like this thing had been set up. But

572
00:28:10,320 --> 00:28:13,600
Speaker 2: again another person predicted this thing. It's like, okay, the

573
00:28:13,640 --> 00:28:16,879
Speaker 2: common sense right way of explaining this is that, wow,

574
00:28:16,960 --> 00:28:19,240
Speaker 2: things had to be really fine tuned, even at a

575
00:28:19,359 --> 00:28:21,560
Speaker 2: level that we didn't really even understand, in order to

576
00:28:21,560 --> 00:28:25,240
Speaker 2: get to where we are. But of course Hoyle wasn't.

577
00:28:25,280 --> 00:28:27,399
Speaker 2: It wasn't like he was sort of open to fine tuning.

578
00:28:27,400 --> 00:28:29,399
Speaker 2: He just said, well, there has to be residents like

579
00:28:29,440 --> 00:28:31,480
Speaker 2: this or we wouldn't have really gotten so much carbon.

580
00:28:31,200 --> 00:28:33,639
Speaker 3: Didn't He say it like a common sense interpretation is

581
00:28:33,680 --> 00:28:35,240
Speaker 3: if somebody who's been monkey.

582
00:28:35,880 --> 00:28:38,840
Speaker 2: That's right, Yes, a super intellect is monkey's with physics.

583
00:28:38,840 --> 00:28:41,440
Speaker 2: That's the common sense explanation. I think that it just

584
00:28:41,600 --> 00:28:44,840
Speaker 2: is it's just the natural human explanation that we should

585
00:28:45,640 --> 00:28:48,720
Speaker 2: feel comfortable in saying we're rational in believing that unless

586
00:28:48,840 --> 00:28:50,880
Speaker 2: you can give me a really darn good argument otherwise,

587
00:28:50,880 --> 00:28:52,920
Speaker 2: Because this is the kind of reasoning we use every

588
00:28:52,960 --> 00:28:54,280
Speaker 2: day quite reliably.

589
00:28:54,360 --> 00:28:56,840
Speaker 3: Okay, so people are tracking and they're going, okay, nineteen

590
00:28:56,880 --> 00:28:59,800
Speaker 3: fifty three, Yep, an atheist is the one who comes

591
00:28:59,880 --> 00:29:00,320
Speaker 3: up with.

592
00:29:00,240 --> 00:29:01,120
Speaker 2: This this one thing.

593
00:29:01,200 --> 00:29:04,320
Speaker 3: But I'm not sure I followed Beryllium and the examples.

594
00:29:05,520 --> 00:29:08,080
Speaker 1: Give us your favorite example, when.

595
00:29:07,960 --> 00:29:10,760
Speaker 3: You're explaining it to somebody who doesn't have a scientific

596
00:29:11,000 --> 00:29:11,320
Speaker 3: it's not.

597
00:29:11,480 --> 00:29:14,840
Speaker 2: When you ask me the chronology shot them, you answered,

598
00:29:15,640 --> 00:29:19,160
Speaker 2: you know, and so and then martinarize for Martinaries and

599
00:29:19,240 --> 00:29:22,320
Speaker 2: Brandon Carr in the sixties and seventies started noticing things

600
00:29:22,360 --> 00:29:27,160
Speaker 2: like the particular masses of elementary particles and certain constants. Right,

601
00:29:27,200 --> 00:29:29,720
Speaker 2: and so people learn about the speed of light, for instance,

602
00:29:30,040 --> 00:29:32,640
Speaker 2: and notice that actually those have to be really precisely

603
00:29:32,920 --> 00:29:37,160
Speaker 2: fine tuned. The so called fundamental constants, the four forces

604
00:29:37,200 --> 00:29:39,760
Speaker 2: of gravity and electromagnetism, and what are called the strong

605
00:29:39,880 --> 00:29:43,280
Speaker 2: nuclear forces that all seem to have this weird you know,

606
00:29:43,360 --> 00:29:47,400
Speaker 2: the dial had to be set really precisely. But probably

607
00:29:47,520 --> 00:29:50,640
Speaker 2: my two favorite, the first one it's called the cosmological constant.

608
00:29:50,680 --> 00:29:53,280
Speaker 2: And again I'm thinking, okay, how to sort of simply

609
00:29:53,400 --> 00:29:56,600
Speaker 2: explain this. I think of the cosmological consonants like the

610
00:29:56,640 --> 00:30:00,280
Speaker 2: properties of empty space, like people often think, okay, if

611
00:30:00,320 --> 00:30:03,880
Speaker 2: there was no atoms or you know, planets, space is nothing.

612
00:30:04,080 --> 00:30:07,360
Speaker 2: Space isn't actually nothing. It has these particular properties that

613
00:30:07,440 --> 00:30:11,160
Speaker 2: can be described with field equations and all these kinds

614
00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:14,560
Speaker 2: of things. And in Einstein's general theory allowed for the

615
00:30:14,600 --> 00:30:17,240
Speaker 2: possibility of there being this thing called the cosmological constant,

616
00:30:17,280 --> 00:30:21,320
Speaker 2: which is this like some some value that's set to

617
00:30:21,840 --> 00:30:25,440
Speaker 2: empty space itself, right, and so signings. I think we're

618
00:30:25,480 --> 00:30:28,040
Speaker 2: hoping it would just be something simple like zero, and

619
00:30:28,200 --> 00:30:30,360
Speaker 2: theory for a while actually predicted it was going to

620
00:30:30,400 --> 00:30:33,280
Speaker 2: be way too large. We finally were able to sort

621
00:30:33,280 --> 00:30:36,800
Speaker 2: of figure out what it was, and it is really crazy.

622
00:30:36,840 --> 00:30:39,200
Speaker 2: And the reason that this is important is that think

623
00:30:39,240 --> 00:30:42,160
Speaker 2: of the cosmological constant as like space having a slight

624
00:30:42,240 --> 00:30:44,640
Speaker 2: repulsive force. All right, that's the simplest say I think

625
00:30:44,680 --> 00:30:47,120
Speaker 2: to think of this. It's sometimes called dark energy. And

626
00:30:47,200 --> 00:30:49,640
Speaker 2: so you have a big bang, you have the universe expanding,

627
00:30:49,960 --> 00:30:51,959
Speaker 2: and the assumption would be, Okay, you've got this initial

628
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:55,320
Speaker 2: expansion and then that's going to slow down. So under

629
00:30:55,360 --> 00:30:58,440
Speaker 2: the force of gravity, the universe itself, the expansion will

630
00:30:58,440 --> 00:31:02,040
Speaker 2: slow down. We discovered. Actually it's weirdly accelerated, right, this

631
00:31:02,160 --> 00:31:04,200
Speaker 2: kind of thing. And so what you realize is that

632
00:31:04,240 --> 00:31:07,120
Speaker 2: it's a certain size scale. If there's this very slight

633
00:31:07,240 --> 00:31:11,720
Speaker 2: repulsive force just to space itself, right, then that might

634
00:31:11,880 --> 00:31:15,920
Speaker 2: overtake the universe, like the attractive force of gravity at

635
00:31:15,960 --> 00:31:19,000
Speaker 2: some point gets so weak that that very weak dark

636
00:31:19,120 --> 00:31:22,880
Speaker 2: energy takes over and then creates this expansion. Well, it's

637
00:31:22,960 --> 00:31:26,560
Speaker 2: a very very precisely set, and so it's one in

638
00:31:26,760 --> 00:31:29,840
Speaker 2: ten to the twentieth, so that would be right. So

639
00:31:29,920 --> 00:31:32,400
Speaker 2: this is a sort of a one intent to one

640
00:31:32,440 --> 00:31:35,720
Speaker 2: hundred and twentieth. Okay, one intend to one hundred and twentieth,

641
00:31:35,800 --> 00:31:37,560
Speaker 2: got it. So it's one in ten and then one

642
00:31:37,600 --> 00:31:40,120
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty zeros all right, And so this isn't

643
00:31:40,120 --> 00:31:43,600
Speaker 2: a number that you can comprehend, right, but it's very precise.

644
00:31:43,960 --> 00:31:44,120
Speaker 4: Right.

645
00:31:44,160 --> 00:31:46,880
Speaker 2: That's how precisely the cosmological constant needed to be set.

646
00:31:46,880 --> 00:31:49,040
Speaker 2: So in other words, it was just slightly different, right,

647
00:31:49,080 --> 00:31:51,560
Speaker 2: you would get just an expansion that would just you know,

648
00:31:51,560 --> 00:31:53,720
Speaker 2: the universe would just blow itself out immediately you never

649
00:31:53,760 --> 00:31:56,760
Speaker 2: form any elements, or it immediately recollapse. Okay, that's one.

650
00:31:56,840 --> 00:32:00,720
Speaker 3: Okay, So this this helps, is this force is enabling

651
00:32:00,760 --> 00:32:05,000
Speaker 3: the universe to expand at just the right narrow speed

652
00:32:05,160 --> 00:32:08,360
Speaker 3: and rate, Yes, varied by one times ten with one

653
00:32:08,440 --> 00:32:11,360
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty zeros. After he's that expands too quickly

654
00:32:11,880 --> 00:32:13,360
Speaker 3: or maybe crunches.

655
00:32:12,920 --> 00:32:14,160
Speaker 1: In in itself exactly.

656
00:32:14,200 --> 00:32:16,880
Speaker 3: And so you don't even have a universe in which

657
00:32:16,920 --> 00:32:19,680
Speaker 3: it's our stars and planets and life if it's not

658
00:32:19,920 --> 00:32:21,080
Speaker 3: within that narrow range.

659
00:32:21,160 --> 00:32:21,640
Speaker 2: Exactly.

660
00:32:21,920 --> 00:32:23,400
Speaker 1: That's one example.

661
00:32:23,520 --> 00:32:24,000
Speaker 2: That's one.

662
00:32:24,200 --> 00:32:28,320
Speaker 3: How many as a whole are you solid saying there's thirty,

663
00:32:28,520 --> 00:32:32,479
Speaker 3: there's fifty, give us a solid conservative estimate, and if

664
00:32:32,520 --> 00:32:34,320
Speaker 3: we add them together, how big woul that number of being?

665
00:32:34,400 --> 00:32:36,880
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the problem is it's people always

666
00:32:36,880 --> 00:32:38,880
Speaker 2: ask these questions and I don't know. And I wrote

667
00:32:38,920 --> 00:32:40,640
Speaker 2: this thing, you know, ten or twelve years ago from

668
00:32:40,640 --> 00:32:42,880
Speaker 2: discovery the sudents like, here's the ones that we're sure of,

669
00:32:43,000 --> 00:32:46,240
Speaker 2: and there's like eight or ten. But there are these parameters.

670
00:32:46,280 --> 00:32:51,600
Speaker 2: In fact, you know, Luke Barnes and Grant Lewis and

671
00:32:52,040 --> 00:32:55,360
Speaker 2: another philosopher actually just last year have a great journal

672
00:32:55,440 --> 00:32:56,959
Speaker 2: article where they talk about this, and I think they

673
00:32:57,000 --> 00:33:00,440
Speaker 2: talked about you know, there's conventionally something like thirty sevenarameters.

674
00:33:00,440 --> 00:33:02,440
Speaker 2: It kind of just depends on how you count these things.

675
00:33:02,480 --> 00:33:04,920
Speaker 1: There at three dozens, yeah.

676
00:33:04,680 --> 00:33:06,920
Speaker 2: Exactly, And I don't you know, I'd rather have really

677
00:33:06,960 --> 00:33:09,160
Speaker 2: solid examples. And in some ways it's not like I

678
00:33:09,160 --> 00:33:11,320
Speaker 2: don't think there's anyone that says, Okay, if you could

679
00:33:11,320 --> 00:33:13,440
Speaker 2: just give me one more, then I would quit being

680
00:33:13,440 --> 00:33:15,880
Speaker 2: an atheist. Right, That's why it's like, do you need more?

