Intelligent Design the Future

Today on ID the Future we hear the first of a series of podcasts in honor of the late Phillip E. Johnson, the pioneering thinker, networker, and organizer, who played such a crucial role in the development and growth of the Intelligent Design movement. These messages come mostly from a November 2019 symposium held in his honor in Berkeley, California. Today we hear Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, as he opens the symposium and introduces speakers to come, and then the first of these speakers, Phillip Johnson himself, in thoughts previously recorded by Illustra Media on intelligent design, philosophical materialism, and strategies for accomplishing change.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, hear an installment in our ID Inquiry series, in which ID scientists and scholars answer your questions about intelligent design and evolution. Tune in to this episode as Dr. Robert Marks, discusses information and how it relates to intelligent design. Marks is the director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence and co-author of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

On this episode of ID the Future, science historian Michael Flannery pays tribute to Gertrude Himmelfarb, the pioneering Darwin critic who passed away in late December 2019. Even as the world was praising Darwin at the 1959 centennial of The Origin of Species, she was writing of his rhetorical sleight of hand, by which “possibilities were promoted into probabilities, and probabilities into certainties, so ignorance was raised to a position only once removed from certain knowledge.” Gutsy, bold, and precise in her scholarship, she saw Darwin’s theory as offering convenient “scientific” support for the class-divided, untrammeled survival-of-the-fittest industrial competition of the day. And she showed that Darwin’s scholarship — especially in his philosophical sources — was thin and thoroughly forgettable, even 60 years ago. Flannery says that when almost no other prominent scholar was saying such things about Darwin, she spoke up to tell the world the emperor had no clothes.

On this episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid and physician and Discovery Institute fellow Dr. Geoffrey Simmons concludes their three-part conversation about Simmons’ new book Are We Here to Recreate Ourselves? The Convergence of Designs. Our own arrival is impossible to explain through evolution, he says, in view of the incredible complexity of our neurological system, and all that had to develop simultaneously with it. The origin of thinking and consciousness itself is hard to explain in evolutionary terms, he argues. Our drive to recreate ourselves leads to a question, though, one Simmons discusses late in the conversation: will we be able ourselves to create truly thinking humanoid robots?

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, host Ray Bohlin talks with Michael Egnor, a pediatric neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery at State University of New York Stony Brook about ways modern science validates the idea that the mind is not reducible to the brain. They delve into oddities of neuroscience that indicate that there is more going on in the brain than mere chemistry, and, in particular, walk through the seminal work of Adrian Owen on MRIs and what it reveals.

On this episode of ID the Future, author and physician Geoffrey Simmons joins host Andrew McDiarmid in a wide-ranging discussion of his new book, Are We Here to Re-Create Ourselves: The Convergence of Designs. From the foresight needed in the design of eyes, to our stereoscopic and redundant hearing systems, to the mysteries of design in the nervous and circulatory systems, signs of engineered design are everywhere in the human body. And humans are mimicking some of those designs now through humanoid robots, which we’re making ever more like ourselves — in appearance, that is. Will robots ever experience empathy or other feelings, or develop a genuine sense of humor? Will robots have souls? Simmons offers his opinion on the matter, and sounds a cautionary note: as robots advance and become more powerful, their goodness or badness will depend on its human programmer.

On this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards discusses his new book Eat, Fast, Feast. Fasting is a traditional religious practice “that’s fallen on hard times,” he says. We “graze” instead. But there’s scientific evidence for the value of intermittent fasting: it reduces total calories while upping adrenaline and human growth hormone, and without reducing metabolic rates. All this in addition to the spiritual benefits that have been recognized across cultures for many centuries. There are simplistic “just-so” evolutionary stories in other diet and health books attempting to explain how our bodies became well adapted for intermittent fasting, but he argues that a much better explanation is that we were intelligently designed this way. In his conversation with host Rob Crowther, he summarizes his case.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Tod Butterfield interviews Steve Laufmann on Dr. Howard Glicksman’s 81-part EN series, The Designed Body. Listen in as Laufmann reflects on coherence in the body, specifically displayed in fetal development, as well as the limits of natural selection.

On this episode of ID the Future, physician Geoffrey Simmons speaks with host Andrew McDiarmid about his new book Are We Here to Recreate Ourselves? The Convergence of Design. There’s a pattern in our re-creating ourselves, Simmons says, even in the artifacts we create, but especially in human reproduction. He sees clues of design in in the processes of reproduction, in development, and in the many complex events in the lungs and vascular system that make childbirth possible. There’s even evidence of intentionality behind aging and death, says Simmons. In sum, Simmons argues, careful observations across many decades have shown that we never see such complex and foresight-rich processes created except by the working of mind or intelligence; it just doesn’t happen any other way.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Tod Butterfield interviews Steve Laufmann on Dr. Howard Glicksman’s 81-part EN series, The Designed Body. Listen in as Laufmann reflects on the body’s fight against equilibrium, the Goldilocks principal, and more!