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There are those in science

who say the exquisite nature of the universe,

the exquisite laws of the universe,

are evidence of a designer.

Does that view make sense to you?

For 2,500 years, there have been two great

competing stories about reality in Western culture.

According to one of these stories, the universe, our planet,

the life it contains, and especially all of us,

are products of a pre-existing intelligence,

a purposeful mind or creator.

People like Galileo, Kepler,

Newton were all believers in the existence

of an intelligent designer behind the universe.

Newton, Boyle, Kepler, the great founders

of modern science, thought that nature had secrets to reveal.

There were patterns there to be revealed

that we could understand because our minds had been made

in the image of the same rational creator

who had built rationality and design

and lawful order into the world.

But according to another story, matter and energy interact

and evolve in a completely mindless,

undirected way and arrange themselves

into everything we see around us.

World famous atheist Richard Dawkins inspired millions

by popularizing evolutionary biology.

Once you've got life started,

once natural selection,

Darwinian natural selection has got going,

then we pretty much understand the four billion year

history of what's given rise to us

and all other living creatures.

And that's the story I want to tell you about.

The things that we hold dear, including our very existence,

are in a cosmic accident.

It seems so obvious that if you've got a garden,

there must be a gardener.

But what science has now achieved is an emancipation

from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator.

And this view became popular

because of scientific theories developed in the 19th century.

Scientists like Pierre Laplace, Charles Darwin,

and Thomas Henry Huxley each tried to explain events

in the history of the universe, like the origin

of the solar system, the origin of new forms of life,

and even the origin of the very first life.

By the end of the 19th century,

a seamless story of the origin of nearly everything

could be told as a consequence of slow, gradual,

and purely naturalistic processes.

By the 19th century,

science had come to be associated

with a larger philosophical idea called materialism,

in which you just presuppose that the material

universe is all there is.

And that's why many leading scientists

have claimed that science undermines belief in any intelligent

or purposeful creator behind the universe.

Yes or no to this statement.

Science refutes God.

500 years of science have demonstrated that God,

that vague notion, is not likely.

I have no problems if,

as we probe the origins of things,

we bump up into the bearded man.

If that shows up, we're good to go.

OK?

Not a problem.

There's just no evidence of it.

How do you respond to that?

It's not what Darwin thought in the 19th century.

It's a new day in biology.

Things are much more complex than people thought

when they formulated these evolutionary ideas.

There's a lot of people

that adopt philosophies that mimic religions.

If you can show that life arose

by a completely undirected evolutionary process,

you're going to be more inclined

toward a more materialistic worldview.

And that view, if true,

has profound consequences for whether our lives

have any ultimate meaning or significance.

Have you thought about what happens

when your life ends?

Have I thought about what happens?

Yeah. Of course, I die.

Yeah.

What do you think happens?

I think I get buried or cremated.

And that's it?

Nothing after that.

You have a brain which decays.

There's just nothing.

Here we are, like mites on a plum.

And the plum is this little planet,

and it goes around an insignificant local star.

And that star is on the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy,

which contains 400 billion other stars.

And this galaxy is just one of something

like 100 billion other galaxies.

So, the idea that we are central,

that we are the reason there is a universe, is pathetic.

This bleak view of the universe

troubles many people.

If we are the products of purely impersonal materialistic

forces, and if eventually the universe will experience a heat

death, leaving only cold, dark matter as scientists tell us,

then there can't be any lasting meaning

or purpose to our existence.

But is that true?

How likely is it that this panorama

that appears to me every time I open my eyes

does not have some very good reason for its existence?

So, we have two great,

competing stories about reality.

One posits a purposeful creator behind the universe.

The other envisions mindless processes

producing everything we see.

But which of these stories is true?

What explains all of this?

What's the story of everything?

You can say, "Look, you can go back as far as you want,

but somehow the stuff of the universe had to come

from somewhere, and isn't that what God did?”

But that's only true if the universe was created.

If the universe was always here,

if the universe was infinitely old,

then there's nothing for a creator to do.

How did the universe start?

It's an ancient question that goes back all the way

to the ancient Greeks.

Has the universe always been here, or is it finite?

A philosophical question that science began to address

and answer in the beginning of the 20th century.

And it starts with a relatively unknown

astronomer named Vesto Slipher.

Slipher is looking through telescopes,

and he's looking at these nebular phenomena in the night sky.

Fuzzy things that never focused

in your telescope.

But what Slipher was able

to discover was that the light coming

from these nebulae is shifted in the red direction

of the electromagnetic spectrum.

You shine light through a prism,

it will separate into the different colors, red to violet.

The red light corresponds to light with longer wavelengths.

We call it redshift because light

that has a longer wavelength tends to be more red in color.

Let's say that you've got a firetruck going past you

with its siren on.

And as it goes past, the pitch changes.

So [imitates siren].

As something is moving away from you,

whatever kind of waves it's emitting,

whether it's sound waves or light waves,

are going to be stretched out.

So, since the nebula that Slipher observed was shifted

in the red direction, it meant that the nebula

was moving away from us.

Now, a nebula, at the time,

was thought to be just a gas cloud within our galaxy.

There were some astronomers who thought it might be at a galaxy

beyond, but that was a debate.

Then, in 1924, the debate was effectively settled

when Edwin Hubble used some new techniques

for measuring astronomical distances.

Hubble started looking at the Andromeda nebula and realized

that it was at least 900,000 light years away from us,

and yet the distance across our whole

galaxy was only 300,000 light years.

And so, he realized that those nebulae

must be separate galaxies.

And then, as he was looking at the galaxies

with this wonderful new dome telescope,

he was also then able to see the beautiful structure,

not just a gaseous smudge on a photographic plate.

And Hubble then began to study not just the Andromeda Nebula,

but many of these nebulae, i.e.

galaxies, and discovered they were all shifted

in the red direction, meaning they were all moving away from us.

So, it looked as

if space-time itself was expanding and stretching--

Like a balloon blowing up.

There's a uniform expansion of almost

all the galaxies moving outward.

But what do you do when you mentally run

that scenario in reverse?

As we begin to wind that clock backwards

and think of what the universe would have been like a thousand

years ago, or a million years ago, or a billion years ago,

or however far back you go, eventually you're gonna get

to a place where all of that expanding material

would have congealed in the same place,

marking the beginning of the expansion.

And arguably, the beginning of the universe itself.

But there was something else.

Several years earlier, the physicist Albert Einstein made

a breakthrough in our understanding of gravity,

one that also pointed to a beginning of the universe.

But he found this implication of his theory so disturbing

that he dismissed it out of hand.

In 1915, he developed a revolutionary new theory

of gravity called general relativity.

The largest change in man's view

of the universe since Isaac Newton.

Nobody could foresee its implication.

It implied that massive bodies

in space literally curved space itself...

in much the same way that a bowling ball changes the shape

of a trampoline.

The distortions of space due

to a massive body like the sun shaped the course

of lesser objects like the planets.