681
00:33:16,080 --> 00:33:17,760
Speaker 2: I mean, I gave you that one, right, So it's

682
00:33:17,760 --> 00:33:20,120
Speaker 2: one in ten to one hundred and twenty. Right, it's

683
00:33:20,160 --> 00:33:21,840
Speaker 2: like if you're gonna if that's not gonna do it,

684
00:33:21,840 --> 00:33:23,880
Speaker 2: I don't know what to tell you. And then the

685
00:33:23,920 --> 00:33:26,560
Speaker 2: initial entropy. This is from Roger Penrose, So this isn't

686
00:33:26,720 --> 00:33:30,200
Speaker 2: one of a fine tuning of U the initial conditions

687
00:33:30,320 --> 00:33:33,320
Speaker 2: and he calculates with the initial entropy in other words, basically,

688
00:33:33,360 --> 00:33:38,480
Speaker 2: how ordered would the initial conditions need to be precisely

689
00:33:38,640 --> 00:33:41,320
Speaker 2: so that you could get a universe like ours? And

690
00:33:41,320 --> 00:33:46,320
Speaker 2: he calculated in this case it's one in ten to

691
00:33:46,480 --> 00:33:49,600
Speaker 2: the tenth to the one hundred and twenty third power. Again,

692
00:33:50,000 --> 00:33:51,960
Speaker 2: if to me, it's like you, why do we need

693
00:33:52,000 --> 00:33:54,720
Speaker 2: more examples? Year people? Yeah, it's like, yeah, because what

694
00:33:54,760 --> 00:33:57,320
Speaker 2: you're gonna get is all the same arguments about multiverses

695
00:33:57,360 --> 00:33:59,640
Speaker 2: or whatever for one example or five examples we'll come

696
00:33:59,640 --> 00:34:02,640
Speaker 2: back to. Yeah. And so in some ways what I

697
00:34:02,640 --> 00:34:05,360
Speaker 2: think the pattern is what's important is that the more

698
00:34:05,480 --> 00:34:07,520
Speaker 2: we learn, if you'd been in sort of late nineteenth

699
00:34:07,560 --> 00:34:09,799
Speaker 2: century and you thought, okay, well cells or these little

700
00:34:09,800 --> 00:34:13,719
Speaker 2: homogeneous kind of globs of jello, right, and life is

701
00:34:13,800 --> 00:34:15,839
Speaker 2: sort of easy. You get some lightning and you stir

702
00:34:15,960 --> 00:34:18,320
Speaker 2: things up, and you're going to get these reproducing cells,

703
00:34:19,040 --> 00:34:21,160
Speaker 2: and you had to have these naive beliefs, and the

704
00:34:21,200 --> 00:34:24,280
Speaker 2: general assumption also is that there wouldn't be this level

705
00:34:24,280 --> 00:34:28,120
Speaker 2: of kind of precision required. Well, what was the trend

706
00:34:28,160 --> 00:34:30,560
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century was to just discover more and

707
00:34:30,600 --> 00:34:32,880
Speaker 2: more examples of these until you get these mind boggling

708
00:34:32,960 --> 00:34:36,279
Speaker 2: numbers and it's like, okay, well, how many of these

709
00:34:36,600 --> 00:34:40,359
Speaker 2: do we need before we rethink maybe that that Victorian

710
00:34:40,480 --> 00:34:44,080
Speaker 2: materialism that we're still sort of hanging on to from

711
00:34:44,080 --> 00:34:45,799
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century, which is what I actually think is

712
00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:47,960
Speaker 2: going on, that's the relevant thing. It's like, look at

713
00:34:47,960 --> 00:34:50,560
Speaker 2: the pattern historically, don't yeah, I don't say okay, I

714
00:34:50,800 --> 00:34:53,000
Speaker 2: just one more if you give me forty or forty one.

715
00:34:53,080 --> 00:34:54,520
Speaker 2: Then then that'll change my mind.

716
00:34:54,719 --> 00:34:58,680
Speaker 3: You mentioned an example by Penrose Steve Myers coming back

717
00:34:58,760 --> 00:35:01,439
Speaker 3: on early May, and we're doing kind of an in

718
00:35:01,520 --> 00:35:05,879
Speaker 3: depth response to Penrose's model. So that's something to look

719
00:35:05,880 --> 00:35:09,080
Speaker 3: forward to, and we will really nerd out on that one.

720
00:35:10,160 --> 00:35:10,600
Speaker 1: Okay.

721
00:35:10,840 --> 00:35:13,480
Speaker 3: So here's a few counter arguments that I pulled from

722
00:35:13,480 --> 00:35:16,200
Speaker 3: some recent books. And this is from an atheist by

723
00:35:16,280 --> 00:35:19,280
Speaker 3: name of Dan Barker. Oh yeah, and he's co written

724
00:35:19,280 --> 00:35:23,319
Speaker 3: a book coming out with Erdman's this spring. I endorsed it,

725
00:35:23,360 --> 00:35:26,160
Speaker 3: thoroughly enjoyed the book. They talk about fine tuning, and

726
00:35:26,200 --> 00:35:28,359
Speaker 3: he has a few objections there. But one he says

727
00:35:28,400 --> 00:35:30,200
Speaker 3: I've heard a lot is that the universe is not

728
00:35:30,360 --> 00:35:33,640
Speaker 3: fine tuned for us. Rather, we are fine tuned to

729
00:35:33,719 --> 00:35:34,320
Speaker 3: the universe.

730
00:35:34,880 --> 00:35:37,480
Speaker 2: Okay, so there's a bunch of things happening here, and

731
00:35:37,520 --> 00:35:39,600
Speaker 2: so the idea is that, well, life adapts to the

732
00:35:39,600 --> 00:35:42,600
Speaker 2: conditions that it's around. And so let's say you're very

733
00:35:42,640 --> 00:35:46,160
Speaker 2: generous with the Darwinian mechanism. Anythink, given you know, kind

734
00:35:46,160 --> 00:35:49,600
Speaker 2: of basic conditions, life can develop and adapt in all

735
00:35:49,640 --> 00:35:51,680
Speaker 2: sorts of very swaite. So let's just be super generous

736
00:35:51,719 --> 00:35:54,680
Speaker 2: with that, all right, fine, that doesn't tell us anything

737
00:35:54,719 --> 00:35:56,840
Speaker 2: about the origin of life. So you don't have adaptation

738
00:35:56,920 --> 00:35:59,040
Speaker 2: in the origin of life because you don't have things reproducing.

739
00:36:00,160 --> 00:36:03,719
Speaker 2: The fact that life under certain conditions can adapt to

740
00:36:03,800 --> 00:36:06,799
Speaker 2: certain things doesn't mean that every set of conditions is

741
00:36:06,840 --> 00:36:09,359
Speaker 2: compatible with life. That's the whole point of the fine

742
00:36:09,360 --> 00:36:13,000
Speaker 2: tuning argument is that when you're dealing with these fine

743
00:36:13,040 --> 00:36:16,760
Speaker 2: tuning arguments, certainly at the cosmological level, you're talking about

744
00:36:16,800 --> 00:36:19,879
Speaker 2: what is needed for any kind of life, at least

745
00:36:19,880 --> 00:36:22,319
Speaker 2: any kind of chemical life. And so before you can

746
00:36:22,360 --> 00:36:25,240
Speaker 2: get an origin of life, before you can get natural

747
00:36:25,280 --> 00:36:29,520
Speaker 2: selection and random variation and differential sort of populations and

748
00:36:29,560 --> 00:36:31,799
Speaker 2: things like that, you've got to get some basic things

749
00:36:31,840 --> 00:36:34,160
Speaker 2: like being able to build elements, being able to build

750
00:36:34,200 --> 00:36:36,839
Speaker 2: something like chemistry or like carbon that right, can build

751
00:36:36,840 --> 00:36:40,600
Speaker 2: these molecules. And so he's sort of assuming that life

752
00:36:40,680 --> 00:36:44,160
Speaker 2: has this infinite malleability, so that almost any universe that

753
00:36:44,280 --> 00:36:46,560
Speaker 2: exists there'd be some kind of life in it. There's

754
00:36:46,600 --> 00:36:48,680
Speaker 2: absolutely no reason to think that, and in fact, I

755
00:36:48,680 --> 00:36:51,960
Speaker 2: don't think any kind of serious physicists thinks that. And

756
00:36:52,040 --> 00:36:55,320
Speaker 2: so that's I think the fundamental difficulty with his argument.

757
00:36:55,560 --> 00:36:58,200
Speaker 2: Even if you grant. It's sort of the most generous

758
00:36:58,200 --> 00:37:01,319
Speaker 2: assessment of the Darwinian mechanism, which I don't. I think

759
00:37:01,320 --> 00:37:03,439
Speaker 2: it's very good at tweaking around the edges. I don't

760
00:37:03,440 --> 00:37:06,440
Speaker 2: think there's any evidence that it does major things. But

761
00:37:06,600 --> 00:37:10,120
Speaker 2: even if you're a committed Darwinian, you've still got to

762
00:37:10,120 --> 00:37:12,919
Speaker 2: deal with the basic reality that have any kind of life,

763
00:37:12,920 --> 00:37:15,560
Speaker 2: you're going to have to have some basic physics in chemistry,

764
00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:18,200
Speaker 2: there's certain preconditions for it, and that's just not going

765
00:37:18,239 --> 00:37:18,560
Speaker 2: to work.

766
00:37:18,680 --> 00:37:20,160
Speaker 3: That's a great answer, And I bring us back to

767
00:37:20,200 --> 00:37:22,719
Speaker 3: the first cosmological example that you gave.

768
00:37:22,800 --> 00:37:23,920
Speaker 1: Cosmological constant.

769
00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:26,799
Speaker 3: Yes, that's not fine tuned with one time ten one

770
00:37:26,840 --> 00:37:29,840
Speaker 3: hundred and twentieth, there's not even a platform or the

771
00:37:29,960 --> 00:37:35,759
Speaker 3: possibility of life developing. And that's one example. So well said,

772
00:37:35,760 --> 00:37:37,920
Speaker 3: I like that. Okay, I know you're familiar with this

773
00:37:37,960 --> 00:37:41,640
Speaker 3: one as well. It's called the weak anthropic principle says

774
00:37:41,640 --> 00:37:45,920
Speaker 3: we couldn't observe ourselves in a nonfine tuned universe, so

775
00:37:45,960 --> 00:37:48,800
Speaker 3: we shouldn't be surprised that we exist in a fine

776
00:37:48,840 --> 00:37:49,800
Speaker 3: tune universe.

777
00:37:50,120 --> 00:37:52,720
Speaker 2: Okay, So, as you said, it's called the weak anthropic principle.

