Something very exciting just happened! By now, most people have heard about the new movie about intelligent design in the universe that is coming to theaters on April 30th through May 6. Well, I’ve been telling people at work about this movie and sending them links about various discussions about it with the people involved. The best discussion is this one led by Peter Robinson, and featuring James Tour, Stephen C. Meyer and John Lennox.
Here is the video:
I watched it in my “after cardio” after lifting weights on Tuesday. They covered 4 of the best scientific arguments for design: the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine-tuning, the origin of life, and the sudden origin of new body plans in the fossil record.
Here’s the description:
Moving from the Big Bang and the discovery of cosmic beginnings, to the fine-tuning of the physical constants that make life possible, to the extraordinary complexity and information embedded in DNA, mathematician John Lennox, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, and chemist James Tour, explores whether these developments point to blind, undirected processes—or to the activity of an intelligent mind. The trio challenges long-held materialist assumptions, revisits classic scientific debates, and reflects on what these questions mean not only for science but also for our understanding of human existence and purpose.
I noticed that our friend Terrell Clemmons has been publishing articles about the movie on the Science and Culture website.
She has three:
- The Story of the Discovery of the Beginning of All Things
- What Grand Design? On Stephen Hawking’s Loophole
- The Living Nano-Factory: Darwinists Ignore the Ultimate Information Enigma
These articles provide some helpful background to what you see in the discussion above, especially for beginners to the material.
Anyway, here’s a snip from her first article, which is about the origin of the universe:
The self-existing-universe paradigm was discarded by the 1970s for the Big Bang model, which holds that the entire universe, including matter and energy and space and time (also called spacetime), began to exist at a zero point in finite history and has been expanding ever since. Until this zero point, nothing material existed.
The human story of this 20th-century paradigm shift is fascinating, but the empirical findings that drove it are even more so. They are — dare I say — captivating. The Story of Everything, which we’ve been discussing here at Science and Culture Today, relates both the human narrative of the shift and the stunning discoveries that propelled it forward. The upcoming theatrical documentary relates more than just these developments, but that story alone is enough to captivate your mind with the wonder of it all.
I’ve always urged readers of this blog to present scientific evidence for creation and design as a series of discoveries made by real people. Discoveries that overturned the eternally-existing, not-designed views of the distant past. In that discussion I linked to above, they mentioned redshift and cosmic microwave background radiation. But they could also have added the light element abundance predictions – maybe those are discussed in the movie. The point is that evidence piled up until it overturned the naive “eternal universe” view that is still held today by atheists who are holding out hope that the new science will all be reversed so they regain support their Old Time Religion.
Here’s a quote from the second article, which talks the naturalistic response to the evidence for the origin of the universe:
In their 2010 book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow set out to answer a big question: “Is the apparent ‘grand design’ of our universe evidence of a benevolent creator who set things in motion — or does science offer another explanation?”
[…]The thesis of The Grand Design, as stated in the closing chapter, is, “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” i.e., no designer required.
The Story of Everything takes up Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s thesis on their own turf, so to speak. From the perspective of physics, does their “another explanation” add up to a viable case for the universe creating itself out of nothing?
If you’ve never seen the Hawking-Mlodinow hypothesis refuted in a debate or lecture, you’re going to see it in “The Story of Everything”. Honestly, I don’t see how a law of nature – a description of the behavior of matter – can instantiate matter itself. Not to mention fine-tuning that allows the universe to support complex, embodied intelligence.
Here’s the third article, which talks about the biological information that has to be present in the first living system in order for it to perform the minimal functions of life:
In the 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule and its information-bearing properties. From that starting point, scientists went on to discover how the chemical subunits on the “rungs” of the DNA “ladder” function like alphabetic letters in a language and how the information they bear directs protein synthesis in the cell.
The Story of Everything, the upcoming theatrical documentary based on Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis, explains the marvelous information processing that operates inside the cell. For every protein molecule synthesized, the operations include deciphering and copying information from a specific segment of the DNA strand, lining up in correct sequence the required amino acids according to the segment’s specifications, and folding the resulting amino-acid chain into the exact shape necessary so that the molecule can perform its specific task in the cell. The process is comparable to a sophisticated factory production line, with everything running automatically according to preexisting coded instructions. Without it, or without the information that runs it, there would be no life on planet Earth. Zip. Nada. It must have been present, too, in Earth’s first life.
So, if you have not heard how the discovery of information in the cell suggests an intelligent designer, they will be telling you the story of the discoveries and the discoverers of it in the movie.
Does this sound like something you would like your friends and family to know about? It’s very strange to me that at a time when we are making all these scientific discoveries that pretty clearly show that the universe was created and was designed for life, that people are still believing whatever they like without evidence. We’ve got to do better than that! So make a plan to take you and yours to the movie – and share the movie trailer or the discussion video with your friends and family.
WINTERY KNIGHT 