AUSTIN, TEXAS: Stephen C. Meyer appeared on Joe Rogan's, 'The Joe Rogan Experience' podcast earlier this month and explored biblical teachings' foundation for modern science and "weird existential questions" and discussed a variety of other topics during the episode.
Stephen C Meyer is an author and retired educator. He promotes the pseudoscience of intelligent design and was a founding member of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), the primary institution supporting the intelligent design movement. Meyer formerly worked as a lecturer at Whitworth College before joining the DI. Meyer is a DI senior fellow and the director of the CSC.
'I found answers to basic worldview questions'
Meyer told Rogan that during his "long protracted" conversion to Christianity in his earlier years, he began to consider the realities of the Bible during a period of "philosophical deliberation." Meyer said, "It was not really based on science initially. I started having weird existential questions when I was 14 years old after I’d broken my leg in a skiing accident and questions like, ‘Well, what’s it going to matter in 100 years?"
He went on to say, "This question of meaning kind of haunted me. What could I possibly do that would have any lasting or enduring meaning??" Meyer, the author of 'Return of the God Hypothesis', stated that when he studied the works of famous philosophers such as Hume and Kant, many of them began to address those questions, leading him to consider himself a "convinced theist."
Meyer maintained an evolutionary perspective even after graduation until he attended a seminar on the origins of the universe, life, and human awareness while working as a geophysicist. Meyer began to reevaluate his life assumptions after seeing the argument dominated by theists and philosophical materialists.
He stated, "I was kind of stunned to learn, or to perceive at least, that the theists seemed to have the intellectual initiative in each of these big discussions, that materialism was a philosophy that was a spent force. It was not explaining where life first came from, where the universe came from, let alone consciousness."
Meyer claims that this triggered an intellectual journey that culminated in his conversion. "I found answers to basic worldview questions that I thought, as a 14-year-old, 'there must be something, nobody else is having these questions," he explained.
'Key foundational assumptions that gave rise to modern science'
One of Meyer's most profound realizations came while reflecting on the transitory legacies of some of his all-time favorite baseball players. "I had this sense that there must be something that doesn't change, or else everything else that does change is passing, ephemeral, and ultimately meaningless," he remarked. Myer claimed that after reading the "big fat family Bible," he got to Exodus 3, where God revealed his name to Moses.
"It was the 'I am that I am,' this timeless, eternal person, and you found the same thing in the New Testament, the way Jesus Christ was referred to as," he said. "And so, I thought.., I wonder if there is something that doesn't change."
He continued, "The philosophical questions I was having made me want to explore whether or not revealed religion might, in fact, be true." When Rogan probed Meyer on what he meant by "eternal, self-existent reality," Meyer explained it as "eternal, self-existent reality" and pointed to his later studies that lead him to the argument from epistemological necessity, a question he claims all postmodern philosophy has revolved around.
Meyer told, “The fundamental question in modern philosophy that has really just been a stumper and has led to this whole postmodern turn where people don't think there's [any] objective basis for any reality is the question of the reliability of the human mind. On what basis can we trust the way our minds process all that sensory information?”
Meyer then cited Hume's "problem of induction," which essentially states that in order to make sense of the present, one must first presuppose nature's uniformity, which requires one to make reference to sensory observations — an argument that, he claims, eventually leads to "arguing in a circle." But, according to Meyer, if one's presuppositions are based on the concept of a "benevolent Creator," the philosophical quandary disappears — and science begins.
“If you presupposed that our minds were made by a benevolent Creator who gave us those assumptions in order to make sense of the world that He also made, then there was a principle of correspondence between the way the mind worked and the way the world worked, in which case we could trust the basic reliability of the mind. This turns out to be one of the key foundational assumptions that gave rise to modern science," he stated.
According to the Discovery Institute, Meyer is believed to be the first proponent of intelligent design on Rogan's podcast, despite having interviewed a number of famous atheist scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Neil Degrasse Tyson.
