Made to Know

A Conversation with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer

Stephen Meyer is one of the great minds behind intelligent design-based scientific inquiry and research. He is the author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (2009), which raised the question of the biological information necessary to produce the first life; Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (2013), which broadened the scope of the case for ID to encompass the history of all life on earth; and Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, which effectively expanded the scope of the argument to the entire universe.

It was a long, tortuous process. I had some existential questions as a young teenager that troubled me. I had a period when I worried I might be insane because of questions about the meaning of life. It sounds a little dramatic, but I wondered, What’s it going to matter in 100 years? How does anything that I do or could do ultimately amount to anything? And so it was, in a sense, a quest for meaning.

I also had puzzling questions about time. It seemed like everything was always changing, but I had this strange intuition that there had to be something that didn’t change. Almost inadvertently I began to read the big, unused family Bible, and I found passages of Scripture that spoke to these kinds of troubling ideas and questions.

I found that the Bible actually addresses this issue of time. According to the Bible, there was something that didn’t change: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and God revealed himself to Moses as the I AM THAT I AM—the idea is that there is a timeless reality that seemed to ground all things in time. So I found that the biblical view created structures for my mind so it wasn’t spinning out of control with unanswerable questions. For the first time I felt kind of normal.

When I got to college, I discovered that a lot of things that had been troubling me were actually philosophical questions, the sort of questions that the French existentialists, the atheistic existentialists, were asking. I remember telling my professor, “Oh, I wasn’t insane. I was just a philosopher.” He laughed, “Well, there’s a fine line between philosophy and insanity, so be careful.”

But in any case, I had the experience of the Bible providing a worldview that brought clarity and sanity and perspective to my life. It took six or seven years before I felt settled in my Christian faith. There was a time during college when I didn’t want it to be true, but I was becoming more and more convinced that it was. There was a lot more to it than that, but I tended to overthink everything.

Well, God gave us minds and intends for us to use them.

That was part of it, too. In college, I encountered this argument about epistemology. I remember staring at objects and wondering, How do I know that what I’m seeing is actually there? This question of knowledge has been haunting the philosophers since the time of the late Enlightenment. We have sensory perceptions of things, but how do we know that those sensory perceptions in some way relate to the actual thing that’s out there? It all comes down to a question of the reliability of the human mind.

One of the arguments that I found extremely persuasive was the argument from what’s called epistemological necessity—that if you have a prior belief in the reality of a benevolent God who made our minds in such a way as to be able to reliably know the world, then you have a basis for knowledge. This was one of the ideas that gave rise to the scientific revolution—the idea of intelligibility, that our minds had been made in such a way that we could discover the order and rationality and design that had been built into the world by the same rational God who both made the world and made our minds to know it. Through all that questioning, I eventually came to faith and realized that God was not only a philosophical necessity, but a living person who could be known.

And the biblical worldview offers a way of making sense of all those questions, even if it doesn’t answer them completely.

Yes, it does. And then there’s the person of Jesus Christ, who I found incredibly compelling. In the book of John, it says that he was full of grace and truth. In our political discourse we used to talk about bleeding-heart liberals and hardheaded conservatives; so maybe one side was committed to truth, and the other side was committed to compassion. But somehow Christ brought the two together. Time and time again, there were things about his person that were unique in that sense of being fully both compassionate and truthful, somehow always giving people grace and still being completely truthful. It’s just one of many things about him that seemed completely unique and commended him to me as someone worth taking very, very seriously.

As a grad student at Cambridge University, you worked mostly with atheists in an environment heavily dominated by materialistic thinking. What kept you from going along with it all?

I was convinced of theism and Christianity by my early twenties. My main intellectual reasons for affirming faith were largely philosophical, relating to some of the things I was just sharing.

My fourth year out of college, I attended a conference in which there were discussions between theists and atheists, or materialists, about the big questions—the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness. Coming out of a small Christian college, I was really taken with the discussions and surprised to realize or to perceive that the theists seemed to have the intellectual initiative around these big scientific questions. One said, “You don’t have to fall off the edge of the rational world to move in a frankly theistic direction in understanding the origin of life.” That was Dean Kenyon, a scientist who announced that he had repudiated his own secular, materialistic, evolutionary theory of the origin of life, and was now considering what later became known as intelligent design. He said it was time for the theologians to reopen the natural theological argument based on things that were being discovered about the information-bearing properties of DNA and the complexity of the cell.

And so, before going to Cambridge, I was encountering people like that. For the first time, I had a sense that maybe there’s also an evidential basis for belief in some kind of rational intelligence behind the universe. I became fascinated with the question of the origin of life. I wrote my master’s thesis on that and then went on to do a PhD on the subject of the origin of life.

You say that we can know God exists, or know some things about God, in the same way that we can know other truths about reality.

This is something that J. P. Moreland has been very explicit in advocating. He asks, “What do we philosophers mean by knowledge?” Well, philosophers define knowledge as “justified true belief.” Okay, so we have various ideas about how you justify belief. That’s the whole question of epistemology. Assuming that there are ways of justifying beliefs, the question is, Can you justify beliefs about God in the same way that you justify beliefs about the natural world around us?

It turns out that the same epistemologies we use to justify beliefs about the world around us can be used to justify belief in God, and therefore we can know God in that philosophical sense. I also think, as a Christian, that there is a subjective knowing that is a product of the work of the Holy Spirit. Someone once said that the work of the Holy Spirit is to make subjectively real to the individual believer things that are objectively real in history—that there is a confidence that one gains about, for example, the testimony of Scripture; it’s a kind of knowing that can’t be unknown.

We call that confidence faith. I think this is what friends who are nonbelievers can find very frustrating about talking to Christians—convinced Christians are really convinced. And they may have very good evidential reasons; they may have very good presuppositional arguments; they may have very good philosophical and rational arguments. But in addition, there is something that I think believers experience when they have the experience of God coming into their lives that’s hard to explain until you’ve had the experience. I empathize with nonbelievers who are having these frustrating conversations with Christians.

I think the evidential and scientific and philosophical arguments can help with that, but eventually, when you’re led to the point of prayer and actually actively asking God to come into your life, if God is personal in the way that the Bible describes, and a reality in the way the Bible describes, then there is this subjective encounter that people can have with him. And this is real, too. Moreland’s point is that we can have knowledge of God in the same way that we have knowledge of the world because we have justifications. We have propositional truth claims about the deity and about God’s actions in time and space and history. And that’s a form of knowledge.

You have also said that the “God hypothesis” is not a science stopper, but rather a science starter.

I think what’s in the mind of the materialist objector is, “I can’t see God in the test tube. Therefore there’s no science to be done around this.” Well, that’s not quite the way it works. There’s a hypothesis that there was a designing agent who produced life, and we see evidence of that in certain things—the digital code in the DNA, the irreducible complexity of molecular machines, things we’ve discovered already that seem to be better explained by positing the activity of a designing intelligence. Science provides explanations of facts that we have already, and good theories provide better explanations than preexisting theories. Intelligent design is providing explanations of facts we already have, and, as my books have argued, better explanations of key things like the digital information present in DNA.

But it also generates new hypotheses about previously unknown facts. It has what philosophers call heuristic value. It can lead to discovery. So it’s the furthest thing from a science stopper. It’s a very fruitful way of looking at nature. Science owes its origin to this perspective that the universe is a designed order.