Whilst reading McGilchrist, I came upon this:
It reminded me of a video I had watched about Stephen C. Meyer is an American author and former educator. He is an advocate of intelligent design and, like Bechly, now said to be a “pseudoscientist”. McGilchrist isn’t speaking up for intelligent design, but he is speaking up about the way scientists are treated if they step outside the accepted norm.
Dr. Günter Bechly was an atheist all his life and held the view that “belief means not knowing,” in the sense that where people once needed religious explanations, there are scientific answers today. He held that Charles Darwin had proved that we do not need a God to understand the origin of life. Time and again, Bechly used public platforms to highlight the superiority of natural science over religious superstition. That was until the event that McGilchrist mentions above.
Bechly continued his research after this incursion in his opinion and found weaknesses in the theory of evolution himself. As an example, given a known mutation rate, it is possible to calculate how long it will take for a mutation to occur at a desired location for a given population size. For some “evolutionary steps,” however, not only one but several very specific mutations must occur simultaneously. The problem: In the case of mammals, one would have to wait longer for two simultaneous mutations than the entire universe exists! And to turn a land creature into a whale, for example, it would take hundreds of thousands of mutations. According to the textbook, however, whales are supposed to have evolved within a paltry five million years. For Bechly, it was obvious that the story could not be true. Even an atheist colleague had confided secret doubts to him behind held hands: “Man Günter, in five million years from a land creature to an aquatic creature - that’s impossible!”
He began to search for clues in other scientific fields as well. In cosmology, for example, after the so-called fine-tuning of the natural constants: Some of the laws of nature in our universe must be tuned to each other to the fortieth decimal place exactly as they are for intelligent life to be possible. With such incredible fine tuning, almost no one believes in coincidence anymore. There was also the question, how could consciousness arise from dead matter? In a purely material world, only soulless particles collide. In whatever way they collide, they remain just as unconscious as before. Bechly said, “That’s why consciousness will not be explained materialistically even in 200 years. To assume that would be a category mistake: It is not possible in principle. Science knows only the third-person perspective and therefore can never give information about a first-person perspective.”
He does not believe in a literal six-day creation and affirms the common descent of species, and, he says, " I am skeptical of the Neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution for purely scientific reasons." bechly.at/
Can you imagine how such a person could embrace a world view of philosophical theism based on axiarchic Neoplatonism and quantum idealism as metaphysics? He now strongly rejects atheism, naturalism, materialism, reductionism, and scientism.