“EXTREMELY Compelling!” Can Science PROVE God Exists? Stephen C Meyer Responds To Richard Dawkins

Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at clod.ai slash spotify and keep thinking. That's clod.ai slash spotify. What makes you think it's Noah's Ark? It's a visual object. You see the ship shape on the side of the mountain. Just south of the volcano Mount Ararat, just like Genesis chapter 8, verse 4 says, and it happened to be exactly 300 royal Egyptian cupids. Even if you found out that it was absolutely a boat, I don't know how you would show that it was Noah's boat. What if you found lots of animal bones? There are lots of animal bones. It could be an incredibly good story. The idea that the Bible is just a collection of myths and legends, I don't think is any longer standing up. There's extensive external corroboration. If we find patterns of two by two animals, would you accept this is Noah's Ark? That would be extremely compelling to me. It's the 20th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' seminal work, The God Delusion, which made the biologist a megastar and spawned the new atheist movement. Arguably for the first time in history, it was fashionable to be unfaithful in the biblical sense, and a rush of intellectuals became very popular by explaining why they believed in nothing but the science. Today, the landscape looks a little bit different. Church attendances are climbing again. The Bible is once again, a bestseller. And my guest in the studio today believes that science is not an antidote to God, but the proof. Stephen C. Myers' recent article in The Telegraph earned a furious rebuke from Professor Dawkins himself, and he joins me now. We did ask Richard Dawkins if he fancied coming on to debate head-to-head with you, but he's not here, so which gives you his answer. The spat that you had with Dawkins, I mean, simple terms, what was the spat about? Well, it's really never been a spat. It's just been two opposing views, developed independently. Several times, you and others have asked for the opportunity to have us together to have a conversation. Finally, it happened in Syriatum. The editor at The Telegraph reached out to both of us that Harry Howard had the idea of having a commemorative piece about the 20-year anniversary of the God delusion, one from the perspective of someone who is critical of the argument of the God delusion, that being myself, and then Dawkins himself defending his original thesis. I wrote the critical piece and also suggested that more than just the fact that the new atheism is on the wane, but I argue that there's a powerful building case for the reality of God from new scientific evidence from different fields, and that the God delusion, in a sense, when it was first published, the scientific arguments that it made were already anachronistic when you looked at the developments in cosmology, physics, and biology over the last century and right up to the present. When Richard Dawkins came on Uncensored the last time, we played him a clip of you. Yes. Let's see his response. There has to be something more difficult to understand than the human brain can understand. I accept that. But it doesn't have to be God. It doesn't have to be the kind of God that we're talking about. Who, oh, I don't know, forgives sins and listens to prayers and things like that. There is something very mysterious, and I don't understand it, and you don't understand it, and maybe we never will. I think it's not clear whether physicists understand it. Some do, some don't. But it's obviously going to be very mysterious. But God is not that interesting mystery. God is just a personification of human desires, a father figure, something like that, somebody who looks after you. You said, you said in the beginning it was comforting for you. God is somebody who listens to prayers, who forgives sins, who takes action for the benefit of humanity or not, as the case may be. We're not talking about that now. We're talking about deeply, deeply mysterious, profound things which physics is working on, and it's very difficult, very difficult to understand. And the fact that you don't understand it and I don't understand it is not a good ground, not good grounds for suddenly invoking a supernatural sky, daddy. What is your response to that? Well, this is a standard Dawkins trope. He wants to say that if you invoke the activity of a designing intelligence to explain some of the things that we're finding in nature, for example, the digital code in the DNA molecule or the exquisite fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial arrangement of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe, the fine tuning and the information bearing properties of DNA are not positive evidence of a designing intelligence, they're just a placeholder for ignorance. And if you invoke God or if you invoke an intelligent designer, you've committed a so-called God of the gaps argument. But instead, the argument has a strong positive basis, and that is that our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific evidence, shows that digital information, for example, is always the product of the activity of a mind, of an intelligence. And what we've discovered in modern biology, long after the time of Darwin from the 1950s, '60s, '70s, right up to the present, is that living cells contain information in a digital form. And the DNA molecule, which is part of a larger information storage, transmission, and processing system, is just an exquisite informational set of properties. And we know from our experience that information always comes from a mind. So this isn't an inference based on ignorance. It's based on our knowledge of cause and effect. We know that it takes a mind to generate information, especially in a digital form. We find information in DNA. Therefore, we have a strong positive basis for an inference to the activity of a mind and the origin of life. You wrote this piece to mark the 20 years of "God Delusion." It was called "Science is Proving Richard Dawkins and the