That discovery was so powerful

that Einstein went from being a nerdy physicist

to a worldwide sensation.

His theory not only changed our understanding

of the present structure of the universe,

it also had profound implications for a long-standing question

about the origin of the universe.

Einstein's theory implied

that in addition to gravity, there

must be an outward pushing force.

Because if gravity were the only force

in the universe, everything would have congealed

into one big black hole.

But we don't live in that kind of universe.

We live in a universe where there is empty space

between massive bodies.

There must be some sort of anti-gravity force

or some sort of outward pushing force

that creates the empty space.

He struggled and struggled with it.

And finally, he said, "I'm going to need to put

in an anti-gravity term into my general equation of relativity,”

and he called it the cosmological constant.

And physicists today accept

that there is a cosmological constant.

There is an outward pushing force.

But Einstein made a further move.

He simply chose an arbitrary value

for this outward pushing force, one

that was exactly balanced to the force of gravity,

to suggest that the universe was static,

neither expanding nor contracting,

and is therefore eternal and self-existent.

However, theoretical physicists began

to work with Einstein's equations.

And one of the physicists was the Belgian priest,

Georges Lemaître.

They realized that the most natural implication

of Einstein's equations was that the universe was expanding.

But Lemaître was also aware of the data coming

from Vesto Slipher about the red shift.

So, Lemaître pulled those two lines of evidence together

and formulated what is now known as the Big Bang Theory.

Einstein, for various philosophical

or theoretical reasons, was trying

to avoid the implications of his theory.

But Lemaître and Einstein met

at a conference in 1927.

They had shared a taxi cab ride together,

where Lemaître apparently informed Einstein

about the redshift evidence that the universe was actually

expanding despite Einstein's attempt to depict it as static.

Einstein tells him that your mathematics is impeccable,

but your physical intuition is abominable.

Einstein accused him of formulating this, deductively drawing it

from the Christian doctrine of creation rather than

from the evidence.

Lemaître bristled at that, showed, no, actually,

I have the evidence on my side.

The universe is expanding.

And your equations, when solved, point to a beginning.

And so, in 1931, Einstein went out

to the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson...

and viewed the evidence of the expanding universe

through Hubble's telescope.

And then, a week or two later, he does an interview

with the New York Times and acknowledges that Hubble

and his colleague Humason had shown

that the universe is not static.

And later, he acknowledged that his fine-tuning

of the cosmological constant...

was the greatest blunder of his scientific career.

From roughly the 1920s till the 60s,

astrophysics proceeded with a lot

of brilliant people doing a lot of great work,

but a lot of it was focused on avoiding the notion

of a beginning.

That view of the universe was debated,

and many people argued against it.

Fred Hoyle was a famous physicist who said, "I'm a Democritean.”

He said, "I believe nothing comes from nothing.”

His argument was there can't be a beginning to the universe

because that would be something coming from nothing.

I don't like the idea

that something is dependent on a cause that I can never verify.

Hoyle was, in fact,

so opposed to the notion of a beginning

that I think he was the one who coined the name

Big Bang as a sort of a derogatory name.

Fred Hoyle, who was, for much of his life,

a secular atheist, he believed that cosmologists

were being too influenced by the Genesis 1:1 narrative.

And so, he formulates another model.

It's called the steady state.

He imagines there's always been matter,

there's always been energy, there's always been space and time.

The universe is infinitely old and

has been creating matter continually.

So, in the mid-1900s,

there was really a battle between two rival cosmologies.

Both theories make predictions,

and Hoyle's prediction was that no matter how far back

in time you look, it will look exactly the same.

If the universe was eternal in time and space,

then there was no beginning and no time

when all of the galactic material would have been concentrated

into a single, hot, dense point.

But the Big Bang predicts that there

would have been such a point.

When that Big Bang exploded,

the universe was in a very dense and hot state.

And as it got bigger, it cooled.

And when it cooled far enough, light was allowed to escape.

So, if the Big Bang theory was true,

there should be some evidence of this light in the form

of leftover radiation spread throughout the universe.

You can think of it as a glow,

as a fossil left over from the creation process.

People looked for this radiation,

couldn't find it.

But then, two Bell Labs physicists were trying

to create a microwave link from the ground to a satellite.

They'd point this big horn antenna at the satellite

and record the data.

Well, they were getting noise and static

and couldn't explain it.

And wherever they pointed their horn antenna,

they got the static, and they said,

"There's something wrong with our antenna.”

In their desperation to figure out the source

of this signal, they thought it might have come

from pigeon droppings that were on this antenna.

They're scraping it off.

Nothing works.

And then, one of them went to a seminar down

at Princeton by a physicist named Robert Dickey.

And Robert Dickey said, "We're looking

for the glow of that Big Bang radiation.

And today, it would have cooled down into the microwave.

That would be the wavelength of light corresponding to that.”

Penzias and Wilson looked at each other and said,

"I think we found it.”

They wrote up a paper that they had discovered the radiation

left over from the Big Bang, and it was such a sensation.

They got the Nobel Prize, and I would say at that point,

90-some percent of the physicists all agreed

that the Big Bang model was the working one.

Hoyle never did.

He insisted that the steady-state model was better,

and he was going to get it fixed one of these days.

We scientists have our predispositions.

And in this case, the predisposition was to avoid a beginning

to the universe.

And that has been going on for about a century now.

And yet it's as if, you know, we are being forced to accept,

by the observations, that the universe is evolving

and it had a beginning.

Now, in the 1960s,

this whole question of the implication of general relativity

for the beginning of the universe was revisited.

And it starts with Stephen Hawking.

He's studying in Cambridge.

And in the middle of the PhD, he is diagnosed with ALS,

Lou Gehrig's disease.

Debilitating neurological disorder.

He's so discouraged that he might just quit the PhD,

but he's encouraged by people near him to press on, and he does.

Quite a heroic story, actually.

He's working on black hole physics.

Black holes, extremely massive,

but compressed down into an unimaginably small amount of space.

These things are warping space and time in ways

that you can't even imagine.

It's causing space around that matter

to curve so tightly that even light can't get out.

But then, Hawking's thinking about the history

and origin of the universe itself.

He realizes that if the universe is expanding outward

in the forward direction of time,

then matter is getting more and more spread out.

And he starts thinking about, well,

what happens in the reverse direction of time?

If the matter is more diffused in the forward direction of time,

it means it's more concentrated in the reverse

direction of time.

Then, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity,

the space around matter should get more tightly curved.

So, as you go back in time, as matter gets more densely

concentrated, the space gets more tightly curved,

and you eventually get to a limiting point

where the matter gets so densely concentrated

that the space gets so tightly curved

that eventually you can't go back any further.

And this, Hawking calls the singularity,

a point of infinite density and infinitely tight curvature.

In his PhD thesis in 1966, Hawking presents

an initial defense of that idea.

He gets incredible praise from his examiners.

