Intelligent Design The Future

On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid reads the afterword to Michael Aeschliman’s newly revised and expanded The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism. As Aeschliman explains, Lewis neither deified nor defied science, but he did insist that science idolatry was the grave and present danger of our age. In this excerpt, Aeschliman, professor of Anglophone Culture at the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano), focuses on Lewis’s brilliant critique of scientism in The Abolition of Man and elsewhere in his work, and on some key thinkers, past and present, who joined Lewis in the fight. It’s a battle, Aeschliman explains, against “the vanity of reason unhinged from ethics,” amidst “a culture that oscillates between the toxic and the trivial.” How did Lewis propose to counteract the polluting effects of scientism? Listen in to find out. And for a deeper dive, pick up a copy of The Restoration of Man.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Sarah Chaffee examines what it looks like to teach the controversy over Darwinian evolution, explaining why students should learn more, not less, on the topic.  Listen in as she looks at a lesson plan overview for a unit on neo-Darwinism, and highlights 3 points of scientific controversy that teachers can discuss.

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.

This episode of ID the Future features Part 2 of Peter Robinson’s conversation with Yale computer scientist David Gelernter and Discovery Institute senior fellows Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski. Here in Part 2, the four men discuss the problem of early and late mutations in embryological development, and the apparently fatal pick-your-poison challenge this poses for modern Darwinism. Then they move on to discuss Gelernter and Berlinski’s reservations with the theory of intelligent design, including--for Gelernter, at least--the problem of apparent bad design in nature. The episode concludes with Meyer addressing this challenge.

On this episode of ID the Future we hear part one of an uncommon trio of experts speaking on the mathematical challenges to Darwinian evolution. Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski, both senior fellows of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, join David Gelernter, a distinguished Yale mathematician, who recently gave up Darwinism based on their work. The conversation is led by Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson.

On this episode of ID the Future, the second in a series, host Andrew McDiarmid reviews three more displays of design in nature. Researchers in Scotland have shown that beavers, once considered by some as nuisances good only for their pelts, are actually great biodiversity engineers. The water lily is another marvel of hydraulic engineering that’s inspiring new designs for desalination plants. And the familiar walnut shell is made of cells interlocked more tightly than any 3-D puzzle ever invented, making it tough enough to need a hammer to open. It’s inspiring new packaging design ideas. See more on these design wonders at Evolution News.

On this classic episode of ID the Future, author Douglas Axe continues his conversation with Eric Metaxas about Axe’s book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed and his account of how he lost his position at a Cambridge research lab because of the implications of his research findings. Axe also talks about the currently polarized atmosphere in science, the reliability of the design intuition, and the larger implications of living in a designed universe. For more from The Eric Metaxas Show, visit www.metaxastalk.com

On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid looks at three new discoveries in nature that shout design. The cone snail has a harpoon as fast as a speeding bullet. Researchers are looking at it for design ideas for robots and medical devices. The humble dandelion’s seeds are so optimized for lift and flight time that scientists wonder about borrowing its design for parachutes. And there’s a species, the mantis shrimp, whose larvae have “flashlights” in their eyes similar to advanced optics designed by human researchers. See more on these design wonders at Evolution News.

On this episode of ID the Future, Cal State history professor Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity and the Case for Life, talks racism past and present, in both Christian and “scientific” secular history. Racism can be found in both arenas, Weikart notes, but Charles Darwin made racial variation—and the claim that certain races were inferior—a key plank in his case for evolution by random variation and natural selection. Weikart goes on to suggest that materialistic Darwinism provides precious little to ground the idea of universal human dignity and rights, ideas with a strong grounding in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, listen in as Eric Metaxas interviews Douglas Axe on The Eric Metaxas show. Axe, author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed, shares how he lost his research position in Cambridge over the evolution controversy.  For more from The Eric Metaxas Show, visit www.metaxastalk.com.

On this episode of ID the Future, From Darwin to Hitler author and historian Richard Weikart returns to his conversation with Mike Keas about a recent book on Darwinism, Christianity, and war by Michael Ruse. Ruse aims at a surprising conclusion in this book. Weikart says he gets there first of all by overlooking several of the most important early voices on Darwinism and war. And the book’s conclusion? That Christianity should “compromise” with a form of religious Darwinism Ruse favors, by giving up on core Christian doctrines. Weikart pushes back. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast: idthefuture.org/donate.

On this episode of ID the Future, From Darwin to Hitler author and historian Richard Weikart speaks with Mike Keas about a recent book on Darwinism, Christianity, and war by Michael Ruse. Weikart says that in the course of the book Ruse appears to shift from warning others about treating Darwinism as a secular religion to himself embracing it as such. Weikart also says the book presents Darwinist views on war as more palatable than Christian views, but only manages to do so by ignoring key primary and secondary historical material indispensable to a fair and accurate assessment of the issue.

On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Richard Sternberg, research fellow at the Biologic Institute, speaks on his mathematical/logical work showing the difficulty of identifying genes purely with material phenomena, and that DNA doesn’t have all that’s needed to direct the development of organisms. The math, he says, is even showing gaps in the computability of what happens in the cell, which could help shed light on how machine-like organisms are or are not, how evolvable they are, and whether artificial life is possible.

On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid reads an excerpt from Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design by Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt. It makes the case that modern neo-Darwinism is today’s “phlogiston,” a theory that explains everything but nothing, faces mounting contrary evidence, and survives only with ever more ancillary hypotheses. In the excerpt Leisola and Witt also discuss the well-documented pattern of scientists defending an existing scientific paradigm even after fresh discoveries have turned against it, with the obsolete dominant paradigm dying only very slowly. An especially dramatic and tragic example gave the name to this all-to-human tendency--the Semmelweis reflex. Listen in to learn more.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Zombie Science author Jonathan Wells talks about his multifaceted, impressive and, at times, quirky educational history. Dr. Wells started as an undergrad geology major at Princeton and later moved to Berkeley to finish his undergraduate work. He was arrested as a conscientious objector and saw the ugly side of the anti-war movement. Disgusted, he moved to the remote mountains and there discovered evidence of intelligent design. After snagging a Ph.D. in theology from Yale, he returned Berkeley for his second Ph.D., this one in embryology. It was in studying embryos that Dr. Wells came across his first Icon of Evolution, Haeckel’s embryos. More icons soon followed. These and the dogmatism of the scientific materialists are explored in his newest book, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution.