The editors at Socrates in the City did a very sophisticated job on the video of Stephen Meyer’s conversation with Eric Metaxas at the Union League Club in NYC back in September. Maybe a little too sophisticated. All the switching back and forth between camera angles may be too much of a good thing.
Still, this is a must-watch. It’s even in HD and looks fantastic.
As always, Metaxas is hilarious. I’ve said before he makes me think of Woody Allen if the latter were a better-looking and better-dressed Evangelical Christian. In the introduction, Eric makes a fuss that Tom Wolfe — yes, that Tom Wolfe — came out to hear Steve Meyer talk about Darwin’s Doubt.
That is interesting. Wolfe we know (from this interview in the Telegraph) is writing about evolution as the subject of his next book:
Titled The Human Beast, it will be a non-fiction book about the theory of evolution, its history, its shortcomings and the ways in which some contemporary neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists have taken it to absurd conclusions.
Anyway, there are many highlights of the interview. One is Meyer’s crisp reply to the possibility acknowledged by Richard Dawkins in Expelled that the source of the design in biology could well, you never know, be an immanent intelligence in the cosmos, commonly designated derisively as “space aliens.” This is Dawkins’s famous ABG (“Anything but God”) maneuver, as Ben Stein has quipped.
Meyer answers that, taking into account the evidence from biology and cosmology, with the latter sealing the deal, the hypothesis of theism is better supported. It’s the combination of the two that’s key. That’s because the ultra fine-tuning of the physical constants at the inception of material existence itself implies an intelligence at work outside and “before” (if that word makes sense in this context, which it doesn’t) the universe.
UPDATE: Also take note of the question from the audience (starting at 1:05:32) by a man who was dismayed at the peculiar review of Darwin’s Doubt that appeared in National Review, but who was impressed and convinced by Casey’s reply published here at ENV. Watch for the comments on John Farrell’s NR review by Metaxas himself, which follow.