778
00:37:52,760 --> 00:37:55,520
Speaker 2: At least that's one interpretation of it. This one is

779
00:37:55,520 --> 00:37:57,279
Speaker 2: the one that drives me crazy, Sean, because it's such

780
00:37:57,320 --> 00:38:00,439
Speaker 2: a terrible argument that I can't believe smart people make it. Honestly, like, wow,

781
00:38:00,560 --> 00:38:02,040
Speaker 2: some of the arguments, it's like you got to spend

782
00:38:02,080 --> 00:38:06,200
Speaker 2: some time on. But it's just a confusion. It's confusing, Okay,

783
00:38:06,239 --> 00:38:12,040
Speaker 2: a necessary condition for observing an event with the event itself,

784
00:38:12,080 --> 00:38:15,719
Speaker 2: with like the explanation of the event. And so the

785
00:38:15,880 --> 00:38:17,960
Speaker 2: sort of famous example, I feel like it maybe came

786
00:38:18,000 --> 00:38:20,799
Speaker 2: from John Leslie or something, would be as if someone was,

787
00:38:20,920 --> 00:38:22,880
Speaker 2: you know, subjected to a firing squad and they were

788
00:38:22,880 --> 00:38:26,040
Speaker 2: getting executed, and you know, let's assume let's take one

789
00:38:26,120 --> 00:38:30,359
Speaker 2: hundred sharpshooters and they're just five feet away, they blindfold you, right,

790
00:38:30,680 --> 00:38:33,000
Speaker 2: and you discovered that the bullets make a perfect outline

791
00:38:33,000 --> 00:38:36,040
Speaker 2: of the guy's body. They take the blindfold off, and

792
00:38:36,080 --> 00:38:38,880
Speaker 2: he could say, well, I shouldn't be surprised to see this,

793
00:38:39,000 --> 00:38:41,800
Speaker 2: because if they had killed me, right, I wouldn't be

794
00:38:41,800 --> 00:38:44,160
Speaker 2: able to do that. It's just ridiculous. The question isn't

795
00:38:44,160 --> 00:38:46,319
Speaker 2: why are you observing this? The question is why did

796
00:38:46,320 --> 00:38:49,279
Speaker 2: they miss? Right? And so the question is that why

797
00:38:49,280 --> 00:38:52,640
Speaker 2: do we observe a universe that is compatible with our existence?

798
00:38:52,719 --> 00:38:57,040
Speaker 2: That's a truism, it's a tautology. Why does such universe exist?

799
00:38:57,160 --> 00:39:01,000
Speaker 2: That is why, given how construy brained and precise the

800
00:39:01,040 --> 00:39:03,520
Speaker 2: fine tuning had to be, why would it be that

801
00:39:03,600 --> 00:39:05,840
Speaker 2: kind of universe that exists? Because the implication of the

802
00:39:05,880 --> 00:39:08,680
Speaker 2: fine tuning is that sort of the set of possible

803
00:39:08,760 --> 00:39:11,719
Speaker 2: universes that could host life is, however you want to

804
00:39:11,719 --> 00:39:14,480
Speaker 2: think about it or measure it, vastly smaller than the

805
00:39:14,520 --> 00:39:16,960
Speaker 2: set where it doesn't work, you know, And that's the

806
00:39:17,000 --> 00:39:18,920
Speaker 2: thing that needs to be explained. And so it always

807
00:39:18,920 --> 00:39:22,759
Speaker 2: surprises me that people will make this argument as if

808
00:39:22,760 --> 00:39:25,560
Speaker 2: it's sort of satisfactory. It's like, look, yeah, the fact

809
00:39:25,600 --> 00:39:28,520
Speaker 2: that you're observing it doesn't that's not the explanation for

810
00:39:28,960 --> 00:39:31,359
Speaker 2: the existence of the thing, and that they would never

811
00:39:31,400 --> 00:39:33,360
Speaker 2: no one would ever make this mistake, I think almost

812
00:39:33,400 --> 00:39:35,319
Speaker 2: anywhere else, but they would make it here. It's like,

813
00:39:35,719 --> 00:39:38,520
Speaker 2: you know, it's like yeah, you know, it's like, oh, good,

814
00:39:38,560 --> 00:39:40,800
Speaker 2: the bomb didn't go off that the mob was planting

815
00:39:40,880 --> 00:39:43,320
Speaker 2: in my car, you know, but I shouldn't be surprised

816
00:39:43,320 --> 00:39:45,160
Speaker 2: that it didn't go off because if it had gone off,

817
00:39:45,160 --> 00:39:47,240
Speaker 2: I wouldn't be here. Well, if you notice that somebody

818
00:39:47,239 --> 00:39:50,640
Speaker 2: cut the wires, that's the explanation, right, and so that

819
00:39:50,760 --> 00:39:53,680
Speaker 2: nobody makes this mistake. And so this is if someone

820
00:39:53,760 --> 00:39:57,279
Speaker 2: is having to such special pleading that they're using an

821
00:39:57,400 --> 00:40:01,080
Speaker 2: argumentative form that they would never accept in any other area,

822
00:40:01,400 --> 00:40:03,560
Speaker 2: that's usually a sign that something's off.

823
00:40:03,719 --> 00:40:07,319
Speaker 3: It seems to be confuses a necessary and sufficient conditions.

824
00:40:07,400 --> 00:40:10,480
Speaker 3: So to observe, Yeah, myself, I need to be in

825
00:40:10,560 --> 00:40:14,239
Speaker 3: a fine tuned universe exactly, But that doesn't sufficiently explain

826
00:40:14,800 --> 00:40:17,719
Speaker 3: where the universe came from, why it's fine tuned, and

827
00:40:17,719 --> 00:40:20,520
Speaker 3: why I'm here. I heard another example, and then we'll

828
00:40:20,840 --> 00:40:23,000
Speaker 3: we'll move on. I don't remember where I heard this one.

829
00:40:23,600 --> 00:40:25,960
Speaker 3: But if I come home and my neighbors in my closet,

830
00:40:26,080 --> 00:40:28,120
Speaker 3: I'm like, what do you do in my closet? It's like, well,

831
00:40:28,600 --> 00:40:29,959
Speaker 3: I got it. Everybody has to be.

832
00:40:30,320 --> 00:40:31,960
Speaker 4: Tell their story in the privilege planet. I don't know

833
00:40:31,960 --> 00:40:34,040
Speaker 4: who told that. I don't know who, I don't know

834
00:40:34,080 --> 00:40:35,520
Speaker 4: where I heard it, but this is right. It's like,

835
00:40:35,800 --> 00:40:39,080
Speaker 4: you know, I comes home early and there's a man naked.

836
00:40:39,360 --> 00:40:41,799
Speaker 4: His neighbor's naked in the closet and he's like, well,

837
00:40:41,840 --> 00:40:44,760
Speaker 4: everybody got to be somewhere, right, It's like, yeah.

838
00:40:44,640 --> 00:40:46,320
Speaker 2: No, that's not That's the question.

839
00:40:46,160 --> 00:40:47,360
Speaker 1: Is why are you here?

840
00:40:47,680 --> 00:40:50,600
Speaker 3: There's a pattern the fires explanation exactly.

841
00:40:50,640 --> 00:40:53,200
Speaker 1: Okay, good, so let's move on. I have four okay,

842
00:40:53,239 --> 00:40:54,799
Speaker 1: you so two more.

843
00:40:54,880 --> 00:40:57,040
Speaker 3: And by the way, folks watching, if you're like, wait

844
00:40:57,080 --> 00:40:59,919
Speaker 3: a minute, there's a better objection to fine tuning, right,

845
00:41:00,120 --> 00:41:02,600
Speaker 3: question and caps, we put it in and we will

846
00:41:02,640 --> 00:41:06,680
Speaker 3: address it Tuesday. So I've heard some people suggest that

847
00:41:06,719 --> 00:41:10,520
Speaker 3: there might be a theory of everything we haven't discovered yet,

848
00:41:11,120 --> 00:41:14,600
Speaker 3: maybe some kind of natural law that would explain why

849
00:41:15,680 --> 00:41:17,800
Speaker 3: we exist in a fine tuned universe.

850
00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:20,600
Speaker 2: Okay, So first of all, there's sort of laws, and

851
00:41:20,640 --> 00:41:24,200
Speaker 2: there's explanations, and laws are we've gotten in this habit

852
00:41:24,239 --> 00:41:27,080
Speaker 2: of talking about laws as if there's for causal agents, right,

853
00:41:27,080 --> 00:41:31,000
Speaker 2: But what G is it's a kind of mathematical value

854
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:34,239
Speaker 2: that we learned from observation about what bodies do in space. Right.

855
00:41:34,600 --> 00:41:37,520
Speaker 2: There's not this force called G that's moving stuff around.

856
00:41:38,400 --> 00:41:40,920
Speaker 2: And so I think there's often a category err in

857
00:41:40,920 --> 00:41:42,360
Speaker 2: this idea that like, okay, if we come up with

858
00:41:42,400 --> 00:41:45,479
Speaker 2: a theory of everything, I think the picture is that, Okay,

859
00:41:45,480 --> 00:41:47,120
Speaker 2: we're going to have a theory and it's going to

860
00:41:47,400 --> 00:41:50,439
Speaker 2: let's say it has one constant, and from this one

861
00:41:50,520 --> 00:41:53,760
Speaker 2: constant you get all these other constants that we observe

862
00:41:53,840 --> 00:41:57,480
Speaker 2: around us, and so they all sort of ultimately collapse

863
00:41:57,520 --> 00:42:00,319
Speaker 2: into this one constant. It's not clear to me that

864
00:42:00,400 --> 00:42:02,479
Speaker 2: solves it all. It seems like it makes it worse.

865
00:42:02,520 --> 00:42:04,560
Speaker 2: I mean, it would be like, Okay, this guy is

866
00:42:04,800 --> 00:42:07,160
Speaker 2: the best pool player you will ever see in your life.

867
00:42:07,200 --> 00:42:10,480
Speaker 2: If he's allowed to break the balls, he will be

868
00:42:10,520 --> 00:42:12,719
Speaker 2: able to sink one ball after another and you'll never

869
00:42:12,719 --> 00:42:15,680
Speaker 2: get a turn. And then a guy shows up and says, okay,

870
00:42:15,680 --> 00:42:17,440
Speaker 2: well let me see what I can do. Can I break?

871
00:42:17,680 --> 00:42:20,040
Speaker 2: And then he hits the balls and he sinks them

872
00:42:20,040 --> 00:42:23,080
Speaker 2: all on the first shot. Right, you wouldn't say, oh, okay, well,

873
00:42:23,080 --> 00:42:25,600
Speaker 2: now there's nothing to explain. He would be the master, right.

874
00:42:25,640 --> 00:42:28,759
Speaker 2: And so the fact that we would have some particular

875
00:42:28,880 --> 00:42:30,279
Speaker 2: it would have to be it would have to be

876
00:42:30,320 --> 00:42:32,239
Speaker 2: an equation, it would have to have constants in it.

877
00:42:32,239 --> 00:42:34,480
Speaker 2: They would have to have particular values. They're not going

878
00:42:34,560 --> 00:42:37,759
Speaker 2: to be logically necessary truths, and so we'd still have

879
00:42:37,840 --> 00:42:40,879
Speaker 2: to explain Okay, why that very precise thing? In fact,

880
00:42:40,920 --> 00:42:43,560
Speaker 2: that would be extraordinary that there would be a mathematical

881
00:42:43,600 --> 00:42:46,239
Speaker 2: expression that could give rise to this. It wouldn't solve

882
00:42:46,280 --> 00:42:48,319
Speaker 2: the problem of the fine tuning. It's just it move

883
00:42:48,440 --> 00:42:51,000
Speaker 2: the fine tuning up to a sort of different location.

884
00:42:51,239 --> 00:42:51,959
Speaker 1: Okay.

885
00:42:51,600 --> 00:42:55,000
Speaker 3: That's the key that I hear Steven Meyer talking about

886
00:42:55,000 --> 00:42:57,440
Speaker 3: a ton is if we come off an explanation to

887
00:42:57,600 --> 00:43:01,279
Speaker 3: explain away information which comes from a mind, right, but

888
00:43:01,360 --> 00:43:05,799
Speaker 3: then we muszl in information and don't explain what needs

889
00:43:05,840 --> 00:43:06,640
Speaker 3: to be explained.

890
00:43:07,120 --> 00:43:08,520
Speaker 1: So if there's some law.

891
00:43:08,320 --> 00:43:13,000
Speaker 3: That required or mandated or generated, it would still raise

892
00:43:13,040 --> 00:43:16,239
Speaker 3: a question why is the law the way it is

893
00:43:16,320 --> 00:43:18,839
Speaker 3: that is resulting in finding universes?