New Atheist Wrong." That sparked a reaction from him. But in your column, you argue the new atheist philosophical arguments were never very good. Moreover, their arguments seem strangely anachronistic, following many of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century. You just touched on some of them. What are some of the big scientific developments you referenced in the piece? Let's just go through these for perhaps the less well-initiated. Yeah. The Big Bang Theory. Well, the Big Bang Theory is essentially a way of talking about a discovery that astronomers and astrophysicists and cosmologists have made, which is that the universe, the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy, as best we can tell, had a definite beginning. That time itself had a beginning. Before which, or independent of which, there was no matter to do the causing. So the attempt to explain the origin of the universe materialistically is a non-starter. And instead, what we need is to invoke some kind of pre-existing mind or creator to explain the origin of the universe. It's a discovery that was-- So that's-- you explain this very articulately, much more scientifically than me. My argument with Dawkins when I had him on was, look, my issue with your atheism and your God delusion argument is that you cannot tell me what was there before the Big Bang. You can't. Right. Because your brain can't understand what nothing is. No human brain can understand that. Right? I mean, no one can explain to me, well, what was there before nothing? The kind of lack of matter you just discussed. Well, what is that? And how long has that been there? And what's infinity? And all these things. Because a human brain can't understand or rationalize it, that offers to me more evidence there must be something more sophisticated, more advanced, more intelligent than us. Or, as someone who believes in God, I think that lends succor to the belief that there must have been some supernatural thing. I do, too. And let me tell you why. From the standpoint of my own field of philosophy of science, the test of a good explanation is one that invokes an entity which has the causal power to produce the effect in question. Materialism, or pure matter, cannot explain the origin of matter. That's a non-starter. Instead, to explain the origin of matter, space, time, and energy, you would need an entity that's outside of matter and energy, time and space. Right. God has that profile. Moreover, if you're looking at the fine-tuning of the universe from the very beginning, the kind of entity that you would need to explain fine-tuning, based on our experience of other finely-tuned systems, whether they be internal combustion engines, or digital code, or French recipes, what we call fine-tuning is always the product of a mind. So the kind of things that the physicists and the cosmologists have discovered about-- about the origin and structure of the universe are the very kinds of things that cannot be adequately explained by purely material causes, but instead suggest the need for a mind, and indeed a transcendent mind, a mind separate from the physical universe. So-- Could AI ever crack this? Well, AI can help us solve practical problems. But this is a fundamental question of essentially what philosophers call causal adequacy. We need a particular-- But if it is, as Trump calls it now, superior intelligence-- That's right. And I'm going to repeat myself for the 100th time. But when I interviewed Stephen Hawking before he died, he said the biggest threat to mankind was artificial intelligence learning to self-design, because then it could very quickly get out of our control. And I sort of fear we're heading towards that point. But if it does get out of our control and is a superior intelligence, could it potentially, in theory, give the solutions to these questions? I think you could program an AI to evade-- VALUATE THE causal adequacy of competing explanations. And I think if you did, it would come up with the same conclusion that I'm suggesting, that materialism as a philosophical system of thought and the materialistic cosmologies that have been proposed are inadequate to explain the origin of matter. You may remember another one of the new atheists was Lawrence Krauss. His book was called Universe from Nothing. And it turned out, however, that his nothing was not a physical nothing. It was a prior set of purely mathematical laws that he thought and other quantum cosmologists thought could explain the origin of the universe. But pure math is conceptual. It has no physical or it has no material substance or cause. But also, my whole thing is always the same, which is my logical brain. If I'm Spock from Star Trek, it's just, OK, well, what was there before the universe got originated? I mean, it's an obvious question. And my point, Piers, is that if you're positing a prior mathematical state to explain the origin of the universe, you're not going to be able to explain the origin of the universe. Math is purely conceptual. You've implicitly confirmed the existence of a mind prior to the universe. Correct. The second big scientific development, the idea of the Goldilocks universe. What is that? Yeah, we've been talking a little bit about that. That's the idea that the basic parameters of physics, the strength of gravitational attraction, the strength of electromagnetic attraction, the masses of the elementary particles, things like the quarks, for example, the force that causes the expansion of the universe, called the cosmological constant, and the initial arrangement of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe, all these parameters fall within very narrow tolerances, outside of which life and even basic chemistry would be impossible. And one after another of these parameters has hit these sweet spots, these Goldilocks zones, has suggested to many physicists that we're living in a Goldilocks universe, a universe that we have fine-tuning and the fine-tuning suggests, as Sir Fred Hoyle put it, a common-sense interpretation, he