Story of Everything, The (2026)

[bunniefuu]

[Music]

[Music]

SARAH SALVIANDER:

There are those in science

who say the exquisite

nature of the universe,

the exquisite laws

of the universe,

are evidence of a designer.

Does that view

make sense to you?

[Music]

STEPHEN MEYER: For 2,500

years, there have been two great

competing stories about

reality in Western culture.

According to one of these

stories, the universe, our planet,

the life it contains,

and especially all of us,

are products of a

pre-existing intelligence,

a purposeful mind or creator.

JOHN LENNOX: People

like Galileo, Kepler,

Newton were all

believers in the existence

of an intelligent designer

behind the universe.

GUEST: Newton, Boyle,

Kepler, the great founders

of modern science, thought

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 lawful order into the world.

But according to another

story, matter and energy interact

and evolve in a

completely mindless,

undirected way and

arrange themselves

into everything

we see around us.

SPEAKER: World famous atheist

Richard Dawkins inspired millions

by popularizing

evolutionary biology.

RICHARD DAWKINS:

Once you've got life started,

once natural selection,

Darwinian natural

selection has got going,

then we pretty much

understand the four billion year

history of what's

given rise to us

and all other living creatures.

SPEAKER: And that's the

story I want to tell you about.

The things that we hold dear,

including our very existence,

are in a cosmic accident.

SPEAKER: It seems so obvious

that if you've got a garden,

there must be a gardener.

But what science has now

achieved is an emancipation

from that impulse to attribute

these things to a creator.

STEPHEN MEYER: And

this view became popular

because of scientific theories

developed in the 19th century.

SPEAKER: Scientists like

Pierre Laplace, Charles Darwin,

and Thomas Henry Huxley

each tried to explain events

in the history of the

universe, like the origin

of the solar system, the

origin of new forms of life,

and even the origin

of the very first life.

STEPHEN MEYER: By

the end of the 19th century,

a seamless story of the

origin of nearly everything

could be told as a

consequence of slow, gradual,

and purely

naturalistic processes.

JAY RICHARDS:

By the 19th century,

science had come

to be associated

with a larger philosophical

idea called materialism,

in which you just

presuppose that the material

universe is all there is.

STEPHEN MEYER: And that's

why many leading scientists

have claimed that science

undermines belief in any intelligent

or purposeful creator

behind the universe.

SPEAKER: Yes or

no to this statement.

Science refutes God.

SPEAKER: 500 years of science

have demonstrated that God,

that vague

notion, is not likely.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:

I have no problems if,

as we probe the

origins of things,

we bump up into the bearded man.

If that shows up,

we're good to go.

OK?

Not a problem.

There's just no evidence of it.

JOE ROGAN: How

do you respond to that?

GUEST: It's not what Darwin

thought in the 19th century.

It's a new day in biology.

Things are much more

complex than people thought

when they formulated

these evolutionary ideas.

JOE ROGAN:

There's a lot of people

that adopt philosophies

that mimic religions.

GUEST: If you can

show that life arose

by a completely undirected

evolutionary process,

you're going to be more inclined

toward a more

materialistic worldview.

STEPHEN MEYER:

And that view, if true,

has profound consequences

for whether our lives

have any ultimate

meaning or significance.

PIERCE MORGAN: Have

you thought about what happens

when your life ends?

GUEST: Have I thought

about what happens?

PIERCE MORGAN: Yeah.

GUEST: Of course, I die.

PIERCE MORGAN: Yeah.

What do you think happens?

GUEST: I think I get

buried or cremated.

PIERCE MORGAN: And that's it?

GUEST: Nothing after that.

You have a brain which decays.

There's just nothing.

SPEAKER: Here we

are, like mites on a plum.

And the plum is

this little planet,

and it goes around an

insignificant local star.

And that star is on the obscure

outskirts of an ordinary galaxy,

which contains 400

billion other stars.

And this galaxy is

just one of something

like 100 billion other galaxies.

So, the idea that

we are central,

that we are the reason

there is a universe, is pathetic.

STEPHEN MEYER: This

bleak view of the universe

troubles many people.

If we are the products of

purely impersonal materialistic

forces, and if eventually the

universe will experience a heat

death, leaving only cold,

dark matter as scientists tell us,

then there can't be

any lasting meaning

or purpose to our existence.

DAVID BERLINSKI:

But is that true?

How likely is it

that this panorama

that appears to me

every time I open my eyes

does not have some very

good reason for its existence?

JAY RICHARDS:

So, we have two great,

competing stories about reality.

One posits a purposeful

creator behind the universe.

The other envisions

mindless processes

producing everything we see.

But which of these

stories is true?

What explains all of this?

What's the story of everything?

SPEAKER: You can say, "Look,

you can go back as far as you want,

but somehow the stuff of

the universe had to come

from somewhere, and

isn't that what God did?

But that's only true if

the universe was created.

If the universe was always here,

if the universe

was infinitely old,

then there's nothing

for a creator to do.

STEPHEN MEYER:

How did the universe start?

It's an ancient question

that goes back all the way

to the ancient Greeks.

Has the universe always

been here, or is it finite?

A philosophical question

that science began to address

and answer in the

beginning of the 20th century.

And it starts with a

relatively unknown

astronomer named Vesto Slipher.

Slipher is looking

through telescopes,

and he's looking at these nebular

phenomena in the night sky.

ROBERT SHELDON: Fuzzy

things that never focused

in your telescope.

STEPHEN MEYER:

But what Slipher was able

to discover was

that the light coming

from these nebulae is

shifted in the red direction

of the electromagnetic spectrum.

You shine light through a prism,

it will separate into the

different colors, red to violet.

The red light corresponds to

light with longer wavelengths.

SARAH SALVIANDER: We

call it redshift because light

that has a longer wavelength

tends to be more red in color.

Let's say that you've got

a firetruck going past you

with its siren on.

And as it goes past,

the pitch changes.

So [imitates siren].

As something is

moving away from you,

whatever kind of

waves it's emitting,

whether it's sound

waves or light waves,

are going to be stretched out.

So, since the nebula that

Slipher observed was shifted

in the red direction, it

meant that the nebula

was moving away from us.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Now, a nebula, at the time,

was thought to be just a

gas cloud within our galaxy.

There were some astronomers

who thought it might be at a galaxy

beyond, but that was a debate.

Then, in 1924, the debate

was effectively settled

when Edwin Hubble

used some new techniques

for measuring

astronomical distances.

Hubble started looking at the

Andromeda nebula and realized

that it was at least 900,000

light years away from us,

and yet the distance

across our whole

galaxy was only

300,000 light years.

And so, he realized

that those nebulae

must be separate galaxies.

[Music]

And then, as he was

looking at the galaxies

with this wonderful

new dome telescope,

he was also then able to

see the beautiful structure,

not just a gaseous smudge

on a photographic plate.

And Hubble then began to study

not just the Andromeda Nebula,

but many of these nebulae, i.e.

galaxies, and discovered

they were all shifted

in the red direction, meaning

they were all moving away from us.

ROBERT SHELDON: So, it looked as

if space-time itself was

expanding and stretching...

STEPHEN MEYER:

Like a balloon blowing up.

There's a uniform

expansion of almost

all the galaxies moving outward.

SARAH SALVIANDER: But what

do you do when you mentally run

that scenario in reverse?

STEPHEN MEYER: As we

begin to wind that clock backwards

and think of what the universe

would have been like a thousand

years ago, or a million years

ago, or a billion years ago,

or however far back you go,

eventually you're gonna get

to a place where all of

that expanding material

would have congealed

in the same place,

marking the beginning

of the expansion.

And arguably, the beginning

of the universe itself.

SPEAKER: But there

was something else.

Several years earlier, the

physicist Albert Einstein made

a breakthrough in our

understanding of gravity,

one that also pointed to a

beginning of the universe.

But he found this implication

of his theory so disturbing

that he dismissed

it out of hand.

STEPHEN MEYER: In 1915, he

developed a revolutionary new theory

of gravity called

general relativity.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: The

largest change in man's view

of the universe

since Isaac Newton.

Nobody could

foresee its implication.