894
00:43:18,920 --> 00:43:21,960
Speaker 2: Exactly? And now I'll perfectly accept if somebody says, well,

895
00:43:22,000 --> 00:43:25,760
Speaker 2: you got to stop explanation somewhere. True, everybody, like presumably

896
00:43:25,800 --> 00:43:27,719
Speaker 2: every worldview, if it's going to be consistent, it's gonna

897
00:43:27,719 --> 00:43:31,960
Speaker 2: have some kind of fundamental sort of mode of explanation, right,

898
00:43:32,520 --> 00:43:34,040
Speaker 2: But there's no reason that it's not. Like, Okay, so

899
00:43:34,120 --> 00:43:36,080
Speaker 2: that's the one brute fact you're going to accept, is

900
00:43:36,120 --> 00:43:38,640
Speaker 2: this kind of thing that we've not discovered, this mathematical

901
00:43:38,640 --> 00:43:41,080
Speaker 2: expression that doesn't sound like. It didn't sound like a

902
00:43:41,160 --> 00:43:43,600
Speaker 2: cause of agent. At least, if you're a materialist that

903
00:43:43,600 --> 00:43:45,480
Speaker 2: believes the universe is eternal, you can say, well, the

904
00:43:45,520 --> 00:43:49,080
Speaker 2: universe is at least is eternal, right, so it's always existed.

905
00:43:49,239 --> 00:43:52,319
Speaker 2: Now we can't really say that now. But this one

906
00:43:52,400 --> 00:43:54,960
Speaker 2: is very strange to me because it doesn't seem to

907
00:43:55,040 --> 00:43:58,239
Speaker 2: do what you would even want an ultimate explanation to do.

908
00:43:58,280 --> 00:44:00,560
Speaker 2: It does. It just ends up moving itself back. And

909
00:44:00,600 --> 00:44:02,879
Speaker 2: that's why I think these design arguments when you get

910
00:44:02,880 --> 00:44:08,080
Speaker 2: to cosmology, ultimately big theological questions which require theological lifts. Okay,

911
00:44:08,120 --> 00:44:12,480
Speaker 2: so what's the self existing reality, right, that's the question,

912
00:44:12,560 --> 00:44:16,040
Speaker 2: And what's the best candidate for self existence in eternality

913
00:44:16,080 --> 00:44:17,200
Speaker 2: or necessary existence?

914
00:44:17,320 --> 00:44:19,759
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's talk about the multiverse, which is the

915
00:44:19,800 --> 00:44:23,319
Speaker 3: big most common objection. And a couple of weeks ago

916
00:44:23,440 --> 00:44:26,359
Speaker 3: had Tim pick Vancy's a philosopher or colleague of mine.

917
00:44:26,400 --> 00:44:31,040
Speaker 3: Here we were responding to philosophical objections and questions about

918
00:44:31,280 --> 00:44:34,920
Speaker 3: Meyer's scientific case from the origin of the universe, and

919
00:44:35,040 --> 00:44:38,320
Speaker 3: multiverse came up and I said, this is more relevant

920
00:44:38,320 --> 00:44:40,439
Speaker 3: to fine tuning, not the orgins of the universe, because

921
00:44:40,440 --> 00:44:43,000
Speaker 3: if you have a multiverse. You still have to explain

922
00:44:43,040 --> 00:44:45,560
Speaker 3: where it came from in the first place, but it

923
00:44:45,640 --> 00:44:49,000
Speaker 3: is relevant and it's a fair challenge to find tuning. Sure,

924
00:44:49,239 --> 00:44:52,120
Speaker 3: so maybe just explain briefly so people understand there's not

925
00:44:52,200 --> 00:44:55,359
Speaker 3: just one multiverse hypothesis. Just give us a sense of

926
00:44:55,360 --> 00:44:57,640
Speaker 3: what that means and what you're responsolutely.

927
00:44:57,800 --> 00:45:00,720
Speaker 2: And so Steve in the Return of the Hot bathesus,

928
00:45:00,760 --> 00:45:04,799
Speaker 2: this just lovingly chases all of these rabbits all the

929
00:45:04,880 --> 00:45:08,640
Speaker 2: way down, you know, it really really does. In the

930
00:45:08,640 --> 00:45:11,239
Speaker 2: privileged planet, we just dealt with them as as we

931
00:45:11,280 --> 00:45:13,719
Speaker 2: thought were relevant to our argument. But the basic idea

932
00:45:13,760 --> 00:45:16,680
Speaker 2: of a multiverse is just that the physical universe that

933
00:45:16,760 --> 00:45:20,200
Speaker 2: we see and can experience and can detect is one

934
00:45:20,239 --> 00:45:25,000
Speaker 2: of perhaps countless other universes. And the reason this comes

935
00:45:25,000 --> 00:45:27,640
Speaker 2: into fine tuning is this idea that, okay, if there

936
00:45:27,760 --> 00:45:30,719
Speaker 2: is only one universe, it would be very strange that

937
00:45:30,800 --> 00:45:32,880
Speaker 2: there would be the one that exists would be so

938
00:45:33,000 --> 00:45:37,840
Speaker 2: precisely fine tuned. If there's a lot of universes, then

939
00:45:37,960 --> 00:45:40,799
Speaker 2: you know, maybe somehow, by chance, one of them will just.

940
00:45:40,800 --> 00:45:41,920
Speaker 1: Sort of get up infinite.

941
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:44,279
Speaker 2: Now, if you get of course, if you get infinite, right,

942
00:45:44,280 --> 00:45:47,440
Speaker 2: if somebody if you grant someone in infinite stimity that

943
00:45:47,520 --> 00:45:50,000
Speaker 2: you can improve a lot of stuff right or really

944
00:45:50,000 --> 00:45:52,799
Speaker 2: really easily, it creates other problems. And so that's the

945
00:45:52,840 --> 00:45:55,319
Speaker 2: idea is that you're just basically you say, okay, well,

946
00:45:55,320 --> 00:45:58,080
Speaker 2: the opportunities for chance to operate are greater. It's just like,

947
00:45:58,120 --> 00:46:00,800
Speaker 2: you know, if you saw me flip a quarter thirty

948
00:46:00,840 --> 00:46:02,759
Speaker 2: times to get thirty heads in a row, you're like, Okay,

949
00:46:02,760 --> 00:46:05,920
Speaker 2: it's obviously two headed, or you know, or something. But

950
00:46:05,960 --> 00:46:07,920
Speaker 2: if somebody had been flipping it for years and they

951
00:46:07,920 --> 00:46:09,880
Speaker 2: got twenty heads in a row, well, that would happen

952
00:46:09,920 --> 00:46:12,759
Speaker 2: by chance. So that's kind of a basic idea. The

953
00:46:12,840 --> 00:46:16,080
Speaker 2: problem is depending upon the theory. As Steve points out

954
00:46:16,160 --> 00:46:18,080
Speaker 2: right is their discussion in the Return of the God

955
00:46:18,080 --> 00:46:21,120
Speaker 2: I Bought this says, either it doesn't answer the initial

956
00:46:21,120 --> 00:46:24,279
Speaker 2: conditions problem, so it doesn't solve that problem, or it

957
00:46:24,360 --> 00:46:26,799
Speaker 2: creates other kind of fine tuning questions. And so then

958
00:46:26,840 --> 00:46:29,520
Speaker 2: you move up and you need some kind of universe

959
00:46:29,520 --> 00:46:33,200
Speaker 2: creating machine that has to itself be fine tuned, and

960
00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:36,399
Speaker 2: it ends up not solving what you would think it's

961
00:46:36,400 --> 00:46:39,960
Speaker 2: supposed to solve. If it's supposed to help explain away

962
00:46:40,040 --> 00:46:43,759
Speaker 2: the fine tuning. If it ends up creating additional, worse

963
00:46:43,920 --> 00:46:46,560
Speaker 2: fine tuning problems, it hasn't actually done what it's supposed

964
00:46:46,560 --> 00:46:48,560
Speaker 2: to do. And then in some cases it might actually

965
00:46:48,600 --> 00:46:51,720
Speaker 2: even imply theism, depending upon how you interpret certain theories,

966
00:46:51,760 --> 00:46:55,080
Speaker 2: and so it doesn't actually solve what it's supposed to do.

967
00:46:55,160 --> 00:46:59,320
Speaker 2: If you think, Okay, the multiverse explains away this evidence

968
00:46:59,400 --> 00:47:03,759
Speaker 2: of fine tuning, that's the kind of popular conception. But

969
00:47:03,760 --> 00:47:05,839
Speaker 2: people that I think that on all sides, that really

970
00:47:05,840 --> 00:47:08,480
Speaker 2: think about this, realize, okay, it's not quite that simple.

971
00:47:08,520 --> 00:47:10,480
Speaker 2: It just it's one of those things that seems plausible

972
00:47:10,520 --> 00:47:11,960
Speaker 2: as long as you don't spend a lot of time

973
00:47:12,000 --> 00:47:14,800
Speaker 2: thinking about it. But it doesn't. It just doesn't ultimately

974
00:47:14,840 --> 00:47:17,160
Speaker 2: solve the problem. If you have to push the fine

975
00:47:17,160 --> 00:47:20,040
Speaker 2: tuning back, you've made the problem worse rather than better.

976
00:47:20,280 --> 00:47:22,360
Speaker 3: I did a full deep dive with Steve, I don't know,

977
00:47:22,400 --> 00:47:25,360
Speaker 3: maybe two years ago, maybe it was less, and he

978
00:47:25,440 --> 00:47:29,160
Speaker 3: talked about how same as we talked discussed before, that

979
00:47:29,239 --> 00:47:31,680
Speaker 3: if you push up to a multiverse, you don't get

980
00:47:31,760 --> 00:47:35,480
Speaker 3: rid of fine tuning, and to even generate universes like

981
00:47:35,520 --> 00:47:38,239
Speaker 3: ours that are fine tuned, you still have He calls

982
00:47:38,280 --> 00:47:41,000
Speaker 3: it like what is he called the information causmological problem

983
00:47:41,120 --> 00:47:42,000
Speaker 3: something to that effect.

984
00:47:42,200 --> 00:47:43,560
Speaker 1: I forget the title of it.

985
00:47:43,560 --> 00:47:46,319
Speaker 3: And he pointed out, like, even in science fiction, I'm

986
00:47:46,360 --> 00:47:50,080
Speaker 3: a big superhero guy, you have like these god type

987
00:47:50,080 --> 00:47:54,239
Speaker 3: figures between the universes regulating them, which is almost a

988
00:47:54,320 --> 00:47:57,280
Speaker 3: punt towards there needs to be a kind of mind

989
00:47:57,880 --> 00:48:00,680
Speaker 3: that we know, and of course the science show. So

990
00:48:00,680 --> 00:48:03,560
Speaker 3: if you have deeper questions about the multiverse, write it in.

991
00:48:03,680 --> 00:48:07,440
Speaker 3: We'll come back on Tuesday. Last question, this one is

992
00:48:07,520 --> 00:48:11,680
Speaker 3: kind of broad. Yeah, are there any newer objections to

993
00:48:11,800 --> 00:48:15,040
Speaker 3: fine tuning that you're aware of or you've seen outside

994
00:48:15,040 --> 00:48:17,440
Speaker 3: of the multiverse that have kind of popped up that

995
00:48:17,600 --> 00:48:20,640
Speaker 3: either are strong or either getting a lot of tension,

996
00:48:21,239 --> 00:48:22,400
Speaker 3: that are worth responding to.

