Leading up to the release of The Story of Everything, Stephen Meyer talked (for two and a half hours!) with Matt Fradd on the wonderful Daily Wire podcast Pints with Aquinas. The movie is about what happens when we apply reason objectively, scientifically, to the problem of why nature exists at all. A fascinating personal angle in this conversation is how Dr. Meyer came to embrace theism, the general rubric shared by monotheists that affirms the existence of a Deity.
His thinking as a student, beset by anguishing doubts, was that the reliability of reason falls apart if you assume that only nature exists, but not a benevolent God. As Meyer puts it, he realized that “either theism was true and knowledge was possible or naturalism was true and no knowledge was possible.” Why? The ability to think critically about reality and about ideas would be in no way selected for by an unguided, materialist evolutionary process. Why would it? Under such a Darwinian scenario, we would have no valid license to trust our minds as we search for truth.
Yet we do trust them. Even the most confirmed Darwinists do. Only the existence of a loving Deity who endowed us with reason — a highly unnatural gift! — can explain why we are able to think rationally, including about science. This means atheist evolutionists reason as if they were theists. The discussion about reason starts at 13:42. Watch the whole the interview. The Story of Everything is out on April 30 in theaters nationwide. You can find tickets here.