Ben Shapiro Interviews Stephen Meyer

[DBowling]

Just came across this interview a couple of days ago.
Great Interview!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDSpLBN ... e=youtu.be

[Philip]

Great video, DB!

For those who do not know, Meyer isn't just another ID advocate, but one of the movement's most important catalysts. I like how Shapiro gets right to key questions – like the difference between creationism and intelligent design. Unbelieving scientists in disciplines related to origin of life questions seem to mostly boil their answers down to merely talking about what they think happened, describing the chain and sequence of whatever elements involved, yet without ever explaining THE key question they have no answer to – and that is, what is the mechanism that produced, precisely, the many extraordinary (in both design and functionality) elements that would even make life possible to begin with. And THEN, what was the agent that brought life to the planet? What agent made possible so many things and mechanisms with such razor-thin margins, in which ALL of them are critical to life as we know it. Their answer seems to simply be, “This things just happened – astounding, but true.” And they say this well knowing that certain assembled parameters and designs require a mind and designer – or at least they should see this.

So, what is going on here. Even atheist scientists will call the Big Bang event and the planet’s march towards living organisms are all miraculous things – only they assert no God would be required to produce these many unbelievably complex things that are even necessary for life to even exist. But the idea of there being a Creator behind it all – this they cannot stomach! But Einstein (and others did) – though he didn’t believe in a personal God who has interacted with mankind and intervenes at times. And I think this idea that any Creator is a personal God that has expectations for our behavior and how we treat each other – this is what I think drives their disbelief in a Creator far more than any science they see as refuting the need for one. Because their unbelief requires nothing of themselves - that is, except for wild, unsubstantiated speculations.

Meyer gets the same pushback that Philip E. Johnson always did - asserting he's critical of various disciplines that he has no expertise in. But tracing the dependent assertions inherent in an argument to the evidence they claim provides proof doesn't need a scientist to detect its inherent flaws. If an evidence-based argument cannot be broken down into basic, understandable explanations - in which reasonably well educated people cannot adequately understand them - or they can't stand up to inspired scrutiny, well, then, that often becomes a fallacy of appealing to expertise designed to hide flawed conclusions.

[bippy123]

Just came across this interview a couple of days ago.
Great Interview!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDSpLBN ... e=youtu.be

Thanks for the link Dbowling , I’ll
Check it out .
Meyer was the first one who introduced me to ID and it was mostly against the origin of life , but my favorite is micheal behes argument from chloroquin resistance against malaria argument which has some very good math behind it .

It wasn’t publicized much by the scientific community but it had many atheist biologists apologizing to behe while gritting their teeth .

Behe believes in natural selection but doesn’t believe in random mutation . He instead believes in guided mutations . He’s also an ID’ist but he also believes in common descent .

[DBowling]

Just came across this interview a couple of days ago.
Great Interview!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDSpLBN ... e=youtu.be

Thanks for the link Dbowling , I’ll
Check it out .
Meyer was the first one who introduced me to ID and it was mostly against the origin of life , but my favorite is micheal behes argument from chloroquin resistance against malaria argument which has some very good math behind it .

It wasn’t publicized much by the scientific community but it had many atheist biologists apologizing to behe while gritting their teeth .

Behe believes in natural selection but doesn’t believe in random mutation . He instead believes in guided mutations . He’s also an ID’ist but he also believes in common descent .

Behe's book The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism

is an extremely important work on this topic, because he uses empirical data (like your example of chloroquin) to determine the behavior and capabilities of Darwininstic evolution ("random" mutation/natural selection) in the real world.
In this book Behe demonstrates how the known observed behavior of random mutation and natural selection is incapable or producing the change that we see in either the fossil record or the complex code that we observe in the DNA of life today.

Behe discusses the empirically observed capabilities of "random" mutation and natural selection in this lecture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6j8Yp6s6E8

[Philip]

The first work I read by Behe was his excellent, Darwin's Black Box. Here he defends his mousetrap analogy ofirreducible complexity, the term he first used in DBB: http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_mousetrapdefended.htm

And speaking of the many intelligent designs apparent in nature, I love what Michael Denton, M.D., Ph.D., a molecular biologist at the University of Otago, New Zealand (and a self-described agnostic, btw), has said about the design evident, even in the smallest biological unit:

“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred-thousand-million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.”

“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.” 

“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.”

And:  

“Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.” 

[bippy123]

Just came across this interview a couple of days ago.
Great Interview!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDSpLBN ... e=youtu.be

Thanks for the link Dbowling , I’ll
Check it out .
Meyer was the first one who introduced me to ID and it was mostly against the origin of life , but my favorite is micheal behes argument from chloroquin resistance against malaria argument which has some very good math behind it .

It wasn’t publicized much by the scientific community but it had many atheist biologists apologizing to behe while gritting their teeth .

Behe believes in natural selection but doesn’t believe in random mutation . He instead believes in guided mutations . He’s also an ID’ist but he also believes in common descent .

Behe's book The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism

is an extremely important work on this topic, because he uses empirical data (like your example of chloroquin) to determine the behavior and capabilities of Darwininstic evolution ("random" mutation/natural selection) in the real world.
In this book Behe demonstrates how the known observed behavior of random mutation and natural selection is incapable or producing the change that we see in either the fossil record or the complex code that we observe in the DNA of life today.

Behe discusses the empirically observed capabilities of "random" mutation and natural selection in this lecture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6j8Yp6s6E8

Correct DBowling and I looked for a whole year for a refutation to his chloroquin resistance and I couldn’t find any .
It made me wonder . If evolutionary biologists were just doing their jobs as scientists why couldn’t they admit on a large scale that behe was
Absolutely correct on this ????

That’s when I remembered what frank turek said in a video I was watching on YouTube .

“”Science doesn’t do science , scientists do science “”

To believe that scientists are these robotic Vulcan like people (sorry I’ve been a Trekkie since I was a kid in queens NY lol ) That are just seeking the facts is not totally realistic . They are people with biases just like everyone else .

I would like any of the atheists here to try and find a refutation for behes chloroquin resistance claim cause I can’t so far .

Evolution news website used to have all of the arguments for an against it but for some reason their search function on their website as Well as google search doesn’t pull
Up all the articles anymore
Well as google search

[bippy123]

Philip , yea the pre-biotic soup scenario just doesn’t seem realistic . I have been looking at inspiring philosophy’s process structuralism (a form of theistic evolution ) . I have just started studying it and it also seems fascinating .

https://youtu.be/-sPBF1o4a4U

He also has some awesome videos on quantum physics , the historical arguments for the resurrection and videos against the current prosperity gospel pastors of today .

[DBowling]

Here is a recent lecture by Behe based on his book Darwin Devolves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24t2eCjPbq4

[bippy123]

Thanks for the link Dbowling , behe is my favorite guy when it comes to ID because I believe that his view best fits ID and evolution together in a way that best fits the odds and the evidence .

I’ll either watch this presentation today or tomorrow when I grab a hotel room .

Here is a 2 part interview with behe on chloroquin resistance
In malaria .

Part 1: https://youtu.be/1bTYvYzm7jE

Part 2: https://youtu.be/ZyK7FyNnx0w

This I feel is the best argument against the odds of mutations being random because the mathematical odds just don’t add up .

Stephen Meyer brought me to intelligent design and the origins of life and behe brought me into reconciling evolution and intelligent design and the development of life.