997
00:48:22,560 --> 00:48:25,840
Speaker 2: Well, I mean they're ones that appeal to certain people

998
00:48:25,880 --> 00:48:29,040
Speaker 2: that but they will not appeal to scientists. So scientists,

999
00:48:29,080 --> 00:48:31,800
Speaker 2: for the most part are realists. So they actually think

1000
00:48:32,200 --> 00:48:35,000
Speaker 2: atoms are real in planets, they really not. Only they

1001
00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:36,520
Speaker 2: think we went to the moon. They believe that there's

1002
00:48:36,520 --> 00:48:39,920
Speaker 2: a moon, right, That's how hardcore they are, right, And

1003
00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:42,120
Speaker 2: so they want arguments and evidence, and so for me

1004
00:48:42,160 --> 00:48:45,600
Speaker 2: it's like, okay, well we're arguing about the interpretation of

1005
00:48:46,000 --> 00:48:49,600
Speaker 2: evidence that's been uncovered by science and observation. I don't

1006
00:48:49,600 --> 00:48:51,560
Speaker 2: think that. I think that we're sort of in a

1007
00:48:51,600 --> 00:48:54,799
Speaker 2: loop of these sort of explanations. Now if you're more

1008
00:48:54,800 --> 00:48:56,839
Speaker 2: into critical theory or something like that, and you can

1009
00:48:57,040 --> 00:49:01,759
Speaker 2: kind of a radical skepticism about scientific reale, and you

1010
00:49:01,800 --> 00:49:03,719
Speaker 2: do get those sorts of things, This idea that these

1011
00:49:03,719 --> 00:49:08,239
Speaker 2: scientific theories they're so abstract, they're really just intellectual constructs

1012
00:49:08,280 --> 00:49:11,200
Speaker 2: developed by particular culture at a particular time and place.

1013
00:49:11,480 --> 00:49:14,240
Speaker 2: That was actually kind of hot in the nineties. Honestly,

1014
00:49:14,239 --> 00:49:17,080
Speaker 2: when Bill Dimsky and Imon Graduate commate pub postmodernism was

1015
00:49:17,120 --> 00:49:20,279
Speaker 2: sort of the thing everybody's reading, the French postmodernists that

1016
00:49:21,560 --> 00:49:25,759
Speaker 2: digs in in certain university departments, and it's usually if

1017
00:49:25,800 --> 00:49:27,920
Speaker 2: they end in the word studies, that's where you find

1018
00:49:27,920 --> 00:49:30,720
Speaker 2: this stuff. And so I've seen some arguments from folks

1019
00:49:30,760 --> 00:49:35,080
Speaker 2: like that, right, or from a kind of radical empirical

1020
00:49:35,760 --> 00:49:41,439
Speaker 2: empiricist theism and our knowledge of God is so inadequate,

1021
00:49:41,520 --> 00:49:43,799
Speaker 2: you know that, even being able to apply categories like

1022
00:49:43,880 --> 00:49:48,360
Speaker 2: design or purpose anthropomorphic, I just find those super obscure,

1023
00:49:48,400 --> 00:49:50,600
Speaker 2: and I don't think that they're ultimately going to appeal

1024
00:49:50,640 --> 00:49:53,239
Speaker 2: certainly not to scientifically train people, but also I don't

1025
00:49:53,280 --> 00:49:55,279
Speaker 2: think to sort of ordinary people in the normal course

1026
00:49:55,320 --> 00:49:58,960
Speaker 2: of life. I mean, the design argument is powerful precisely

1027
00:49:59,000 --> 00:50:02,600
Speaker 2: because at bottom it just appeals to our basic modes

1028
00:50:02,640 --> 00:50:05,879
Speaker 2: of reasoning. We're really good at distinguishing. Okay, that thing

1029
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:09,440
Speaker 2: was clearly that's a setup that probably just happened because

1030
00:50:09,480 --> 00:50:11,719
Speaker 2: you know, the wind blew by. We don't always get

1031
00:50:11,719 --> 00:50:13,520
Speaker 2: it right, but we're very good at doing that. And

1032
00:50:13,560 --> 00:50:16,640
Speaker 2: so when you you know, when you see these same

1033
00:50:16,719 --> 00:50:19,680
Speaker 2: kinds of properties in the physical universe, I think it's

1034
00:50:19,680 --> 00:50:22,200
Speaker 2: just natural to infer design. So that if only if

1035
00:50:22,520 --> 00:50:26,520
Speaker 2: you will not countenance the possibility of an intelligence that

1036
00:50:26,640 --> 00:50:30,239
Speaker 2: is outside the universe, that even created and sustains it

1037
00:50:30,239 --> 00:50:33,759
Speaker 2: in existence. Now, if you just refuse to consider that,

1038
00:50:33,760 --> 00:50:35,279
Speaker 2: that's one thing, But if you're open to it, I

1039
00:50:35,280 --> 00:50:38,440
Speaker 2: think the evidence is quite powerful that the evidence of

1040
00:50:38,600 --> 00:50:42,160
Speaker 2: the natural world points beyond itself to that kind of explanation.

1041
00:50:42,560 --> 00:50:44,000
Speaker 3: That's the question I was going to follow up with

1042
00:50:44,040 --> 00:50:46,520
Speaker 3: and ask what kind of world do you? Implications would

1043
00:50:46,520 --> 00:50:51,520
Speaker 3: follow from this, and in our conversation about cosmology, if

1044
00:50:51,520 --> 00:50:53,560
Speaker 3: the universe had a beginning and the science seems to

1045
00:50:53,600 --> 00:51:00,320
Speaker 3: strongly point that direction. You have a spaceless, timeless, unchanging, health,

1046
00:51:00,440 --> 00:51:06,759
Speaker 3: existent personal agent that brought it into existence. Rules out

1047
00:51:06,800 --> 00:51:11,360
Speaker 3: things like naturalism, arguably rules out things like pantheism where

1048
00:51:11,600 --> 00:51:15,760
Speaker 3: there is no personal monotheistic God or distinction between creation

1049
00:51:16,040 --> 00:51:19,759
Speaker 3: and creator. That doesn't really rule out deism necessary to

1050
00:51:19,840 --> 00:51:24,200
Speaker 3: causological arguments, so it narrows things down. We talked about

1051
00:51:24,200 --> 00:51:26,719
Speaker 3: this a little bit with Doug, and he's talking about

1052
00:51:26,880 --> 00:51:30,360
Speaker 3: arguments from DNA and what we could potentially know about design.

1053
00:51:30,960 --> 00:51:35,080
Speaker 3: What is fine tuning tell us about kind of what

1054
00:51:35,160 --> 00:51:37,960
Speaker 3: best explanation we have for the universe. How close could

1055
00:51:38,000 --> 00:51:40,240
Speaker 3: it get us to a god or the Christian God.

1056
00:51:40,440 --> 00:51:43,000
Speaker 2: I think that as long as we can add a

1057
00:51:43,040 --> 00:51:46,600
Speaker 2: few plausible assumptions, okay, it right, and we can get

1058
00:51:46,600 --> 00:51:50,080
Speaker 2: a causmological argument. I actually do think Bill Craig's arguments

1059
00:51:50,080 --> 00:51:53,759
Speaker 2: about the impossibility of an infinite regress work. But just

1060
00:51:53,840 --> 00:51:56,120
Speaker 2: the fact that we think the universe has an age, right,

1061
00:51:56,239 --> 00:51:58,319
Speaker 2: whatever you think the age is. If you think it

1062
00:51:58,360 --> 00:52:00,800
Speaker 2: has an age, then that means it hasn't always existed,

1063
00:52:01,040 --> 00:52:03,200
Speaker 2: So that knocks it out right. If the big question

1064
00:52:03,360 --> 00:52:07,520
Speaker 2: is something like some kind of theism or teleology, right,

1065
00:52:07,560 --> 00:52:10,600
Speaker 2: that's not dependent on matter or a material universe. Well,

1066
00:52:10,600 --> 00:52:13,120
Speaker 2: if all the evidences of the universe came into existence,

1067
00:52:13,360 --> 00:52:16,320
Speaker 2: it can't be the ultimate explanation, right, unless you're just

1068
00:52:16,360 --> 00:52:18,279
Speaker 2: going to say, well, the ultimate explanation just sort of

1069
00:52:18,280 --> 00:52:20,719
Speaker 2: popped into exist, that's uncaused out of nothing. Where I mean,

1070
00:52:20,760 --> 00:52:22,080
Speaker 2: I guess you could have that if you want it.

1071
00:52:22,120 --> 00:52:25,080
Speaker 2: That's not really what anybody means by an ultimate explanation.

1072
00:52:25,160 --> 00:52:28,440
Speaker 2: And so in some ways, as long as we could

1073
00:52:28,480 --> 00:52:31,840
Speaker 2: think the material universe was eternal, the materialists could just

1074
00:52:31,880 --> 00:52:34,160
Speaker 2: sort of say, well, I don't need an additional kind

1075
00:52:34,200 --> 00:52:37,080
Speaker 2: of explanation. I'll just stop with the brute factor of

1076
00:52:37,120 --> 00:52:40,600
Speaker 2: the universe. They can't do that now, because we know

1077
00:52:40,640 --> 00:52:42,720
Speaker 2: the universe had a beginning, and that's in some ways

1078
00:52:42,719 --> 00:52:46,399
Speaker 2: why this whole conversation is happening. And so I would say,

1079
00:52:46,440 --> 00:52:49,080
Speaker 2: insofar as theism at least says that you have a

1080
00:52:49,239 --> 00:52:52,520
Speaker 2: personal causal agent powerful enough to be able to bring

1081
00:52:52,560 --> 00:52:55,680
Speaker 2: a universe into existence and to sustain it into existence,

1082
00:52:56,000 --> 00:52:59,560
Speaker 2: no reason to take that for granted. That's something like theism. Now,

1083
00:53:00,280 --> 00:53:02,560
Speaker 2: no that we're not going to get the trinity. We're

1084
00:53:02,560 --> 00:53:06,280
Speaker 2: not going to get you know, the two nature's doctrine

1085
00:53:06,320 --> 00:53:08,200
Speaker 2: of Christ. We're not going to know God's personal name.

1086
00:53:09,280 --> 00:53:10,920
Speaker 2: Why would we expect that? I mean, I think as

1087
00:53:10,920 --> 00:53:13,719
Speaker 2: a Christian, God has created a world that testifies to

1088
00:53:13,760 --> 00:53:17,279
Speaker 2: his existence as a creator, and that is sufficient at

1089
00:53:17,360 --> 00:53:19,200
Speaker 2: least to tell us that there's a moral law so

1090
00:53:19,239 --> 00:53:22,279
Speaker 2: that we're accountable, as Paul says in Romans one, and

1091
00:53:22,320 --> 00:53:25,680
Speaker 2: that's knowable by reason. And we need special revelation. We

1092
00:53:25,719 --> 00:53:28,640
Speaker 2: need God to disclose himself as a person. And history

1093
00:53:28,680 --> 00:53:31,080
Speaker 2: and in the person of Jesus Christ, and scripture teaches

1094
00:53:31,120 --> 00:53:33,680
Speaker 2: other things, but those are complimentary things. And so I

1095
00:53:33,719 --> 00:53:35,600
Speaker 2: do think that if you sort of add up all

1096
00:53:35,600 --> 00:53:39,000
Speaker 2: the fine tuning arguments, add a cosmological argument on top

1097
00:53:39,040 --> 00:53:42,719
Speaker 2: of that, in light of the contemporary evidence circa twenty

1098
00:53:42,760 --> 00:53:46,080
Speaker 2: twenty six, I'd say you can get to a bare theism,

1099
00:53:46,400 --> 00:53:49,720
Speaker 2: certainly a deism, maybe a theism. And I think especially

1100
00:53:49,760 --> 00:53:53,759
Speaker 2: if you take seriously the kind of ongoing reality of

1101
00:53:53,800 --> 00:53:58,839
Speaker 2: teleology and life. I mean, I think, honestly, I think

1102
00:53:58,840 --> 00:54:02,440
Speaker 2: God's deeply involved in the details all the way through.

1103
00:54:03,360 --> 00:54:05,120
Speaker 2: And if you can add that, then you're not just

1104
00:54:05,120 --> 00:54:07,600
Speaker 2: talking about a god like creating it at the beginning.