STEPHEN MEYER: It

implied that massive bodies

in space literally

curved space itself...

in much the same way that a

bowling ball changes the shape

of a trampoline.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: The

distortions of space due

to a massive body like

the sun shaped the course

of lesser objects

like the planets.

ROBERT SHELDON: That

discovery was so powerful

that Einstein went from

being a nerdy physicist

to a worldwide sensation.

STEPHEN MEYER: His theory

not only changed our understanding

of the present

structure of the universe,

it also had profound implications

for a long-standing question

about the origin

of the universe.

ROBERT SHELDON:

Einstein's theory implied

that in addition

to gravity, there

must be an outward

pushing force.

STEPHEN MEYER: Because

if gravity were the only force

in the universe, everything

would have congealed

into one big black hole.

But we don't live in

that kind of universe.

We live in a universe

where there is empty space

between massive bodies.

There must be some

sort of anti-gravity force

or some sort of

outward pushing force

that creates the empty space.

ROBERT SHELDON: He

struggled and struggled with it.

And finally, he said,

"I'm going to need to put

in an anti-gravity term into my

general equation of relativity,

and he called it the

cosmological constant.

STEPHEN MEYER: And

physicists today accept

that there is a

cosmological constant.

There is an outward

pushing force.

But Einstein made

a further move.

He simply chose

an arbitrary value

for this outward

pushing force, one

that was exactly balanced

to the force of gravity,

to suggest that the

universe was static,

neither expanding

nor contracting,

and is therefore

eternal and self-existent.

However, theoretical

physicists began

to work with

Einstein's equations.

And one of the physicists

was the Belgian priest,

Georges Lematre.

They realized that the

most natural implication

of Einstein's equations was

that the universe was expanding.

But Lematre was also

aware of the data coming

from Vesto Slipher

about the red shift.

So, Lematre pulled those

two lines of evidence together

and formulated what is now

known as the Big Bang Theory.

JAY RICHARDS: Einstein,

for various philosophical

or theoretical

reasons, was trying

to avoid the

implications of his theory.

STEPHEN MEYER: But

Lematre and Einstein met

at a conference in 1927.

They had shared a

taxi cab ride together,

where Lematre

apparently informed Einstein

about the redshift evidence

that the universe was actually

expanding despite Einstein's

attempt to depict it as static.

Einstein tells him that your

mathematics is impeccable,

but your physical

intuition is abominable.

Einstein accused him of

formulating this, deductively drawing it

from the Christian doctrine

of creation rather than

from the evidence.

Lematre bristled at

that, showed, no, actually,

I have the evidence on my side.

The universe is expanding.

And your equations, when

solved, point to a beginning.

And so, in 1931,

Einstein went out

to the Hooker Telescope

at Mount Wilson...

and viewed the evidence

of the expanding universe

through Hubble's telescope.

And then, a week or two

later, he does an interview

with the New York Times

and acknowledges that Hubble

and his colleague

Humason had shown

that the universe is not static.

And later, he acknowledged

that his fine-tuning

of the cosmological constant...

was the greatest blunder

of his scientific career.

BIJAN NEMATI: From

roughly the 1920s till the 60s,

astrophysics

proceeded with a lot

of brilliant people

doing a lot of great work,

but a lot of it was focused

on avoiding the notion

of a beginning.

ROBERT SHELDON: That

view of the universe was debated,

and many people

argued against it.

Fred Hoyle was a famous physicist

who said, "I'm a Democritean.

He said, "I believe nothing

comes from nothing.

His argument was there can't

be a beginning to the universe

because that would be

something coming from nothing.

FRED HOYLE: I

don't like the idea

that something is dependent

on a cause that I can never verify.

BIJAN NEMATI:

Hoyle was, in fact,

so opposed to the

notion of a beginning

that I think he was the

one who coined the name

Big Bang as a sort

of a derogatory name.

BRIAN KEATING: Fred Hoyle,

who was, for much of his life,

a secular atheist, he

believed that cosmologists

were being too influenced

by the Genesis 1:1 narrative.

STEPHEN MEYER: And so,

he formulates another model.

It's called the steady state.

He imagines there's

always been matter,

there's always been energy,

there's always been space and time.

The universe is

infinitely old and

has been creating

matter continually.

BRIAN KEATING:

So, in the mid-1900s,

there was really a battle

between two rival cosmologies.

ROBERT SHELDON: Both

theories make predictions,

and Hoyle's prediction was

that no matter how far back

in time you look, it will

look exactly the same.

STEPHEN MEYER: If the universe

was eternal in time and space,

then there was no

beginning and no time

when all of the galactic material

would have been concentrated

into a single, hot, dense point.

But the Big Bang

predicts that there

would have been such a point.

BRIAN KEATING: When

that Big Bang exploded,

the universe was in a

very dense and hot state.

And as it got bigger, it cooled.

And when it cooled far enough,

light was allowed to escape.

SARAH SALVIANDER: So, if

the Big Bang theory was true,

there should be some

evidence of this light in the form

of leftover radiation spread

throughout the universe.

BRIAN KEATING: You

can think of it as a glow,

as a fossil left over from

the creation process.

ROBERT SHELDON:

People looked for this radiation,

couldn't find it.

But then, two Bell Labs

physicists were trying

to create a microwave link

from the ground to a satellite.

They'd point this big horn

antenna at the satellite

and record the data.

Well, they were

getting noise and static

and couldn't explain it.

And wherever they

pointed their horn antenna,

they got the static,

and they said,

"There's something

wrong with our antenna.

SARAH SALVIANDER: In their

desperation to figure out the source

of this signal, they

thought it might have come

from pigeon droppings

that were on this antenna.

They're scraping it off.

Nothing works.

ROBERT SHELDON: And then,

one of them went to a seminar down

at Princeton by a physicist

named Robert Dickey.

And Robert Dickey

said, "We're looking

for the glow of that

Big Bang radiation.

And today, it would have

cooled down into the microwave.

That would be the wavelength

of light corresponding to that.

Penzias and Wilson looked

at each other and said,

"I think we found it.

They wrote up a paper that

they had discovered the radiation

left over from the Big Bang,

and it was such a sensation.

They got the Nobel Prize,

and I would say at that point,

90-some percent of

the physicists all agreed

that the Big Bang model

was the working one.

Hoyle never did.

He insisted that the

steady-state model was better,

and he was going to get

it fixed one of these days.

BIJAN NEMATI: We scientists

have our predispositions.

And in this case, the predisposition

was to avoid a beginning

to the universe.

And that has been going

on for about a century now.

And yet it's as if, you know,

we are being forced to accept,

by the observations, that

the universe is evolving

and it had a beginning.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Now, in the 1960s,

this whole question of the

implication of general relativity

for the beginning of the

universe was revisited.

And it starts with

Stephen Hawking.

[Music]

He's studying in Cambridge.

And in the middle of the

PhD, he is diagnosed with ALS,

Lou Gehrig's disease.

Debilitating

neurological disorder.

He's so discouraged that

he might just quit the PhD,

but he's encouraged by people

near him to press on, and he does.

Quite a heroic story, actually.

He's working on

black hole physics.

SARAH SALVIANDER:

Black holes, extremely massive,

but compressed down into an

unimaginably small amount of space.

These things are warping

space and time in ways

that you can't even imagine.

STEPHEN MEYER: It's

causing space around that matter

to curve so tightly that

even light can't get out.

But then, Hawking's

thinking about the history

and origin of the

universe itself.

He realizes that if the

universe is expanding outward

in the forward

direction of time,

then matter is getting

more and more spread out.

And he starts

thinking about, well,

what happens in the

reverse direction of time?

If the matter is more diffused

in the forward direction of time,

it means it's more

concentrated in the reverse

direction of time.

Then, according to Einstein's

theory of general relativity,

the space around matter

should get more tightly curved.

So, as you go back in time,

as matter gets more densely

concentrated, the space

gets more tightly curved,

and you eventually

get to a limiting point

where the matter gets

so densely concentrated

that the space gets

so tightly curved

that eventually you

can't go back any further.

And this, Hawking

calls the singularity,

a point of infinite density

and infinitely tight curvature.

[Music]

In his PhD thesis in

1966, Hawking presents

an initial defense of that idea.