The idea of a space-time singularity,

a beginning to the universe, that's a mind-blowing conclusion.

But there's a problem.

As you're going back toward the very beginning

of time, the volume of the universe is going to zero.

There's no space to put anything.

Zero size is not something that can exist in space and time.

Rather, the singularity is the point outside of space and time.

It's not in space and time.

Before the beginning of time,

there's no universe.

The universe comes into existence out of the singularity.

There is no matter.

There is no space.

There is no time.

There is no energy.

There's no material stuff there to do the causing.

Physicist Robert Dickey said,

"An infinite universe would relieve us of the necessity

of understanding the origin of matter

at any finite time in the past.”

Notice that verb, relieve.

That's not a scientific term.

What does Dickey mean?

Well, if the universe is eternal and infinite,

then we don't even have to ask the question where it came from.

So, if an infinite universe relieves us of the necessity,

what does a finite universe do?

We now know the universe began

to exist finitely long ago, but whatever begins

to exist is caused to exist by something else.

Now, because we're talking about the origin

of the universe itself, by which we mean the origin of matter,

energy, space, and time, any entity capable

of causing the universe to come into existence must be external

to or separate from the universe itself.

It must exist independently of matter

and transcend space and time.

And so, whatever explains the finite

physical universe must be itself non-physical.

Whatever explains the finite material

universe must itself be immaterial...

to get in this way to the philosophical stopping point

of the first cause.

I first witnessed astronomers

and cosmologists wrestling with this problem of the first cause

at a conference early in my career.

It may not be the ultimate truth.

At that conference,

I encountered the work of a great

cosmologist named Allan Sandage.

He was well known for being a hard-bitten

scientific materialist.

But he'd worked closely with Edwin Hubble

on verifying the expansion of the universe

in all quadrants of the sky.

And at this conference, he announced

that he had come to a theistic belief,

not in spite of, but because of the scientific discoveries

concerning the origin of the universe and its fine tuning.

And I can remember him looking into the camera and saying--

Here is evidence for what can only

be described as a supernatural event.

Super natural event.

And there was a kind of a beat, a pause

between the words super and natural.

There's no way that this could have been

predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.

Another astronomer at the conference

who was particularly distressed by the problem

of the first cause was Robert Jastrow.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Though he was an agnostic,

he had recently published a book called

"God and the Astronomers".

Later, he did a number of interviews

about the conclusion of his book.

One of the things that interests me

that I find most puzzling in this astronomy we've

been discussing is the fact that there was a beginning.

The mystery of creation.

If there were no beginning, we wouldn't have to ask

what happened before the beginning.

And we wouldn't have to worry about who created the universe.

But the fact the universe sprang

into being at a definite moment seems to me theological...

and nothing that could be answered within science.

There always has to be a cause for any effect,

and then that cause becomes an effect of a cause underlying it.

But in the case of the Big Bang,

that calls for an uncreated creator,

and that would answer to some people's definition of a god.

I'm an agnostic, not a believer,

but not an atheist.

Suppose you try to get away from the theological explanation.

Is there something else that we can imagine

that would lay these questions to rest?

Some--

I can't see it.

The last paragraph of Jastrow's book says

that the natural scientist or the physicist

has scaled the peak of ignorance.

As he pulls himself over the last boulder,

he finds the philosophers and the theologians

sitting there waiting for him.

The point Jastrow is making is no scientist wanted there

to be a creation to the universe.

He wanted it to be eternal.

But that was inevitably where science was taking us

to, that point where we had to acknowledge

there was a beginning.

Hawking proves the singularity,

doesn't much like its implications,

because it seems to point to a kind of creation event.

So, he spent much of the rest of his career attempting

to circumvent the conclusion of his own proof.

And in the process, he developed these quantum

cosmological ideas through a tiny loophole.

Hawking and other physicists recognize

that they can only back extrapolate to almost the singularity.

They can get to 1E-43 of a second

after the beginning of the universe.

To say it's a blink of an eye is a huge exaggeration.

Before that time, they thought gravity might have worked

differently, according to quantum mechanics,

the physics that applies to the tiny subatomic realm.

So, they attempted to develop an alternative cosmological model

that they called quantum cosmology.

The hope among some of those cosmologists is that this model

would eliminate the need for a beginning of the universe

or would somehow explain the origin of the universe

without any need to posit an external creator.

I can recall Stephen Hawking at Cambridge,

just when the beginnings of Motor Neurone Disease

were being seen in his difficulty in walking.

When I was given a pre- publication edition of his book,

"The Grand Design", I was quite amazed to come

across what appears to be a central statement.

Because there are laws, such as gravity,

the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

I had an immediate visceral reaction.

What could that possibly mean?

Because there is a law such as gravity,

that is because there is something,

the universe can create itself from nothing.

And that appears to me to be a flat contradiction.

Nothing is certainly not nothing.

Hawking is saying that the universe

has come out of some sort of pre-existing laws

of physics that are expressed as mathematical equations.

The implication of this is that out of math comes matter,

space, time, and energy.

But these mathematical equations don't describe anything

yet because there is no universe yet to describe.

Math has no causal power by itself.

And one of the developers of quantum cosmology,

the Russian physicist Alexander Volinkin,

has reflected deeply on this kind of paradoxical result.

He says, "In the absence of space, time,

and matter, what tablets could these laws be written upon?”

Hawking was sensitive to the same concern.

He said, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations

and makes a universe for them to describe?”

In our experience, math is conceptual.

It exists in a mind.

So, if we're saying the material universe came out of a set

of mathematical equations, are we really saying

that the material universe came out of a mind?

The basic idea of fine-tuning is that the universe

is just so, that its properties, the initial conditions,

the so-called constants of physics, the laws of nature,

rest on a razor's edge so that if they were slightly different

than they are in the actual universe,

the universe would not be habitable.

That is, it would not be compatible with life.

Physicist Sir John Polkinghorne used

to have an excellent visual illustration

to convey the idea of the fine-tuning.

He used to ask people in the audience to imagine

that they were on a spaceship that had docked

at a space station.

And upon entrance to the space station,

they discovered there was a great room

with a huge universe-creating machine inside.

And it had dials and knobs and sliders,

each representing one of the fundamental physical parameters,

where each one of the dials was set to a very precise value.

Imagine what would happen if you changed one

of the dials one click this way or

that, or move a slider one notch this way or

that, that life in the universe would suddenly

become impossible.

But it was none other than Fred Hoyle who first discovered

that our universe is actually fine-tuned for life.

I'm going to tell you today a story which,

if you hear it, may seem very strange to you.

Hoyle was trying to show,

as part of his work on the steady-state cosmology,

where carbon could have come from.

And certainly it would have seemed strange to me,

some 20 years ago, when the path

which led to this work began to be followed.

When he himself made a discovery

that shook his personal philosophy.

So, let me begin then without more ado.

So, Hoyle is trying to explain the abundance

of carbon in the universe because he recognized

that you needed carbon to build life,

but he can't figure out for the life

of him how it could have been built.

