On this episode of ID the Future from the archive, biochemist and medical doctor Michael Denton explores a “miraculous convergence of properties” for life. The topic is Denton's book Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Sunlight That Make Us Possible, part of his Privileged Species book series that also includes The Miracle of Man, The Miracle of the Cell, The Wonder of Water, and Fire-Maker. Here, Denton lets his astonishment flow freely in an interview with host Sarah Chaffee, with topics ranging from the light of the sun to key chemicals here on earth. "The atmosphere lets through just the light we need," says Denton, "and the sun puts out just the light we need. It's a remarkable coincidence...The atmosphere does just what is needed for life on earth." Taken together, it’s an astonishing array of evidence showing how finely tuned Earth is for human life. And the common-sense conclusion, Denton says, is that a designing intelligence is the most adequate explanation for the properties on our planet that make life like us possible. This is Part 1 of a two-part discussion. Read More ›
The groundbreaking recent book Your Designed Body is the focus of today’s ID the Future. Here in Part 2 of a two-part conversation with host Wesley J. Smith, the two authors, systems engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman, delve deeper into the exquisite, multi-layered fine tuning of the human body. They point to essential systems within systems within systems—irreducible complexity cubed, if you will. They also respond to the charge that aspects of the human body are poorly designed and, therefore, are supposedly better explained by the blind process of Darwinian evolution. Laufmann identifies five common errors that Darwinists make when pushing this bad-design argument. All of the errors involve an ignorance of key engineering principles, he says, one of them being a failure to consider the principle of constrained optimization. This episode is reposted at ID the Future by permission of Wesley J. Smith and the Humanize podcast. Read More ›
Is your body engineered? Or did it evolve through impersonal, random processes over millions of years through natural selection? On this ID The Future, host Wesley J. Smith interviews engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman about their recent book Your Designed Body. In their book, Laufmann and Glicksman evaluate the causal factors of Darwinism - heritability, random mutation, natural selection, and time - and find that they are both inadequate and incapable of producing the interconnected systems of the human body. "The systems that are required to make the human body work," says Laufmann, "are exactly the kinds of things that engineers design and build." Instead, they explain the body through the lens of engineering, showing that design is the most adequate mechanism currently available to explain how the origin of our amazing human bodies. Says Glicksman: "The more we understand how life actually works, the more the neo-Darwinian narrative becomes impossible." This is Part 1 of a two-part interview, originally airing on the Humanize podcast, a production of Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism. Read More ›
On this classic episode of ID The Future from the vault, host Casey Luskin interviews Phillip Johnson, former UC Berkeley law professor and one of the founders of the modern intelligent design movement. Back in 2007, Johnson was one of the only intelligent design proponents interviewed for and included in PBS's long-running science series NOVA in an episode about the Dover case called "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial." Johnson weighs in with his thoughts about the ruling issued by Judge Jones, about the scientific status of intelligent design, his views on PBS's teaching guide about intelligent design, and the popular claim at the time that intelligent design would inject religion into the classroom.