He gets incredible

praise from his examiners.

The idea of a

space-time singularity,

a beginning to the universe,

that's a mind-blowing conclusion.

But there's a problem.

FRANK TIPLER: As you're going

back toward the very beginning

of time, the volume of the

universe is going to zero.

There's no space

to put anything.

Zero size is not something

that can exist in space and time.

Rather, the singularity is the

point outside of space and time.

It's not in space and time.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Before the beginning of time,

there's no universe.

The universe comes into

existence out of the singularity.

There is no matter.

There is no space.

There is no time.

There is no energy.

There's no material stuff

there to do the causing.

JAY RICHARDS: Physicist

Robert Dickey said,

"An infinite universe would

relieve us of the necessity

of understanding

the origin of matter

at any finite time in the past.

Notice that verb, relieve.

That's not a scientific term.

What does Dickey mean?

Well, if the universe

is eternal and infinite,

then we don't even have to ask

the question where it came from.

So, if an infinite universe

relieves us of the necessity,

what does a finite universe do?

TIMOTHY MCGREW: We

now know the universe began

to exist finitely long

ago, but whatever begins

to exist is caused to

exist by something else.

STEPHEN MEYER: Now,

because we're talking about the origin

of the universe itself, by which

we mean the origin of matter,

energy, space, and

time, any entity capable

of causing the universe to come

into existence must be external

to or separate from

the universe itself.

It must exist

independently of matter

and transcend space and time.

JAY RICHARDS: And so,

whatever explains the finite

physical universe must

be itself non-physical.

Whatever explains

the finite material

universe must

itself be immaterial...

to get in this way to the

philosophical stopping point

of the first cause.

STEPHEN MEYER: I

first witnessed astronomers

and cosmologists wrestling

with this problem of the first cause

at a conference

early in my career.

SPEAKER: It may not

be the ultimate truth.

STEPHEN MEYER:

At that conference,

I encountered

the work of a great

cosmologist named Allan Sandage.

He was well known

for being a hard-bitten

scientific materialist.

But he'd worked closely

with Edwin Hubble

on verifying the

expansion of the universe

in all quadrants of the sky.

And at this conference,

he announced

that he had come

to a theistic belief,

not in spite of, but because

of the scientific discoveries

concerning the origin of the

universe and its fine tuning.

And I can remember him looking

into the camera and saying...

ALLAN SANDAGE: Here

is evidence for what can only

be described as a

supernatural event.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Super natural event.

And there was a

kind of a beat, a pause

between the words

super and natural.

ALLAN SANDAGE: There's

no way that this could have been

predicted within the realm

of physics as we know it.

STEPHEN MEYER: Another

astronomer at the conference

who was particularly

distressed by the problem

of the first cause

was Robert Jastrow.

ROBERT JASTROW: National

Aeronautics and Space Administration.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Though he was an agnostic,

he had recently

published a book called

"God and the Astronomers".

Later, he did a

number of interviews

about the conclusion

of his book.

ROBERT JASTROW: One

of the things that interests me

that I find most puzzling

in this astronomy we've

been discussing is the fact

that there was a beginning.

The mystery of creation.

If there were no beginning,

we wouldn't have to ask

what happened

before the beginning.

And we wouldn't have to worry

about who created the universe.

But the fact the universe sprang

into being at a definite moment

seems to me theological...

and nothing that could be

answered within science.

SPEAKER: There always

has to be a cause for any effect,

and then that cause becomes

an effect of a cause underlying it.

But in the case of the Big Bang,

that calls for an

uncreated creator,

and that would answer to

some people's definition of a god.

ROBERT JASTROW: I'm

an agnostic, not a believer,

but not an atheist.

Suppose you try to get away

from the theological explanation.

Is there something

else that we can imagine

that would lay these

questions to rest?

Some...

I can't see it.

ROBERT SHELDON: The last

paragraph of Jastrow's book says

that the natural

scientist or the physicist

has scaled the

peak of ignorance.

As he pulls himself

over the last boulder,

he finds the philosophers

and the theologians

sitting there waiting for him.

The point Jastrow is making

is no scientist wanted there

to be a creation

to the universe.

He wanted it to be eternal.

But that was inevitably

where science was taking us

to, that point where

we had to acknowledge

there was a beginning.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Hawking proves the singularity,

doesn't much like

its implications,

because it seems to point

to a kind of creation event.

So, he spent much of the

rest of his career attempting

to circumvent the

conclusion of his own proof.

And in the process, he

developed these quantum

cosmological ideas

through a tiny loophole.

Hawking and other

physicists recognize

that they can only back

extrapolate to almost the singularity.

They can get to

1E-43 of a second

after the beginning

of the universe.

To say it's a blink of an

eye is a huge exaggeration.

Before that time, they thought

gravity might have worked

differently, according

to quantum mechanics,

the physics that applies

to the tiny subatomic realm.

So, they attempted to develop

an alternative cosmological model

that they called

quantum cosmology.

The hope among some of those

cosmologists is that this model

would eliminate the need

for a beginning of the universe

or would somehow explain

the origin of the universe

without any need to

posit an external creator.

JOHN LENNOX: I can recall

Stephen Hawking at Cambridge,

just when the beginnings

of Motor Neurone Disease

were being seen in

his difficulty in walking.

When I was given a pre-

publication edition of his book,

"The Grand Design", I

was quite amazed to come

across what appears to

be a central statement.

STEPHEN HAWKING: Because

there are laws, such as gravity,

the universe can and will

create itself from nothing.

JOHN LENNOX: I had an

immediate visceral reaction.

What could that possibly mean?

Because there is a

law such as gravity,

that is because

there is something,

the universe can

create itself from nothing.

And that appears to me

to be a flat contradiction.

Nothing is certainly

not nothing.

STEPHEN MEYER: Hawking

is saying that the universe

has come out of some

sort of pre-existing laws

of physics that are expressed

as mathematical equations.

The implication of this is

that out of math comes matter,

space, time, and energy.

But these mathematical

equations don't describe anything

yet because there is no

universe yet to describe.

Math has no causal

power by itself.

And one of the developers

of quantum cosmology,

the Russian physicist

Alexander Volinkin,

has reflected deeply on

this kind of paradoxical result.

He says, "In the

absence of space, time,

and matter, what tablets could

these laws be written upon?

Hawking was sensitive

to the same concern.

He said, "What is it that

breathes fire into the equations

and makes a universe

for them to describe?

In our experience,

math is conceptual.

It exists in a mind.

So, if we're saying the material

universe came out of a set

of mathematical equations,

are we really saying

that the material universe

came out of a mind?

[Music]

JAY RICHARDS: The basic idea

of fine-tuning is that the universe

is just so, that its properties,

the initial conditions,

the so-called constants of

physics, the laws of nature,

rest on a razor's edge so that

if they were slightly different

than they are in

the actual universe,

the universe would

not be habitable.

That is, it would not

be compatible with life.

STEPHEN MEYER: Physicist

Sir John Polkinghorne used

to have an excellent

visual illustration

to convey the idea

of the fine-tuning.

He used to ask people

in the audience to imagine

that they were on a

spaceship that had docked

at a space station.

And upon entrance

to the space station,

they discovered

there was a great room

with a huge universe-creating

machine inside.

And it had dials and

knobs and sliders,

each representing one of the

fundamental physical parameters,

where each one of the dials

was set to a very precise value.

Imagine what would

happen if you changed one

of the dials one

click this way or

that, or move a slider

one notch this way or

that, that life in the

universe would suddenly

become impossible.

But it was none other than

Fred Hoyle who first discovered

that our universe is

actually fine-tuned for life.

FRED HOYLE: I'm going to

tell you today a story which,

if you hear it, may

seem very strange to you.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Hoyle was trying to show,

as part of his work on the

steady-state cosmology,

where carbon could

have come from.

FRED HOYLE: And certainly it

would have seemed strange to me,

some 20 years ago, when the path

which led to this work

began to be followed.

STEPHEN MEYER: When

he himself made a discovery

that shook his

personal philosophy.

FRED HOYLE: So, let me

begin then without more ado.

