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Dr. Stephen C. Meyer defends belief in God using the progress of science

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Dr. Stephen C. Meyer is my favorite defender of Christianity these days. His first book covered the origin of life. His second book covered the sudden origin of body plans in the fossil record. And his third book covered the origin of the universe and fine-tuning. In this post, we’ll see a recent popular-level article he wrote for The Federalist, and 6 new short videos he made for Prager University.

Here is latest article from my favorite news source – The Federalist. He explains how scientific discoveries provide evidence for a Creator of the universe:

From the first astronomical investigations about the early history of the universe, light, and other forms of radiant energy, have yielded the most important clues about cosmic origins. During the 1920s, astronomers discovered that the wavelengths of light coming from distant galaxies were stretched out, or “red-shifted,” as if the galaxies were moving away from us. Just as sound coming from a train whistle drops in pitch as the result of the sound waves being stretched out as the train recedes, light coming from a distant galaxy changes color (becomes more red) as light waves are elongated as galaxies move away from Earth.

Soon after the discovery of the red shift, Belgian priest-physicist Georges Lemaître and Caltech astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that galaxies farther away from Earth were receding faster than those close at hand. That suggested a spherical expansion of the universe in all directions of space like a balloon inflating from a singular explosive beginning—from a “Big Bang.”

Then in 1965, physicists discovered a different kind of light they thought provided further evidence of the Big Bang. While working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson inadvertently discovered an extremely low-energy radiation on their highly sensitive, large antennas. This radiant energy, now known as the Cosmic Background Radiation, is postulated to be a remnant of the earliest moments after the Big Bang when the universe was immensely hot and densely compacted.

Those are the 3 most common pieces of evidence for a cosmic beginning – and therefore, a Cosmic Beginner. And this evidence is likely to be enhanced by NASA’s newest telescope, which Dr. Meyer talks about:

[O]n December 22 NASA will launch a new satellite capable of seeing the first starlight from just after the Big Bang—a light, and an event, that tell us about the creation of the universe and, in their own ways, reveal God to the world.

NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope will be carried into space this week from French Guiana on the back of an Ariane 5 rocket. The $10 billion, 21-foot telescope features a massive umbrella-like sun shield. It also boasts 15 times the range of motion and six times the light-gathering capability of the Hubble Space Telescope—NASA’s next best instrument for peering deep into space and far back in time.

The light that NASA’s new telescope seeks to detect comes, not from those very earliest moments after the beginning, but from the first stars and galaxies that formed an estimated several hundred thousand years later. Detecting that light will nevertheless provide further confirmation of an expanding universe.

Since the new telescope can detect infrared light—invisible light with extremely long wave-lengths—it can establish whether the most distant galaxies exhibit the amount of red shift that astronomers expect given the Big Bang.

[…]This additional evidence of an expanding universe would further deepen the mystery associated with the Big Bang and add weight to a growing science-based “God hypothesis.” If the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning—as observational astronomy and theoretical physics increasingly suggest—it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of any physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe. After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy—no physics—would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.

Instead, whatever caused the universe to originate must not have been material and must exist beyond space and time. It must further have been capable of initiating a great change of state, from nothing to everything that exists. Such considerations have led other scientists—former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Gerald Schroeder and the late Caltech astrophysicist Allan Sandage, for example—to posit an external creator as the best explanation for the origin of the universe as revealed by modern cosmology.

This new telescope creates an interesting situation for Christians and atheists. Christians are excited about this telescope, and anxious to get back the results that will confirm a supernatural Creator. Atheists are nervous about this telescope. They are committed to an eternally existing universe. One that doesn’t implicate any kind of supernatural first cause of the natural world. If the universe has a beginning, then by definition, the cause of the universe must be supernatural and eternal. Because it existed causally prior to the beginning of the universe. It is not material, because it created matter. It is not in time, because it created the physical universe that marks the passage of time.

Anyway, to share this information, Dr. Meyer has created six new short videos for Prager University. I’ve embedded the 6 videos below, and each title is a link to Prager University where you can find a transcript. These are perfect for busy people to get the big picture.