Hoyle reasoned that the Big Bang couldn't do it,

the Quasi-Steady State universe couldn't do it,

and the only other laboratories for doing

so were in the bellies of stars.

The understanding now is that all of the elements

that we have, carbon, oxygen, so on, were synthesized

inside of stars.

When that star exploded, goes supernova,

then that gets spread throughout the universe.

Then, that gets to be re-accumulated back

into new stars and planets.

He developed numerous ideas

about how carbon might form from simpler atoms inside stars.

But for various reasons, none of them would work.

But then, he comes up with a theory that works with the physics.

His theory envisions two elements,

beryllium with an atomic weight of eight

and helium with an atomic weight of four,

combining to make carbon with an atomic weight of 12.

But there's a catch.

When he did the math, the resulting carbon would have a higher

energy state than the ordinary carbon

that we have around us in our solar system.

And this higher energy version of carbon would have to exist

for beryllium and helium to come together

to form carbon in the first place.

So, if you have a wine glass and you flick it,

it will have a certain note that it puts out there,

a certain frequency.

If I sing that frequency back at the wine glass,

it will absorb that sound much more effectively than

if I just sing some other random note at the wine glass.

There's a way that a carbon nucleus could sing,

could wobble around, could vibrate

and oscillate in just the right way...

that it would live long enough to sort of hold itself together

in time to make a stable carbon nucleus rather than a couple

of things falling apart.

Without this singing frequency in a carbon atom,

the process just won't work.

Hoyle realized that there must be a version

of the carbon atom capable of vibrating at a precise frequency

that would allow it to absorb the combined energies

of the beryllium and helium so that carbon could form.

After which time, it would settle into the stable form of carbon

that we see all around us today.

Now, what Hoyle did was to say, "All right, well,

if that's the way that carbon's got to be made in the universe,

carbon better sing at just this energy level,

otherwise this whole thing's not gonna work.”

So, he contracted with a physicist out

at Caltech named Willie Fowler.

So, Hoyle was invited to Caltech

to give a lecture on the steady state theory.

The next day, he came into the laboratory

and began asking us questions about the energy levels

of the carbon-12 nucleus.

And we kind of gave him the brush off.

"Get away from us, young fellow.

You bother us.”

See, we didn't know him all that well.

And there was this funny little man who thought

that we should stop all this important work

that we were doing otherwise and look for this.

He convinced Ward Whaling, who was an assistant

or associate professor at that time, to give it a whirl.

And sure enough...

the energy he got was almost exactly what Hoyle had predicted.

It was really quite a tour de force

that a man had walked into the lab,

predicted the existence of an excited state

of a nucleus from astrophysical arguments.

We then took Hoyle very seriously.

That confirmed Hoyle's suspicion

about how carbon might have been made,

but it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg

of a deeper problem.

The fact that carbon sings

at just this energy level itself depends on other properties.

The fine-tuning of the energy levels

was the whole cascading effect of other fine-tuning parameters

that were discovered that had to be just right.

Each one of these different parameters falls

within a very narrow tolerance.

We can put fairly precise values

on how finely tuned they have to be.

The probability of the strength of gravity being just right,

one part in 10 to the power of 35.

The odds of the weight of a proton to an electron.

One part in 1,000.

The ratio between the gravitational attraction

and the electromagnetic attraction.

One part in 10 to the power of 4.

The gravitational force compared

with the weak nuclear force.

One part in 10 to the 10,000.

One part in 10 to the 21st power.

Initial expansion rate of the universe.

One part in 10 to the 17.

Not too strong, not too weak, not too fast,

not too slow, not too heavy, not too light.

Everything's got to be just right.

The Goldilocks universe.

It's not just that life would be different or

that history would be different,

but that the universe would not be compatible

with any sort of chemically based life.

The probability of getting these specific

parameters right is infinitesimally small.

Unless it's also claimed

that instruction happens by sort of divine providence,

ex machina, to be just such.

I felt obliged to take seriously the proposition

that life is a cosmic phenomenon.

By a cosmic phenomenon,

Hoyle meant that life in the universe was a consequence

of the precise fine-tuning of the physical parameters

of the entire universe.

So, the concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon,

if it's correct, should have many consequences.

The question then was what does one do about it?

And at the end of this investigation,

Hoyle shifted.

And he attributes his conversion from an aggressive form

of scientific atheism to affirming some kind

of intelligent design behind the universe,

to his discovery, his own discovery

of these fine-tuning parameters.

He's later quoted as saying that a common-sense interpretation

of the evidence suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed

with physics and chemistry to make life possible.

Think of it like this.

Suppose that I'm a detective arriving on the scene of a crime.

I'm at a bank, and there's been a heist, OK?

The safe is open, all the money is gone,

and I say, "All right, let's have a look at security footage.”

And I'm watching on the little screen,

and the burglars come in, and they walk up to the safe,

and there is a 12-digit code, and they walk up

and punch in the correct code.

Opens up, and off they go.

Here's two possible explanations.

Maybe these are really lucky robbers,

but they just guess the first 12-digit code that comes to mind,

and hey presto, they take the money.

Here's another option.

It's an inside job.

Someone who already knew the code told

the robbers what the code is.

Let's pause the video just as the lead thief puts his finger up

in order to put the code in.

What would we expect to happen according

to the first hypothesis, the they got lucky?

Well, if they're just guessing the code,

then we'd expect them to put in the wrong code.

We can't really predict what code you would put in,

but we can predict with a high degree

of certainty you put in the wrong one.

And so, our expectation there that naturally forms

from that scenario doesn't match with what actually happens.

On the other hand, if we knew it was an inside job

and we stopped the video just before they put in the code,

we would expect them to put in the right code

and get into the vault.

It's possible by random means

that some process would have stumbled

on exactly the parameters needed

to create a life-friendly universe.

But our overwhelming expectation,

if we consider the odds, is that without guidance,

we would get a life-unfriendly universe.

But that's not the kind of universe we see.

Instead, we see the kind of universe we would expect

if it had been intentionally set up for life,

suggesting that it was intended.

Fine-tuning implies a fine-tuner.

But there's another type of fine-tuning.

And that's the fine-tuning of the initial arrangement

of matter at the very beginning of the universe.

If you thought the idea of a Big Bang was one of order emerging

from chaos, get that out of your mind.

It's exactly the opposite.

What we have is an initial moment

of exquisite precision and order.

One of the remarkable things about the universe we

see around us is there's a direction, so to speak, of time.

This fact that processes go one way

but not the other is captured in a physical quantity called

entropy, which very roughly, in a sort of hand-wavy way,

measures the amount of disorder in a system.

The more chaotic,

the more random the distribution, the higher the entropy.

The more ordered the system, the lower the entropy.

You have a glass of coffee, and you have a glass of milk.

It's highly ordered.

Then, you mix them together.

They're completely disordered and random.

We see things happening seemingly only in a way

that entropy increases.