STEPHEN MEYER: So, Hoyle

is trying to explain the abundance

of carbon in the universe

because he recognized

that you needed

carbon to build life,

but he can't figure

out for the life

of him how it could

have been built.

BRIAN KEATING: Hoyle reasoned

that the Big Bang couldn't do it,

the Quasi-Steady State

universe couldn't do it,

and the only other

laboratories for doing

so were in the bellies of stars.

DAVID SNOKE: The understanding

now is that all of the elements

that we have, carbon,

oxygen, so on, were synthesized

inside of stars.

When that star

exploded, goes supernova,

then that gets spread

throughout the universe.

Then, that gets to be

re-accumulated back

into new stars and planets.

STEPHEN MEYER: He

developed numerous ideas

about how carbon might form

from simpler atoms inside stars.

But for various reasons,

none of them would work.

But then, he comes up with a

theory that works with the physics.

His theory envisions

two elements,

beryllium with an

atomic weight of eight

and helium with an

atomic weight of four,

combining to make carbon

with an atomic weight of 12.

But there's a catch.

When he did the math, the

resulting carbon would have a higher

energy state than

the ordinary carbon

that we have around

us in our solar system.

And this higher energy version

of carbon would have to exist

for beryllium and

helium to come together

to form carbon

in the first place.

LUKE BARNES: So, if you

have a wine glass and you flick it,

it will have a certain

note that it puts out there,

a certain frequency.

If I sing that frequency

back at the wine glass,

it will absorb that sound

much more effectively than

if I just sing some other

random note at the wine glass.

There's a way that a

carbon nucleus could sing,

could wobble

around, could vibrate

and oscillate in

just the right way...

that it would live long enough

to sort of hold itself together

in time to make a stable carbon

nucleus rather than a couple

of things falling apart.

Without this singing

frequency in a carbon atom,

the process just won't work.

[Music]

STEPHEN MEYER: Hoyle

realized that there must be a version

of the carbon atom capable of

vibrating at a precise frequency

that would allow it to

absorb the combined energies

of the beryllium and helium

so that carbon could form.

After which time, it would settle

into the stable form of carbon

that we see all around us today.

LUKE BARNES: Now, what

Hoyle did was to say, "All right, well,

if that's the way that carbon's

got to be made in the universe,

carbon better sing at

just this energy level,

otherwise this whole

thing's not gonna work.

STEPHEN MEYER: So, he

contracted with a physicist out

at Caltech named Willie Fowler.

WILLIE FOWLER: So,

Hoyle was invited to Caltech

to give a lecture on

the steady state theory.

The next day, he

came into the laboratory

and began asking us

questions about the energy levels

of the carbon-12 nucleus.

And we kind of gave

him the brush off.

"Get away from us, young fellow.

You bother us.

See, we didn't know

him all that well.

And there was this funny

little man who thought

that we should stop

all this important work

that we were doing

otherwise and look for this.

He convinced Ward

Whaling, who was an assistant

or associate professor at

that time, to give it a whirl.

And sure enough...

the energy he got was almost

exactly what Hoyle had predicted.

It was really quite

a tour de force

that a man had

walked into the lab,

predicted the existence

of an excited state

of a nucleus from

astrophysical arguments.

We then took

Hoyle very seriously.

STEPHEN MEYER: That

confirmed Hoyle's suspicion

about how carbon

might have been made,

but it turned out to be

the tip of the iceberg

of a deeper problem.

LUKE BARNES: The

fact that carbon sings

at just this energy level itself

depends on other properties.

STEPHEN MEYER: The

fine-tuning of the energy levels

was the whole cascading effect

of other fine-tuning parameters

that were discovered

that had to be just right.

Each one of these

different parameters falls

within a very narrow tolerance.

SPEAKER: We can

put fairly precise values

on how finely tuned

they have to be.

The probability of the strength

of gravity being just right,

one part in 10 to

the power of 35.

SPEAKER: The odds of the

weight of a proton to an electron.

SPEAKER: One part in 1,000.

SPEAKER: The ratio between

the gravitational attraction

and the electromagnetic

attraction.

SPEAKER: One part

in 10 to the power of 4.

SPEAKER: The

gravitational force compared

with the weak nuclear force.

SPEAKER: One part

in 10 to the 10,000.

SPEAKER: One part

in 10 to the 21st power.

SPEAKER: Initial expansion

rate of the universe.

SPEAKER: One

part in 10 to the 17.

STEPHEN MEYER: Not too

strong, not too weak, not too fast,

not too slow, not too

heavy, not too light.

Everything's got

to be just right.

The Goldilocks universe.

JAY RICHARDS: It's not just

that life would be different or

that history would be different,

but that the universe

would not be compatible

with any sort of

chemically based life.

STEPHEN MEYER: The

probability of getting these specific

parameters right is

infinitesimally small.

FRED HOYLE:

Unless it's also claimed

that instruction happens

by sort of divine providence,

ex machina, to be just such.

I felt obliged to take

seriously the proposition

that life is a cosmic

phenomenon.

STEPHEN MEYER: By

a cosmic phenomenon,

Hoyle meant that life in the

universe was a consequence

of the precise fine-tuning

of the physical parameters

of the entire universe.

FRED HOYLE: So, the concept

of life as a cosmic phenomenon,

if it's correct, should

have many consequences.

The question then was

what does one do about it?

STEPHEN MEYER: And at

the end of this investigation,

Hoyle shifted.

And he attributes his conversion

from an aggressive form

of scientific atheism

to affirming some kind

of intelligent design

behind the universe,

to his discovery,

his own discovery

of these fine-tuning parameters.

He's later quoted as saying that

a common-sense interpretation

of the evidence suggests that

a super-intellect has monkeyed

with physics and chemistry

to make life possible.

[Music]

LUKE BARNES:

Think of it like this.

Suppose that I'm a detective

arriving on the scene of a crime.

I'm at a bank, and

there's been a heist, OK?

The safe is open,

all the money is gone,

and I say, "All right, let's

have a look at security footage.

And I'm watching

on the little screen,

and the burglars come in,

and they walk up to the safe,

and there is a 12-digit

code, and they walk up

and punch in the correct code.

Opens up, and off they go.

Here's two possible

explanations.

Maybe these are

really lucky robbers,

but they just guess the first

12-digit code that comes to mind,

and hey presto,

they take the money.

Here's another option.

It's an inside job.

Someone who already

knew the code told

the robbers what the code is.

Let's pause the video just as

the lead thief puts his finger up

in order to put the code in.

What would we expect

to happen according

to the first hypothesis,

the they got lucky?

Well, if they're just

guessing the code,

then we'd expect them

to put in the wrong code.

We can't really predict

what code you would put in,

but we can predict

with a high degree

of certainty you put

in the wrong one.

And so, our expectation

there that naturally forms

from that scenario doesn't

match with what actually happens.

On the other hand, if we

knew it was an inside job

and we stopped the video

just before they put in the code,

we would expect them

to put in the right code

and get into the vault.

STEPHEN MEYER: It's

possible by random means

that some process

would have stumbled

on exactly the parameters needed

to create a

life-friendly universe.

But our overwhelming

expectation,

if we consider the odds,

is that without guidance,

we would get a

life-unfriendly universe.

But that's not the kind

of universe we see.

Instead, we see the kind

of universe we would expect

if it had been

intentionally set up for life,

suggesting that it was intended.

Fine-tuning

implies a fine-tuner.

JAY RICHARDS: But there's

another type of fine-tuning.

And that's the fine-tuning

of the initial arrangement

of matter at the very

beginning of the universe.

If you thought the idea of a Big

Bang was one of order emerging

from chaos, get

that out of your mind.

It's exactly the opposite.

What we have is

an initial moment

of exquisite

precision and order.

LUKE BARNES: One of the

remarkable things about the universe we

see around us is there's a

direction, so to speak, of time.

This fact that

processes go one way

but not the other is captured

in a physical quantity called

entropy, which very roughly,

in a sort of hand-wavy way,

measures the amount

of disorder in a system.

BRIAN KEATING: The more chaotic,

the more random the

distribution, the higher the entropy.

The more ordered the

system, the lower the entropy.

You have a glass of coffee,

and you have a glass of milk.

It's highly ordered.

Then, you mix them together.