said, suggests that it's super-intellectual. Why is it called Goldilocks? Well, remember in the Goldilocks story with the three bears, the porridge is not too hot, not too cold, just right. All the physical parameters are not too strong, not too weak, not too heavy, not too light. Everything is in a sweet spot. It's in the just right zone. Could there be other universes? Well, that's the main go-to atheistic argument now. And the multiverse idea is that there are so many other universes that, that eventually one would have to arise with the right combination of physical parameters in the, just the right sweet spots to allow for the possibility of life. But how can we possibly know? I mean, the scale of the universe is so mind-blowing anyway. How could we as mere humans on planet Earth have the vaguest conception in reality of whether there are other universes? We wouldn't. Well, first of all, we have no evidence of them, but there's. But how could we? I mean, we'd have to go outside our existing universe. It's a very good question. Which is, it's so big. It's unfathomably big. How could we possibly conceptualize anything else? There have been some physicists that have proposed tests by which we might detect the impact of another universe. But they don't know, do they? They don't. But here's the real kicker, that in all of the attempts to, if you want to explain the multiverse, you have to have some kind of universe generating mechanism. And the universe generating mechanisms that have proposed, all the universe generating mechanisms that have been proposed, whether they're based on something called string theory, or whether they're based on something called inflationary cosmology, presuppose the need for prior unexplained fine-tuning of the universe generating mechanisms as a condition of generating new universes. So you end up being right back where you started. Even if you propose a multiverse, you need to explain prior unexplained fine-tuning. Logically, that's exactly where you end up. The third one is the signature in the cells. What's that about? Well, I thank you. That was actually a book title of mine. So I appreciate the promotion. But it's a good way to describe what's going on. In Dawkins's article in the Telegraph, he claimed that no one had updated the design argument from before the time of Darwin. But two weeks before, when I wrote in the Telegraph, I described the evidence for intelligent design based on the discovery of the information-bearing properties of DNA. And in the book, I go much further and describe the whole information processing system. In fact, there are two separate information processing systems at work in even the simplest living cells. It's an extraordinary realm of digital nanotechnology that we've discovered. What we know from our experience is that whenever we see information, especially in a digital form, it always arises from an intelligent source. Richard Dawkins himself acknowledges that the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever devised. Well, what do we know about the origin of software? What do we know about the origin of machine code? It always comes from a mind. So if that's what we're looking at, and this is the universal consensus of molecular biologists, we are dealing with a form of information, the technical name is specified or functionally specified information, that always arises from a mind. One of the early scientists who applied the information sciences to analyzing DNA and RNA said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. So what are we looking at? We are looking at an artifact or a feature of living cells that we know from in any other realm of experience would trigger an awareness of a designing mind. Bill Gates says that DNA is a form of information, but what are we looking at? We are looking at an artifact or a feature of living cells that we know from in any other realm of experience would trigger an Darwin mortally wounded it. This is your core idea of intelligent design. And his success has finished the job. To Darwin's sword, I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheaters to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheaters, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator's ball? That whole question is downstream from the question that he ignores and it lies, which is how do you get biological form in the first place? Where does the first life come from? And where does the information necessary to build it come from? Dawkins has said that the design argument has not been updated in a hundred years, but the argument that I sketched in the Telegraph article is based on developments in molecular biology that began in the 1950s, started with something called the sequence hypothesis of Francis Crick. And those, the discoveries of the sequence hypothesis of modern molecular biology have completely changed the game as far as whether we're looking at a design system or something that could be the result of undirected natural processes like natural selection and random mutation. His go-to way of responding to the case for intelligent design that I just sketched is to say, well, we can't invoke something more complex like a mind to explain something less complex like the digital code in DNA. That would be a violation of Occam's razor. We have to explain something more simple. But that's a misapplication of Occam's razor. Occam's razor said that, Occam said that we should not needlessly multiply theoretical entities. His principle is not a prohibition against invoking a complex mind to explain certain phenomena. If it was, we couldn't invoke the mind of Richard Dawkins to explain the God delusion. But of course, Richard Dawkins's mind is the explanation for the beautiful, elegant prose in the God delusion. Instead, Occam's prohibition is against multiplying, making complex hypotheses with lots and lots of different explanatory entities as the multiverse offers us. Right. Okay, well, look, as mentioned, we did ask Richard Dawkins to come on and debate face-to-face, but he doesn't really return our calls anymore. So in his place, an intellectual ally of the great man, Matt Dillahunty, is from The Atheist Experience. His many conversations with Dawkins about their shared atheism have been viewed millions of times on YouTube. And he joins me now. Well, Matt, welcome to Uncensored. