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2000 years ago, a newscaster that we know of as Jesus Christ warned us about false Christianity. The warning was not against the devil but against false Christianity…about people who come in His name and deceive many.
The Real Reason Our Culture Is Falling Apart | Stephen Meyer Explains
This year is the 40th anniversary of a very significant speech that was given by Alexander Sultzene the great Soviet dissident and this was his famous men have forgotten God speech. There are disasters befalling America. And the question I want to ask tonight is if these disasters any of them all of them some of them have something to do with our having forgotten God. I’m going to start the talk tonight on a on a unapologetically uh somber note because I think all of us have a sense that uh our culture is in
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some serious trouble and that there are in many many ways the wheels are coming off and it happens that this year is the 40th anniversary of a very significant speech that was given by Alexander Sultzene. Esen the great Soviet dissident and this was his famous men have forgotten God speech and in this speech he told the story of the word spreading across the Soviet Union across Russia mother Russia at the time of the bolevik takeover and that the old people were telling him repeatedly these things h are happening these great
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disasters have bef fall in Russia because men have forgotten God. And this is a passage from his his speech. While I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia. Men have forgotten God. That’s why this is happening. Now, we have many disasters befalling America. If we’re if we’re cleareyed and honest with ourselves, we have a near epidemic level of of teen suicide. We have an anxiety epidemic. We
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have mass shootings. We have family breakdown out of wedlock births. We have a confusion about gender identity, even a fluidity idea that is resulting in medical mutilation of young people. promiscuity, illegitimacy, abortion. It’s getting kind of depressing, I realize, but I could go on. And the crime waves, the fentanyl deaths, there there is something there are disasters befalling America. And the question I want to ask tonight is if these disasters, any of them, all of them, some of them have something to
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do with our having forgotten God. The Gallup people published a great poll last summer in which they noted that there had been a 10% drop in the number of people who believe in God in our culture in less than a decade. That’s still fairly high number, 81%. But it was a very precipitous drop in a short period of time driven by a particular cohort, a particular group of people in the population. You can probably guess it’s the Gen Z’s, the 18s to30s. This the the young people are even if they have been raised in a
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Jewish or Christian or religious home are walking away from traditional religious belief in very dramatic in in in decidedly large numbers. And we’ve done some polling on this ourselves trying to get underneath numbers like this is the Gallup poll is not the only one by any means. Uh Pew has done polling on this and many other organizations. So we did some polling on this to find out what are the factors that are making belief in God seem incredible or untenable to young people in particular. And in a
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survey that we did, we found that 65% of self-described atheists and 43% of agnostics affirmed the following statement. The findings of science make the existence of God less probable. This was one of the top factors cited. Science science undermines belief in God. Now, this wasn’t at all surprising to me. We’ve have many, many encounters with young people. There’s a we do a science and faith conference every year on the east coast. Every year that I’ve gone, the same I would say bererieved
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mother comes to give us an update on her formerly very devout son who went off to one of the great science universities in the United States. Came under the mentorship of a prominent scientific atheist and not only lost his faith but had become a very hostile atheist who was hostile to everything his parents believed and stood for. and it made for a rift in the family. We were at this event three years ago, almost four now I guess. Uh Eric Mataxis and I were doing an interview. Eric was interviewing me
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and was kind of an interesting evening because as we were being interviewed I could see stage left and he was aware of this as well that a young camera woman who was filming the event about halfway through the interview was seen to be visibly weeping. I mean really dramat I mean you a little bit of shaking. It was a dram dramatic expression of of emotion and she was so embarrassed by this later she wrote the film producer who had hired her to work the event with and and wrote a letter explaining what had been
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going on with her and it was that she was learning in our interview about scientific evidence that was support that supported belief in God. And she was so touched by this because she’d been living in a state of cognitive dissonance since graduating from college. And this is what she wrote in the letter. She said, “Throughout my college career, professors would constantly lecture that based on the evidence they had provided, there should be no way that anyone in class could believe in God. They’d argue that the