They're completely

disordered and random.

We see things happening

seemingly only in a way

that entropy increases.

LUKE BARNES: No one has

ever put a spoon into coffee

and stirred it and separated

the milk out from the coffee.

Never happened.

What's going on

with all of this?

DAVID SNOKE: Since entropy

is increasing continuously,

that means that if

we go into the past,

entropy had to be decreasing.

JAY RICHARDS: To allow

things to be this orderly now,

how orderly must the universe

have been at the beginning?

LUKE BARNES: This is where

a very interesting argument

from Roger Penrose comes in.

What Penrose worked out was, OK,

if we consider the

full set of possibilities

for the way you

could start a universe,

our sort of universe is an

extraordinarily small piece

of that set of possibilities.

STEPHEN MEYER: He has calculated

that initial entropy

fine-tuning as one chance

in 10 to the 10th power

raised again to the 123rd power.

It's called a

hyper-exponential number.

LUKE BARNES: What that's

telling us is there's something

remarkably special about

the start of our universe.

There has to be something

about the arrangement of the stuff,

whatever the stuff was,

very early in the universe,

which is not the typical way you

would expect a

universe to start.

STEPHEN MEYER: You could

understand this by analogy.

In the old days, when civil

engineers were building a tunnel

through a mountainside, they

would configure a charge just right

to make sure that the

blast removed the rock

where they wanted

it to be removed.

And very small adjustments

in the initial positioning

of those expl*sive charges

would make very big differences

in where the hole appeared

in the mountainside.

Analogously, that's what's

going on with the fine-tuning

of the initial entropy

of the universe.

You can just

think of it this way.

The amount of disorder is

so small that it's nearly perfect.

There's a famous passage in the

"General Scholium

to the Principia",

which is an epilogue

that Newton wrote in

one of the later editions

to his great work on

universal gravitation.

He's describing the beautiful

balance of the planets,

the sun, the comets that

create this stable order.

In this passage, he says, "This

most beautiful system of sun,

planets, and comets could

only proceed from the counsel

and dominion of an

intelligent and powerful being.

JAY RICHARDS: Even in

a highly fine-tuned universe,

you still need a heck

of a lot more to go right

in a planetary environment in

order for not only complex life

in general, but human

life in particular to exist.

BIJAN NEMATI: Our solar

system, especially in view

of what we now have learned

about other solar systems,

really ends up looking

quite remarkable.

Our solar system has

terrestrial planets...

in neat, circular orbits.

And then, you get

to these gas giants...

that are also in

neat, circular orbits.

JAY RICHARDS:

They serve as guards.

They serve as sentinels for

our solar system so that they,

very often, take hits for

us from these comets...

that if they were not

there would find their way

into our neighborhood and

have an unfortunate tendency

to sterilize life on our planet.

BIJAN NEMATI: For example,

the comet Shoemaker-Levy,

it ended up in Jupiter.

JAY RICHARDS:

Jupiter and Saturn,

these planets that for a long

time were associated with Greek

and Roman gods, actually

do play a role in protecting us.

BIJAN NEMATI: And

all of this around a stable,

energetic, metal-rich star.

Just these makes the

solar system pretty unique.

Beyond that, our own planet

within the solar system is situated

in what we call the

circumstellar habitable zone.

BRIAN MILLER: If we were

too close, radiation would k*ll us.

If we were too far away, our

planet wouldn't have the right

materials to support

life in the way it does.

It's the right tilt

and has the right

rotation rate so that

we have seasons.

JAY RICHARDS: You

need a large moon in order

to stabilize the

planet's tilt on its axis.

BRIAN MILLER: In

addition, what the moon

does is that recirculates

the ocean through the tides

to allow oxygen to

get to deeper levels.

JAY RICHARDS: You need

the right kind of atmosphere,

the right thickness

of the atmosphere,

the right mass for the planet

in order to hold the right kind

of atmosphere in

place, and then you

need the right kind of geology.

BRIAN MILLER: We have a molten

magma in the Earth that rotates.

That creates a magnetic shield.

That has an

important consequence

because the magnetic field

of the Earth is our blanket,

our shield against dangerous,

deadly cosmic radiation

that would otherwise

modify our DNA,

preventing us from

perhaps ever coming to exist.

JAY RICHARDS:

It's not at all obvious

that that necessarily

has to happen.

In some ways, Mars

is the perfect example

of how precisely things

have to be fine-tuned

at a local level in

order to have life.

Remember, Mars is the

most Earth-like planet known

in the universe.

Mars is in an otherwise

habitable solar system.

It's very close to the

Goldilocks zone in its orbit.

It's close to the

same mass as Earth.

It has many of the

same materials.

And yet a few things

didn't go quite right.

And as a result,

it's lifeless while

Earth is suffused with life.

It's a remarkably

exquisite system of design

in which all of these pieces

have to work together in order

to produce a small abode on

the surface of a single small planet

where life can exist.

[Music]

TIMOTHY MCGREW: One

of the most curious attempts

to get a round

inference to design

in the universe is to push

it all off onto the concept

of a multiverse.

STEPHEN MEYER: The idea

that there are billions and billions

and billions of other

universes out there,

which had different combinations

of fundamental

physical parameters

and different

initial conditions,

and we just happen

to be in the lucky one.

JAY RICHARDS:

Given enough universes,

presumably at least one or a

few of those universes will exist

in such a way that

complex life can exist.

LUKE BARNES: The nice thing

about the multiverse explanation

is it shows that this

fine-tuning business seems

to be pointing beyond

the universe as we know it.

There's got to be

something else.

There's got to be a

bigger story out there.

BIJAN NEMATI: The multiverse,

as an appeal to a materialistic,

naturalistic explanation, loses

any of its original attraction.

Anything that's outside

of this nature is essentially,

manifestly supernatural.

And so, we're appealing

to something supernatural

to avoid the supernatural.

STEPHEN MEYER: Leonard Susskind,

a prominent physicist

at Stanford, says, "Look,

if we don't posit this kind

of a multiverse model,

we're hard pressed to

answer the arguments

of the ID proponents as to

how to explain the fine-tuning.

But there's a problem with that.

For the multiverse

explanation to work,

there must be some kind of

universe-generating mechanism,

a kind of common cause of

all the universes so that we

can portray each of the

universes as the outcome

of a kind of cosmic lottery.

And these

universe-generating machines,

where they're constantly

generating universes

with slightly different

parameters and laws of physics.

And this is the sleeper.

All the speculative

cosmological models

that have been invoked to

explain how you might generate new

universes, whether those

models are based on string theory

or something called

inflationary cosmology,

all those models

require exquisite,

prior fine-tuning in the

universe-generating mechanism

that is proposed.

JAY RICHARDS: If a

monkey clicked on a typewriter

for an infinite amount

of time, in theory

it would eventually

type out Hamlet.

But if the typewriter

didn't have the letter H,

then it wouldn't stand a chance.

Just as the parts of the

typewriter need to be fine-tuned

to include all the

letters of the alphabet

to make possible typing

different words and sentences,

so too, all proposed

universe-generating mechanisms

would require fine-tuning

to make it possible

to generate different

universes with different

initial conditions

and laws of physics.

STEPHEN MEYER: The

multiverse doesn't actually get rid

of the fine-tuning or explain

the origin of the fine-tuning.

You really just push the fine-tuning

problem back one generation

without solving it.

And yet we know of one cause

that does produce fine-tuning

in our experience.

Whenever we see

what we call fine-tuning,

we always trace that type

of a system back to a mind,

whether we're talking about

a finely tuned French recipe,

a finely tuned internal

combustion engine,

or a finely tuned radio dial.

LUKE BARNES: The ability

to look at a set of possibilities

and to choose an outcome is

almost by definition intentional.

It's something that

a mind does that sort

of mindless matter doesn't do.

STEPHEN MEYER: So, given

that the multiverse doesn't actually

provide an ultimate

explanation for fine-tuning,

the best explanation

for fine-tuning

is still intelligent design.

PETER THIEL: The multiverse

is like this gateway drug.

Once you're lost

in the multiverse,

you might as well

be in a simulation.