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. You've been listening there to Professor Meyer. So what is your response to what he's been saying? Well, I've never met Dr. Meyer before, but I read the Telegraph article and I was expecting, I don't know if he was saddled with the title or if he thinks the title is fair, but when you start off by saying that science is demonstrating that Dawkins and the new atheists are wrong, I was expecting science and new science. And there's really nothing new in there, just like there's nothing new in new atheism, which I guess is a common criticism. But for example, the Bored Goof Blinken model that he cites and that William Lane Craig and others have cited, it has its issues. But as Sean Carroll pointed out, Sean Carroll had Alan Goof come in and hold up a sign because that model does not suggest that the universe had a beginning. In fact, he specifically states that he suspects it did not have a beginning. And the thing that I see with creationism is, whether they call it intelligent design or not, they're not capable of doing science because they don't have a testable and falsifiable model. And so what they'll do is try to poke holes in evolution and physics, fill in those gaps, the kind of God of gaps that Dr. Meyer was talking about earlier. But really, it comes down to, look, we're trying to explain reality without appealing to our magical panacea, and they haven't finished it yet. Therefore, we win. And that's just not how a reasonable case for belief works. I don't know how the universe began. I'm not a physicist. I'm not a biologist. I'm not an information specialist. But my position is, if you can demonstrate an evidence-based, reasonable warrant for a God belief, I'll believe it. I used to. I was a scientist. I was a scientist. I was a a fundamentalist Christian for decades. what what made you not become a christian i thought that uh i thought that god had been calling me to be a preacher and so did my family and my church and i sort of ran from that calling and wanted to kind of live my life and when i decided to get serious about it and pursue it in preparation for seminary i dug in i i wanted to find a way i had a roommate at the time who was an atheist but didn't care about it and i wanted to make sure that i was able to convince him that my beliefs about jesus in particular were true so that i didn't get to heaven and have god say hey why is this guy burning in hell and i found out in short order that i didn't have good reason to believe christianity was true but that didn't mean that there wasn't some god and so i dug in on philosophy and science to figure out if there was a god what could we know about it and if the answer is we can't know anything then i must be a non-believer okay uh professor mind richard dawkins concluded this column by saying if verified god would be the most exciting hypothesis in the entire history of science a universe conceived and designed by superhuman intelligence would be a totally different kind of universe from the one which in my opinion we actually inhabit however i believe the hypothesis is almost certainly false 20 years on i stand by what i wrote in the god delusion bearing in mind what he said there what's your response to what matt delahunty just wanted to say nice to meet you matt watch some of your stuff this podcast is supported by anthropic the public benefit corporation behind claude everyone's got a hard question about ai anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions ask yours at claude.ai spotify and keep thinking that's claude.ai spotify online your story is very compelling and and interesting and i look forward to the conversation and maybe maybe another one outside of this sort of a debating type environment but um be happy to i think uh uh professor dawkins in that final uh segment of his article says something a little bit different than what matt matt has just said because he he uh has identified the god hypothesis as something that is testable uh he has a famous quote where he says that the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose no design nothing but blind pitiless indifference well blind pitiless indifference is his shorthand for his scientific atheist or materialistic worldview which he thinks is testable by looking at the world around us and seeing if what he expects to see is what he should expect to see given a materialist perspective but the converse of that is also true that if materialism is is testable so is theism and the point that i make in my book the return of the god hypothesis is that the major discoveries of the last 100 years uh the discovery that the universe had a beginning the universe that the they discovered that the universe is fine has been finely tuned since the beginning and the discovery that the living cell contains an exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology all of these discoveries are quite unexpected from a a materialistic world picture or worldview but they're they're much more expected from a theistic worldview and therefore they provide evidential support for that kind of worldview that is to say theism as much as materialism is testable against the scientific evidence okay um matt delahunty there are kind of three tenets i guess which are used in favor of the atheism argument i want to go through them and get professor meyer to respond so the first one is the science has explained many things we once thought were controlled by god would you would you concur with that yes all right i don't think that that means it's not like we've proven everything or we have a great understanding of everything when when dr meyer talked earlier just a moment ago um about basically it seemed like he was implying