No one has ever put a spoon into coffee

and stirred it and separated the milk out from the coffee.

Never happened.

What's going on with all of this?

Since entropy is increasing continuously,

that means that if we go into the past,

entropy had to be decreasing.

To allow things to be this orderly now,

how orderly must the universe have been at the beginning?

This is where a very interesting argument

from Roger Penrose comes in.

What Penrose worked out was, OK,

if we consider the full set of possibilities

for the way you could start a universe,

our sort of universe is an extraordinarily small piece

of that set of possibilities.

He has calculated

that initial entropy fine-tuning as one chance

in 10 to the 10th power raised again to the 123rd power.

It's called a hyper-exponential number.

What that's telling us is there's something

remarkably special about the start of our universe.

There has to be something about the arrangement of the stuff,

whatever the stuff was, very early in the universe,

which is not the typical way you

would expect a universe to start.

You could understand this by analogy.

In the old days, when civil engineers were building a tunnel

through a mountainside, they would configure a charge just right

to make sure that the blast removed the rock

where they wanted it to be removed.

And very small adjustments in the initial positioning

of those explosive charges would make very big differences

in where the hole appeared in the mountainside.

Analogously, that's what's going on with the fine-tuning

of the initial entropy of the universe.

You can just think of it this way.

The amount of disorder is so small that it's nearly perfect.

There's a famous passage in the

"General Scholium to the Principia",

which is an epilogue

that Newton wrote in one of the later editions

to his great work on universal gravitation.

He's describing the beautiful balance of the planets,

the sun, the comets that create this stable order.

In this passage, he says, "This most beautiful system of sun,

planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel

and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Even in a highly fine-tuned universe,

you still need a heck of a lot more to go right

in a planetary environment in order for not only complex life

in general, but human life in particular to exist.

Our solar system, especially in view

of what we now have learned about other solar systems,

really ends up looking quite remarkable.

Our solar system has terrestrial planets...

in neat, circular orbits.

And then, you get to these gas giants...

that are also in neat, circular orbits.

They serve as guards.

They serve as sentinels for our solar system so that they,

very often, take hits for us from these comets...

that if they were not there would find their way

into our neighborhood and have an unfortunate tendency

to sterilize life on our planet.

For example, the comet Shoemaker-Levy,

it ended up in Jupiter.

Jupiter and Saturn,

these planets that for a long time were associated with Greek

and Roman gods, actually do play a role in protecting us.

And all of this around a stable,

energetic, metal-rich star.

Just these makes the solar system pretty unique.

Beyond that, our own planet within the solar system is situated

in what we call the circumstellar habitable zone.

If we were too close, radiation would kill us.

If we were too far away, our planet wouldn't have the right

materials to support life in the way it does.

It's the right tilt and has the right

rotation rate so that we have seasons.

You need a large moon in order

to stabilize the planet's tilt on its axis.

In addition, what the moon

does is that recirculates the ocean through the tides

to allow oxygen to get to deeper levels.

You need the right kind of atmosphere,

the right thickness of the atmosphere,

the right mass for the planet in order to hold the right kind

of atmosphere in place, and then you

need the right kind of geology.

We have a molten magma in the Earth that rotates.

That creates a magnetic shield.

That has an important consequence

because the magnetic field of the Earth is our blanket,

our shield against dangerous, deadly cosmic radiation

that would otherwise modify our DNA,

preventing us from perhaps ever coming to exist.

It's not at all obvious

that that necessarily has to happen.

In some ways, Mars is the perfect example

of how precisely things have to be fine-tuned

at a local level in order to have life.

Remember, Mars is the most Earth-like planet known

in the universe.

Mars is in an otherwise habitable solar system.

It's very close to the Goldilocks zone in its orbit.

It's close to the same mass as Earth.

It has many of the same materials.

And yet a few things didn't go quite right.

And as a result, it's lifeless while

Earth is suffused with life.

It's a remarkably exquisite system of design

in which all of these pieces have to work together in order

to produce a small abode on the surface of a single small planet

where life can exist.

One of the most curious attempts

to get a round inference to design

in the universe is to push it all off onto the concept

of a multiverse.

The idea that there are billions and billions

and billions of other universes out there,

which had different combinations

of fundamental physical parameters

and different initial conditions,

and we just happen to be in the lucky one.

Given enough universes,

presumably at least one or a few of those universes will exist

in such a way that complex life can exist.

The nice thing about the multiverse explanation

is it shows that this fine-tuning business seems

to be pointing beyond the universe as we know it.

There's got to be something else.

There's got to be a bigger story out there.

The multiverse, as an appeal to a materialistic,

naturalistic explanation, loses any of its original attraction.

Anything that's outside of this nature is essentially,

manifestly supernatural.

And so, we're appealing to something supernatural

to avoid the supernatural.

Leonard Susskind,

a prominent physicist at Stanford, says, "Look,

if we don't posit this kind of a multiverse model,

we're hard pressed to answer the arguments

of the ID proponents as to how to explain the fine-tuning.”

But there's a problem with that.

For the multiverse explanation to work,

there must be some kind of universe-generating mechanism,

a kind of common cause of all the universes so that we

can portray each of the universes as the outcome

of a kind of cosmic lottery.

And these universe-generating machines,

where they're constantly generating universes

with slightly different parameters and laws of physics.

And this is the sleeper.

All the speculative cosmological models

that have been invoked to explain how you might generate new

universes, whether those models are based on string theory

or something called inflationary cosmology,

all those models require exquisite,

prior fine-tuning in the universe-generating mechanism

that is proposed.

If a monkey clicked on a typewriter

for an infinite amount of time, in theory

it would eventually type out Hamlet.

But if the typewriter didn't have the letter H,

then it wouldn't stand a chance.

Just as the parts of the typewriter need to be fine-tuned

to include all the letters of the alphabet

to make possible typing different words and sentences,

so too, all proposed universe-generating mechanisms

would require fine-tuning to make it possible

to generate different universes with different

initial conditions and laws of physics.

The multiverse doesn't actually get rid

of the fine-tuning or explain the origin of the fine-tuning.

You really just push the fine-tuning problem back one generation

without solving it.

And yet we know of one cause that does produce fine-tuning

in our experience.

Whenever we see what we call fine-tuning,

we always trace that type of a system back to a mind,

whether we're talking about a finely tuned French recipe,

a finely tuned internal combustion engine,

or a finely tuned radio dial.

The ability to look at a set of possibilities

and to choose an outcome is almost by definition intentional.

It's something that a mind does that sort

of mindless matter doesn't do.

So, given that the multiverse doesn't actually

provide an ultimate explanation for fine-tuning,

the best explanation for fine-tuning

is still intelligent design.

The multiverse is like this gateway drug.

Once you're lost in the multiverse,

you might as well be in a simulation.

Some people have argued

that our universe is actually a simulation,

that there's perhaps some extraordinary

computer that's running a simulation.

We're part of that simulation.

