Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2008 - Stephen C Meyer
Uploaded: 2023-07-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2008 - Stephen C Meyer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2008 - Stephen C Meyer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2008 - Stephen C Meyer

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
First of all, thank you for being here. Appreciate it.
It is great to be here, Joe. Thanks for having me.
I've really enjoyed watching some of your videos online and listening to these
arguments.
This idea of intelligent design, my question to you, like, right off the bat
was,
is this an idea that you, did you have a pre, did you have a notion in your
mind already
that you were trying to prove? Or was this something that you sort of started
to believe
upon the preponderance of evidence?
It was more the latter, but I had a, by the time I first encountered it,
a philosophical framework that made me open to it. I had a long protracted,
religious conversion from late high school all the way through college. It took,
it was the last thing from a Damascus road experience. And, uh,
How did it happen?
It was a process of philosophical deliberation. It was not really based on
science initially.
I started having weird existential questions when I was 14 years old after I'd
broken my leg in a
skiing accident and questions like, well, what's it going to matter in a
hundred years?
Uh, I, I was, there's this great quote from Bertrand Russell where he says, you
know, that
all the, the noonday genius of human achievement is destined for extinction and
the vast heat death
of the solar system.
Whoa, I had never encountered Bertrand Russell as a 14 year old, but I later
encountered that quote.
And I thought that was what was bothering me, you know, that dude was a scorcher.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I read in the hospital after I had this accident,
I was reading a book about the history of baseball and I was totally into
baseball at the time.
I couldn't think of a better, a higher form of human achievement than to play
for the New York Yankees.
And yet all the stories of the great baseball guys ended the same. You know,
they, they were recruited
by, uh, scouts who saw their talent. They came up to the big leagues. They, uh,
uh, amassed records.
They won a certain number of world series. And then, you know, if they were
really great, uh, they go to
the hall of fame and retire at 38 and then what? And then I got to thinking,
well, but then what for
any of us, you know, and, and so I was, I was this, this question of, of, uh,
of meaning kind of haunted
me. What, what, what could I possibly do that would have any lasting or
enduring meaning?
And, um, I ended up taking, I did a physics major and a geology major, uh, in
college, but I took as
many philosophy classes as I could along the way. And I encountered these
existentialist writers who were
asking these same types of questions and realized, Oh, uh, as a 14 year old, I
thought I must be insane
to be having these questions. And I worried that I was insane. I was a real, I
mean, it was a,
it was a real funk I was in for six or eight months. Uh, and then later I
realized, no,
these were philosophical questions. And for me, uh, the religious conversion I
had started to address
and answer those questions. So I was, I was, by the time I got out of college,
I was a convinced
theist for philosophical reasons, but it, but I had, at that point I was
completely comfortable
with the evolutionary explanation of everything. And then at a conference in my,
that I attended,
um, while I was working as a geophysicist, uh, it was a conference about the
origin of the universe,
the origin of life and the origin and nature of human consciousness. And it was
divided on each panel
between theists and philosophical materialists who were debating these, these
big questions at the
intersection of science and philosophy. And I was kind of stunned to learn or
to, to perceive at least
that the theists seem to have the intellectual initiative in each of these big
discussions,
that materialism was a philosophy that was a spent force. It was not explaining
where life first came
from or the universe came from, let alone consciousness. And so I began, in a
sense,
on a kind of intellectual journey to see where these new evidences, the
evidence for the beginning of
the universe or the fine tuning of the universe, or the, the thing that really
intrigued me was the
discovery that at the foundation of life and even the very simplest cells, we
have this amazingly complex
code that DNA we all learned about in high school. We think that, you know, we
all learned about the
double helix structure of the DNA molecule. But that's not the most important
thing about it. It's that within that
double helix, there is literally a code, a digital information that is
directing the
construction of the important proteins and protein machines that every cells,
every cell needs to stay alive.
Bill Gates has said it's like a software program, but much more complex than
any we've ever created.
And I was doing at the time for the work as a geophysicist for an oil company,
I was doing
seismic digital signal processing, which was an early form of information
technology. And I got fascinated
with the idea that, that there was this, first of all, an impasse in
evolutionary explanations of the
origin of life. Nobody knew how we got from the chemistry in the prebiotic soup
to the code in an actual
living cell. But I was fascinated that the impasse was created by the mystery
surrounding the origin
of information. Where did that come from? And so a year later, I was off to
grad school in England,
I ended up doing a PhD in origin of life biology within a history and
philosophy of science department
in Cambridge. And so that's kind of my sketch of my journey and how I got
interested in this. I saw in one
of your previous interviews, you said that you were very interested in origin
stories and yeah, me too, you know,
that was the what's always interesting when you see someone who's kind of
dedicated their life to a very specific thing,
like where, what's the root of this? Where did it come from? So for you, you
went through this funk and
did you find comfort in religion? Is that what helped you? Did you find
structure in it?
