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

natural evil

Woman kisses her boy on forehead outdoors as they both stay in the war zone after Russia attacked Ukraine.

Eric Hedin on Suffering in a Designed World

Is natural evil an argument against intelligent design? And is human evil more consistent with naturalism or theism? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid speaks with Dr. Eric Hedin about his recent article "Thoughts of Evil in a Designed World." First, Dr. Hedin discusses the problem of natural evils like earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, and other natural disasters. He reports that in the last century, the human death toll from such tragedies has dropped as we have learned to mitigate the effects of these natural forces in our lives. Hedin also discusses the impact of sickness on our bodies. "Any complex system can break down," Hedin reminds us, "because we do live in a world where the second law of thermodynamics applies not just to stars and mountainsides and physical systems but also to our own bodies." But suffering, tragic as it can be for all of us to endure, is not inconsistent with design. Then there's the other major cause of suffering in life: human evil. If humans are products of an evolutionary process, we'd expect human evil to more or less match what we see in the animal world. But as recent attacks on the people of Israel starkly demonstrate, that is not the case. We are capable of much worse, as well as much better. Dr. Hedin explains that humans have the gift of rational override, something determinists tend to forget. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Read More ›
house-on-sand-foundation

Darwin’s Rhetorical Foundation of Sand: Theological Utilitarianism

On this ID the Future, biophysicist Cornelius Hunter explores Charles Darwin’s theological arguments for his theory of evolution. By theological, Hunter doesn’t mean that Darwin was arguing for theistic evolution. He means that Darwin received what is known as theological utilitarianism from the intellectual culture of his youth, which had strong deistic tendencies and expected everything in creation to be perfectly adapted, and he made a case against it, presenting mindless evolution as a better explanation for his observations of the biological world than theological utilitarianism. But one problem with this approach, according to Hunter, is that it assumed that theological utilitarianism is THE alternative to blind evolution. In fact, there are other alternatives, including an orthodox Judeo-Christian understanding of God’s relationship to his creation. In Hunter’s conversation with host Casey Luskin, he unpacks the differences in this other understanding of God and shows how Darwin’s tunnel-vision fixation on theological utilitarianism led him into multiple problems. Hunter further shows that this basic theological mistake of Darwin’s also crops up in later defenders of Darwinism. Hunter and Luskin end the discussion by making what may strike some as a surprising claim: Evolutionary theory, argued in the way that Darwin and many of his followers argue the case, is fundamentally theology-based, whereas the theory of intelligent design, which points to a design of life and the cosmos, is strictly science-based. The occasion for the interview is Hunter’s chapter on this subject in the recent anthology co-edited by Luskin, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Check it out.