On this episode of ID the Future, host Jay Richards and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, authors of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery, discuss what’s changed in the 15 years since the book first appeared. One big change, the number of exo-planets discovered has exploded from 200 or so to several thousand. Gonzalez walks through this and other exciting recent advances in astronomy, and the two discuss how these new discoveries bear on the predictions and arguments they advanced in their book. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast.

On this episode of ID the Future, biochemist Michael Behe speaks further about his new book Darwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA That Challenges Evolution. Behe explains how evolutionists in the past had freedom to use their imaginations to suppose ways evolution could achieve major innovations, but new research at the molecular level now reveals obstacles previously unimagined. The most productive adaptations in nature tend overwhelmingly to be in one direction, Behe says, degrading or destroying genes, and no series of mutations have ever demonstrated the kind of coordinated effects needed to produce new systems.

On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid continues his conversation with biochemist Michael Behe, author of the newly released Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution. Here Behe further presses the case that the review bypasses his book’s main point and that the reviewers appear to have misunderstood the plain language of one of his arguments in a previous book. Also, the reviewers claim that Behe hasn’t answered his critics’ objections on key points, a charge Behe shows is demonstrably false. Despite the negative review, Behe says he remains optimistic. Listen in to learn why. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast.

On this episode of ID the Future, author, speaker, and radio talk show host Greg Koukl, president of Stand to Reason, talks through a review of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design. It’s the autobiographical story, co-written by Jonathan Witt, of distinguished Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola. His whole perspective on science changed when he asked himself the question Koukl likes to ask: “Do you want the right answers, or do you demand the right kinds of answers — those answers that comport with naturalism, materialism, and physicalism?” Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast.

On this episode of ID the Future, host Mike Keas and philosopher J. P. Moreland continue their conversation on Moreland’s new book Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology. Scientism is the view that science trumps all other knowledge, but Moreland and Keas reveal in this podcast just how much science depends on both philosophy and history. Scientism is, thus, self-defeating. Nevertheless, and as Moreland goes on to argue, it remains “at the bottom of the turmoil that is facing our culture,” and many young people are being sucked into its errors.

On this episode of ID the Future we hear part one of Dennis Prager’s remarkable Prager Show conversation with Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Prager had been agnostic on evolution, but reading and talking with Meyer changed his mind, he says. And it wasn’t any religious concerns, Prager explains. It was the science. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast.

On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Michael Denton talks with host Sarah Chaffee about his new book Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Sunlight That Make Us Possible. Dr. Denton speaks of the properties of both light and water: From photosynthesis to metabolism to circulation, even from plate tectonics to the hydrologic cycle, both have exactly what it takes — in “amazingly fortuitous” ways — to make complex organic life possible; showing once again that the world is fine-tuned by a designing intelligence. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast.

On this episode of ID the Future, biologist Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong and Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution, debunks a new study purporting to breathe fresh life into an old and throughly discredited icon of evolution, the peppered moth. Wells also tells how this icon of a moth “evolving” from light to dark still lives on in current textbooks, in the same form many parents probably remember from their school days. Dr. Wells and others have shown that many of these pictures used dead moths, pinned in places that live ones never rest. The supposed science of peppered moth evolution has been shown to be false as well. But the pictures and the claims are persuasive, so some textbooks still use them. This prompts host Rob Crowther to ask Dr. Wells, what can parents do to help their kids know the truth? Listen in and to hear Dr. Wells’ advice.

On this episode of ID the Future, we explore two topics. Sarah Chaffee analyzes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s viewpoints on intellectual diversity. Kristof makes a compelling case for hiring faculty with varying political and religious viewpoints, but stops short when it comes to those skeptical of evolution. Then, David Klinghoffer discusses the “anti-science” label – and how it’s now used by those on both sides of disagreements on scientific issues.

German paleontologist Günter Bechly was co-author (with Stephen C. Meyer) of the chapter titled The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry, in the major new book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique.  In this second conversation with Sarah Chaffee on this topic, Bechly speaks of “life’s second ‘big bang,'” one of many discontinuities in the fossil record. “There’s no reasonable way,” he concludes, “to get from bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.”