Johnson was the author of the 1993 bestseller Darwin on Trial, an inspiration to many scientists and scholars in the intelligent design research community. He was an advisor to Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture for many years. He died in 2019. Read More ›
Today’s ID the Future spotlights the new book The Toxic War on Masculinity, by author and scholar Nancy Pearcey, professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. In her conversation with host Andrew McDiarmid, Pearcey argues against the current fashion of seeing masculinity as inherently toxic. She traces the tendency back to Darwinism and explains how the industrial revolution, working hand in glove with secularism, fueled toxic masculinity at the expense of virtuous masculinity. Tune in for the stimulating discussion and to hear what Pearcey offers as an antidote to the war on virtuous masculinity. Read More ›
On this ID The Future, host Casey Luskin talks with Eric Anderson on location at this year's Conference on Engineering and Living Systems (CELS). The two discuss an intriguing new engineering-based model of bounded adaptation that could dramatically change how we view small-scale evolutionary changes within populations of organisms. In presenting his argument for natural selection, Charles Darwin pointed to small changes like finch beak size and peppered moth color as visible evidence of an unguided evolutionary process at work. Many have adopted this perspective, quick to grant the Darwinian mechanism credit for micro, if not macro, evolution. But Anderson and other attendees of the CELS conference are starting to promote a different view. "We need to stop saying organisms are partly designed," says Anderson. "We need to view them as deeply designed and purposeful, active and engaged in their environments, and capable of adapting within their operating parameters." Tune in to get a fascinating glimpse of this novel approach to biology. Read More ›
On today’s ID the Future from the archive, Tom Gilson--author, senior editor with The Stream, and occasional contributor to Evolution News & Science Today--tackles the question of how best to discuss intelligent design (ID) with friends and associates skeptical of the theory. There is so much misinformation about the theory of ID that many well-intended people reject not the actual theory but a silly caricature, a straw man. They don’t realize that ID is not an argument from ignorance but an inference to the best explanation based on positive evidence for design and negative evidence against competing materialistic explanations. It involves abductive reasoning, a standard mode of reasoning in the historical sciences. When in conversation with someone who understands none of this, Gilson suggests using the Socratic method and, in particular, three questions designed to turn down the heat, promote dialogue, and draw the other person into a discovery of the actual theory of intelligent design. Try it with friends, colleagues, and family members! Read More ›
The new book Science After Babel is again in the spotlight here at ID the Future, with its author, philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, and host Andrew McDiarmid teasing various elements of the work. The pair discuss the puzzling relationship between purely immaterial mathematical concepts (the only kind) and the material world; World War II codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, depicted in the 2014 film The Imitation Game; and the sense that the field of physics, once seemingly on the cusp of a theory of everything, finds itself at an impasse. Then, too, Berlinski writes, there is the mystery of life itself. If scientists thought that its origin and nature would soon yield to scientific reductionism, they have been disappointed. Life’s “fantastic and controlled complexity, its brilliant inventiveness and diversity, its sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world” remains before us, suggesting, as Berlinski puts it, “a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else.” Get your copy of the book at www.scienceafterbabel.com. Read More ›
On this ID The Future, host Rob Crowther chats with Kristin Marais about her new online chemistry course launching this fall through Discovery Institute Academy. Her chemistry class is a two-semester, virtual, synchronous, and lab-based course which integrates the fundamentals of chemistry with applicable intelligent design concepts and topics. Students will progress through the course with Marais and fellow students together, with ample opportunity for real-time teacher-student engagement and student-to-student engagement. Class meets three times a week via Zoom to discuss content, ask questions, and work on problems together. Students can also utilize optional drop-in sessions after class, as well as the opportunity to set up one-to-one live video sessions with the teacher. "What's a wet lab?" Crowther asks during their discussion. Marais explains that a wet lab involves hands-on physical experiments. Students will conduct both physical and simulated virtual experiments during the state-of-the-art course, from equilibrium labs designed to see reversible reactions to reaction rate labs they'll get to design themselves. This chemistry course is unique among other available chemistry courses because it's connected to the Discovery Institute. As such, Marais will be able to connect students with questions to a global network of scientists and scholars in the intelligent design research community, as well as a mountain of books, articles, videos, and animations to help them learn more about chemistry and science in general.
Learn more and register for the course today at www.discoveryinstitute.academy. Get a discount on registration through June 30th, 2023. Read More ›
On today’s ID the Future from the vault, we’re pleased to feature a cross-post from our sister podcast Mind Matters. Here, host Robert J. Marks begins a conversation with trailblazing mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin. The two discuss Chaitin’s beginnings in computer science, his growing up in the 1960s a stone’s throw from Central Park, his thoughts on historic scientists in his field such as Leonard Euler and Kurt Gödel, and the story of Chaitin’s thwarted meeting with the famed German-Austrian logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Also touched on: Gödel’s ontological proof for the existence of God and how children can be said to have solved Chaitin’s incompleteness problem! Read More ›
