It’s a great, great privilege to work with brilliant scientists who do such an amazing job of explaining the science that lies behind the deepest questions men and women can ask themselves. Because of that, it is a remarkable thing to me that some smart public intellectuals get this (Ben Shapiro) while some equally smart folks who ought to get it (Kevin Williamson) don’t.

Back in January, some of our very brightest colleagues gathered for Discovery Institute’s Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. The discussions there have just come online at YouTube so that we can all enjoy them. As an introduction, here is the Socrates in the City conversation between Stephen Meyer and Eric Metaxas, which kicked off the weekend.

Do Yourself a Favor

Do yourself a favor and watch this now:

Meyer, a philosopher of science, talks about the move to the next frontier in the argument for intelligent design. His forthcoming book, which is going to be huge, is The Return of the God Hypothesis. With Metaxas, who imperfectly disguises his own brilliance behind a hilarious comic persona, Meyer explains the origins of his thinking about design in cosmology and biology, tracing those back to a 1985 conference he just happened to attend in, yes, Dallas.

The Rest Is History

That sent him to Cambridge University to study Darwin’s method of reasoning, which he adopted as his own. The rest is history, summed up so far in Dr. Meyer’s books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt.

But it all started in Dallas. Well, not everything started there — the discussion about the evidence for ID goes back to Charles Darwin’s colleague and (ultimately) rival Alfred Russel Wallace and before that, to philosophers extending to Plato and Aristotle. But in a sense the modern ID movement had its start in Texas. So the location was appropriate as Meyer joined James Tour, Guillermo Gonzalez, Jay Richards, John West, and of course Eric Metaxas to sketch what science is telling us at the moment about the ultimate question.

Photo: Stephen Meyer and Eric Metaxas at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, via YouTube.