that if the natural world is testable then the supernatural world is testable as well and i completely disagree with that um the fact that we can engage in uh testability falsifiability being key aspects of science if we have a model that we can investigate about the world we're able to explore that doesn't mean that a world we're not able to explore is testable in principle or otherwise and so the null hypothesis or the default position is i don't get to consider god as a candidate explanation for anything until somebody demonstrates that that god is possible plausible probable etc and so far i mean of the gods that have been proposed the ones that are testable seem to have been debunked in some sense or another and the ones that are untestable are the ones that persist and i'd argue maybe i don't i don't know for sure that i have uh there's weak atheism and strong atheism where there are gods i'm not convinced exist and there are other gods where i'm convinced they absolutely don't exist because they're in conflict with observations in reality and i one of the differences probably between me and dr meyer is that um by picking a particular god he might have eliminated and be a hard atheist on more gods than i am but if you start with hey i need to be convinced and convincing uh like i'm not i don't buy into doxastic volunteerism i don't think you choose your beliefs i think you become convinced and you can become convinced for good reasons or bad reasons and i think that people for fear of acknowledging they don't know and living in a in a world where they don't have the answers they desperately seek um are more prone to saying hey this may not be enough enough information and enough data for me to reach a conclusion about a b or c or d but i'm going to go ahead and do it here professor i mean obviously respond to that but also there's this ongoing issue of if there is a a god why would god allow despicable evil and suffering you know i remember my grandmother was a big believer and she sort of renounced her faith over the holocaust for example sure you know she came out of the the second world war in her 20s and just couldn't understand how a just fair god would allow that kind of suffering to have happened and evil what do you say to that well you and i talked about this the last time i was here in studio and of course it's one of the the deep and and really troubling uh parts of the human condition um uh and i think we i sketched or articulated what's sometimes called the free will defense that um god having created human beings in his own image with volition and free will uh deemed it better to allow us to have that free will than to make human beings puppets or automatons that are simply programmed to do whatever he wants but the risk of that that he incurred with that choice was the risk that we might use our free will to harm each other which we have certainly done and i think the the the christian story that you and i share in our belief system is is the story of of how god will redeem things despite despite the choices that humans have made why why doesn't god reveal him or herself or itself oh you are you not talking about the what's called sometimes called the hiddenness yes i'm less sympathetic to that if he exists well where is he well when when you work in the area i do looking at the inner workings of the cell and when i was on last with you you showed me a cross section of his cell with the um the the i've been i've been giving you a kind of a a rough approximation of what what scientists are actually seeing inside the cell when you you see the the there are two separate information processing systems we have a computer programmer and uh who's worked with us in our offices in seattle who's a elite uh architect level programmer from from microsoft he came into my office one day he was writing 10 000 lines of code to simulate what's called the gene expression system the means by which the digital code and dna directs the construction of proteins and protein machines and he threw a book on my table and it's called design patterns and he said he said very dramatically i get a feeling someone figured this out before us i said what do you mean he said well a design pattern in computer science is a an established means of storing and processing digital information and the it's not just that there's digital code in dna which you're always talking about steve it's that there to process the information there are all these established computer design patterns uh hierarchical filing of information automated error correction he went on ticked all these things off and he said it's very eerie it's like there is a very powerful mind having left its fingerprints in what has been made which is the very which echoes actually the biblical language that from the things that are made the unseen qualities of the creator are clearly manifest uh mandela hundy pascal's wager for atheists is a 17th century philosophical argument by blaise pascal that claims it's always rational to believe in god because the potential reward of infinite heaven outweighs any finite earthly loss in other words for atheists if you say you believe you gain everything if it's true but if it's not true you lose nothing why not why not take the bet well that's not quite what pascal was saying pascal by the way agreed with me that belief is not a choice and he wasn't arguing about belief in god versus disbelief in god he was arguing about the contrast between a specific version of god versus disbelief in that and so So it's not a no-lose situation for the theist, because which heaven do you seek? Which hell do you avoid? How do you determine what criteria you should use to judge which one to seek out? I'm willing to believe in any heaven or any hell that is actually supported by evidence, but I find it kind of dangerous to say, let me glom onto this version of a heaven and hell. And then what if you find out there's no God? Well, you probably won't find out. You maybe haven't lost anything. What if you find out there's a