ID the Future

ID the Future _{Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast}

Pt. 3: Stephen Meyer and Skeptic Michael Shermer

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Stephen C. Meyer
September 17, 2021}

On this ID the Future, Return of the God Hypothesis author Stephen Meyer and skeptic Michael Shermer address the question of how a divine immaterial being could act in the material world to design and fashion things such as the first life. Meyer argues that while we don’t know precisely how an immaterial mind would do this or did do this, we have good evidence that minds can and do affect matter, as for instance in the evidence that our minds can affect our brains and, by extension, our bodies. Meyer and Shermer also discuss the idea of front-loaded intelligent design—that is, where God loaded into the moment of the Big Bang everything necessary for the emergence of stars, planets, Earth, Read More ›

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Pt. 2: Stephen Meyer and Skeptic Michael Shermer

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Stephen C. Meyer
September 15, 2021}

Today’s ID the Future continues a lively and cordial conversation between atheist Michael Shermer and Stephen Meyer, author of Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. In this segment of the four-part series, Shermer and Meyer discuss a fourth argument for theism, the moral law within. Then they discuss the similarities and differences between inferring design for something like the Rosetta Stone versus inferring intelligent design from the information in DNA or the fine tuning of the universe. The interview is reposted here by permission of Michael Shermer.

Stephen Meyer and Skeptic Michael Shermer, Pt. 1

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Stephen C. Meyer
September 13, 2021}

Today’s ID the Future spotlights the first part of a lively and cordial conversation between host and atheist Michael Shermer and Stephen Meyer, author of Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. In this first of the four-part series, the two touch on everything from Meyer’s three key lines of evidence for theism to a quick flyover of less well-known materialistic origins theories, including the oscillating universe model, panspermia as an explanation for the origin of the first life on earth, and Stephen Hawking’s idea of imaginary time. Meyer lumps many of these ideas under what he terms exotic naturalism and suggests that the atheists who defend these explanations are multiplying exotic Read More ›

Why This Virus is No Threat to Intelligent Design

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Cornelius G. Hunter
September 10, 2021}

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, host and biologist Ray Bohlin interviews biophysicist Cornelius Hunter, author of Darwin’s God, about an article in the journal Science concerning a virus invasion of E. coli bacteria. The article subtitle announces “Natural Selection Caught in the Act,” and suggests that an impressive instance of unguided evolution has been directly witnessed. Not so fast, Hunter says. The results were intelligently designed (by the lab scientists), he notes, and the changes are less impressive than they may appear at first glance. Hunter also explains protein-protein binding and counters evolutionist Dennis Venema to argue that the way the immune system drives change is not analogous to the evolutionary process of random mutations and natural selection. Read More ›

Physicist Brian Miller Talks Nanotech, Origin of Life, and Area 51

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Brian Miller
September 8, 2021}

On today’s ID the Future physicist Brian Miller and host Eric Anderson continue their exploration of a recent conversation between origin-of-life investigators Jeremy England and Paul Davies on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? radio show. Miller begins with a quick flyover of the many nanotechnologies essential to even to the simplest viable cell. A minimally complex cell is vastly more sophisticated than our best human nanotechnology. What about England’s insistence that real progress has been made in origin-of-life studies since the 1950s? True, Anderson says, but the progress has been principally in better understanding how the simplest cells function, and in figuring out what doesn’t work to blindly evolve life from non-life. That is, the direction of discovery has been to throw Read More ›

Infinity War, Human Exceptionalism, and the Ultimate Resource

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Rachel Adams
September 3, 2021}

This classic ID the Future resurfaces just in time to celebrate human creative capacity, and a blockbuster movie, for Labor Day weekend. Host Robert Crowther talks with Rachel Adams about Thanos, the arch-villain from Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, and a couple of real-life thinkers, Eric Pianka and Paul Ehrlich, who share the villain’s view that the world would be a better place with far fewer humans. Thanos, Pianka, and Ehrlich appear to share a materialistic view of the human person, one that ignores the inherent dignity and worth of every person as well as humanity’s capacity to generate solutions and new resources through creative labor, growing the resource pie. Thanks to this, life is not a zero-sum game. The human Read More ›

Dissecting an Unbelievable Conversation about Abiogenesis

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Brian Miller
September 1, 2021}

On today’s ID the Future physicist Brian Miller and host Eric Anderson explore a recent conversation between physicists Jeremy England and Paul Davies on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? radio show. Davies admitted he doesn’t want the origin of life to require divine design, while England argued that his work on non-equilibrium systems offers a promising avenue for explaining the origin of the first life in naturalistic terms. Miller and Anderson demur on both counts. They hold out hope that Davies, having recognized his philosophical bias, will eventually decide to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if doing so has theistic implications. And as for Jeremy England’s approach, Miller says it’s fascinating work but fails to solve the origin-of-life challenge in Read More ›

Author Neil Thomas Takes Leave of Darwin, Pt. 2

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Neil Thomas
August 30, 2021}

On this ID the Future, Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas and host Jonathan Witt continue their conversation about Thomas’s journey from Darwinian materialism to theistic humanism and a thorough skepticism of Darwinian theory. Here Thomas links the heroic posturing of modern atheists Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell, on the one hand, and on the other, the heroic fatalism of poetry stretching back to the early Middle Ages and, further still, to the ancient Greeks. Thomas also draws a link between the animistic thinking of much ancient pagan thought and the magical powers attributed to the Darwinian mechanism. Thomas explains why he now views the latter as essentially “crypto-animism.” In their wide-ranging conversation, Thomas and Witt also touch on Read More ›

John West and Michael Medved Talk Human Zoos and Racism

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John G. West
August 27, 2021}

This ID the Future from the vault features an interview with filmmaker John West on the Michael Medved Show, about West’s powerful documentary Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism, now streaming on YouTube and with more than three million views. Medved and West explore the tragic story of Ota Benga, and the prominent role that the Bronx Zoo, the pro-Darwinian scientific establishment, and the New York Times played in that tragedy. As West explains, there are lessons here about the danger of letting the voices of “science” confuse our grasp of moral truth.

Jonathan Wells Dives into “the Genome’s Uncharted Territories”

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Jonathan Wells
August 25, 2021}

On this ID the Future, Icons of Evolution author Jonathan Wells sat down with host and fellow biologist Ray Bohlin at the August 2021 Insiders’ Briefing near Seattle to discuss some fresh discoveries into the workings of the human genome detailed in a recent article in the journal Axios, “Diving into the Genome’s Uncharted Territories.” As the article details, researchers continue to discover important functions in the noncoding regions of the human genome, once regarded by evolutionists as junk DNA. Wells and Bohlin explore the exciting new findings and some of their implications for modern evolutionary theory and intelligent design.

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