BRIAN MILLER: Some

people have argued

that our universe is

actually a simulation,

that there's perhaps

some extraordinary

computer that's

running a simulation.

We're part of that simulation.

DAVID BERLINSKI:

The simulation theory?

That belongs in the movies.

Come on, that's ridiculous.

We're not living

in a simulation.

There's no evidence of

a discrete film being run

in the background.

This is not what

I would consider,

or what you would consider,

sophisticated discourse.

Has nothing to do with science.

PETER THIEL: I think what all

these things have in common,

the simulation

theory, the multiverse,

you can't trust what's

in front of your eyes.

DAVID BERLINSKI: The

multiverse, simulation hypothesis,

we're living in a computer,

all those sorts of things,

there's nothing

wrong with any of this.

It just shouldn't be

mistaken for anything serious.

STEPHEN MEYER: We're not

only seeing evidence of design

at the macroscopic

scale of the entire universe

and in the fundamental

parameters of physics

that affect the

whole of the cosmos,

but we're now seeing

design in the microcosm

and the tiny recesses

of living cells.

[Music]

MICHAEL BEHE: Back in

the middle of the 19th century,

the cell was thought to

be a little piece of jelly,

so it seemed to

be pretty simple.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Thomas Henry Huxley said

that the living

cell is a simple,

h*m* globule of

undifferentiated protoplasm.

It's just a simple

enclosure with some Jello

or goo on the inside.

MICHAEL BEHE: But

modern science has shown

that the cell is an enormously

complex nanoscale factory.

And when you study biochemistry,

you come across machinery,

literally molecular machines.

One of my favorites is

the bacterial flagellum.

It is quite literally

an outboard motor

that bacteria use to swim.

It's got a propeller, this

long whip-like strand.

And the propeller is

attached to the drive shaft

by something called the U-joint,

which is attached to the motor.

And the motor is hooked

onto the cell membrane

by something called the stator.

The stator requires

bushing to push up

through the

membrane of the cell.

And altogether, there are

30 parts that are needed for it.

STEPHEN MEYER: In some

species, the flagellar motor is rotating

at 100,000 rpm, and

it can change direction

in a quarter of a turn.

It's an absolutely amazing piece

of high technology

in a low form of life.

MICHAEL BEHE: Another great

example of a molecular machine

in the cell is the ATP synthase.

STEPHEN MEYER:

It's a true turbine

that generates energy

for use in the cell

in much the same way a turbine

in a dam generates electricity.

MICHAEL BEHE: It's an engine

with a barrel-shaped rotor made

of protein subunits.

As the rotor spins, it turns

a drive shaft with a specially

placed bump that opens a

specifically shaped compartment.

Once opened, this compartment

receives two molecules

and combines them to form

another energy-rich molecule

called ATP, the

power plant for the cell.

SPEAKER: And

there's a whole host

of molecular

machines inside cells.

Turbines, rotary

engines, sliding clamps,

machines for copying

digital information.

We've got kinesin

motors that are running

along that are basically UPS

trucks that are delivering things.

Motor proteins that walk step

by step as they tow vesicles

of material along tracks

made of other special proteins.

MICHAEL BEHE:

Darwin knew nothing

of these sophisticated multi-part

machines in the 19th century,

and his theory is not

equipped to explain them.

Darwin himself said, "If

it could be demonstrated

that there was any system

that could not be put together

by numerous, successive,

slight modifications,

my theory would

absolutely break down.

In the bacterial

flagellar motor,

if you take away

the drive shaft or

if you take away the propeller

or the U-joint, it's broken.

If any key component of

the flagellar motor is removed,

it stops functioning.

This means simpler evolutionary

precursors wouldn't have worked.

So, natural selection

wouldn't have preserved them,

halting evolution

before the fully

functional motor could develop.

On the flip side, when you

see a system that's put together

with a number of components

matched to each other,

you recognize that's

the product of a mind.

STEPHEN MEYER: The

Darwinian mechanism of mutation

and selection, which has

long been posed as a kind

of designer-substitute mechanism,

cannot build those systems.

Then, perhaps they look designed

because they really

were designed.

But there's an even

deeper consideration

that points to intelligent

design and biology.

SPEAKER: One of the

most brilliant theories

of modern science was formulated

by an American, JD Watson,

and an Englishman, FHC Crick.

FRANCIS CRICK:

As soon as we met,

we found that although we

had very different backgrounds,

we had a lot of

things in common.

STEPHEN MEYER: Francis

Crick was a PhD student

at Cambridge University,

working in physics,

not even in biology.

He teamed up with a 23-year-old

American named James Watson.

JAMES WATSON:

Neither of us were trained

for what really

interested us now.

We both wanted to find the gene.

We weren't organic chemists.

We weren't anything else.

STEPHEN MEYER: And they

began to work on what was at the time

deemed to be kind of the

holy grail of biological research.

By the early 1950s, many

scientists were suspecting

that DNA had something

to do with the transmission

of hereditary information,

but didn't know

what the structure of DNA was.

And so, Watson and Crick

began a kind of odyssey

to try to crack this problem.

And by the spring of 1953, they

had actually formulated a model

that elucidated the structure

of the DNA molecule.

They showed that it had a

beautiful double helix structure.

And along the spine

of the molecule,

on the interior, there were

chemical subunits, four of them.

SPEAKER: One, two, three, four.

STEPHEN MEYER: Now represented

with the letters A, T, G, and C.

SPEAKER: A would pair with T.

And then, you have

two other genetic letters.

C would pair up with G.

So, you had the double helix.

So, the discovery of

the structure suggested

that one strand of DNA had

a complementary strand...

that could in turn function

as a template for rebuilding

or copying the original strand.

And this suggested

a duplication process.

[Music]

FRANCIS CRICK: I don't think

I worried too much about what

the structure might tell us.

I just thought we

ought to find out.

And when we had

found out, of course,

it struck us with a

tremendous impact,

just how beautiful

and exciting it was.

Because there before

us was the answer to one

of the fundamental problems in

biology, how do genes replicate?

And it was very simple,

and you couldn't miss it.

We used to occasionally

just, Jim and I,

just sit and look

at the molecule

and think how beautiful it was.

STEPHEN MEYER: Interestingly,

Crick had been a code breaker

in World w*r II.

In 1957, he then formulates

something called the sequence

hypothesis, which in many

ways, I think is a more significant

achievement than even the

original elucidation of the structure.

Crick realizes that the four

chemical subunits along the spine

of the double helix, on

the interior of the helix,

are functioning like alphabetic

characters in a written text.

That is to say that it's

not the physical properties

of these subunits.

It's not their molecular

weight or their shape,

but rather it's their

arrangement in accord

with an independent

symbol convention

that molecular biologists

eventually elucidate,

called the genetic code,

that gives them their ability

to transmit information.

RICHARD STERNBERG:

What also happened

around the same time

was Gamow had shown

that you could take those

letters, As, Cs, Gs, and Ts,

and you could represent them

in binary code, zeros and ones.

So, it had an uncanny

resemblance to a digital bit string.

It looked very much like

an information carrier.

But for what?

DOUGLAS AXE: Crick

anticipated this, too.

He thought these bases

were carrying information

for the construction

of proteins.

A cell is filled with proteins

that are performing the tasks

inside the cells.

STEPHEN MEYER: They're

like the tools in a toolbox.

You have a hammer,

a wrench, a saw.

Each of those different tools

perform different functions

because of the different

three-dimensional shapes

that they have.

The same thing

is true of proteins.

Proteins catalyze

reactions at super-fast rates,

those are called

enzyme proteins,

they build the structural

parts of molecular machines,

and they also help to process

information on the DNA molecule.

So, proteins do all

these important jobs,

but they do those jobs

because they have very specific

three-dimensional

conformations or shapes.

Now that raises the question,

how do they acquire those shapes?

Well, they get those

precise shapes if and only

if the amino acid subunits,

the constituent parts out

of which they're made, are

arranged in very specific ways.

BRIAN MILLER: And there's

20 amino acids in the same way

that you've got 26

letters in the alphabet.

So, the order of the amino acids

in a protein is like the

letters in a sentence.

They have to be in

the right order to work.

STEPHEN MEYER: But

what causes the amino acids

to get arranged properly

so that they will fold properly

into the right shapes?