I found answers to basic worldview questions that I thought were, as a 14 year
old, I thought
nobody, you know, there must be something wrong with me. Nobody else is having
these questions.
I'm not talking to anyone at school who's worried about it. I think you're just
smart.
It was, I remember one day I'm in just total, well, okay, for example, I was in
this big leg cast and I
would crutch my way up to the, to the, uh, up our driveway, get the newspaper,
bring back the box
scores to read, you know, about the baseball games the night before. And every
day it's a new date.
And I do this and a new date and a new date. And I started thinking time is a
really freaky thing.
I can imagine an event and I'm going to lift this cup. I'm going to drop it. I'll
put it over there.
Now that event just took place, but it's already gone. We're not experiencing
it anymore.
We have a memory of it, but what does that actually mean? Where did, there was
this flow of sensory
experience, but there didn't seem to be anything rooting it that gave it a, a,
um, an enduring reality.
And I had this sense there must be something that doesn't change or else
everything else that does
change, um, is passing ephemeral and, uh, and ultimately have no account. And
so, you know,
you read, I ended up reading the big fat family Bible that I'd never cracked
and, uh, found that
when God revealed his name to Moses, it was the, I am that I am this timeless,
eternal person. And you
found the same thing in the new Testament, the way Jesus Christ was referred to
is, uh,
and so I thought, I wonder if there is something that doesn't change. And so
the kind of philosophical
questions that I was having made me want to explore whether or not revealed
religion might in fact be
true. Can I ask you to expand on that? What do you mean by something that does
not change?
Um, some eternal self-existent reality. I guess I, you know, it was not
something as a 14 year old I had
worked out. It was a kind of an intuition that there, um, all I, it was the
experience of having, uh,
the, the, the, the, the constant flux of changing sense perceptions left me
with a sense that, uh,
there was nothing solid to, to hold onto in reality. And, um, and so this was,
this is not a great,
you know, this is not the argument for the existence of God that I would repose
in, in which I would
repose great trust. I'm not trying to persuade anyone by this. I'm just telling
what my experience
was at this point. I later found what I think are very, very persuasive
arguments, both philosophically
and scientifically. The thing that really convinced me as a, as a university
student doing, uh, studying
philosophy was an argument known as the argument from epistemological necessity.
The fundamental
question in modern philosophy that has really just been a stumper and has led
to this whole postmodern
turn where people don't think there's no objective basis for any reality is the,
the question of the
reliability of the human mind. On what basis can we trust the way our minds
process all that sensory
information? This goes back to, to, to Hume and Kant and some of the
philosophers in the, uh,
enlightenment period. And from that point forward, there was a great doubt.
Maybe we can't trust our
minds. Maybe we can't trust, uh, we have all these things we assume about
reality in order to make sense
about reality that every cause has an effect, for example. Um, but we can't
prove those things. We have
to use those assumptions in order to know anything at all. And the, the, I
encountered this argument that
suggested, well, if, if we try to justify our ability to know the world around
us by, um, by empirical data,
by things we observe, this was Hume's argument. Can't do it. Uh, if we, we, uh,
he was a radical
empiricist and found that in order to make any sense of the, of the sense and
presence he had, he had to
presuppose the uniformity of nature. But to prove the uniformity of nature, he
had to make reference to
sensory observations. And so he was arguing in a circle. And so it came down,
you couldn't justify
the reliability of assumptions we, the, the, we make in our minds by observing
the world. You had
to use those assumptions to make sense of the observations. But if you presupposed
that our minds
were made by a benevolent creator who gave us those assumptions in order to
make sense of the world that
he also made, then there was a principle of correspondence between the way the
mind worked
and the way the world worked, in which case we could trust the, the basic
reliability of the mind.
And this turns out to be one of the key foundational assumptions that gave rise
to modern science. It
was called the idea of intelligibility. Newton, Boyle, Kepler, the great
founders of modern science
thought that they, that nature had secrets to reveal. There were patterns there
to be revealed
that we could understand because our minds had been made in the image of the
same rational creator
who had built rationality and design and pattern and lawful order into the
world.
Peter Robinson: Do you, do you believe in evolution?
Peter Robinson: I believe in, uh, well, that's a, I believe in micro evolution.
I believe that there are
real evolutionary processes. I'm skeptical about what's called universal common
descent. The idea that all
living forms have evolved from one single common ancestor. I'm profoundly
skeptical, skeptical about
chemical evolution. The idea that the, um, non-living chemicals in a prebiotic
ocean or prebiotic soup
arranged themselves to form the first living cell. And I'm also skeptical about
the creative power of
the mutation selection mechanism, which as it happens, uh, so are many leading
evolutionary biologists
today. I attended a conference in 2016 at the Royal, convened by the Royal
Society, uh, in London,
Royal Society being the oldest and most august scientific