1105
00:54:07,640 --> 00:54:10,239
Speaker 2: You're talking about a God that's intimately involved throughout it.

1106
00:54:10,880 --> 00:54:14,920
Speaker 2: That's theism, and that's something right, I mean, like the

1107
00:54:15,080 --> 00:54:20,200
Speaker 2: main intellectual impediment to Christian belief in particular is materialism,

1108
00:54:20,239 --> 00:54:23,960
Speaker 2: and you can get to theism. It's a totally different

1109
00:54:23,960 --> 00:54:25,319
Speaker 2: ballgame at oh for sure.

1110
00:54:25,320 --> 00:54:28,879
Speaker 3: And what's different about this And sometimes I've heard this

1111
00:54:28,920 --> 00:54:30,799
Speaker 3: is a weaker argument, don't hear it a lot, but

1112
00:54:30,800 --> 00:54:33,600
Speaker 3: that fine tuning could be explained by something within the

1113
00:54:33,719 --> 00:54:38,520
Speaker 3: universe like Prometheus, the Alien movie, right, has a kind

1114
00:54:38,560 --> 00:54:41,160
Speaker 3: of fine tune of these aliens who see the planet

1115
00:54:41,160 --> 00:54:43,879
Speaker 3: with life. That's right, that could work for proteins in.

1116
00:54:43,920 --> 00:54:45,879
Speaker 1: DNA in the principle.

1117
00:54:46,120 --> 00:54:48,800
Speaker 3: Whether or not it's the best explanation separate issue, but

1118
00:54:48,840 --> 00:54:51,600
Speaker 3: in principle it could. Of course, fine tuning is about

1119
00:54:51,680 --> 00:54:56,080
Speaker 3: the universe, and nothing within the universe could explain it.

1120
00:54:56,080 --> 00:55:00,280
Speaker 3: It has the same implications as the cause of logical areument.

1121
00:55:00,360 --> 00:55:02,360
Speaker 3: Would something beyond the universe?

1122
00:55:02,960 --> 00:55:06,319
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there is, I mean, honestly, because of things

1123
00:55:06,360 --> 00:55:09,439
Speaker 2: like Prometheus, there's this popular idea that Okay, well, maybe

1124
00:55:09,480 --> 00:55:11,440
Speaker 2: it's not a god, or maybe what we mean by

1125
00:55:11,440 --> 00:55:14,160
Speaker 2: god is just a really advanced alien race from a

1126
00:55:14,239 --> 00:55:18,399
Speaker 2: previous universe, right, that then is now creating universes. Now,

1127
00:55:18,400 --> 00:55:21,840
Speaker 2: at this point it's like, okay, yeah, but you've conceded design,

1128
00:55:21,960 --> 00:55:26,000
Speaker 2: you've conceded intelligence, And then it feels really ad hoc. Right,

1129
00:55:26,040 --> 00:55:28,319
Speaker 2: It's like it's this alien race of because then you

1130
00:55:28,360 --> 00:55:33,160
Speaker 2: start getting into principle of parsimony and Occam's razor. A

1131
00:55:33,239 --> 00:55:37,760
Speaker 2: single God is a much more economical explanation, and in fact,

1132
00:55:37,800 --> 00:55:40,520
Speaker 2: I think if you really think about it, you actually

1133
00:55:40,560 --> 00:55:43,880
Speaker 2: you have the fundamental sort of mode of explanation. That

1134
00:55:43,920 --> 00:55:47,520
Speaker 2: fundamental reality has to be something that's intrinsically a unity.

1135
00:55:47,960 --> 00:55:49,960
Speaker 2: It can't be made up of a bunch of of

1136
00:55:49,960 --> 00:55:53,680
Speaker 2: separable parts, or the parts would be fundamental. And this

1137
00:55:53,719 --> 00:55:55,560
Speaker 2: is this is I think the kernel of truth in

1138
00:55:55,600 --> 00:55:58,960
Speaker 2: the complicated idea of divine simplicity, which sometimes it can

1139
00:55:59,000 --> 00:56:01,840
Speaker 2: go too far, but society, the fundamental reality is going

1140
00:56:01,880 --> 00:56:04,680
Speaker 2: to be something that unifies everything within itself. Well, an

1141
00:56:04,680 --> 00:56:08,640
Speaker 2: alien race it was in a previous you know, previous

1142
00:56:08,719 --> 00:56:11,080
Speaker 2: universe that doesn't do that. That just sounds to me

1143
00:56:11,239 --> 00:56:14,560
Speaker 2: like okay, I gotta have something and it can't be God.

1144
00:56:14,719 --> 00:56:17,160
Speaker 2: So this I'll go with this. Even though we don't

1145
00:56:17,160 --> 00:56:18,359
Speaker 2: have any independent evidence of that.

1146
00:56:18,760 --> 00:56:22,520
Speaker 3: I'd be curious what studying and developing this argument means

1147
00:56:22,560 --> 00:56:25,640
Speaker 3: for you personally. And if you're like Sean, this is

1148
00:56:25,680 --> 00:56:30,000
Speaker 3: my ministry, this is my profession. I'm not fishing for something.

1149
00:56:30,239 --> 00:56:33,239
Speaker 3: It's not necessarily there. Right, you've been studying this for

1150
00:56:33,280 --> 00:56:35,840
Speaker 3: a long time, You've been doing debates, you've been writing

1151
00:56:35,920 --> 00:56:38,799
Speaker 3: journal articles. You said this argument is stronger than it

1152
00:56:38,840 --> 00:56:41,000
Speaker 3: was in the past, and I agree with you, like

1153
00:56:41,120 --> 00:56:44,000
Speaker 3: on a personal level, whether your spiritual life or just

1154
00:56:44,040 --> 00:56:48,120
Speaker 3: the way, how does studying this affect you personally?

1155
00:56:48,280 --> 00:56:50,839
Speaker 2: Gosh, that's a good question. I should say that. You know,

1156
00:56:50,920 --> 00:56:52,440
Speaker 2: our book came out in two thousand and four, and

1157
00:56:52,480 --> 00:56:56,000
Speaker 2: then Garmu and I wrote a totally revised and rewritten

1158
00:56:56,080 --> 00:56:58,120
Speaker 2: edition with the new evidence, came out in twenty twenty

1159
00:56:58,160 --> 00:57:00,759
Speaker 2: four because of the total totally clips yep. And so

1160
00:57:00,800 --> 00:57:03,160
Speaker 2: to revisit it, first of all, to discover that you

1161
00:57:03,200 --> 00:57:05,919
Speaker 2: weren't a great writer twenty years before, or at least

1162
00:57:05,920 --> 00:57:08,560
Speaker 2: that you've gotten better. Right, there's that discovery, But also

1163
00:57:08,600 --> 00:57:10,200
Speaker 2: that's like, oh my word, we made a lot of

1164
00:57:10,280 --> 00:57:14,120
Speaker 2: risky predictions about type two. Sure, you know Type two

1165
00:57:14,200 --> 00:57:17,520
Speaker 2: supernova and you know, one a supernov and lots of

1166
00:57:17,520 --> 00:57:21,439
Speaker 2: stuff that was risky that's panned out. And in fact,

1167
00:57:21,440 --> 00:57:23,680
Speaker 2: we've thought about some other examples that we had in

1168
00:57:23,720 --> 00:57:26,560
Speaker 2: the book that we hadn't thought of initially. That's powerful

1169
00:57:26,560 --> 00:57:28,840
Speaker 2: because it's like it's like the natural world itself is

1170
00:57:28,840 --> 00:57:30,920
Speaker 2: sort of testifying to this, and I think, I mean,

1171
00:57:30,960 --> 00:57:33,000
Speaker 2: I don't know how everyone experiences it. I'll just speak

1172
00:57:33,000 --> 00:57:35,000
Speaker 2: for myself. But like, sometimes you get yourself in a

1173
00:57:35,040 --> 00:57:37,800
Speaker 2: funk where it's like, I don't know, maybe I'm just

1174
00:57:37,960 --> 00:57:40,360
Speaker 2: making all this stuff up and it's totally crazy, and

1175
00:57:40,400 --> 00:57:43,240
Speaker 2: I can almost get myself. This is the problem with philosophy, right,

1176
00:57:43,280 --> 00:57:46,240
Speaker 2: you almost get yourself in a state of doubt. But

1177
00:57:46,360 --> 00:57:48,680
Speaker 2: then I'll remember, oh wait a second, but first of all,

1178
00:57:48,720 --> 00:57:52,240
Speaker 2: the other alternatives are way worse, and what about this?

1179
00:57:52,320 --> 00:57:53,880
Speaker 2: And then and it reminds me of it. And I'm

1180
00:57:53,880 --> 00:57:57,000
Speaker 2: of course intimately acquainted with the arguments and the evidence,

1181
00:57:57,040 --> 00:57:59,280
Speaker 2: so it just sort of brings you back. That's why

1182
00:57:59,280 --> 00:58:02,520
Speaker 2: I think it's important to study this stuff, because yeah,

1183
00:58:02,560 --> 00:58:06,040
Speaker 2: I mean, God has to move you, obviously, and the

1184
00:58:06,080 --> 00:58:08,040
Speaker 2: work of the Holy Spirit in your life is crucial.

1185
00:58:08,320 --> 00:58:11,040
Speaker 2: But I think he wants to respect our reason, and

1186
00:58:10,480 --> 00:58:14,600
Speaker 2: we're rational animals, and so the fact that He's given

1187
00:58:14,680 --> 00:58:18,720
Speaker 2: us things that actually they add up, they're confirmed by

1188
00:58:18,760 --> 00:58:22,120
Speaker 2: the best evidence of the natural world. That makes us,

1189
00:58:22,280 --> 00:58:24,320
Speaker 2: I think, a really exciting time to be alive. I

1190
00:58:24,360 --> 00:58:26,640
Speaker 2: really think there's never been a better time to be

1191
00:58:26,720 --> 00:58:31,600
Speaker 2: at Theist than in twenty twenty six. Honestly, I love that.

1192
00:58:31,640 --> 00:58:33,800
Speaker 3: I'm going to clip that, throw that on social media.

1193
00:58:33,800 --> 00:58:36,040
Speaker 3: I think you're right for me. Some of these arguments

1194
00:58:36,080 --> 00:58:38,200
Speaker 3: like that. I remember I went through kind of a

1195
00:58:38,200 --> 00:58:40,840
Speaker 3: doubting period when I was a student here. I remember

1196
00:58:40,880 --> 00:58:43,200
Speaker 3: reading this skeptic who said, you know, why doesn't God

1197
00:58:43,320 --> 00:58:45,400
Speaker 3: just write made by yahweh on every cell?

1198
00:58:45,520 --> 00:58:45,680
Speaker 2: Yeah?

1199
00:58:46,200 --> 00:58:48,280
Speaker 3: And then when I really studied DNA, I was like,

1200
00:58:48,960 --> 00:58:52,040
Speaker 3: oh my goodness, he kind of did.

1201
00:58:52,200 --> 00:58:53,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, he kind of did.

1202
00:58:54,320 --> 00:58:56,720
Speaker 3: And you know, I can't look at a solar eclipse

1203
00:58:56,720 --> 00:58:58,560
Speaker 3: the same. A few years ago there was one in

1204
00:58:58,600 --> 00:59:01,520
Speaker 3: southern California and I was able to watch it with

1205
00:59:01,600 --> 00:59:04,080
Speaker 3: the glasses on, and I'm thinking about, wait a minute,

1206
00:59:04,480 --> 00:59:07,200
Speaker 3: all the things that have to be lined up here

1207
00:59:07,240 --> 00:59:12,520
Speaker 3: are so mathematically improbable, and this enables us to understand

1208
00:59:12,520 --> 00:59:15,320
Speaker 3: the world, and it's beautiful. On top of that, absolutely

1209
00:59:15,480 --> 00:59:17,600
Speaker 3: some of this study for me has made me read

1210
00:59:17,640 --> 00:59:21,360
Speaker 3: passes like Psalms nineteen one and two. The heavens declared

1211
00:59:21,400 --> 00:59:24,120
Speaker 3: the glory of God, the skies proclaimed his majesty. Day

1212
00:59:24,120 --> 00:59:26,800
Speaker 3: by day, they speel worth knowledge, night by night they

1213
00:59:26,880 --> 00:59:27,720
Speaker 3: display wisdom.