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science was proven and God was hence a myth.” I was not equipped, she said, to present a valid opposition in debate. I was desperate to find commonality between my beliefs and my scientific education, but I could find none. Now, apparently in her case, she did not entirely lose her faith, but she decided she didn’t want to do any more science. She would have been otherwise gone to grad school in science. She decided to do film production instead. and um had been living for several years in a state
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of as I said cognitive dissonance where she w wanted to believe but it seemed like the facts of the matter contradicted the very possibility of belief and so many young people struggle from this very thing and it’s not hard to see why we’ve had a very uh a group of very prominent voices in our culture advancing the message that science properly understood undermines belief in God. Some of these folks you will know there was a there was a in fact a a publishing genre that became the rage
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about 2007 and has lasted almost to the present day. I think it’s beginning to wne as far as its popularity in publishing, but it was called the new atheist genre. And you had figures like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, the science guy, more serious figures like Stephven Hawk, uh, Stephven Hawking, and Stephen Weinberg, the great physicist from the University of Texas who just passed away the summer before los last. uh Weineberg was famous for saying the more things seem comprehensible meaning to our science
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the more they seem pointless. So this meshes not only of just atheism but a kind of atheistic nihilism that there’s no meaning to life because how could there be an ultimate meaning? Meaning is something that derives from persons and there is no ultimate person behind the universe such that when we die that will be the end of things. Um so you had this and of course the Richard Dawkins title was the god delusion. So these very popular books uh Dawkins sold 3 million Hawkings um uh brief history of SC time
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sold 10 million copies and the famous most famous line from that book was what need then for a creator. So this message has percolated. It’s been around for quite a while because this was repackaged late 19th century scientific atheism, but it was packaged very effectively and it seems to have had a discernable effect on the belief system of young people such that pollsters are now picking that up and um and reporting on that. Now one of the other things that we found when we did polling about
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what lies behind this shift in belief is another factor that was commonly cited. One of the top factors again was scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life. And this was cited again by a great number of people. More people cited this more young people cited this than cited the problem of pain and suffering. So you got a picture of of young people who were fairly affluent, hadn’t suffered a lot themselves personally, but had deep intellectual doubts. The sense that the facts of the matter, the facts of the
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world, of science, of history, of whatever didn’t support the faith. So this made belief untenable. Now again this second factor is not surprising to to me and to many of my colleagues who work on these topics of biological origins because we’ve understood for a long time that theories of biological origins and cosmological origins end up in inevitably raising deep philosophical questions. Uh sometimes in philosophy uh scholars will talk about the concept of a world view, a comprehensive belief
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system that people have whether they know it or not, a kind of default way of thinking. And the most important worldview question that every worldview has to answer is the question of what what one worldview writer James Sire calls the prime reality question. What is the thing or the process uh from which everything else comes? What is the thing the entity or the process from which everything else comes? Of course in traditional Judeo-Christian religious belief that thing or entity that prime reality is God a personal God. But if uh
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a more a more common thought form in the elite universities in the knowledge culture today is a a thought form or worldview known as materialism or sometimes called naturalism. The idea that nature is all there is and there’s nothing beyond nature. No god, no creator, no designing intelligence. And Rich Richard, sorry, Steven J. Gould has made very clear the importance of for example Darwinian evolution in support of this materialistic view. He said that Darwin developed an evolutionary theory
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based on chance variation and the process of natural selection. And then he goes on to to explain a rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic version of evolution. Many of you are aware that the term evolution can mean lots of different things. Its most basic meaning just means change over time. But Darwinism isn’t just about change over time. It’s about an undirected unguided mechanism that produces the appearance or the illusion of design without itself being guided or directed in any way. And
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so Gould and many other leading evolutionary biologists have been very explicit about the way in which Darwinian evolution supports a materialistic worldview. and undermines belief in God. And that’s showing up in the polling data that we’ve seen. This is a a major factor in causing young people in particular to think that there is no scientific basis, no evidential basis, no factual basis for faith. Because what we know about the prime reality question, the process from which everything else came is that it was
