Transcription
One of the biggest objections I run into when I'm having conversations with people, um, objections to the existence of God is evolution. They would hear slogans like, "Well, evolution has disproven Christianity." Um, so I'm going to go ahead and we're going to show a section of the film that talks about that particular topic. Um, but the film is going to have a bunch of different uh uh topics we'll cover as well.
>> Awesome. Let's let's do it. I'll pull it up here.
In my book Darwin's Stout, I discuss a problem that Darwin understood about his own theory even in 1859 when he published the Origin of Species. And that is that the pattern of appearance of new forms of life in the fossil record does not match the branching tree pattern that he presented in the Origin of Species. But instead, in the fossil record, new forms of life arise very abruptly. And there's one particular such event in the history of life that's especially dramatic. It's known as the Cambrian explosion. Most of the first animals arise during the Cambrian period. And these first animals exemplify very new ways of arranging body parts and tissues called a body plan. On my shelf here, I've got a a trilobite fossil. And this particular one has very well-preserved trilobite eyes. The trilobites, one of the earliest Cambrian animals, came on the scene already with sophisticated compound eyes. You can see the the compound eyes like the eyes of of modern insects. We know those are very sophisticated devices. They are there from the very beginning of the Cambrian explosion.
>> Every time we see innovation, it happens explosively. These are called radiation events. So there are radiation events for the fishes, for amphibians, for reptiles. There are three radiation events for birds. There's a radiation event for mammals. And even when human beings come on the scene, there's something called the sociocultural big bang where out of nowhere, this incredibly sophisticated behavior appears explosively. This is completely contrary to what you'd expect from an evolutionary framework. You would expect that there would be a proliferation of species which eventually leads to new genera, which eventually leads to new families and new orders, new classes, and last of all, new phyla. But we see the opposite in the fossil record. The phyla show up first, and they show up simultaneously and suddenly. So when we see these big explosions of new biological form, we now know we're also seeing evidence of big explosions of biological information. To build that form, you need information. It's kind of like in the computer world where if you want to give your computer a new function, you have to give it new code. Where does that information come from? Information always comes from a mind. In other words, in our uniform and repeated experience, we always see a conscious mind as the source of information. If we see a hieroglyphic inscription, a paragraph in a book, the information embedded in a radio signal, software, any place where we have information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form, it always has arisen from conscious activity, from a mind, not an undirected material process. And so the discovery of information at the foundation of life in even the simplest living cells is powerful evidence of a designing intelligence. And interestingly, I make that case using Darwin's own method of scientific reasoning that we should be looking for causes now in operation in order to posit the best explanation for the phenomenon of interest. The phenomenon of interest is the information in DNA. What cause now in operation produces digital information? Well, there's only one, and that's a mind. Today, there are a number of biologists that are calling for what they call an extended evolutionary synthesis, meaning that evolutionary theory is incomplete. It's inadequate. They called a meeting in November of 2016 to come up with a new theory of macroevolution because the current theory they have, this neo-Darwinian theory, where you mutate DNA and get a new body plan, they were admitting doesn't work. So they called all these people to the UK back in November of 2016 to have this meeting, and they heard a lot of people complaining about the current theory of macroevolution, but they couldn't come up with another naturalistic theory as to how these subsequent life forms could evolve. Darwinism, neo-Darwinism is dying. The mutation natural selection mechanism, which has been the go-to explanation for the origin of biological form in evolutionary biology, is insufficient to produce the information necessary to build fundamentally new form in the history of life. It provides a good explanation for small-scale variations, but if you want to make a major change, you're not going to get it by mutation and selection. Even if evolution were true, all it would explain is how one species morphed into another species and then over time we get the complexity and diversity of life. Evolution doesn't explain why there's something rather than nothing. Evolution doesn't explain why the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned for life. Evolution can't explain the origin of life. There's a recent Gallup poll that shows that belief in God in the United States has dropped to an all-time low. Young people in particular, in the age group from 18 to 31, are generating that trend away from religious belief. One of the factors that is most commonly cited is science. The particular finding of science atheists and agnostics cite most is the idea of undirected evolutionary change. That life arose by an undirected evolutionary process. That's cited more than worries about death or disease or suffering. So evolutionary ideas about origins have played an outsized role in convincing people that God does not exist, that God, as Richard Dawkins put it, is a delusion. And yet we live in a time when such unbelief is not only unnecessary as the result of science. It's actually contrary to what science has discovered over the last 100 years. The idea that the universe has a beginning, that it's been finely tuned against all odds and for no underlying physical reason from the beginning, and that the living cell is chalk full of miniature machines that doesn't just rival, but it vastly exceeds our own high-tech digital technology. These are discoveries that I have argued point to a designing intelligence and indeed a designing intelligence with the attributes that traditional theists, Jews, and Christians, for example, have long ascribed to God: transcendence, intelligence, great power, and a willingness to be involved in the creation. This is not a time to give up on religious belief. Instead, I think science is now pointing us back to God and helping us rediscover what I call the God hypothesis.
The ideas that you put forward in this documentary, as far as I understand, represent to some extent the the thought journey that you went on from atheism to Christianity. Is is that a fair assessment or how would you how would you state that?
