Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge is one of the great interviewers. In a new conversation out today via Stanford’s Hoover Institution, he brings together Discovery Institute philosopher of science Stephen Meyer and Rice University chemist James Tour to discuss the origin of life. Robinson knows they agree on one weighty thing: current materialist “explanations” of the first life come nowhere remotely near their target. Instead, the target keeps getting farther away. 

However, Meyer and Tour disagree on another question that’s also of great weight: whether the same evidence that shows the cluelessness of origin-of-life research also points positively to intelligent design. In Signature in the Cell and Return of the God Hypothesis, Dr. Meyer argues in the affirmative. But Dr. Tour isn’t willing to go there, though he says he is “sympathetic” to ID. While a strong theist, he feels that the dimness of our understanding of life is too much to permit a scientific design hypothesis. That is a fascinating tension — and so it’s precisely where Robinson focuses his attention.

Some very interesting observations here. Tour emphasizes that the problem of biological information goes far beyond DNA: “Every piece of the cell is information. And so, to just focus on DNA being information…every piece of your cell is information.” It seems that would make the design inference even stronger, wouldn’t it?

Robinson says he is going off script to ask a simple question. When you plant an inert, seemingly dead thing — a seed — in the ground, and it grows to be a flower, what has just happened? Life has happened. But why? What is life? Can science tell us? Meyer and Tour agree that it cannot. On the same point, weirdly, check out this image I stumbled on yesterday: a 1931 painting by Frida Kahlo of the botanist and eugenicist Luther Burbank, depicting him as a plant growing out of the ground from a tree stump under which is buried his (Burbank’s) own dead body. Bizarre — and yet no less scientific really than anything science can say in response to Robinson’s query.

The discussion is framed by references to the ancient world. Tour notes that the Babylonians believed the first life as well as the gods emerged from a fetid pond. On the origin of life, materialist science in 2024 has not advanced appreciably beyond that. And Robinson pays respect at the end to the wisdom of a poetic verse from the “late Bronze Age.” Watch and enjoy a wonderful interaction between these three men: