Dr. Stephen Meyer

And so we don't really lose that perspective, that theistic perspective on what's going on in science until the late 19th century with figures like Darwin, Marx, Freud, Thomas Henry Huxley.

These are staunch materialist figures, the great materialists who want to answer all the big questions that religion had answered before.

So Darwin tells us where we came from.

Marx has a utopian vision of the future.

Freud tells us what to do about the human condition and about our guilt.

Huxley takes Darwin's ideas about the origin of new forms of life and applies it even to the very first life and tries to explain the origin of the first cell from simple non-living chemicals.

So you get this kind of materialist synthesis at the end of the 19th century, and that becomes the default way of thinking in the 20th century.

It affects figures like Marx,

Lenin and the early Marxists in the Soviet Union, they have a materialistic worldview that they express in a Marxist way.

The Nazis are very influenced by evolutionary thinking, and that's a really kind of grisly story to tell.

And in the West, too, we've been affected by a more generic scientific materialism that has kind of, I think, undermined people's sense of meaning and purpose.

So

So the shift takes place late 19th century, early 20th century.

We kind of get a default worldview of materialism.

But the argument of my book, my most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis, is that the God hypothesis, the awareness of a mind behind the universe of a creator, is coming back not in spite of but because of new discoveries in science.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's kind of the story of my book, Return of the God Hypothesis, and our new film, The Story of Everything.

And in the film, we tell the story of very prominent figures in science who have had the same kind of worldview shift that you had as they begin to reflect on the discoveries that have been made.

And most of them have to do with biological and cosmological origins.

Where did everything come from?