The simulation theory?

That belongs in the movies.

Come on, that's ridiculous.

We're not living in a simulation.

There's no evidence of a discrete film being run

in the background.

This is not what I would consider,

or what you would consider, sophisticated discourse.

Has nothing to do with science.

I think what all these things have in common,

the simulation theory, the multiverse,

you can't trust what's in front of your eyes.

The multiverse, simulation hypothesis,

we're living in a computer, all those sorts of things,

there's nothing wrong with any of this.

It just shouldn't be mistaken for anything serious.

We're not only seeing evidence of design

at the macroscopic scale of the entire universe

and in the fundamental parameters of physics

that affect the whole of the cosmos,

but we're now seeing design in the microcosm

and the tiny recesses of living cells.

Back in the middle of the 19th century,

the cell was thought to be a little piece of jelly,

so it seemed to be pretty simple.

Thomas Henry Huxley said

that the living cell is a simple,

homogenous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.

It's just a simple enclosure with some Jello

or goo on the inside.

But modern science has shown

that the cell is an enormously complex nanoscale factory.

And when you study biochemistry, you come across machinery,

literally molecular machines.

One of my favorites is the bacterial flagellum.

It is quite literally an outboard motor

that bacteria use to swim.

It's got a propeller, this long whip-like strand.

And the propeller is attached to the drive shaft

by something called the U-joint, which is attached to the motor.

And the motor is hooked onto the cell membrane

by something called the stator.

The stator requires bushing to push up

through the membrane of the cell.

And altogether, there are 30 parts that are needed for it.

In some species, the flagellar motor is rotating

at 100,000 rpm, and it can change direction

in a quarter of a turn.

It's an absolutely amazing piece

of high technology in a low form of life.

Another great example of a molecular machine

in the cell is the ATP synthase.

It's a true turbine

that generates energy for use in the cell

in much the same way a turbine in a dam generates electricity.

It's an engine with a barrel-shaped rotor made

of protein subunits.

As the rotor spins, it turns a drive shaft with a specially

placed bump that opens a specifically shaped compartment.

Once opened, this compartment receives two molecules

and combines them to form another energy-rich molecule

called ATP, the power plant for the cell.

And there's a whole host

of molecular machines inside cells.

turbines, rotary engines, sliding clamps,

machines for copying digital information.

We've got kinesin motors that are running

along that are basically UPS trucks that are delivering things.

Motor proteins that walk step by step as they tow vesicles

of material along tracks made of other special proteins.

Darwin knew nothing

of these sophisticated multi-part machines in the 19th century,

and his theory is not equipped to explain them.

Darwin himself said, "If it could be demonstrated

that there was any system that could not be put together

by numerous, successive, slight modifications,

my theory would absolutely break down.”

In the bacterial flagellar motor,

if you take away the drive shaft or

if you take away the propeller or the U-joint, it's broken.

If any key component of the flagellar motor is removed,

it stops functioning.

This means simpler evolutionary precursors wouldn't have worked.

So, natural selection wouldn't have preserved them,

halting evolution before the fully

functional motor could develop.

On the flip side, when you see a system that's put together

with a number of components matched to each other,

you recognize that's the product of a mind.

The Darwinian mechanism of mutation

and selection, which has long been posed as a kind

of designer-substitute mechanism, cannot build those systems.

Then, perhaps they look designed

because they really were designed.

But there's an even deeper consideration

that points to intelligent design and biology.

One of the most brilliant theories

of modern science was formulated by an American, JD Watson,

and an Englishman, FHC Crick.

As soon as we met,

we found that although we had very different backgrounds,

we had a lot of things in common.

Francis Crick was a PhD student

at Cambridge University, working in physics,

not even in biology.

He teamed up with a 23-year-old American named James Watson.

Neither of us were trained

for what really interested us now.

We both wanted to find the gene.

We weren't organic chemists.

We weren't anything else.

And they began to work on what was at the time

deemed to be kind of the holy grail of biological research.

By the early 1950s, many scientists were suspecting

that DNA had something to do with the transmission

of hereditary information, but didn't know

what the structure of DNA was.

And so, Watson and Crick began a kind of odyssey

to try to crack this problem.

And by the spring of 1953, they had actually formulated a model

that elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule.

They showed that it had a beautiful double helix structure.

And along the spine of the molecule,

on the interior, there were chemical subunits, four of them.

One, two, three, four.

Now represented with the letters A, T, G, and C.

A would pair with T.

And then, you have two other genetic letters.

C would pair up with G.

So, you had the double helix.

So, the discovery of the structure suggested

that one strand of DNA had a complementary strand...

that could in turn function as a template for rebuilding

or copying the original strand.

And this suggested a duplication process.

I don't think I worried too much about what

the structure might tell us.

I just thought we ought to find out.

And when we had found out, of course,

it struck us with a tremendous impact,

just how beautiful and exciting it was.

Because there before us was the answer to one

of the fundamental problems in biology, how do genes replicate?

And it was very simple, and you couldn't miss it.

We used to occasionally just, Jim and I,

just sit and look at the molecule

and think how beautiful it was.

Interestingly, Crick had been a code breaker

in World War II.

In 1957, he then formulates something called the sequence

hypothesis, which in many ways, I think is a more significant

achievement than even the original elucidation of the structure.

Crick realizes that the four chemical subunits along the spine

of the double helix, on the interior of the helix,

are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text.

That is to say that it's not the physical properties

of these subunits.

It's not their molecular weight or their shape,

but rather it's their arrangement in accord

with an independent symbol convention

that molecular biologists eventually elucidate,

called the genetic code, that gives them their ability

to transmit information.

What also happened

around the same time was Gamow had shown

that you could take those letters, As, Cs, Gs, and Ts,

and you could represent them in binary code, zeros and ones.

So, it had an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string.

It looked very much like an information carrier.

But for what?

Crick anticipated this, too.

He thought these bases were carrying information

for the construction of proteins.

A cell is filled with proteins that are performing the tasks

inside the cells.

They're like the tools in a toolbox.

You have a hammer, a wrench, a saw.

Each of those different tools perform different functions

because of the different three-dimensional shapes

that they have.

The same thing is true of proteins.

Proteins catalyze reactions at super-fast rates,

those are called enzyme proteins,

they build the structural parts of molecular machines,

and they also help to process information on the DNA molecule.

So, proteins do all these important jobs,

but they do those jobs because they have very specific

three-dimensional conformations or shapes.

Now that raises the question, how do they acquire those shapes?

Well, they get those precise shapes if and only

if the amino acid subunits, the constituent parts out

of which they're made, are arranged in very specific ways.

And there's 20 amino acids in the same way

that you've got 26 letters in the alphabet.

So, the order of the amino acids

in a protein is like the letters in a sentence.

They have to be in the right order to work.

But what causes the amino acids

to get arranged properly so that they will fold properly

into the right shapes?