different God or judged by a different criteria? What if God's trying to determine how gullible we are, how rigorous we are in seeking information and how devoted we are to the truth, rather than taking the thing that's more comforting or more popular in our area? Pascal's Wager has tons and tons of flaws and isn't merely about God versus no God. In a broad sense. But I think even if it were, no God has met its burden of proof. Um, the interesting things that, that, uh, Stephen was saying about the, the cells, uh, it's really great. And, oh yeah, we're using an analogy of information to say, oh, that comes from a mind, but it's our minds that are using languages we've created to describe the physical workings of the universe. The notion that we would see order is the least surprising thing. And if the universe had turned out some different way, even if that was possible, which they haven't demonstrated, um, wouldn't there possibly be some other life sitting here thinking that the universe was designed for them? I think probably Douglas Adams said it better than anybody else. Well, okay. Let's just expand the debate now. Can I come back to that? Yeah, of course. Well, yeah. Um, the, the, first of all, the information that's stored in DNA is not merely analogous to the kind of functional information that's stored in DNA. It has the same two properties, uh, technically it's called complexity or improbability plus what's known as functional specificity. And that conjunction of properties always indicates the activity of intelligence. It's not merely an analogy. Um, and then, and then secondly, I just say that, uh, the, that, uh, this is, we can talk about Pascal's wager or whether belief in God gives comfort. I think those sorts of questions are best to set aside in my way of thinking that the, that really we can adjudicate these things. Evidentially when professor Dawkins says the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect. If materialism is true, um, it turns out that, that the, the things that have been discovered in the last 100 years in science, that about the universe having a beginning about it's being finely tuned from the beginning and about the exquisite digital information processing that's going on inside cells is completely unexpected from a materialistic point of view. But it's exactly the kind of thing that theism would expect because theism presupposes the activity of intelligence. The designing mind as the ultimate explanation for biology and cosmology. Okay. Let's let the universe having a beginning isn't consistent with the actual science and not even the science that you're representing. The authors of the, or at least one of the authors, there's going to be a great article in the journal inference and in coming out very soon about the board. Good. Full income theorem showing that, that it does indeed show that there must have been a beginning and attempts to get around it, get trapped in a catch 22. The author is Bruce. That'll be handy when it comes out. So as it stands right now, the consensus of physicists, not, not true. Matt, Matt, the Lincoln himself, I have the studies right here. Yeah. The Lincoln himself has assisted nowhere to hide. There is a, there is his theorem shows that there's a beginning. I'm talking about surveys, consulting physicists broadly. And, and the study that I saw this morning is that 68% hold to a big bang cosmology is a theory that says the universe evolves from a hot tent state that says, there's nothing about whether there was an absolute beginning of time or not. That's the latest. Let me ask you the question. I asked professor Dawkins there. What was there before? Nothing. What is nothing? Well, that question may be nonsensical because it's time and space. Space time has one thing because they're inseparable. If that expansion occurred and we can't explore prior to the plank time, like we can't break anything down prior to that, we still don't even don't even have a, a, a, a brain. I mean, all of you, all of you. That's functional beginning to the. The universe. You've just talked out of both sides of your mouth. But let's clear, I mean, Matt. No, that's the, that's the functional expansion. We haven't even discussed whether or not a time or B time is. Yeah, but Matt, you have no comprehension of, of what nothing is or infinity or any of those things. None of us do. We can't. Well, I wouldn't say no comprehension, but yes, I, I, I agree functionally that if these. Well, no, no comprehension of what, in other words, what was there, people say the big bang theory. Okay. Well, what was there before the big bang theory? And people say nothing. I say, what's nothing. When did that start? And then they say, well, it's infinite. Well, what's infinite? What does that mean? We can't understand these things. Our human brains cannot understand what those things are. Sorry to interrupt here. The affirmation of the universe from nothing has been essential to both Hawking's quantum cosmology. It was the title of Lawrence Krauss's book. That is an implicit affirmation that the universe had a beginning and there are multiple lines of observational astronomy that point in that direction and the theoretical physics also points in that direction. There have been numerous attempts to circumvent that because it's a, it's a, it's a conclusion that's very uncomfortable for philosophical materialists, but those, those conclusions end up in Catch-22s. I've done a lot of work on this myself. I've got two chapters on the problems of quantum cosmology, how they inadvertently, A, never got rid of a beginning, but inadvertently affirmed the need for a preexisting mind, even as they attempted to circumvent the theistic conclusions of, of a beginning from observational astronomy. Right. Well, one of the, one of the things which is fascinating about this is that many believers have tried to prove the existence of God by looking for definitive proof of the stories in the Bible. And in the corner of Eastern Turkey, a team of independent researchers claim they