1214
00:59:28,040 --> 00:59:30,720
Speaker 1: It's actually objectively true.

1215
00:59:31,120 --> 00:59:33,920
Speaker 3: Yes, all right, So well, I want to ask you

1216
00:59:33,920 --> 00:59:37,280
Speaker 3: about the movie and you're interviewing this it's fantastic. But

1217
00:59:37,400 --> 00:59:39,960
Speaker 3: before we get to that, do you have any sense

1218
00:59:40,000 --> 00:59:46,200
Speaker 3: about where debates about fine tuning are maybe headed? Like

1219
00:59:46,240 --> 00:59:48,360
Speaker 3: what would be your guess if you had to say,

1220
00:59:48,440 --> 00:59:50,360
Speaker 3: here's where I think things are moving, and maybe in

1221
00:59:50,440 --> 00:59:52,760
Speaker 3: light of some trends you've seen change in the years

1222
00:59:52,880 --> 00:59:53,880
Speaker 3: leading up to today.

1223
00:59:54,000 --> 00:59:55,760
Speaker 2: The fact that for a long time, I hate to

1224
00:59:55,760 --> 00:59:58,480
Speaker 2: say this, the reality is it was hard to have

1225
00:59:58,560 --> 01:00:01,320
Speaker 2: these debates because of the in actual orthodoxy that made

1226
01:00:01,360 --> 01:00:04,920
Speaker 2: it costly. It was not costly in the academy to

1227
01:00:04,960 --> 01:00:07,720
Speaker 2: be a materialist. It was like that's how you get tenure, right,

1228
01:00:07,760 --> 01:00:11,800
Speaker 2: It was costly no matter how careful you were. You know,

1229
01:00:11,920 --> 01:00:15,360
Speaker 2: my co author, Germmel Gonzalez, he suffered in his career

1230
01:00:15,400 --> 01:00:19,919
Speaker 2: despite a stellar publication record, just simply because of being

1231
01:00:19,960 --> 01:00:22,600
Speaker 2: associated with this argument. I can't remember. I asked him

1232
01:00:22,600 --> 01:00:23,640
Speaker 2: one time, I said, do you think it was a

1233
01:00:23,640 --> 01:00:26,720
Speaker 2: good idea to, you know, to write this book before

1234
01:00:26,760 --> 01:00:29,240
Speaker 2: you had tenure? And he's like, well, the idea, it

1235
01:00:29,280 --> 01:00:31,240
Speaker 2: happened when it happened. You know. It's like we would

1236
01:00:31,280 --> 01:00:33,480
Speaker 2: be we would have been suppressing this if we hadn't

1237
01:00:33,480 --> 01:00:35,840
Speaker 2: done it when we did. I haven't really suffered from it,

1238
01:00:35,960 --> 01:00:39,760
Speaker 2: you know, And so I think that's changed. And so

1239
01:00:39,880 --> 01:00:43,000
Speaker 2: the things that worked in two thousand and four or five,

1240
01:00:43,120 --> 01:00:46,360
Speaker 2: and in terms of trying to resideline the argument, I

1241
01:00:46,360 --> 01:00:49,760
Speaker 2: don't think there's going to keep working. And so if

1242
01:00:49,840 --> 01:00:52,400
Speaker 2: I were a materialist at this point, I would be

1243
01:00:52,440 --> 01:00:54,680
Speaker 2: trying to figure out a way to accommodate all the

1244
01:00:54,720 --> 01:00:59,840
Speaker 2: evidence however I could, and then somehow sort of appeal

1245
01:00:59,880 --> 01:01:03,280
Speaker 2: to a type of agnosticism or something. Because the truth

1246
01:01:03,280 --> 01:01:04,680
Speaker 2: of the matter is, I don't think we're going to

1247
01:01:04,680 --> 01:01:07,840
Speaker 2: get fundamentally different kinds of arguments. You're getting these multiverse arguments.

1248
01:01:07,840 --> 01:01:10,760
Speaker 2: You're going to get brute fact arguments. You're going to get,

1249
01:01:10,920 --> 01:01:14,600
Speaker 2: you know, attempts to debunk the maybe the empirical details.

1250
01:01:14,840 --> 01:01:16,800
Speaker 2: It's very hard to imagine, you know, there are only

1251
01:01:16,840 --> 01:01:19,080
Speaker 2: so many kinds of arguments that you can construct in

1252
01:01:19,080 --> 01:01:21,480
Speaker 2: this way, and so I'd be really surprised if there

1253
01:01:21,520 --> 01:01:23,720
Speaker 2: were some fundamentally new kind of argument. I think what

1254
01:01:23,760 --> 01:01:27,040
Speaker 2: you'll get is new strategies as the kind of awareness

1255
01:01:27,040 --> 01:01:30,800
Speaker 2: of this stuff settles in. It would be much easier,

1256
01:01:30,880 --> 01:01:34,480
Speaker 2: certainly for me. I'm thinking if I were didn't want

1257
01:01:34,520 --> 01:01:37,040
Speaker 2: to cease being a materialist, I would want to do

1258
01:01:37,080 --> 01:01:39,280
Speaker 2: my best to kind of accommodate all the best evidence

1259
01:01:39,320 --> 01:01:41,360
Speaker 2: for this and then just try to find some kind

1260
01:01:41,400 --> 01:01:43,880
Speaker 2: of exit ramp. And I'm not an atheist, so I

1261
01:01:43,880 --> 01:01:46,760
Speaker 2: can't quite that would work. I think that's what I

1262
01:01:46,800 --> 01:01:47,640
Speaker 2: would be trying to do.

1263
01:01:47,840 --> 01:01:49,240
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fair, that makes sense.

1264
01:01:49,680 --> 01:01:52,840
Speaker 3: I think one of the big objections to intelligent design

1265
01:01:52,920 --> 01:01:57,520
Speaker 3: is it's not testable, it's not falsifiable, doesn't make predictions.

1266
01:01:58,000 --> 01:02:00,960
Speaker 3: You guys made bold predictions in two thousand and four,

1267
01:02:01,680 --> 01:02:05,600
Speaker 3: and seems like most of them, if not all of them,

1268
01:02:05,680 --> 01:02:09,040
Speaker 3: came true as a whole, which even if they didn't,

1269
01:02:09,480 --> 01:02:12,600
Speaker 3: would tell us that ID and principle is technical and it.

1270
01:02:12,560 --> 01:02:13,840
Speaker 2: Is a bible.

1271
01:02:13,880 --> 01:02:15,160
Speaker 1: This is kind of a win win.

1272
01:02:15,680 --> 01:02:17,360
Speaker 3: But it turns out I would guess you're going to

1273
01:02:17,400 --> 01:02:20,720
Speaker 3: predict that maybe we will find even more examples of fine.

1274
01:02:20,520 --> 01:02:22,200
Speaker 2: Tuning more than happy.

1275
01:02:22,360 --> 01:02:24,360
Speaker 3: Maybe in ten years we sit down and there's fifty

1276
01:02:24,440 --> 01:02:28,040
Speaker 3: thousand planets. They found your thesis. You think we're going

1277
01:02:28,080 --> 01:02:32,120
Speaker 3: to find that Earth is even exquisitely privileged.

1278
01:02:31,640 --> 01:02:33,760
Speaker 2: And we'll have a much better sense of what the

1279
01:02:33,960 --> 01:02:36,920
Speaker 2: what the ratio is, right, don't We do think we're

1280
01:02:36,960 --> 01:02:40,840
Speaker 2: absolutely competent. The ratio of habitable planets to uninhabitable planets

1281
01:02:41,080 --> 01:02:43,960
Speaker 2: is very significant. Other words, you know, habital plants a

1282
01:02:44,040 --> 01:02:47,320
Speaker 2: very small number, and uninhabitable is very very high. We

1283
01:02:47,360 --> 01:02:49,440
Speaker 2: don't know exactly what it is. And so the more

1284
01:02:49,480 --> 01:02:52,520
Speaker 2: planets we discover around different in different systems, around different

1285
01:02:52,520 --> 01:02:55,600
Speaker 2: types of stars, the more numbers we're going to be

1286
01:02:55,640 --> 01:02:57,240
Speaker 2: able to add to that. And so that's what I

1287
01:02:57,240 --> 01:03:00,000
Speaker 2: would expect is that we'll just it will get empirically

1288
01:03:00,160 --> 01:03:02,200
Speaker 2: much tighter as we discover new things.

1289
01:03:02,240 --> 01:03:02,680
Speaker 1: I love it.

1290
01:03:02,720 --> 01:03:06,480
Speaker 3: We'll have you back in twenty more years, actually hopefully.

1291
01:03:06,200 --> 01:03:07,439
Speaker 1: Long before then.

1292
01:03:08,040 --> 01:03:10,560
Speaker 3: So tell us about the movie The Story of Everything.

1293
01:03:10,680 --> 01:03:12,920
Speaker 3: I had a chance to see an early actually I

1294
01:03:12,960 --> 01:03:15,240
Speaker 3: think it was finished, but on my laptop they sent

1295
01:03:15,280 --> 01:03:18,760
Speaker 3: me a file. Fantastic, so well done. I've never seen

1296
01:03:18,800 --> 01:03:21,520
Speaker 3: a better movie on intelligent design. It deserves to be

1297
01:03:21,560 --> 01:03:24,640
Speaker 3: in the big screens. But tell us what's unique about

1298
01:03:24,640 --> 01:03:26,560
Speaker 3: the film and why people should go see it.

1299
01:03:26,600 --> 01:03:30,600
Speaker 2: Well, it combines these evidences and so you know, when

1300
01:03:30,600 --> 01:03:32,880
Speaker 2: you're the nice thing about doing a film like this is,

1301
01:03:32,920 --> 01:03:34,480
Speaker 2: of course people watch it. It's gonna be a bunch

1302
01:03:34,480 --> 01:03:38,800
Speaker 2: of experts, you know, started talking, but amazing animation, a

1303
01:03:38,920 --> 01:03:42,360
Speaker 2: narrative structure so that you can actually see how these

1304
01:03:42,360 --> 01:03:45,040
Speaker 2: things connect. It's not like one little isolated piece of

1305
01:03:45,080 --> 01:03:48,560
Speaker 2: evidence about the origin of the universe. But there's a

1306
01:03:48,640 --> 01:03:51,040
Speaker 2: beginning of the universe. There's this fine tuning at the

1307
01:03:51,320 --> 01:03:54,920
Speaker 2: fundamental levels. There's the origin of life, there's the complexity

1308
01:03:54,920 --> 01:04:00,360
Speaker 2: of life, there's the competing explanations. And what's beautifu about

1309
01:04:00,360 --> 01:04:02,000
Speaker 2: it is, of course a lot of us have always

1310
01:04:02,000 --> 01:04:04,120
Speaker 2: wanted to focus on, like the privileged planet. If person

1311
01:04:04,160 --> 01:04:06,320
Speaker 2: reads a privileged planet. We were criticized for this. We

1312
01:04:06,360 --> 01:04:09,160
Speaker 2: don't make a theological argument. We don't go any farther

1313
01:04:09,320 --> 01:04:10,960
Speaker 2: other than to say, look this, we think this is

1314
01:04:11,040 --> 01:04:13,360
Speaker 2: solid evidence for purpose. We just didn't want to get

1315
01:04:13,400 --> 01:04:15,480
Speaker 2: out beyond the evidence. But as I just said a

1316
01:04:15,520 --> 01:04:18,520
Speaker 2: minute ago, I do think you line the evidence up

1317
01:04:18,520 --> 01:04:20,480
Speaker 2: a certain way, and you can frame it in a

1318
01:04:20,480 --> 01:04:23,880
Speaker 2: certain way. You can get from the evidence of natural

1319
01:04:23,920 --> 01:04:27,920
Speaker 2: science to the existence of God, and that's what the

1320
01:04:27,960 --> 01:04:31,520
Speaker 2: film does. It finally sort of it's the full picture,

1321
01:04:31,880 --> 01:04:34,200
Speaker 2: and in some ways it's the full picture at the moment.