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purely undirected and unguided. There was no divine hand or intelligence or creative um intellect behind it all. Uh when I was teaching I used to draw world sketch out depict worldviews with drawings on the chalkboard and my drawings were so bad my students converted me to PowerPoint and so this is one that we came up with. This is a way of understanding that materialistic worldview. The the blue disc represents the physical universe. The pendulum represents the laws of nature. The guy being moved back and forth by the laws
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of nature implies that we are completely determined by forces beyond our control, our genes and our environment and so forth. And then the other picture here that comes up is the the Godbuster sign, the idea that there’s nothing beyond the physical world that nature is all there is and nature being composed of matter and energy. And so this world view has become very dominant as I said in our knowledge c culture in the media in the law schools in the courts in the permanent bureaucracy and especially in
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the the uh universities particularly in the sciences from which it seems to have emanated going back to the 19th century. And so materialism has many tenants. Not just that we are the product of unguided undirected processes, but also things like human beings have no intrinsic value. Free will is an illusion. Objective morality is an illusion. Life has no ultimate purpose. And when we die, we rot. There is no possibility of an afterlife. And we’re talking tonight about the concept or the u the enterprise of
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apologetics. And we’re going to be talking about why apologetics matters, why making a case for faith based on the facts around us is an important thing to do. And there’s a there’s a biblical passage about this, a Hebrew proverb that says that what many people in our political discourse will often say, ideas have consequences. The biblical way of saying that is as a man thinkketh so is he or in older translations so shall he act. And this is what’s true of individuals is true of the culture that
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our fundamental thought forms, our guiding worldview will affect the decisions we make in our life. And sometimes alas, tragically so. A few years ago, some of you may know that we had a film called Expelled that was out in the theaters and over a million people saw it and it uh explored some of the the ideas surrounding the concept of intelligent design. In a a year or so after the film came out, we got a call from a bereaveved father whose son had committed suicide. The son’s name was Jesse Kilgore, apparently a fine young
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man. He’d been in the military. He got out and he went back to university and he was taking biology courses and he ran into a buzzsaw of an aggressive procilitizing scientific atheist and he was challenging the students to read some of the the works of the scientific atheists that I mentioned earlier. Uh anyway, after Jesse’s body was found, they also found in his bedroom under his book, under his bed, an annotated copy of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. And you could see in the annotations
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according to his dad the progression of his thought that first there was a sort of outrage and anger at the the I you know the Dawkins’s thesis and then there was some sort of creeping doubts as he didn’t really know how to answer some of the arguments and then there was some soulsearching and eventually it became clear that he had lost his faith and very soon after kind of lost his hope. Now, not everyone who loses belief in God takes their own life. I’m not trying to imply that. But some people take
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ideas very seriously and some and think through their implications. And I’m very sensitive to this because as a young person, as a 14-year-old, um I had a a severe case of what I would now term metaphysical anxiety. I was asking questions about, well, what’s it going to matter in a hundred years? I couldn’t come up with an answer to that. It seemed like no matter what I did, it wouldn’t matter. that when you die, you rot. Indeed. And then there’s this great quote from Bertrand Russell when he
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talks about all the the the highest human achievements will will be, you know, lost in the heat death of the universe. And there there’s nothing that will have lasting or mean value. And I saw a little video the other day of a campus event where a a um it was a one of these God’s not dead events and um they did a man on the street interviews with students before the event and afterwards and they were asking students, “Do you believe in God?” And one of the students said, “You know, I’m
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probably the wrong person to ask because I I just to be honest, I’m having some problems with mental illness because I can’t find any meaning in life.” And it was the most most um bracing and honest response I I was really I was really taken with and I really I thought well you know that was me at 14. And so when I heard the story of Jesse Kilgore I thought not everyone takes things that much to heart but here’s a young man who did and we have this problem with teen suicide and it’s often with with kids
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from very affluent families. It’s not a matter of lack of resources or opportunities. Here’s just another example. is very again very personal but we had these these these mass shootings and John West has often dug into this and documented this uh in many many cases with the mass shootings there’s an underlying philosophical materialism that’s involved or a Darwinian rationale one of the first major ones that came into the media was the Coline case in 1999 where 12 students and a teacher