have scientific proof of one of the biggest religious stories. Andrew Jones is the lead for Noah's Ark Archaeology. He joins us now. And in the more skeptical corner, Dr. Flint Dibble of Cardiff University. Welcome to both of you. So Andrew Jones and my previous two guests are staying with us for this. Andrew Jones, you believe we've discovered Noah's Ark. I think we're pointing to that direction of what we are seeing on the ground. We have a Turkish university team involved. I'm the vice president of the project. We have Dr. Cenkur Atilla from Sivas University, who's been studying this site and it's been in and out of the news since 1959, but with newer technology, we're involved coring the site. We're doing samples and using radar on the site. We think we're in this process of seeing what's below the surface. What makes you think it's Noah's Ark though? Well, so first of all, when it was first discovered, it's a visual object. You see the ship shape on the side of the mountain, but then going beyond that, when they went there in June, 1960, they measured it on the ground and it happened to be exactly 300 Royal Egyptian cubits. Now the biblical account mentions 300 cubits, but if those who believe that Moses wrote it, that's a lot of places. Then at that time, the Royal Egyptian cubit was the standard of measurement. And so then you have this exact measurement on the ground of a boat shaped object just south of the volcano Mount Ararat. So you're in the mountains of Ararat, just like Genesis chapter eight, verse four says. So those are the basics that got more people interested. It was really in the news in the 80s a lot, then it died down. And then we brought in some teams in 2019. The Turkish government brought in some teams after that, and now we have a university project really go deeper in the site that hasn't been done before. Okay. Professor Dibble, welcome back to Uncensored. You've often poured cold water on alternative pyramid speculation. What do you think about the speculation around Noah's Ark being unearthed? Hi everybody. It's great to meet you and Piers. It's great to see you again. I'm here as your grumpy archeology uncle to sort of say, show me the evidence, right? The voice of archeology reason, I prefer to think of you. Yeah, exactly. So in this sense, I mean, what I see is I see an oval rock shape formation, which is really, really cool and it needs investigation. Why geologically could this have happened? Is there any archeology associated with it? But sort of as usual, I'm here saying, show me some archeological evidence. And there's been coring done. There's been a range of remote sensing done. And so far there's multiple geological reports that show everything there is natural. And so I just don't quite understand why there would be a boat. There's a boat shaped rock formation around a wooden boat. It doesn't make any sense. Why would that signal anything? And then to return to Andrew's one point about the 300 cubits, that is a remarkable coincidence for the length of this feature. But the width of it does not match what's in the book of Genesis. In the book of Genesis, it says it should be 50 cubits in width and this is far more than that. So why would you match one feature but not the other to prove that this is the Ark? Andrew Jones, why would you? Yeah. So a couple of points here. He's talking about, he says there's been multiple studies proved that this is a rock formation. So there definitely have been peer-reviewed published articles, but they're all not compatible. One says it's a syncline. One other says it's a limestone block that came down from above and it was glaciers forming into a ship shape. And then a non-published article by a creationist even suggested that it's a block of bedrock sticking up and then the mud flow went around it and formed a ship shape. We core-drilled this year. It's not published, I'm sorry, but I'll just tell you from my observation with the 12 holes and also the multiple radar scans done with the Buktar radar and with the GPR in 2019, we're not seeing any solid block of rock. The edges are not rock. This is an earthen formation. And so what we did in 2024, we took soil analysis inside at 88 different locations. And the random soil survey published last year, it showed that there was three times more organic matter, 38% more potassium. Again, suggesting that the soil inside, whatever the shape is, is not the same as just the soil right outside the boat shape that's going around, people think, a rock. So core drilling is not showing a rock. Now, in regards to the width, the Bible is not very detailed as how Noah's Ark was built or the shape. There's the debate whether it's a rectangular barge. Other traditions have it as a cube or a round structure. In the Bible, you can definitely take those same dimensions and do an average and say, wow, look at the drop on our site, the site we're looking at today, and the 50-cubit average. It's almost, it's not exact, but inside measurements going down that site from the point then to the round, you're getting a very close to a 50-cubit average. The height, I don't know. You know, it's buried. We have Turkish archaeologists involved. We have a season two plan. We'll go where the data goes. But right now, you know, we're really interested in just these coincidences that some people think is just a rock formation. We'll see what it is. It is. It's kind of fascinating. Professor Meyer, what's your view of Noah's Ark being? I'd have no specific view of the archaeological evidence in this case. I do think it's interesting that both investigators presuppose that it is possible to distinguish a natural effect from one that is intelligently designed. And one of the aspects of our work on intelligent design has been to develop criteria by which you can determine or distinguish things that have been produced by minds from things that have been produced by purely. natural processes. And what we've found is that in the universe and in life and things that pre-exist human intelligence, there are these