Is the natural world full of flawed, makeshift designs, as some critics of intelligent design have argued? Or are living things far more ingeniously engineered than we've been led to believe? On this episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid is pleased to bring you a conversation with award-winning British engineer and designer Dr. Stuart Burgess, a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and author of the book Ultimate Engineering.
Dr. Burgess has spent decades studying engineering design, both in human technology and in humans themselves. And his work has led him to challenge the popular claim that biology is full of poor design. In this conversation, originally recorded for the Truthful Hope podcast, host Jacob Vasquez talks with Burgess about the so called bad design argument and what engineering principles can tell us about the evidence for intelligent design in nature. Read More ›
Purpose has been a fundamental part of our understanding of nature for millennia. But the rise of scientific materialism and Darwinism saw purpose get left out of the scientific pursuit. In recent years, materialists have found it necessary to bring purpose back into the equation, and they’re looking for a way to explain it without recourse to intelligent design. On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his conversation with Dr. Stephen Iacoboni, an award-winning cancer researcher and practitioner of medical oncology for forty years.
20th-century materialism treated living organisms as reducible machines governed strictly by Newtonian physics and simple genetic mechanics. But modern research shows organisms are not passive objects: "Organisms don't act like inert objects responding to external forces impinged on them," says Dr. Iacoboni. They are "active agents that figure out what's going on in their conditions of existence and they figure out what to do about it in real time."
This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Read More ›
Intelligent design is fundamentally a theory of design detection. But in addition to helping us evaluate models that best explain past events, ID can also guide experiments that study the present-day operations of nature. On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid records a conversation from our new Studio West in the Seattle offices of Discovery Institute.
McDiarmid is joined by two members of our Center for Science & Culture science team, Dr. Emily Reeves and Dr. Brian Miller, to discuss a new paper co-authored by our science team that unpacks how intelligent design can guide scientific research in multiple fields of science. Read More ›
You may already know that an intelligent design framework can help us empirically detect whether an outcome in nature exhibits properties that indicate design. But did you also know an ID perspective can be applied to experimental science to guide research into how the natural world operates? On this episode of ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid is joined by Dr. Casey Luskin and Dr. Jonathan McLatchie, two members of the Center for Science & Culture's team of resident scientists, to discuss a new paper co-authored by the science team unpacking how intelligent design can guide scientific research in multiple fields of science. Read More ›
How rare is Planet Earth in the vastness of the cosmos? Will we find other planets in space that could possibly harbor life? A new space telescope has just been launched that may help us with answers to those questions. On today's episode of ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes a two-part conversation with physicist Dr. Bijan Nemati about his work on the Nancy Roman Space Telescope. In this segment, we dive deeper into what constitutes a habitable planet, how Roman will team up with the James Webb space telescope to discover hidden worlds, and how intelligent design can inform our expectations and interpretations of data sent back from Roman. Read More ›
What is the state of the debate over evolution and intelligent design in the UK? And how will Discovery Institute's new Cambridge initiative impact the debate going forward? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid welcomes fellow Scotsman Dr. Alistair McKitterick, a Consulting Fellow at the Center for Science & Culture’s Whewell Center in Cambridge and a Program Director at London School of Theology. The pair will discuss how Alistair got interested in intelligent design, his work at the Whewell Center, and the state of the debate over evolution and intelligent design in the United Kingdom. Read More ›
What is the story of everything? Is there a scientific and philosophical basis for meaning? Today on ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid continues exploring those questions with physicist and author Dr. Eric Hedin.
In Part 2, the conversation turns to the scientific and philosophical basis for meaning in the universe. Dr. Hedin argues that materialism "fails to describe the world we experience." He explores the problem with reducing life and the universe to their lowest terms. Sure, we boil down to matter in motion at the microscopic level, but we also live a life full of meaning at the macroscopic level. To acknowledge one and not the other, or to say that the one causes an illusion of the other, doesn't match up with what science is telling us, says Hedin. Read More ›
Why are we here? Does life, or the universe, mean anything? And if it does, what? Today on ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid explores those questions and more with physicist and author Dr. Eric Hedin. Using the recent documentary film The Story of Everything as a springboard for discussion, Hedin shows that cumulative scientific evidence is pointing to a purposeful universe, not a cosmic accident. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Look for Part 2 next! Read More ›
By now, you’re likely familiar with the multiverse hypothesis, which is actually just one of dozens of cosmological models proposed to explain away the significance of a beginning to the universe and the evidence for fine-tuning. But you may not know there’s a rigorous method to evaluate these models, which can prove helpful in understanding the flaws of each. On today's ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid continues his conversation about evaluating cosmological models with philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon and physicist Brian Miller. This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Read More ›
Is the intelligent design movement a short-lived phenomenon that has come and gone? Or is its steady and consistent growth evidence of a flourishing scientific program? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin about his critique of a recent book called Designer Science that portrays the ID movement as a short-lived political, cultural, and religious phenomenon that has produced little new research in the last two decades. In Part 2, Luskin turns to another major problem: Designer Science almost entirely ignores the last twenty years of ID scientific research and novel arguments. As the book gets retracted by the publisher, Luskin corrects the record in this conversation. This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Read More ›