>> It absolutely is. Um, because I, so I was an atheist uh most of my life growing up, and once I realized that there was actual evidence out there and I actually took a second look at at Christianity and dug a little bit deeper than just the face value slogans that I had heard. That was when I really started to actually take a second look at the evidence and dive deeper into it. And that's the entire reason that I'm doing this documentary. Um, I had made films prior to this, but most of those films were horror films. Um, and when I gave my life to Jesus, I I had talked with my wife and I was like, well, I need to do something um to show people because one of the things I realized when I gave my life to Christ was I just assumed that this was kind of the the journey that everyone else took. I assumed that people looked at the evidence, came to the conclusion that God exists, gave their life to Jesus, and then went out there and started evangelizing and telling people about these evidences. But what I realized once I gave my life to Christ is that about 90% of the people I interacted with had no idea even what apologetics was. They had no idea that there were good arguments for the existence of God out there. And so because of that, they weren't out there sharing their faith. They weren't out there talking about Jesus because they were afraid they were going to get hit or asked questions that they weren't able to answer. They weren't equipped to answer. And a lot of it is because they had they were raised um and told that it's true, not told why it's true. And so I wanted to help people um to realize like there are good arguments, there are good resources out there. And that's the entire um mindset behind making this film was to show people the evidences that convinced me that it was true. And I like how you said you said earlier about like Christian propaganda. One of the things I was adamant about when I was making this film is that I didn't want it to be overly pushy, right? Because I I've watched a few documentaries that are Christian documentaries and it just feels like you're getting yelled at. And so I wanted to be I wanted to just basically say here's the evidence. Take it or leave it. And it's it's very compelling evidence. And so at the end of the film, one of the things that I express is that the evidence is there. I challenge you to go and and take a second look at it. Um, but I'm not going to uh I I just felt like I wanted it to be a more of a softer approach and just laying the evidence out and letting people come to their conclusions about it.
I think that we're in a perfect timing right now in in Western culture for this type of documentary because frankly, I think that hard materialism it is failing and has to a large extent already failed. When you look at the amount of people that are now open to a spiritual realm of some kind or are exploring ideas like panpsychism or panentheism um or even idealism, to me it reflects that materialism is simply from a from an explanatory perspective insufficient. And also from the perspective of a of a philosophy that you can actually live your life out of, it's insufficient. It's totally boring. It's totally meaningless. Um, and it and it just it fails really at every level. And your documentary, I know, goes into a lot of why that is the case. But because that's true, there's a real open door right now for people to, like you said, reconsider this whole this whole Christian thing, this whole this whole concept that there is a a a creator of the creation, a a personal being responsible for all other reality. And and that's an idea that I think it's the way I think about it is speaking of the fossil record, I almost think of it like everybody started here. And so it feels like the most surface-level concept.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Okay. That, like you said, I was told that that was true in high school or junior high or my or a VBS or my Christian Bible or whatever.
>> Um, but I wasn't told why it's true. And then I went deeper and I went into and I was taught evolution in high school or college. I went, you know, I went to the University of Florida and I studied a biology class, and my PhD biology professor told me that evolution shows that God is not real. So now I'm in a deeper level of of uh the fossil, you know, I've gone deeper here and I I've left these surface things behind.
>> Right. Your documentary seems to say, well, there are some significant problems here, and even deeper than that, pure materialist explanation is actually God. And so the thing that you thought was on the surface is actually at at the basis of everything. And all of these other things that are amazing and deep and we should talk about, we should marvel in are actually things that are derivative of him. uh that that are uh I don't know if you would put it that way, but um the amazing engineering that exists everywhere in the universe, the amazing uh mechanisms and apparatus and and design, all all these things are amazing. We should study them. We shouldn't just say, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," full stop. We should we should do our best to understand why the world is the way that it is, how it works, how it functions. But our depth of knowledge into the mechanism of things is not a replacement for the basis for reality themselves, at least how I would put it. And it feels like your documentary is speaking into that curiosity that the culture has right now of, Yeah, you're right. It doesn't make sense to talk only in terms of mechanism and never in terms of agency. It doesn't make sense to only talk about how things are, but not talk about why things are in the first place.
>> Right.
>> And and and it seems like the the timing of this is is really great.
>> It is. So, originally I was going to, cuz I've already been working on the film for three years. I mean, it's taken a long, actually, I think it's been four years now, I'm thinking back at it. So, it's taken a very long time to make it. And originally, I was trying to raise money so that I could get it into theaters. And I thought that was my mission. That's where I'm going to get it. But then a lot of things happened just in the culture and in the world. And I even noticed within the conversations I've been having with people, you're right, things are changing. And I think it's it's a good time for people to, because they are questioning it. They're questioning that whole materialistic mindset and realizing it's not sufficient. It it doesn't explain the things that we see. And that's actually one of the things I love about Christianity is because it really is the best explanation. Um, when you look at all of reality and all of the evidences we see um within nature, uh, even through the ideas through philosophy, it really it's the best explanation for why um for the reality that we find ourselves in.
I guess I should in closing here say, like, if someone is interested, wants to watch the film, wants to, I don't know, find out more about you or connect with you, what's sort of the call to action here?
>> Um, so the film is available. It's on all major streaming platforms. Uh, Amazon, Apple TV, uh, Google, uh, Fandango. So, all the major streaming platforms, you're able to go on there and rent it. Um, and then I also have my website set up, which will have additional resources so that after you've watched the film, you'll be able to go and dive a little bit deeper into these topics because again, I can't build an entire case based on an hour and 20, 25-minute film. But what I can do is pique your curiosity and then hope that you'll go and do more research. So on my website, there will be a tab called Resources. Um, underneath that tab has all of the ministries, uh, to all of the scholars who are in the film. Uh, so I would challenge you to dig a little bit deeper and take a second look at all this.