1322
01:04:34,600 --> 01:04:36,480
Speaker 2: Now it's an hour and a half film, so we

1323
01:04:36,520 --> 01:04:40,120
Speaker 2: can pack everything into it, obviously, but it's really great.

1324
01:04:40,160 --> 01:04:43,640
Speaker 2: It's also great because there are people of actually different

1325
01:04:43,720 --> 01:04:47,920
Speaker 2: Christian traditions, non Christians right in the film. It's sort

1326
01:04:47,920 --> 01:04:50,360
Speaker 2: of all over the place talking about this, which is

1327
01:04:50,400 --> 01:04:51,840
Speaker 2: in some ways I think it's a sign of the

1328
01:04:51,880 --> 01:04:55,440
Speaker 2: maturity of the research and the debate that it's like, okay,

1329
01:04:55,640 --> 01:04:58,440
Speaker 2: look lots of people are talking about this, guys, and

1330
01:04:58,520 --> 01:05:01,000
Speaker 2: so you can't say we can't have this conversation anymore.

1331
01:05:01,080 --> 01:05:03,560
Speaker 1: It's amazing thing about the film Expelled that.

1332
01:05:03,560 --> 01:05:06,480
Speaker 3: Came out, what oh, two thousand and eight, two thousand

1333
01:05:06,480 --> 01:05:09,640
Speaker 3: and eight, so almost two decades ago, and it was

1334
01:05:09,800 --> 01:05:13,000
Speaker 3: like the idea was on the defensive and there had

1335
01:05:13,000 --> 01:05:15,040
Speaker 3: to be humor, and you need somebody to like Ben

1336
01:05:15,120 --> 01:05:18,560
Speaker 3: Steyning to even get a voice. This is like a mature,

1337
01:05:18,800 --> 01:05:22,520
Speaker 3: thoughtful here's the case where part of the conversation test.

1338
01:05:22,560 --> 01:05:25,120
Speaker 3: It like we could almost do an analysis of those

1339
01:05:25,160 --> 01:05:29,000
Speaker 3: two films about how culture has changed and the debate

1340
01:05:29,040 --> 01:05:31,160
Speaker 3: about God has shifted. Of course, that was in the

1341
01:05:31,200 --> 01:05:34,560
Speaker 3: height of the New Atheists, when everybody was like an attacking.

1342
01:05:34,160 --> 01:05:37,400
Speaker 2: That's the key thing. That was the peak of New atheism,

1343
01:05:38,120 --> 01:05:40,360
Speaker 2: you know, that was when I debated Christpher Hitchins. It

1344
01:05:40,400 --> 01:05:42,840
Speaker 2: was Stanford. It was part of the kind of run

1345
01:05:42,920 --> 01:05:45,240
Speaker 2: up to the film. That's why ben Stein was the moderator,

1346
01:05:45,640 --> 01:05:48,000
Speaker 2: and New Atheism was just everywhere. Well, I've got I

1347
01:05:48,000 --> 01:05:50,360
Speaker 2: won't mention them. I've got two friends that I'm very

1348
01:05:50,360 --> 01:05:52,600
Speaker 2: close with that I worked on other issues. These guys

1349
01:05:52,600 --> 01:05:56,080
Speaker 2: were really active in New atheism. That is deader than

1350
01:05:56,200 --> 01:05:58,440
Speaker 2: dead at this point, right, It's like that's just not

1351
01:05:58,600 --> 01:06:01,840
Speaker 2: where the action is. There's other stuff happening. But you know,

1352
01:06:01,920 --> 01:06:05,080
Speaker 2: that was the impression all these you know, all this

1353
01:06:05,200 --> 01:06:09,840
Speaker 2: adulation about this kind of movement and it just petered out.

1354
01:06:09,960 --> 01:06:13,080
Speaker 2: And so I think that that's a sign of how

1355
01:06:13,120 --> 01:06:15,640
Speaker 2: things have changed since the sort of beginning, because ID

1356
01:06:15,840 --> 01:06:20,240
Speaker 2: sort of emerged alongside the New atheist movement. It's Peter

1357
01:06:20,320 --> 01:06:22,280
Speaker 2: de Yeah, yeah, we're still here.

1358
01:06:22,280 --> 01:06:24,920
Speaker 3: Yes you are, although you predated it in the eighties.

1359
01:06:25,000 --> 01:06:27,800
Speaker 3: If you go back in the nineties, Yeah, we're here

1360
01:06:27,960 --> 01:06:30,040
Speaker 3: arguably stronger than we've ever been.

1361
01:06:30,160 --> 01:06:30,360
Speaker 2: Yeah.

1362
01:06:30,440 --> 01:06:32,920
Speaker 3: Tomsky and I Casey Leskin are updating the book on

1363
01:06:33,000 --> 01:06:35,040
Speaker 3: ID that we released, as I think about it was

1364
01:06:35,040 --> 01:06:38,640
Speaker 3: also two thousand and eight, Understanding Intelligent Design. So good

1365
01:06:38,640 --> 01:06:41,360
Speaker 3: things are happening, happening, but it feels like a certain

1366
01:06:41,480 --> 01:06:44,400
Speaker 3: maturity that's come where we're just doing the work and

1367
01:06:44,440 --> 01:06:45,200
Speaker 3: moving forward.

1368
01:06:45,680 --> 01:06:46,560
Speaker 1: For those who want to.

1369
01:06:46,520 --> 01:06:49,840
Speaker 3: Engage folks, if you're watching this going or listening to going, Okay,

1370
01:06:49,840 --> 01:06:52,840
Speaker 3: wait a minute, you did not consider this objection, write

1371
01:06:52,880 --> 01:06:55,880
Speaker 3: it in. Write the word question of caps as succinctly

1372
01:06:55,880 --> 01:06:58,040
Speaker 3: as you can. In fact, if you don't have any objections,

1373
01:06:58,040 --> 01:07:01,000
Speaker 3: you can write and chat GPT. Give me the best

1374
01:07:01,120 --> 01:07:04,200
Speaker 3: objections to fine tuning, and if you care about that,

1375
01:07:04,640 --> 01:07:07,000
Speaker 3: load them in here. We will not ignore any that

1376
01:07:07,040 --> 01:07:10,080
Speaker 3: are on topic and are the best objections. Write it

1377
01:07:10,080 --> 01:07:14,560
Speaker 3: in so you can invite your Christian friends, your skeptical friends, whoever,

1378
01:07:14,640 --> 01:07:17,680
Speaker 3: to participate. Jay and I will be back Tuesday at

1379
01:07:17,720 --> 01:07:20,960
Speaker 3: four point thirty to take your questions. Check out the

1380
01:07:21,000 --> 01:07:23,600
Speaker 3: film The Story of Everything. It's so well done. Go

1381
01:07:23,680 --> 01:07:27,080
Speaker 3: support it in theaters when it's done, download it, watch it.

1382
01:07:27,520 --> 01:07:31,200
Speaker 2: Infinite universe would relieve us of the necessity of understanding

1383
01:07:31,200 --> 01:07:34,480
Speaker 2: the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.

1384
01:07:35,040 --> 01:07:37,920
Speaker 2: Notice that verb relieve. That's not a scientific term. What

1385
01:07:37,920 --> 01:07:41,880
Speaker 2: does dicky mean? Well, if the universe is eternal and infinite,

1386
01:07:42,760 --> 01:07:44,439
Speaker 2: then we don't even have to ask the question where

1387
01:07:44,440 --> 01:07:48,200
Speaker 2: it came from. So, if an infinite universe releaves us

1388
01:07:48,200 --> 01:07:51,160
Speaker 2: of the necessity, what does a finite universe do? And

1389
01:07:51,200 --> 01:07:54,640
Speaker 2: so whatever explains the finite physical universe must be itself

1390
01:07:54,680 --> 01:07:58,600
Speaker 2: non physical. Whether it explains the finite material universe must

1391
01:07:58,680 --> 01:08:01,880
Speaker 2: itself be immterial. To get in this way to the

1392
01:08:01,920 --> 01:08:04,360
Speaker 2: philosophical stopping point of the first.

1393
01:08:04,120 --> 01:08:10,160
Speaker 3: Cast before we go, anything else you're working on that's

1394
01:08:10,200 --> 01:08:12,840
Speaker 3: coming up that you want to tell us about, or

1395
01:08:12,880 --> 01:08:14,600
Speaker 3: how can people follow you?

1396
01:08:14,640 --> 01:08:17,280
Speaker 2: Follow me at x is, you know, I'm a gen

1397
01:08:17,439 --> 01:08:19,519
Speaker 2: xer and so x is the main social media. But

1398
01:08:19,880 --> 01:08:24,559
Speaker 2: at doctor j Richards, doctor d RT and then my

1399
01:08:24,640 --> 01:08:28,120
Speaker 2: name Jay Richards, and I'm actually working on questions about

1400
01:08:28,120 --> 01:08:31,799
Speaker 2: health in chronic disease, actually at the Heritage Foundation, working

1401
01:08:31,840 --> 01:08:37,639
Speaker 2: on this weird reality that American children are developing these

1402
01:08:37,760 --> 01:08:42,280
Speaker 2: crazy chronic diseases, which actually has a tie into these questions. Yeah,

1403
01:08:42,320 --> 01:08:45,680
Speaker 2: and so this stuff, this isn't just sort of metaphysical

1404
01:08:45,680 --> 01:08:48,640
Speaker 2: and interesting. I mean I think these ideas actually have

1405
01:08:48,840 --> 01:08:52,240
Speaker 2: a role to play in public policy and in our health. Actually,

1406
01:08:52,360 --> 01:08:52,760
Speaker 2: I love it.

1407
01:08:52,760 --> 01:08:54,479
Speaker 1: Well, let's have a conversation about that.

1408
01:08:55,000 --> 01:08:55,200
Speaker 2: Jay.

1409
01:08:55,240 --> 01:08:56,000
Speaker 1: We'll see you Tuesday.

1410
01:08:56,040 --> 01:08:56,400
Speaker 2: Thanks. Sure.

1411
01:08:56,400 --> 01:08:59,040
Speaker 3: Hey, friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that

1412
01:08:59,120 --> 01:09:02,040
Speaker 3: fall button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning

1413
01:09:02,080 --> 01:09:04,439
Speaker 3: in haven't done this yet, and it makes a huge

1414
01:09:04,439 --> 01:09:07,200
Speaker 3: difference in helping us reach and equip more people and

1415
01:09:07,240 --> 01:09:11,639
Speaker 3: build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review. Every

1416
01:09:11,840 --> 01:09:14,960
Speaker 3: review helps. Thanks for listening to the Sean McDowell Show,

1417
01:09:15,080 --> 01:09:18,920
Speaker 3: brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University,

1418
01:09:18,960 --> 01:09:22,280
Speaker 3: where we have on campus and online programs and apologetic

1419
01:09:22,320 --> 01:09:25,599
Speaker 3: spiritual information, marriage and family, Bible, and so much more.

1420
01:09:25,680 --> 01:09:28,679
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1421
01:09:28,760 --> 01:09:31,599
Speaker 3: and defend the Christian faith today and we will see

1422
01:09:31,640 --> 01:09:33,479
Speaker 3: you when the next episode drops.