Earlier this year, interviewer Piers Morgan talked with Stephen Meyer about intelligent design. This week he talked with atheist Richard Dawkins — about intelligent design and about Stephen Meyer, among other things. It was as if someone had asked me, “Imagine you have 45 minutes on a YouTube channel with 3.2 million subscribers to pose all the challenges to Dr. Dawkins that you like. What would you ask?” More or less, Morgan did just that for me. Thanks!

Clearly, he had studied his interview with Dr. Meyer, author of Return of the God Hypothesis, with care. And he launches into it almost immediately (starting at 3:05). Morgan plays for Dawkins a lengthy clip of the conversation with Meyer, where Dr. Meyer responds to what Dr. Dawkins had said on a previous interview with Morgan. Says Meyer, Dawkins wished “to portray theistic belief as if it were equivalent to belief in fairies.” Meyer goes on to explain why what we know of the Big Bang is best explained by a scientific theistic hypothesis. Morgan himself finds that what Meyer calls the God hypothesis “explains things that are otherwise inexplicable.”

Something Wonderful

There’s something wonderful about watching Dawkins, who has always evaded engaging the scientific arguments for intelligent design, being compelled to watch Stephen Meyer and then being obliged to respond to Meyer by name, before an audience in the millions. His tactic is to evade yet again by proclaiming that he is not a physicist and that he is as “baffled” as anyone else by what might have brought about the Big Bang: 

We are not physicists. I, like you, am completely baffled by what physicists say to me, that you cannot use the word “before” for before the Big Bang. Time began at the Big Bang. Now that is counterintuitive to me. It’s counterintuitive to you. It’s counterintuitive to Stephen Meyer. But we are not physicists. And you need to talk to a physicist. Talk to a physicist about that.

Morgan presses him on the origin of life: how there could be a DNA code but no “coder.” Yes, that is Intelligent Design 101. Dawkins responds with frustration but no answers. Moving on, Morgan asks him how he can dub himself a “cultural Christian” who loves cathedrals and Christmas carols, while calling on the world to “mock” Christianity. Another good question. And he asks him if he has any insights into the mental health crisis of countless “doom-laden” young people. Now that, it seems obvious, can’t have nothing to do with the attacks on faith of the kind led for a couple of decades by the likes of Richard Dawkins. But Dawkins once again evades: “I’m not a psychiatrist.”

Judged by the Evidence

Stephen Meyer often gives credit to Dawkins for framing the issue of theism versus atheism in a way that can be judged empirically, by the scientific evidence. Agreed. Here, though, I’m struck by the way this foremost atheist — a brilliant man — is so on the ropes. He seems unable to give answers to some basic questions raised by his own atheism. Watch the whole thing. Throwing up your hands and saying you’re not a physicist, or not a psychiatrist, is not an answer. For an 83-year-old, he is as sharp as ever. So it’s not his age, but instead, I think, the contradictions in his own perspective. 

Morgan, not a biologist, a physicist, or a psychiatrist, was able to home in on those contradictions. They seem increasingly evident to a lot of people, and that might well be a sign of the times.