And the answer to

that was the discovery

that the DNA molecule

contains information...

instructions for

directing the construction

of those protein molecules

that do all those important jobs.

DOUGLAS AXE: In

those stretches of DNA,

you have very particular

sequences of A's, C's, G's,

and T's that tell cells how to

make amino acid sequences

that fold and become

functional proteins.

And molecular biologists now

have a very good understanding

of how the information in

DNA directs the process

of protein synthesis.

First, the cell uses a large protein

machine called a polymerase

to make a copy of the

information on the DNA.

The polymerase separates

the DNA into two strands.

One strand serves as

a template for creating

a complementary RNA copy.

The resulting copy, called a

messenger RNA transcript,

detaches and then

approaches and passes

through the nuclear

pore complex.

Then the transcript with the

genetic assembly instructions

arrives at a two-part chemical

factory called the ribosome,

the site of protein synthesis.

As the messenger RNA transcript

passes through the ribosome,

a mechanical assembly line

builds a specifically sequenced chain

of amino acids using the

instructions on the transcript.

These amino acids are

transported to the ribosome

by molecules

called transfer RNAs,

which link specific

sequences of bases

to corresponding amino acids

in accord with the genetic code.

The sequential arrangement

of the amino acids determines

whether the chain will

fold into a functional protein,

and if so, which type.

Once the chain is folded

into a functional protein,

it is ready to perform

its job inside the cell.

That's in fact what's

going on inside cells.

STEPHEN MEYER:

The discovery meant

that you had to explain

not just the origin

of the cell viewed as a

kind of amorphous blob,

but rather as an enclosure

of a sophisticated information

storage device and a sophisticated

information transmission

and processing system.

SPEAKER: They

inherited all the traits

of the cell they came from.

And this same sort of process

goes on in all living creatures.

JAMES TOUR: It's not just a

bunch of protoplasm anymore.

The cell is utterly amazing.

How can you look

at this and not think,

how in the world did this start?

Because molecules don't come

together to do that on their own.

SPEAKER: OK.

But what I'd like to know is,

where'd the first cell come from?

SPEAKER: In a way, you're

asking where life itself began.

We don't know that.

STEPHEN MEYER: I first

encountered the mystery about the origin

of the first life at a

conference that I attended

when I was a young scientist.

There was a discussion

between scientists

who were committed to the

standard chemical evolutionary model

for how life arose

from simpler chemicals

in the so-called prebiotic soup,

and other scientists who

had become skeptical

of the standard model.

One of those scientists on the

panel was a man named Dean

Kenyon, a biophysicist with a

Stanford PhD, he'd worked at NASA,

and he'd written the best-

selling advanced graduate-level

textbook on how life first arose

from these prebiotic chemicals,

"Biochemical Predestination".

But leading up

to the conference,

he began to doubt

his own theory.

DEAN KENYON: My own

research work on origin

of first life was one

of the main factors

that led me to begin to

question this general viewpoint

about origins.

As time went on there, I

began to be more aware

of some of the

problems involved.

Actually, some students brought

me a book in which my own work,

"Biochemical

Predestination", was critiqued.

I thought I could easily refute

this refutation of my work.

And so, I said, "Well,

I'll take the summer

to look at this material.

It looks very interesting.

Here, the question of

origin of genetic information

looked increasingly

problematical.

By the time the summer

was over, I had decided

that I could not

refute this criticism.

Things added up to the time

for a critical reexamination.

STEPHEN MEYER: And his

old idea was that the subunits

of the large information-

carrying biological molecules,

like the proteins and the

DNA, would have self-organized

because of forces of attraction

between the constituent parts

of those large molecules.

In chemistry, sodium and

chloride combine to form salt.

NA has a plus charge.

Cl has a minus charge.

They attract, and they form a

nicely ordered crystal lattice.

However, as he got

deeply into the chemistry,

Kenyon realized that DNA

wasn't that kind of molecule.

DEAN KENYON: In the DNA

molecule, we have A, T, C, and G.

And the specific order in which

they occur does not depend

on the chemical

binding affinities

between or among

those various bases.

STEPHEN MEYER: I used

to use a visual illustration

with my students to

get the idea across.

I would use a little

magnetic chalkboard

and stick letters to

it, magnetic letters.

In the case of the magnetic

letters in the chalkboard,

there were magnetic

forces that explained

why the letters stuck

to the backboard.

But those forces didn't explain

the arrangement of the letters

that spelled out some message.

Instead, that was explained

only by an exogenous source

of information, namely, I

had arranged the letters.

So, the magnetic forces

explain why the letters stuck

to the backboard, but

not their arrangement.

And in the same way, there

are forces of attraction in DNA

that explain why the bases stick

to the sugar phosphate backbone,

but not forces that explain the

arrangement of the characters.

DEAN KENYON: And so,

my doubt just reached, I guess,

for me, the intellectual

breaking point.

If one could get at the

origin of the messages,

the encoded messages

within the living machinery,

then you would really be on to

something far more intellectually

satisfying than this

chemical evolution theory.

STEPHEN MEYER:

And at this conference,

he publicly repudiated

his own theory.

DEAN KENYON: I don't think

you have to jump off the end

of the rational world

to move in the direction

of a frankly theistic

understanding of the origin of life.

JAMES TOUR: Since

Kenyon announced his doubts,

there have been

many other attempts

to simulate how the molecular

compounds necessary for life,

like proteins and DNA, or even

simpler chemical building blocks

of those compounds,

might have evolved

under realistic prebiotic

conditions on the early Earth.

But those laboratory simulations

invariably require a cheat.

Human interference.

When you do organic synthesis,

when you make a compound,

you need to generally

start with pure compounds

because the

impurities cause a lot

of deleterious

reactions to occur.

Once you've made your

compound, you've got to stop it

at exactly the right time

before it decomposes,

more human interference.

Now, what you have to

do is you have to separate it

from all the other

compounds that formed.

Separations are

really hard, really hard.

Huge human involvement.

Now you have to identify it.

You have to know what

it is and characterize it

in order to bring it

on to the next step.

How do you go on?

And the poor early

Earth was mindless.

It didn't know what it

was supposed to make.

Molecules have never been

known to move toward life.

Never, ever, ever.

Molecules don't evolve

toward life. They don't.

STEPHEN MEYER: Attempts to

simulate how life could have arisen

from a prebiotic environment

involve an element

that never gets acknowledged.

And that element

is intelligence.

JAMES TOUR: We need to

address more fundamental questions.

What's the origin of the code?

JOHN LENNOX: And I know

that philosophers of science

and scientists find it

difficult to really grasp what

information is because

it has a couple of levels.

STEPHEN MEYER: In

classical information theory,

there isn't a way to

distinguish a series of symbols

that are merely improbable

from a series of symbols

that are improbable

and also functional.

[Music]

The difference between the

monkey typing out random gibberish,

which would be a highly complex

arrangement of characters,

but not one that

conveys any meaning

or performs a

communication function,

and, say, a line

of poetry, like,

"Time and tide wait for no man.

If you compare those two

symbol strings side by side,

you'll see that they both

are highly improbable.

But something is

present in the one string

of characters that's

not present in the other.

And that's what

we call specificity.

Or sometimes it's called

specified complexity.

The arrangement of

the characters is specific

to perform a function.

DOUGLAS AXE: Now,

what's interesting in life,

you have things that

are not just complex and

that there's lots of parts, it's

that they're arranged

in a particular way

that allows them to do

something remarkable.

And that is the thing

that makes the complexity

not just ordinary complexity...

but specified complexity.

And DNA is a great example

of specified complexity.

JOHN LENNOX: And when we're

talking about information contained

in the genetic code

in DNA, we are talking

about a level of

semantic information.

Because in DNA, the sequence

is coding for something.

In that sense, it has meaning.

STEPHEN MEYER: A

scientist named Henry Quastler,

who was one of the pioneers in

applying the information sciences

to analyzing the information

that's stored in DNA, he says,

"The creation of new

information is habitually associated

with conscious activity.

JOHN LENNOX: We

associate information

with a rational

intelligence behind it.

That's true at all levels.