And the answer to that was the discovery

that the DNA molecule contains information...

instructions for directing the construction

of those protein molecules that do all those important jobs.

In those stretches of DNA,

you have very particular sequences of A's, C's, G's,

and T's that tell cells how to make amino acid sequences

that fold and become functional proteins.

And molecular biologists now have a very good understanding

of how the information in DNA directs the process

of protein synthesis.

First, the cell uses a large protein machine called a polymerase

to make a copy of the information on the DNA.

The polymerase separates the DNA into two strands.

One strand serves as a template for creating

a complementary RNA copy.

The resulting copy, called a messenger RNA transcript,

detaches and then approaches and passes

through the nuclear pore complex.

Then the transcript with the genetic assembly instructions

arrives at a two-part chemical factory called the ribosome,

the site of protein synthesis.

As the messenger RNA transcript passes through the ribosome,

a mechanical assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain

of amino acids using the instructions on the transcript.

These amino acids are transported to the ribosome

by molecules called transfer RNAs,

which link specific sequences of bases

to corresponding amino acids in accord with the genetic code.

The sequential arrangement of the amino acids determines

whether the chain will fold into a functional protein,

and if so, which type.

Once the chain is folded into a functional protein,

it is ready to perform its job inside the cell.

That's in fact what's going on inside cells.

The discovery meant

that you had to explain not just the origin

of the cell viewed as a kind of amorphous blob,

but rather as an enclosure of a sophisticated information

storage device and a sophisticated information transmission

and processing system.

They inherited all the traits

of the cell they came from.

And this same sort of process goes on in all living creatures.

It's not just a bunch of protoplasm anymore.

The cell is utterly amazing.

How can you look at this and not think,

how in the world did this start?

Because molecules don't come together to do that on their own.

OK.

But what I'd like to know is, where'd the first cell come from?

In a way, you're asking where life itself began.

We don't know that.

I first encountered the mystery about the origin

of the first life at a conference that I attended

when I was a young scientist.

There was a discussion between scientists

who were committed to the standard chemical evolutionary model

for how life arose from simpler chemicals

in the so-called prebiotic soup,

and other scientists who had become skeptical

of the standard model.

One of those scientists on the panel was a man named Dean

Kenyon, a biophysicist with a Stanford PhD, he'd worked at NASA,

and he'd written the best- selling advanced graduate-level

textbook on how life first arose from these prebiotic chemicals,

"Biochemical Predestination".

But leading up to the conference,

he began to doubt his own theory.

My own research work on origin

of first life was one of the main factors

that led me to begin to question this general viewpoint

about origins.

As time went on there, I began to be more aware

of some of the problems involved.

Actually, some students brought me a book in which my own work,

"Biochemical Predestination", was critiqued.

I thought I could easily refute this refutation of my work.

And so, I said, "Well, I'll take the summer

to look at this material.

It looks very interesting.”

Here, the question of origin of genetic information

looked increasingly problematical.

By the time the summer was over, I had decided

that I could not refute this criticism.

Things added up to the time for a critical reexamination.

And his old idea was that the subunits

of the large information- carrying biological molecules,

like the proteins and the DNA, would have self-organized

because of forces of attraction between the constituent parts

of those large molecules.

In chemistry, sodium and chloride combine to form salt.

NA has a plus charge.

Cl has a minus charge.

They attract, and they form a nicely ordered crystal lattice.

However, as he got deeply into the chemistry,

Kenyon realized that DNA wasn't that kind of molecule.

In the DNA molecule, we have A, T, C, and G.

And the specific order in which they occur does not depend

on the chemical binding affinities

between or among those various bases.

I used to use a visual illustration

with my students to get the idea across.

I would use a little magnetic chalkboard

and stick letters to it, magnetic letters.

In the case of the magnetic letters in the chalkboard,

there were magnetic forces that explained

why the letters stuck to the backboard.

But those forces didn't explain the arrangement of the letters

that spelled out some message.

Instead, that was explained only by an exogenous source

of information, namely, I had arranged the letters.

So, the magnetic forces explain why the letters stuck

to the backboard, but not their arrangement.

And in the same way, there are forces of attraction in DNA

that explain why the bases stick

to the sugar phosphate backbone,

but not forces that explain the arrangement of the characters.

And so, my doubt just reached, I guess,

for me, the intellectual breaking point.

If one could get at the origin of the messages,

the encoded messages within the living machinery,

then you would really be on to something far more intellectually

satisfying than this chemical evolution theory.

And at this conference,

he publicly repudiated his own theory.

I don't think you have to jump off the end

of the rational world to move in the direction

of a frankly theistic understanding of the origin of life.

Since Kenyon announced his doubts,

there have been many other attempts

to simulate how the molecular compounds necessary for life,

like proteins and DNA, or even simpler chemical building blocks

of those compounds, might have evolved

under realistic prebiotic conditions on the early Earth.

But those laboratory simulations invariably require a cheat.

Human interference.

When you do organic synthesis, when you make a compound,

you need to generally start with pure compounds

because the impurities cause a lot

of deleterious reactions to occur.

Once you've made your compound, you've got to stop it

at exactly the right time before it decomposes,

more human interference.

Now, what you have to do is you have to separate it

from all the other compounds that formed.

Separations are really hard, really hard.

Huge human involvement.

Now you have to identify it.

You have to know what it is and characterize it

in order to bring it on to the next step.

How do you go on?

And the poor early Earth was mindless.

It didn't know what it was supposed to make.

Molecules have never been known to move toward life.

Never, ever, ever.

Molecules don't evolve toward life. They don't.

Attempts to simulate how life could have arisen

from a prebiotic environment involve an element

that never gets acknowledged.

And that element is intelligence.

We need to address more fundamental questions.

What's the origin of the code?

And I know that philosophers of science

and scientists find it difficult to really grasp what

information is because it has a couple of levels.

In classical information theory,

there isn't a way to distinguish a series of symbols

that are merely improbable from a series of symbols

that are improbable and also functional.

The difference between the monkey typing out random gibberish,

which would be a highly complex arrangement of characters,

but not one that conveys any meaning

or performs a communication function,

and, say, a line of poetry, like,

"Time and tide wait for no man.”

If you compare those two symbol strings side by side,

you'll see that they both are highly improbable.

But something is present in the one string

of characters that's not present in the other.

And that's what we call specificity.

Or sometimes it's called specified complexity.

The arrangement of the characters is specific

to perform a function.

Now, what's interesting in life,

you have things that are not just complex and

that there's lots of parts, it's

that they're arranged in a particular way

that allows them to do something remarkable.

And that is the thing that makes the complexity

not just ordinary complexity...

but specified complexity.

And DNA is a great example of specified complexity.

And when we're talking about information contained

in the genetic code in DNA, we are talking

about a level of semantic information.

Because in DNA, the sequence is coding for something.

In that sense, it has meaning.

A scientist named Henry Quastler,

who was one of the pioneers in applying the information sciences

to analyzing the information that's stored in DNA, he says,

"The creation of new information is habitually associated

with conscious activity.”