1. ARE RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN CONFLICT?

2. SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR GOD AND WHY IT MATTERS

3. HOW DID THE UNIVERSE BEGIN?

4. ALIENS, THE MULTIVERSE, OR GOD?

5. DNA AND THE EVIDENCE FOR INTELLIGENT DESIGN

6. EVOLUTION: BACTERIA TO BEETHOVEN

If you’re looking for a longer lecture, delivered to an audience of students, this one from 2015 is 95 minutes long, and has over 900,000 views:

What I’d like to see is parents and pastors stop worrying about how Christians feel,and whether we are like. Step one of being a Christian is knowing and showing that God exists. It’s not about feelings, community or peer approval. This is not Disney. This is not romance novels. What we need is young Christians who can have productive conversations about Christianity. And those conversations are easy – if we are trained in the mainstream science that confirms the existence of the supernatural Creator / Designer.

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Will computers and robots ever become self-aware?

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There is a very famous thought experiment from UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle that all Christian apologists should know about. And now everyone who reads the Wall Street Journal knows about it, because of this article. (Full text available at archive.md)

In that article, Searle is writing about the IBM computer that was programmed to play Jeopardy. Can a robot who wins on Jeopardy be “human”? Searle says no. And his famous Chinese room example (discussed in the article) explains why.

Excerpt:

Imagine that a person—me, for example—knows no Chinese and is locked in a room with boxes full of Chinese symbols and an instruction book written in English for manipulating the symbols. Unknown to me, the boxes are called “the database” and the instruction book is called “the program.” I am called “the computer.”

People outside the room pass in bunches of Chinese symbols that, unknown to me, are questions. I look up in the instruction book what I am supposed to do and I give back answers in Chinese symbols.

Suppose I get so good at shuffling the symbols and passing out the answers that my answers are indistinguishable from a native Chinese speaker’s. I give every indication of understanding the language despite the fact that I actually don’t understand a word of Chinese.

And if I do not, neither does any digital computer, because no computer, qua computer, has anything I do not have. It has stocks of symbols, rules for manipulating symbols, a system that allows it to rapidly transition from zeros to ones, and the ability to process inputs and outputs. That is it. There is nothing else.

Here is a link to the full article by John Searle on the Chinese room illustration.

By the way, Searle is a naturalist – not a theist, not a Christian. Now, let’s hear from a Christian scholar who can make more sense of this for us.

Here’s a related article on “strong AI” by Christian philosopher Jay Richards.

Excerpt:

Popular discussions of AI often suggest that if you keep increasing weak AI, at some point, you’ll get strong AI. That is, if you get enough computation, you’ll eventually get consciousness.

The reasoning goes something like this: There will be a moment at which a computer will be indistinguishable from a human intelligent agent in a blind test. At that point, we will have intelligent, conscious machines.

This does not follow. A computer may pass the Turing test, but that doesn’t mean that it will actually be a self-conscious, free agent.

The point seems obvious, but we can easily be beguiled by the way we speak of computers: We talk about computers learning, making mistakes, becoming more intelligent, and so forth. We need to remember that we are speaking metaphorically.

We can also be led astray by unexamined metaphysical assumptions. If we’re just computers made of meat, and we happened to become conscious at some point, what’s to stop computers from doing the same? That makes sense if you accept the premise—as many AI researchers do. If you don’t accept the premise, though, you don’t have to accept the conclusion.

In fact, there’s no good reason to assume that consciousness and agency emerge by accident at some threshold of speed and computational power in computers. We know by introspection that we are conscious, free beings—though we really don’t know how this works. So we naturally attribute consciousness to other humans. We also know generally what’s going on inside a computer, since we build them, and it has nothing to do with consciousness. It’s quite likely that consciousness is qualitatively different from the type of computation that we have developed in computers (as the “Chinese Room” argument, by philosopher John Searle, seems to show). Remember that, and you’ll suffer less anxiety as computers become more powerful.

