Meyer founded and heads the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England and is the author of two previous books that are essential reading in the scientific debate about evolution. The first, Signature in the Cell, examines the role of DNA and the cellular-level evidence for intelligent design.
The second, Darwin’s Doubt, shows how the explosive origin of animal life in the Cambrian era makes a case for intelligent design (ID).
Darwinians have been flummoxed by the arguments in both books and have apparently realized that the best response is to simply pretend they don't exist.
Meyer did an interview recently with World magazine. You can read the whole interview here, but one part of it was particularly interesting to me. Meyer is reportedly taking the debate about intelligent design to the next level. Heretofore, ID theorists were careful to avoid claims about who they thought the designer was, how long ago the designer acted, and so forth.
They simply argued that life showed ample evidence of having been intelligently engineered and that the naturalistic theory which asserts that it's the result of blind, purposeless processes is intellectually unsupportable.
In The Return of the God Hypothesis Meyer makes the case for explicitly identifying the designer with the God of theism. Toward the end of the interview he's asked this (The interviewer's remarks are in boldface, Meyer's reply follows):
Critics of intelligent design have accused the ID movement of secretly pushing creationism. You and your allies have insisted ID is a legitimate scientific inquiry that stops short of trying to identify the designer. Now you’re making the case for His identity. Could this book give fuel to your critics?Of course, the identity of the designer has been implicit in the fine-tuning argument from the beginning. Anything responsible for the universe had to be extremely powerful, extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgeable and had to transcend the universe it created which means it couldn't be spatial, temporal or material. This sounds very much like the God of theism.
I’m sure it could, but that’s not an evidential objection. That’s an accusation as to motive. It is irrelevant to the merits of the argument itself.
The argument we’ve made is that nature points to a designing agent. In biology, we see evidence of design in the digital code that’s present in the DNA molecule. We know from our uniform and repeated experience that information in a digital or alphabetic form—what we call sequence-specific—invariably arises from an intelligent source.
If we’re trying to reconstruct what happened in the past, we want to consider what we know about cause-and-effect patterns in the world around us. The same method of reasoning Darwin used has led us to a non-Darwinian conclusion: If there’s a program, then there’s a programmer. Now, I’m looking at a broader range of evidence to answer: “Who is the designer?”
This then is something new in your quest.
In making the original case for design in biology, I left unspecified whether the designing intelligence was a transcendent designer or an immanent designer, a designer within the cosmos or a designer that transcended matter, space, time, and energy, what we call the universe.
In this new book, what I’m doing is simply looking at a broader range of evidence to answer a question that’s been posed to me, which is, “What can we say from science about the identity of the designer? Is it more likely to be an alien or a god, and immanent or transcendent?”
And you’re seeing ... The designer must have preceded the universe, because the fine-tuning was established at the very beginning of the universe. No immanent intelligence, no space alien designer within the cosmos, can account for the laws of physics upon which its very life depends and which preceded its existence.
The fine-tuning problems point to a transcendent design that preexists matter, space, time, and energy.
Intelligent Design theorists, however, have for much of the last several decades focused on the biological rather than the cosmological evidence for design so they rarely "officially" drew this inference. Meyer's book evidently takes the next step and fuses the biological evidence with the evidence from physics, chemistry, and cosmology to present a unified philosophical and scientific argument for the existence of God.
I urge you to read the rest of the interview - it's not long - and if you're interested in getting a copy of The Return of the God Hypothesis you can order it from the good people at my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds. It's a small independent shop standing athwart the Amazonian goliath and the big box stores. I encourage you to check them out and give them your support.
