Stephen Meyer has finished his next book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, and (here is a bit of insider information) is currently awaiting copyedits from his publisher. The wheels of book publishing do not grind hastily. I’ve read the book, and it’s fantastic. If you are impatient to get your hands on it, you can get a bit of a preview in a presentation Dr. Meyer gave at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. You can watch that right now:

It’s poignant to think that the conference, on January 25, was held just a few days after the first COVID-19 case in the United States was confirmed, in a man who had visited Wuhan. That was here in Washington State. In our present surreal, locked-down virus world, such an event of course could not be planned. God willing, we’ll return to something like normalcy before too long.

In the meantime, you’ll find meaning and inspiration in Meyer’s words. He opens by discussing the emotional response of one young woman who was present for his interview with Eric Metaxas at the 2019 Dallas Conference. She wept at realizing that there was a rational, objective, scientific response to the scientific atheism she had been fed by her professors in college.

An Exception from Bertrand Russell

Steve’s presentation reminds me of an admission by atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell that Paul Nelson referred to in a note at the end of his tribute here to his teacher Adolf Grünbaum, on Monday. Writing in 1945, Russell dismantled the “classical arguments for God’s existence.” But he granted a fascinating exception to the argument from intelligent design:

This argument has no formal logical defect; its premises are empirical, and its conclusion professes to be reached in accordance with the usual canons of empirical inference. The question whether it is to be accepted or not turns, therefore, not on general metaphysical questions, but on comparatively detailed considerations.

Those “comparatively detailed considerations,” to be judged on empirical grounds, are the subject of Steve Meyer’s next book and of his comments at the Dallas Conference. Don’t miss either.

We are presenting, each Wednesday, videos of the main speeches from the Dallas event. Next week, check back here at Evolution News and watch Michael Behe on “Darwin Devolves.”