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

mathematics

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The study of the origin, evolution, and structure of the universe as a whole
Image Credit: SUPHANSA - Adobe Stock

Uncovering the Hidden Mathematical Structure of the Universe

Do humans project mathematical order onto nature? Or was it there all along? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his conversation with Dr. Melissa Cain Travis about her recent book Thinking God’s Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility. In Part 3, we look at how Kepler's ideas and work can inform the scientific enterprise today. Many scientists recognize the mystery of cosmic comprehensibility, including such respected voices as Albert Einstein, Sir Roger Penrose, and Paul Davies. Materialists remain agnostic or put it down to chance. But there's a more satisfying explanation, says Travis. "Centuries ago, Kepler already held the trump card. Science itself...can't be explained within the framework of scientific materialism." Genuine human rationality - the very thinking that helped fuel the enormous success of the natural sciences - would not exist if a naturalistic account of the human mind were correct. To get an intellectually satisfying answer for the cosmic comprehensibility we enjoy as humans, we have to think outside the materialist box. Travis explains how we can do that using Kepler's tripartite harmony of archetype, copy, and image. It turns out Keplerian natural theology is more robust than ever before and can help us make sense of the mysteries of our age, including the multiverse, the limits of AI, transhumanism, and more. This is Part 3 of a 3-part discussion. Read More ›
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Composite image of solar system against white background 3d
Image Credit: vectorfusionart - Adobe Stock

Kepler’s Pursuit of a Mathematical Cosmology

Why is the cosmos intellectually accessible to us? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid continues his conversation with Dr. Melissa Cain Travis about her recent book Thinking God’s Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility. In Part 2, Travis illuminates Kepler's university years to show us how his study of mathematics and astronomy complemented his interest in theology. We learn about obstacles he overcame during his education and how an unexpected appointment to assist imperial mathematician Tycho Brahe jump-started his career as an astronomer and gave him the tools he needed to develop and advance his revolutionary ideas. Travis unpacks Kepler's major works, from Mysterium Cosmographicum to his magnum opus Harmonices Mundi. She also tracks for us the progression of Kepler's ideas to show us how he became a key figure in the transition from ancient astronomy to a true celestial physics. This is Part 2 of a 3-part discussion. Read More ›
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Science After Babel, Berlinski book cover

David Berlinski on the Immaterial, Alan Turing, and the Mystery of Life Itself

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 ›
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Vienna, Austria. 2019/10/23.
Image Credit: Adam Ján Figeľ - Adobe Stock

David Berlinski on His New Book, Science After Babel

On today’s ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid rings up Science After Babel author David Berlinski in Paris to discuss the philosopher’s latest book. Berlinski is at his cultivated best as the two discuss everything from the biblical Tower of Babel as a metaphor for modern materialistic science, to his friendship with the brilliant and colorful French intellectual Marcel Schützenberger, a world-class mathematician who was self-taught and, as we learn here, came within a hair’s breadth of being swept up in the Chinese Revolution. Berlinski also reflects on the seminal 1966 WISTAR symposium, which laid out some mathematical challenges to Darwinism, challenges that Berlinski says remain unanswered to this day. At the same time, Berlinski gives the devil — here Read More ›

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Video still from Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson

Gelernter, Meyer, Berlinski Deny Darwinism, Pt. 3

On this episode of  ID the Future we hear the final portion of a three-part series featuring Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski along with distinguished Yale computer science professor David Gelernter, who recently gave up Darwinism thanks in part to their books. Led by Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson, they discuss the hard problem of consciousness, how Darwinism functions as a religious dogma that punishers dissenters, and whether biology can ever “get over Darwin and move on.” This interview is presented here courtesy of Peter Robinson and the Hoover Institution.

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Stephen Meyer on His CSC Summer Seminar Talks

On this episode of ID the Future, Stephen Meyer, Director of the Center for Science and Culture, discusses the two lectures he gave to a private audience at Discovery Institute’s 2019 Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design. One talk focused on the fossil record, and the other on the Big Bang.

Kepler, Galileo, the Book of Nature, and the First Mathematician

On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid talks with science historian Michael Keas on pioneering mathematical astronomer Johannes Kepler, based on Keas’ new work from ISI Books, Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion. Kepler studied theology before turning to math and science, and it was his belief in God that guided his extraordinary discoveries. “Without an architect who created the world,” he said, “there is no … power in mathematics to make anything material.” Scientists, in his view of God, were thinking the thoughts or ideas that God himself had thought any time they discovered some law or deep pattern in nature. Kepler is just one of a long list of great early scientists, including Galileo, who saw a “book” of God’s revelation in nature written in the language of mathematics. God designed the world for discovery, Kepler believed, and that conviction inspired his groundbreaking investigations.

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Paul Nelson on the 50th Anniversary of the Wistar Conference

In 1966, MIT engineers and eminent biologists met at the Wistar Institute to discuss problems with evolutionary theory. Now, at the 50th anniversary of the conference, CSC senior fellow and philosopher of biology, Dr. Paul Nelson, describes what happened at the symposium called “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.”

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Whales: New “Icon of Evolution” or a Challenge to Darwinian Theory?

On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin discusses a recent fossil discovery that puts a kink in the evolutionary explanation of whales. Evolutionists claim that whales evolved from fully terrestrial mammals to fully aquatic ones in 5-10 million years. The new fossil find of a whale jaw bone shrinks that number considerably, making a shaky theory even shakier. Luskin explains that it’s highly unlikely that the number of changes needed for such a transformation could occur in such a small time period. “Mathematically speaking, it is not possible that an unguided Darwinian process could take a land mammal to a whale in such a short period of time.”

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A Mathematician Dissents From Darwin

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Granville Sewell about how he came to be a Darwin skeptic and why a mathematician’s view of neo-Darwinian evolution matters. Listen in as Dr. Sewell shares his views and gives advice to students who doubt Darwinism.

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