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were killed by two students who were deeply depressed and they wrote a manifesto The media was asking well why would they do this and it you know had to do with all the various left and right political debates were all being debate but no it was actually something deeper. It was that they believed that they were helping natural selection along. They were committed Darwinian nihilists. And of course not all Darwinists are nihilists. Not all Darwinists would would would endorse such an action. But these guys were
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taking the idea very seriously that natural selection culled the herd and we needed to get weak rid of the weak and the the the uh the biologically failing. And so they this was part of their manifesto. Natural selection is the best thing that ever happened to the earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms. It’s all na but it’s all natural. Yes, it’s good. Um and so we could go on and one of one of the people on the panel tonight is Nancy Piery. I’ve had a long admiration for her work
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because one of the things that Nancy does so well is show the connection between ideas and how ideas have consequences and how these fundamental ideas about world about prime reality and and our our basic worldview end up affecting many many different aspects of life. If we had more time, we could map all of them, but we’re going to talk more about that in the conversation that follows. Just one more example, the sanctity of life, the whole issue of abortion. Uh if you you’ve got two different views. If you if you’re a
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theist, you think of the the the developing fetus as a human being made in God’s image. If you’re a materialist, you think of the developing fetus as a lump of tissue, as a group of cells. And that makes all the difference in the in the position you take on this contentious issue. The underlying worldview has a profound influence on the way you’re going to think about that political and social issue. Now, the 19th century, as I said, I I said was where most of this started. Darwin told
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us where we came from. Markx had a utopian and materialistic vision of the future about where we were we’re going to end up. And Freud early in the 20th century told us what to do about our guilt. And so between these three great materialistic scientists, philosophers or scientific philosophers, these different theories were answering all the basic questions that traditional Judeo-Christian belief had always answered, but in materialistic terms. And I think it’s fair to say that we we have seen the consequence of that
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through the 20th century and and now into our own. Okay, I told you it was a somber opening, but now here’s the good news. There is a tremendous change taking place in science and philosophy and it’s taking place at the highest levels of scientific and philosophical discourse. It’s still controversial. It’s still contentious. But what’s driving it are major changes in philosophical thinking and also major discoveries that have been made in science. And I just want to tick off
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three with a brief description of each to get our conference going. Some of you who have read some of our books from Discovery Institute, if you’ve been kind enough to uh pick up a copy of my book at one point, you will you will be familiar with these three discoveries. The first is and most unexpected that the material universe had a beginning. You may remember the quotation from Richard Dawkins where he says, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom
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there is no purpose, no design, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiles indifference.” Blind pitiles indifference is shorthand for materialistic worldview. So he’s saying the material the the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if the materialistic worldview is is is correct. Well, that has in three very important respects proven to be incorrect. One of the great discoveries of 20th century science was that the material universe had a beginning. And you may know something of
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the story. This started in the 19s and 20s. Astronomers began to use these great big dome telescopes. Edwin Hubble was one of the first and he was using the 100inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson in California. And through that telescope and with the use of new photographic plate technology, he was able to uh resolve little tiny points of light in the distant night sky which had been somewhat mysterious before. People didn’t know whether they were astronomers didn’t know whether they were stars with gas around them within
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our galaxy or whether they might be galaxies in their own right. And what what Hubble discovered to make a long story short is they were not only galaxies in their own right, but they were galaxies that were expanding outward in every direction of the night sky. And I had the opportunity here in Dallas in 1985 when I was very early in my career to attend a conference that discussed the evidence about the origin of the universe. And one of the scientists there was Alan Sandage. Sandage was a long well he was a student