markers of the activity of intelligence or intelligent design, suggesting that life in the universe were also intelligently designed. I mean, we know from scholars basic agreement that Jesus of Nazareth existed as a real historical figure, for example. But what do we know about him, Professor Meyer, that you would say is undeniably true? I mean, birth, baptism, ministry, death, resurrection, are those all inarguable about the life of Jesus of Nazareth? Are there other things we know as factually, historically proven? It happens that I have an avocational interest in the historicity of the Bible. And this summer in a course that I team taught in Cambridge, we had a whole sequence on different periods of biblical history and the extensive body of extra-biblical, archaeological and documentary history. The historical evidence of these different periods that are documented in the biblical narrative happens that the trial of Jesus is one of the best attested events in all of ancient history. In the last 60 years, between five and seven of the figures mentioned in the trial narrative have been independently attested by archaeological inscriptions. In addition to extensive documentary historical evidence, the first century Roman praetorium where the trial was almost certainly held, and the Bema Seat, where the encounter between Pilate and Jesus took place, has been discovered. And so this is an extensively documented event, externally corroborated. In the same course, I gave a lecture on a narrative in the Hebrew Bible. The encounter between the Assyrian King Sennacherib and the Jewish King Hezekiah. Extensive points of agreement between the biblical record and the Assyrian record. I gave the lecture on a Friday. We came into the British Museum on Saturday, went to the Assyrian room and saw all the artifacts that had been on my PowerPoint slides the day before. So the idea that the Bible is just a kind of collection of myths and legends, I don't think is any longer standing up. I venture no opinion about the structure in Turkey, but there are many parts of the biblical record that have been extensively corroborated. One archaeologist that people might want to. I want to keep an eye on is a young man named Titus Kennedy, who has now published four books, including one titled Unearthing the Bible. Another one called Excavating the Evidence for Jesus. And there's, I think, the question of the historical existence and indeed the basic facts of the life of Jesus, I think, are now very extensively corroborated. Matt Delahunty, the latest Polly Market on the question, will Jesus Christ return before 2020? 2027, $66 million in that market. I have to say the odds apparently are not great. So 98.7% are saying they do not believe Christ will return. Yeah. If there was to be a dramatic return of Jesus Christ, would you accept in that moment you've been completely wrong or rather you were right the first time? Well, yeah, probably right. I wasn't right. I wasn't right the first time. You can be, you can have the correct position for completely better. You don't know you weren't right the first time. Right. And the thing is, what does it feel like to be wrong? It feels exactly like being right until you find out that you're actually wrong. And this is where we tend to live. We assume that we have good reasons for things until we're shown that we don't. And as a skeptic, somebody who's advocating for skepticism and sound epistemology, I have no problem with the idea that Jesus existed. I don't know about him. That's another discussion. Whether or not he performed any miracles, that's another discussion. And some of these things are more consistent with facts about reality than others. And so I don't know what it is in Turkey. I'm interested in finding out. But even if you found out that it was absolutely a boat, I don't know how you would show that it was Noah's boat. And even if that story is tied to something real and true, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a global flood. It could be an incredibly good story, but there's no evidence for a global flood. What if they were all laid out two by two? My specialty is animal bones. If they were all laid out two by two, then the story is false. Interesting. Professor Dibble, last word to you. You're an animal bone specialist, I've just discovered. So if we find patterns of two by two animals' bones going into this structure, would you accept this is Noah's Ark? Well, I'd hope that they're coming out because this is where the Ark's supposed to live. This is where the Ark supposedly crashed. Ah, good point, good point. Hopefully they're going the other way. So if the bones are layered coming out in pairs, what would you say? Yeah, exactly. If you could show me a zooarchaeological assemblage, in a sense, that is patterned in that kind of way, that would be extremely compelling to me. And at that point, would you as an atheist archaeologist, in that moment of discovery, admit you've been wrong all the time and be a believer in God? If I found two by two animals that naturally should not be in that location. in Turkey, so animals from all over the world that were right there and there's no other possible explanation, I would start questioning it seriously. This is big stuff. I can't wait to see. Well, let us know how you're going, Andrew Jones. The problem is if we just prove it. But I need the evidence first. I need the evidence first. No, I get it. That's what Andrew Jones is going to be doing. So hopefully Andrew will solve the mystery of time. Thank you all very much. Professor Mark, great to see you back in London. Nice to see you. Great to see my other panelists joining us down the line there. Really enjoyed the debate. Thank you very much. Please welcome our senator. He's proud. He's proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free. Independent, uncensored media has never been more critical and we couldn't do it without you. Afternoon glare totally ruined my watch party for the big game. 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