ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
Topic

idealism

Max McLean Talks about His New C.S. Lewis Movie

On this ID the Future award-winning actor Max McLean joins host John West to discuss his new film, The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis. West and McLean discuss how McClean came to do stage plays focused on Lewis’s work, and how he and filmmaker Norman Stone came to create a feature-length dramatic film in the midst of the coronavirus shutdown. McLean tells about Lewis’s long and winding conversion from agnosticism to Christianity, and then he and West focus on those aspects of Lewis’s conversion centered on science, evolutionary theory, and rational theism. Key to Lewis’s move from agnosticism to idealism and eventually Judeo-Christian theism—his friend Owen Barfield and the question of the origin of reason. Lewis realized that Darwinian materialism gives us little reason to trust our reason (as Darwin himself conceded in one of his franker moments). Lewis determined that he should and inevitably does trust the human capacity to reason. And if that trust is based on something real, then we have strong grounds to distrust Darwinian materialism, Lewis decided. For more on Lewis’s views on science, evolution, intelligent design, and the rational case for theism, check out this Discovery Institute website on C.S. Lewis.

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Pat Flynn and Stephen Meyer Talk Thomism and Intelligent Design

On today’s ID the Future, Return of the God Hypothesis author Stephen C. Meyer sits down with podcaster and philosopher Pat Flynn to discuss Meyer’s new book. Flynn notes that some contemporary followers of the great medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas argue that the theory of intelligent design is incompatible with Thomism. In response Meyer, a philosopher of science and the director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, points out that some Thomists are fully on board with ID, and he offers reasons why he sees ID as fully compatible with Thomistic philosophy. Flynn and Meyer then move into a discussion of Meyer’s new book with a particular focus on the sections exploring the beginning of the universe and the fine tuning of the cosmos for life. The interview is used by permission of Pat Flynn.

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3d rendering of pink jellyfish floating in the dark blue ocean background with sunlight.

The Evolution (or not) of Consciousness

On this ID the Future neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviews Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher with a background in computer engineering, about consciousness, evolution, and intelligent design. Did consciousness evolve? What does the evidence suggest? And how do materialists deal with the seemingly immaterial reality that is consciousness? This is a guest episode borrowed with permission from Mind Matters, a podcast of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.