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of Edwin Hubble. He’d been very involved in verifying the expansion of the universe outward from a singular beginning point from a creation event. And at the conference he announced that he had become a Christian which was shocking to the audience there. So they in it included some of the other cosmologists and astrophysicists were people like Carl Sean’s science adviser uh Donald Goldmidt. Um and uh Sandage explained how the evidence of of the of a beginning to the universe had shaken his materialistic faith and eventually
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that led him to soulsearching and to a full religious conversion. And what he said about it was extremely memorable to me. He at the time he was describing all the evidence for this beginning point past which you could not go any further back and he said here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There’s no way this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it. Hard-bitten scientific materialist changed his worldview in response to one of the great discoveries of 20th century
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science that the materialist or that the material universe had a beginning. Second great discovery this in physics more than just astrophysics or cosmology and that is that from the very beginning of the universe the fundamental physical parameters of the universe the laws of physics what are called the constants of physics and the initial condition of the matter and energy at the beginning of the universe all these fundamental factors were very as the physicists say finely tuned to allow for the
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possibility of life by fine-tuning they mean that these physical parameters are balanced on a razor’s edge. They fall, if you’re an engineer, within very fine tolerances outside of which life would be impossible and even basic chemistry would be impossible such that you can’t say that the evolutionary process evolved to take advantage of the finely tuned parameters. We had to have fine-tuning for any kind of evolution of any kind to be possible at all and still less and still more for there to be
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life. And so many of the the great uh uh physicists of the 20th century and our century have been talking about our universe is a kind of goldilocks universe. There’s a major book out right now by a a young astrophysicist named Luke Barnes called the fortunate universe. And the idea is that all these different parameters and you could think of a kind of universe creating machine with dials and knobs to get the the idea across each one representing one of the physical parameters. Each one of those
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dials, knobs or sliders is set to a very precise value. Again, such that if you moved it one click this way or that, you’d get a catastrophic consequence that would make life impossible. A heat death or a collapse into a giant black hole, that sort of a thing. So one of the physicists who discovered these some of these parameters, Sir Fred Hy said a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology to make life
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possible. You may have heard me say before that I always love the way the monkeys make it into the origins scenarios even in physics. Okay, last big discovery, third big discovery, and that is we’ll talk a lot about this tomorrow morning, so I’ll cover this very quickly, but to me, this was the one that rocked my world. It was the discovery of the digital code stored in the DNA molecule that at the foundation of life, we have a molecule that literally stores information. And you know, may know a little bit of the
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story. Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. In 1957 1958, Francis Crick working on his own formulates something called the sequence hypothesis in which he realizes that the chemical subunits running along the interior of that famed and beautiful double helix molecule. Those subunits are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters in a section of machine code. And that has raised an extraordinary question which is where did all that
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digital information come from? Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program but much more advanced far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created. That’s a highly suggestive remark because we know that software comes from programmers. And in fact, whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we’re talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or a headline in a newspaper or information embedded in a radio signal or built into
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a software program, that information has always come from a mind, from an intelligent source, not an undirected material process. So, of course, I’ve developed this argument in about 500 pages. We’re just sketching it right now, but it’s one of the three big factors that suggest that a designing intelligence has indeed played a role in the origin of life in the universe. So, three big discoveries. The material universe had a beginning. The universe has been fine-tuned for life from the
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very beginning. And there is evidence of design in life. in particular, the big infusions of digital information that have been infused into our biosphere since the beginning of the universe. One great historian of science says that the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than any time in the last hundred years. In my book, I go a little further than that and say that the postulation of a transcendent, intelligent, and active creator, the kind of creator we find in
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the Judeo-Christian scriptures, provides the best overall explanation for biological and cosmological origins, where everything came from. And I think that has is creating a kind of renaissance in the field of apologetics.