Dr. Stephen Meyer
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah, well, I currently direct a research center at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and have founded a similar institute in Cambridge, England.
The
The focus of both institutes is examining the scientific evidence that points to not undirected materialistic processes, but to some kind of intelligent design behind the universe, a mind behind the universe and in life.
So there's a term in British intellectual history called natural theology, the idea that nature is pointing to God.
And we're, in essence, reviving that tradition.
It goes back to figures like Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton and one of Newton's mentors named John Ray and โ
who was a founder of botany.
So the early scientists all believed that they were studying nature.
As one book title put it, For the Glory of God.
It was a famous book by a historian of science who published a book at Princeton Press called For the Glory of God about the scientific revolution.
And so there's been kind of a rise-fall-rise story in the history of science that initially science came out of a โ
of a Judeo-Christian milieu for very almost biblical reasons.
People believed that they could study nature and understand its secrets, that it was intelligible, was their word, because it had been made in the image of the same rational Creator who gave us rationality.
So we had rationality that had come from the Creator that enabled us to understand the creation, the order and design that the Creator built into it.
So our institute in Seattle has a program called the Center for Science and Culture, and we're challenging what we call scientific materialism, the idea that there's no mind, no intelligence behind everything, and instead affirming this idea of intelligent design, that there is a mind or creator behind the physical and biological world that we study.
And it's a venerable tradition in science, and we're reviving it.
Yeah, we get such a big, a different idea today that science is opposed to faith.
I guess that's part of your story.
You were a pretty hard-nosed atheist and you placed your faith in science as opposed to belief in God.
But people don't realize that