And as we grow up, we learn.

We read books.

We see words.

We learn language.

And everything

points towards the fact

that this does not

arise spontaneously.

STEPHEN MEYER: Bill Gates

says that DNA is like a software

program, only much more

complex than any we've ever created.

What do we know about

the origin of software?

It always comes from a

mind, from a programmer.

In fact, whenever

we see information

and we trace it

back to its source,

whether we're looking at

a section of software code

or a hieroglyphic inscription

or a paragraph in a book

or information embedded

in a radio signal,

if we trace the information

back to its ultimate source,

we always come to a

mind, not a material process.

So, the discovery of

information in a digital

or alphabetic form at

the foundation of life

in molecules like DNA and

RNA is a powerful indicator

of a designing intelligence

playing a role in the origin

of that information, and

therefore in the origin of life itself.

JOHN LENNOX: That's

where all our experience

of the universe points.

We see the word exit, immediately

we infer to a mind behind it.

A Chinese archaeologist sees

a couple of strokes on the wall

of a cave and says,

"Human intelligence.

And I say, "Don't be

so stupid, two strokes.

Ah, yes, but they are the

Chinese symbol for a human being.

And so, there must have

been an intelligence behind that.

WILLIAM DEMBSKI:

We look inside the cell.

We have a whole

theory which describes

these controlled

transfers of information.

And the only examples

we know of this sort

of controlled transfers

of information is systems

that intelligent agents

have developed.

BRENDAN DIXON: When we look

at how information gets processed

in the cell, you get the string

of information being ejected out

of the nucleus, but

that string of information

on its own does not give

you, in any way, shape,

or form, the product we

need to get work done.

It has to be picked up

by another mechanism

that knows how

to read that string

and convert what it sees there

into what is needed over here

to get the work done that

that thing over there needs.

That gave me pause

and made me go,

"Wait a minute, I've

seen this before.

We do this all the time

in computer science.

Some of the ideas that

we were seeing in biology

that resonated with me were

such notions as error correction.

RICHARD GUNASEKERA:

By any chance,

if there's something

that is done incorrectly,

there's even another

protein that's able

to proofread and fix this.

[Music]

STEPHEN MEYER: The

existing code can be recoded,

it can be rewritten, it

can be edited on the fly.

The information

processing system

in the cell uses design

strategies reminiscent

of high-tech digital computing

with one key difference.

The design logic in the

cell exceeds anything

human engineers have produced.

BRENDAN DIXON:

We know now that DNA,

you can read it

once in one direction.

You can read it in

that direction again,

but if you start here, you get a

different gene expressed than

if you start here, even

though those overlap.

WALTER MYERS: You can read

the same segment of DNA forward

to get one protein and

backwards to get another.

BRENDAN DIXON: We've never

been able to yet make anything like

that happen with computers.

WALTER MYERS: The

code in the computer program,

it only does one thing.

You can't read

it back and forth.

You read it one way,

and that's what it does.

That's all it does.

ROBERT SHELDON: In DNA, we

have codes within codes within codes.

They're interdigitated.

They are multi-level,

overlapping.

We're dealing with

a system that exhibits

a manifold complex design.

BRENDAN DIXON: The

level of complexity that we see,

I stand back and go,

"Wow, that's really elegant.

DAVID BERLINSKI: As

soon as the immense miracle

of the cell is exposed,

it's an ongoing process.

We're far from a complete

description of even the simplest cell.

We see these are

not random structures.

They haven't been

cobbled together.

They haven't been

pieced together

by some sort of

stochastic mechanism.

They're exquisitely and

ingeniously put together

in a certain way, and if

they're not put together

in that certain way,

they don't work.

STEPHEN MEYER:

Let's take a look at what's

around us on planet Earth.

Do we see what looks like

the bare bones, minimalistic,

cobbling together

something by accident

for the sheer purpose

of ruthless survival?

Or do we see something

much more extravagant,

beautiful in its expression?

This is actually a big problem

in evolutionary biology.

It's called the problem

of gratuitous beauty.

Many organisms have beauty

beyond anything that's relevant

for their survival.

ROBERT SHELDON: This

deserves an explanation.

Many people have tried to

give a utilitarian explanation.

Oh, yeah, well, it's

some adaptive reason,

or there's some

sexual selection.

But I think the answer

requires something more.

The one who realized

the answer requires

something more was Aristotle.

He said, "No, it's the result of

some kind of rational structure

to the universe, dare

say even an intelligence.

So, the exuberance

is one that appears

to be designed to

elicit our attention.

[Music]

It's one that seems to

be reaching out to us.

Now, here I am waxing.

It would seem to be mystical.

DAVID BERLINSKI: I must

say that these are observations,

they're appeals to intuition,

but not to be dismissed

for that reason.

Not to be dismissed.

There's something

interesting going on.

STEPHEN MEYER:

There's something in science

called the beauty principle

that says true theories often

convey a mathematical beauty

or structural harmony.

Upon looking at their

model of the DNA molecule,

Francis Crick was

quoted as saying,

"It's so beautiful,

it's got to be right.

ROBERT SHELDON: You find

that all the time in the literature

today, people saying, "Beauty

is truth, and truth beauty.

If we find a set of equations

that is just beautiful,

then it must be true.

SPEAKER: Sometimes the

path toward the truth leads

through beauty.

And that is an important window.

We need to be

willing to open that.

JAY RICHARDS: There's really

two fundamental hypotheses

about reality.

One is that the story

of everything is purpose,

that behind everything

there is an author.

The alternative is

that none of that is true.

We're the result of blind

and impersonal processes

that did not have us in mind.

So, ultimately, these questions

about the origin of matter,

the origin of life, the

origin of the universe,

come down to that fundamental

question and those two options.

TIMOTHY MCGREW: Richard

Dawkins has very famously said

that the universe

has, at bottom,

just those properties one would

expect if there were no design,

no purpose, only blind,

pitiless indifference.

That's an interesting claim.

What I find interesting about

it is that it's the right kind

of claim to be trying to make.

We want to take our

metaphysical hypotheses

and see what consequences

they have, what they point

to, how well they

account for various things.

One of the most important

questions any of us can ask,

when should I change my mind?

Or to put it a

little bit differently,

if I am wrong, how

am I going to find out?

Consider you're walking

through the woods.

In a stretch of woods that you

had thought totally uninhabited,

you stumble upon an

old, sort of rundown cabin.

Looking at it, you

think it's just a relic left

over from a long time ago.

Then you go up to the door,

and you push it, and it opens.

And as you step inside,

you see a cup of tea,

still hot, steeping

on a little table

in the middle of the cabin.

When Richard Dawkins says the

universe has exactly the features

that we would expect if there

were at bottom no reason,

no purpose, what he's saying

is that there should be no signs

of intelligence in the universe.

Where Dawkins goes wrong

is that there actually is a cup

of tea on the table.

JAY RICHARDS: And so much more.

Recent scientific discoveries

point in the direction

that none of the leading

scientific materialists expected.

STEPHEN MEYER: No one

expected that the physical universe

of matter, space,

time, and energy

would have a definite beginning.

No one expected that the

universe would be finely tuned

against all odds to

make life possible.

Dawkins himself has confessed

to being knocked sideways

with wonder at the

miniaturized intricacy

of the data processing

machinery inside the cell.

We're not living in a vast,

meaningless universe.

From the forces holding the

cosmos together to the instructions

in the DNA in our own

bodies, we see evidence

that everything was

intended for a purpose,

that the story of

everything is not blind,

pitiless indifference, but the

unfolding of a grand design

that all of us are part of.

And surprisingly, perhaps, it is

science that has revealed this.

[Music]

ALLAN SANDAGE: Here

is evidence for what can only

be described as a

supernatural event.

DEAN KENYON: I don't think

you have to jump off the end

of the rational world

to move in the direction

of a frankly theistic

understanding of the origin of life.

ROBERT JASTROW: Is there

something else that we can imagine

that would lay these

questions to rest?

I can't see it.

FRED HOYLE: The question

then was what does one do about it?

SPEAKER: We might

rethink the story of everything.

The universe does not

look like it's been left to itself.

It bears everywhere the

fingerprints of its creator.

[Music]