Stephen Meyer Says Biblical Teachings Gave 'Rise to Modern Science' on Joe Rogan's Podcast

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Earlier this month, Stephen Meyer, Ph.D., philosopher of science and the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, appeared as a guest on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, where he shared how modern science finds its basis on biblical teachings.

Meyer, the author of Return of the God Hypothesis, told Rogan that he began to look at the teachings of the Bible during a time of "philosophical deliberation."

"It was not really based on science initially," Meyer said. "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?"

He also noted that he became a "convinced theist" after reading from prominent philosophical authors, including Hume and Kan.

According to The Christian Post, Meyer previously held to an evolutionary worldview even after college until he attended a conference discussing the origins of the universe, life, and human consciousness.

"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," Meyer, who workers as a geophysicist at the time, said. "It was not explaining where life first came from, where the universe came from, let alone consciousness."

In response, Meyer went on an intellectual journey that ultimately resulted in his conversion.

"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 told Rogan. When reading the Bible, he came across 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," 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."

Meyer further described it as an "eternal, self-existent reality." He referenced his later studies that drew 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?"

Pointing to Hume's "problem of induction," which states that making sense of the present entails the presupposition of the uniformity of nature, which calls one to make reference to sensory observations, Meyer said that the argument ultimately leads to "arguing in a circle."

"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."

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Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for CrosswalkHeadlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.