Author Stephen C. Meyer points to 'timeless, eternal person' of Jesus Christ on Joe Rogan podcast
Ex-geophysicist: Presupposition of 'eternal, self-existent reality' paved way for modern science
When it comes to defending the faith to the world’s biggest podcast audience, sometimes philosophy can be just as powerful as theology.
In an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast earlier this month, Stephen Meyer, Ph.D., philosopher of science and the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, gave a wide-ranging interview in which he spoke about intelligent design and how biblical teachings laid the foundation for modern science.
Speaking about his “long protracted” conversion to Christianity in his younger years, Meyer told Rogan he began to consider the truths of the Bible in a time of “philosophical deliberation.”
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“It was not really based on science initially,” said Meyer. “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?...
“This question of meaning kind of haunted me. What could I possibly do that would have any lasting or enduring meaning?”
Meyer, who is also the author of Return of the God Hypothesis, said as he read through some of the great philosophical authors like Hume and Kant, many of them began to answer those questions, leading him to a point where he considered himself a “convinced theist.”
Still, Meyer said he held to an evolutionary worldview even after college until, while working as a geophysicist, he attended a conference about the origins of the universe, life, and human consciousness.
When he saw the debate focused largely on theists and philosophical materialists, Meyer began to reconsider his presuppositions on life.
“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,” he said. “It was not explaining where life first came from, where the universe came from, let alone consciousness.”
That launched an intellectual journey that, according to Meyer, 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 said.
For Meyer, one of the most profound truths came while he considered the fleeting 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, have no account,” he said.
After reading what he called the “big fat family Bible,” Myer said he came 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 explained. “And so, I thought, ‘I wonder if there is something that doesn’t change.
“... The philosophical questions I was having made me want to explore whether or not revealed religion might, in fact, be true.”
When Rogan pressed Meyer on what he meant by something that does not change, Meyer described it as an “eternal, self-existent reality” and pointed to his later studies that led him to the argument from epistemological necessity, a question on which he said all postmodern philosophy has turned.
“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,” he said. “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 says that in order to make sense of the present, one has to presuppose the uniformity of nature, which in turn requires one to make reference to sensory observations — an argument that, he said, ultimately leads to “arguing in a circle.”
But, said Meyer, if one’s presuppositions were grounded in the notion of a “benevolent Creator,” then that philosophical dilemma vanishes — 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," he explained.
“This turns out to be one of the key foundational assumptions that gave rise to modern science.”
Rogan — who has previously said he was raised Catholic — has never shied away from having guests on from Jewish, Christian, and other religious backgrounds, including Christian-identified guests like Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, journalist Michael Shellenberger, as well as former CIA covert operations officer Mike Baker who himself is not a believer but finds value in Christianity,
And while he’s had on a number of notable atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins and Neil Degrasse Tyson, Meyer is believed to be the first proponent of intelligent design on Rogan’s podcast, according to the Discovery Institute.
Following his appearance on the podcast, Meyer praised Rogan for the roughly three-hour conversation.
“Joe is insatiably curious and he asked many probing questions in an interview that flowed naturally from one deep subject to another,” said Meyer. “He definitely put me through my paces, but all in his trademark spirit of open inquiry.”
Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post and the author of BACKWARDS DAD: a children's book for grownups. He can be reached at: [email protected].
