Stephen Meyer is the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the religious conservative pseudo think tank The Discovery Institute. (Even the name of this institute is an inversion of reality: No discovery is actually necessary since they already know how the universe and life began. The god of Christianity did it.)
Discovery Institute so called “fellows” are notorious for making misleading statements about biological evolution. The acidic critic Professor Dave has a series of videos exposing Discovery Institute fraudsters:
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Meyer achieved infamous notoriety for his participation in the 2008 creationist documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which participants were misled and then misrepresented in the final cut. The film made any number of false and misleading claims.
True to form, here’s Meyer misrepresenting the state of the art in cosmology. It’s both intellectually obnoxious and also psychologically unsettling for him to do this since there’s literally nothing, given his educational attainment, that would prevent him from doing a modicum of research on what the current debates are in cosmology. If he had done this he’d know that it’s certainly not settled that the universe had a beginning.
Maybe we’ll discover that the universe had a beginning, maybe we won’t. But in the meantime there are people like Meyer motivated to effectively lie about science in order to shore up religious faith and conservative social and political agendas. I find it unsettling how readily people are willing to dictate to the universe how it should be. This tendency bespeaks variously of intellectual narcissism, unaccounted for bias, the insecure and overcompensating arrogance of religious faith, and the cognitive distortions that accrue from wanting to have your cosmology and eat it too.
If you’re looking for reasons why conspiratorial belief is so rampant in society and especially on the right, look no further than creationist fraudsters like Meyer and the Discovery Institute. Much of the intellectual infrastructure of the right, even and especially in its more serious registers as with pseudo think tanks like Discovery, is committed to constructing what often amounts to an alternate ontological and normative reality to Enlightenment values and beliefs. It’s not as though mainstream elite opinion in science is always correct. It’s that if you want to overturn it, if you want a new paradigm in science, you often have a monumental level of intellectual labor ahead of you.
