What's Wrong with Atheism? — Science and God | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:02In a recent interview, while I was presenting some scientific discoveries that may point
2. 0:06to the existence of God, a camera operator, a young woman whom I’ll call Maria, began
3. 0:12to weep visibly. Later she told me the reason for her tears.
4. 0:18Like many young people, Maria believed in God when she arrived in college. But while
5. 0:23there, she repeatedly encountered professors who insisted that based on “the science”
6. 0:28God was a myth.
7. 0:29No more real than Santa Claus.
8. 0:33Maria didn’t feel equipped to challenge her professors. She eventually left college
9. 0:37with nagging doubts about her faith and wondering whether life, including her own life, might
10. 0:42be nothing more than a cosmic accident.
11. 0:46Many young people share Maria’s doubts.
12. 0:49Indeed powerful voices in the academy tell us that science makes belief in God—and
13. 0:54human significance—untenable. For example, as Richard Dawkins, the famed atheist from
14. 0:59Oxford, has asserted “[t]he universe we observe has precisely the properties we should
15. 1:04expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose…nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
16. 1:14But are we the product of such indifference—that is, purely materialistic processes that “did
17. 1:19not have us in mind” as another scientific atheist has put it? Does the universe have
18. 1:25the properties we should expect if this “all there is is matter” vision of reality is
19. 1:29correct?
20. 1:31Perhaps not. Three major scientific discoveries contradict the expectations of scientific
21. 1:37atheists and point instead in a distinctly God-friendly direction.
22. 1:41First, the Big Bang. Discoveries in observational astronomy and developments in theoretical
23. 1:48physics have revealed that the universe had a beginning. This is contrary to the expectations
24. 1:55of scientific materialists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent
25. 2:01and, therefore, in no need of an external creator.
26. 2:05This evidence for a beginning has instead confirmed the expectations of theists. Nobel
27. 2:11laureate Arno Penzias helped make a key discovery establishing a cosmic beginning. He later
28. 2:18observed, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing
29. 2:23to go on but the first five books of Moses. . .and the Bible as a whole.”
30. 2:26And he’s not alone. Cosmological evidence has led other prominent scientists—including
31. 2:33former MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder and the great Caltech astronomer Allan Sandage—to
32. 2:39affirm a transcendent creator beyond space and time as the best explanation for the origin
33. 2:46of our finite universe.
34. 2:48Second, fine-tuning. We live in what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely “Fortunate
35. 2:56Universe,” where fundamental laws and physical parameters have somehow been “fine-tuned”
36. 3:01with just the right strengths and values to make life possible. The incredible odds against
37. 3:07this happening by chance has led even agnostic and atheistic physicists to marvel. As British
38. 3:13physicist Paul Davies has exclaimed, “the impression of design is overwhelming.” Atheist
39. 3:19physicist George Greenstein expresses similar cognitive dissonance: “The thought insistently
40. 3:25arises that some supernatural...Agency, must be involved…”
41. 3:29Third, the complexity of life. Molecular biology has revealed the presence in living cells
42. 3:37of an exquisite world of informational nano-technology—digital code in DNA and RNA; tiny, intricately-constructed
43. 3:45molecular machines, a complex, information storage, transmission and processing system
44. 3:51that resembles, but vastly exceeds, our most advanced digital high-technology.
45. 3:58Not what anyone would expect to see as the result of blind materialistic processes.
46. 4:04Dawkins himself may have conceded as much when he recently confessed to being knocked
47. 4:10“sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery
48. 4:15in the living cell.”
49. 4:17So what should we make of all this?
50. 4:19For their part, scientific atheists have constructed ever more convoluted and fanciful theories.
51. 4:26They posit alien designers to account for the code of life; multiple parallel universes
52. 4:31to try to explain fine tuning; and they’ve developed elaborate mathematical equations
53. 4:37in an attempt to use physics to show how the universe could have begun from nothing physical.
54. 4:44But what if the scientific atheists are just wrong? What if the universe has precisely
55. 4:49the properties we should expect if there is an intelligent and purposeful Creator behind
56. 4:55it all?
57. 4:56In my book Return of the God Hypothesis, I argue that the universe has precisely such
58. 5:02properties.
59. 5:03And that raises a hopeful possibility--that we are not the product of “blind pitiless
60. 5:09indifference,” but instead that we were made on purpose—that we were intended.
61. 5:15British historian Paul Johnson has argued that, “the existence or non-existence of
62. 5:20God is the most important question we humans” can ever ask. Given the scientific evidence
63. 5:26we now have, it might be time to consider—or reconsider this question.
64. 5:32I’m Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science at the Discovery Institute, for Prager University.