Even if computer technology provides accelerating returns for the foreseeable future, it doesn’t follow that we’ll be replacing ourselves anytime soon. AI enthusiasts often make highly simplistic assumptions about human nature and biology. Rather than marveling at the ways in which computation illuminates our understanding of the microscopic biological world, many treat biological systems as nothing but clunky, soon-to-be-obsolete conglomerations of hardware and software. Fanciful speculations about uploading ourselves onto the Internet and transcending our biology rest on these simplistic assumptions. This is a common philosophical blind spot in the AI community, but it’s not a danger of AI research itself, which primarily involves programming and computers.

AI researchers often mix topics from different disciplines—biology, physics, computer science, robotics—and this causes critics to do the same. For instance, many critics worry that AI research leads inevitably to tampering with human nature. But different types of research raise different concerns. There are serious ethical questions when we’re dealing with human cloning and research that destroys human embryos. But AI research in itself does not raise these concerns. It normally involves computers, machines, and programming. While all technology raises ethical issues, we should be less worried about AI research—which has many benign applications—than research that treats human life as a means rather than an end.

When I am playing a game on the computer, I know exactly why what I am doing is fun – I am conscious of it. But the computer has no idea what I am doing. It is just matter in motion. The computer’s behavior is just the determined result of its programming and the inputs I supply to it. And that’s all computers will ever do. Trust me, this is my field. I have the BS and MS in computer science, and I have studied this area. AI has applications for machine learning and search problems, but consciousness is not on the radar. You can’t get there from here.

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Report: Soros-funded ‘disinformation’ group paid $926,000 to Steele dossier creators

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So on this blog, I’ve tried to cover the origins of the fake Steele dossier that was used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant spy on the Trump campaign. I’ve talked about the role of the Democrat-supporting law firm Perkins Coie, and the Democrat-backed opposition research firm Fusion GPS. But now we have information about George Soros’ role in the scandal.

Here’s the latest from The Federalist:

A left-wing group backed by billionaire Democratic mega-donor George Soros that falsely claims to fight disinformation paid nearly seven figures to individuals behind the discredited Steele dossier, a Clinton campaign-funded disinformation document, new documents show.

Public IRS tax filings reveal the group paid a total of $926,000 to firms connected to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, and Fusion GPS, the Democrat-backed consulting firm that sponsored the opposition research.

[…]According to the newly released Democracy Integrity Project’s IRS 990 form for fiscal year 2020, the self-purported crusaders against disinformation paid $521,000 to Steele’s British firm, Walsingham Partners, and $405,000 to D.C.-based Fusion GPS as independent contractors.

In 2017, the group paid more than $3.8 million to the two firms behind the conspiracy at its height, according to The Daily Caller, which was “more than three times what the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS and Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign.” That same year, the same Democracy Integrity Project meddled in the Alabama special election Senate race using Russian disinformation techniques.

This scandal is quite serious, and some of the Democrats responsible are facing legal consequences for using government as a weapon against Republicans:

Those culpable in the years-long Russia collusion hoax are just now beginning to suffer legal consequences after avoiding them for years.

In early November, Steele’s primary sub-source, Igor Danchenko, became the third arrested over the course of an independent probe in the Justice Department conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham. In October, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was indicted on false statements to the FBI made in September 2016.

At the beginning of the year, former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was virtually let off the hook with one year probation and 400 hours of community service for falsifying documents to obtain spy warrants on the Trump campaign.

Let’s review the Clinton campaign and DNC role in the Steele dossier.

The far-left Washington Post explains:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

That’s from the far-left Washington Post.

I think it’s important that everyone is clear about what happened. The mainstream news media allied with Big Tech social media companies to keep this all quiet during the 2020 election campaign. They wanted everyone to trust the Democrats and the FBI. But we’re learning more and more every day about how corrupt the Democrats are. We’re learning who is behind all of their disinformation efforts. We’re learning how they interfere in our elections. We should never vote for these corrupt, power-hungry people to rule over us.

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