We associate information

with a rational intelligence behind it.

That's true at all levels.

And as we grow up, we learn.

We read books.

We see words.

We learn language.

And everything points towards the fact

that this does not arise spontaneously.

Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software

program, only much more complex than any we've ever created.

What do we know about the origin of software?

It always comes from a mind, from a programmer.

In fact, whenever we see information

and we trace it back to its source,

whether we're looking at a section of software code

or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book

or information embedded in a radio signal,

if we trace the information back to its ultimate source,

we always come to a mind, not a material process.

So, the discovery of information in a digital

or alphabetic form at the foundation of life

in molecules like DNA and RNA is a powerful indicator

of a designing intelligence playing a role in the origin

of that information, and therefore in the origin of life itself.

That's where all our experience

of the universe points.

We see the word exit, immediately we infer to a mind behind it.

A Chinese archaeologist sees a couple of strokes on the wall

of a cave and says, "Human intelligence.”

And I say, "Don't be so stupid, two strokes.”

Ah, yes, but they are the Chinese symbol for a human being.

And so, there must have been an intelligence behind that.

We look inside the cell.

We have a whole theory which describes

these controlled transfers of information.

And the only examples we know of this sort

of controlled transfers of information is systems

that intelligent agents have developed.

When we look at how information gets processed

in the cell, you get the string of information being ejected out

of the nucleus, but that string of information

on its own does not give you, in any way, shape,

or form, the product we need to get work done.

It has to be picked up by another mechanism

that knows how to read that string

and convert what it sees there into what is needed over here

to get the work done that that thing over there needs.

That gave me pause and made me go,

"Wait a minute, I've seen this before.”

We do this all the time in computer science.

Some of the ideas that we were seeing in biology

that resonated with me were such notions as error correction.

By any chance,

if there's something that is done incorrectly,

there's even another protein that's able

to proofread and fix this.

The existing code can be recoded,

it can be rewritten, it can be edited on the fly.

The information processing system

in the cell uses design strategies reminiscent

of high-tech digital computing with one key difference.

The design logic in the cell exceeds anything

human engineers have produced.

We know now that DNA,

you can read it once in one direction.

You can read it in that direction again,

but if you start here, you get a different gene expressed than

if you start here, even though those overlap.

You can read the same segment of DNA forward

to get one protein and backwards to get another.

We've never been able to yet make anything like

that happen with computers.

The code in the computer program,

it only does one thing.

You can't read it back and forth.

You read it one way, and that's what it does.

That's all it does.

In DNA, we have codes within codes within codes.

They're interdigitated.

They are multi-level, overlapping.

We're dealing with a system that exhibits

a manifold complex design.

The level of complexity that we see,

I stand back and go, "Wow, that's really elegant.”

As soon as the immense miracle

of the cell is exposed, it's an ongoing process.

We're far from a complete description of even the simplest cell.

We see these are not random structures.

They haven't been cobbled together.

They haven't been pieced together

by some sort of stochastic mechanism.

They're exquisitely and ingeniously put together

in a certain way, and if they're not put together

in that certain way, they don't work.

Let's take a look at what's

around us on planet Earth.

Do we see what looks like the bare bones, minimalistic,

cobbling together something by accident

for the sheer purpose of ruthless survival?

Or do we see something much more extravagant,

beautiful in its expression?

This is actually a big problem in evolutionary biology.

It's called the problem of gratuitous beauty.

Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that's relevant

for their survival.

This deserves an explanation.

Many people have tried to give a utilitarian explanation.

Oh, yeah, well, it's some adaptive reason,

or there's some sexual selection.

But I think the answer requires something more.

The one who realized the answer requires

something more was Aristotle.

He said, "No, it's the result of some kind of rational structure

to the universe, dare say even an intelligence.”

So, the exuberance is one that appears

to be designed to elicit our attention.

It's one that seems to be reaching out to us.

Now, here I am waxing.

It would seem to be mystical.

I must say that these are observations,

they're appeals to intuition, but not to be dismissed

for that reason.

Not to be dismissed.

There's something interesting going on.

There's something in science

called the beauty principle

that says true theories often convey a mathematical beauty

or structural harmony.

Upon looking at their model of the DNA molecule,

Francis Crick was quoted as saying,

"It's so beautiful, it's got to be right.”

You find that all the time in the literature

today, people saying, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.”

If we find a set of equations that is just beautiful,

then it must be true.

Sometimes the path toward the truth leads

through beauty.

And that is an important window.

We need to be willing to open that.

There's really two fundamental hypotheses

about reality.

One is that the story of everything is purpose,

that behind everything there is an author.

The alternative is that none of that is true.

We're the result of blind and impersonal processes

that did not have us in mind.

So, ultimately, these questions about the origin of matter,

the origin of life, the origin of the universe,

come down to that fundamental question and those two options.

Richard Dawkins has very famously said

that the universe has, at bottom,

just those properties one would expect if there were no design,

no purpose, only blind, pitiless indifference.

That's an interesting claim.

What I find interesting about it is that it's the right kind

of claim to be trying to make.

We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses

and see what consequences they have, what they point

to, how well they account for various things.

One of the most important questions any of us can ask,

when should I change my mind?

Or to put it a little bit differently,

if I am wrong, how am I going to find out?

Consider you're walking through the woods.

In a stretch of woods that you had thought totally uninhabited,

you stumble upon an old, sort of rundown cabin.

Looking at it, you think it's just a relic left

over from a long time ago.

Then you go up to the door, and you push it, and it opens.

And as you step inside, you see a cup of tea,

still hot, steeping on a little table

in the middle of the cabin.

When Richard Dawkins says the universe has exactly the features

that we would expect if there were at bottom no reason,

no purpose, what he's saying is that there should be no signs

of intelligence in the universe.

Where Dawkins goes wrong is that there actually is a cup

of tea on the table.

And so much more.

Recent scientific discoveries point in the direction

that none of the leading scientific materialists expected.

No one expected that the physical universe

of matter, space, time, and energy

would have a definite beginning.

No one expected that the universe would be finely tuned

against all odds to make life possible.

Dawkins himself has confessed to being knocked sideways

with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy

of the data processing machinery inside the cell.

We're not living in a vast, meaningless universe.

From the forces holding the cosmos together to the instructions

in the DNA in our own bodies, we see evidence

that everything was intended for a purpose,

that the story of everything is not blind,

pitiless indifference, but the unfolding of a grand design

that all of us are part of.

And surprisingly, perhaps, it is science that has revealed this.

Here is evidence for what can only

be described as a supernatural event.

I don't think you have to jump off the end

of the rational world to move in the direction

of a frankly theistic understanding of the origin of life.

Is there something else that we can imagine

that would lay these questions to rest?

I can't see it.

The question then was what does one do about it?

We might rethink the story of everything.

The universe does not look like it's been left to itself.

It bears everywhere the fingerprints of its creator.