Intelligent Design the Future

This episode of ID the Future features a clip from a “Signature in the Cell” event a few years ago in Tampa, FL, featuring Stephen Meyer, Michael Medved, David Berlinski and Tom Woodward. Listen in as Dr. Meyer interviews Dr. Berlinski about the questions that led him to criticize Darwinism.

On this episode of ID the Future, mathematician, polymath, and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Berlinski concludes a two-part conversation with Jonathan Witt about Berlinski’s new book Human Nature. Today he talks about what we’ve sadly lost from the West, disputing secularists’ optimistic claims that we’re less violent than the medievals were. From his home next door to Notre Dame Cathedral, he also muses on the cathedral fire and contemporary France’s inability to build anything like the great cathedral. Re-construct, yes--though even that may lie beyond the collective will of France. Create, no. 

On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards and astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, co-authors of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, discuss reports on another extra-solar planet recently in the news. It’s K2-18b, 124 light years away, the first exoplanet found in its star’s circumstellar habitable zone with liquid water in its atmosphere. Science journalists have sensationalized it as another potential earth-like home for life, even though, says Gonzalez, it’s much more like Neptune or Saturn than Earth. BBC science journalist Pallab Ghosh recently criticized this kind of unbalanced science reporting. We have to keep our eyes open for this sort of thing, especially since--as Gonzalez and Richards show--Ghosh makes precisely this mistake himself in his article warning about the problem.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, David Klinghoffer shares about Tom Wolfe’s new book, which critiques evolutionary explanations for the origin of language.

On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher, mathematician, and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Berlinski answers questions from Jonathan Witt about Berlinski’s celebrated new book Human Nature. Is evolution carrying us upward to new heights of human goodness, as some have claimed? If not that, then will a computer-connected singularity take us on that upward trajectory, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus? With his famous quick wit, Berlinski says no, and warns of a new “explosion of religion,” but a new religion, one without rational grounding and with a great willingness to punish dissenters.

On this episode of ID the Future, Darwin Devolves author and Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe sits down with host Rob Crowther to discuss Behe’s recent speaking trip to Brazil, and on where he sees the Darwinism/design debate heading in the next few years. In their conversation, Behe enthuses about Brazilian food and hospitality, and says the students at the schools he spoke at were refreshingly open to considering the evidence for intelligent design. It was typical of what he finds elsewhere, he says. While the old guard tends to dig in its heels, younger researchers tend to bring an open and “exploratory” attitude to his presentations. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast: idthefuture.org/donate.

 

On this episode of ID The Future, Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, honors Phillip Johnson, the U.C. Berkeley law professor who helped ignite the modern intelligent design movement with the publication of his highly successful book Darwin on Trial. Meyer says Johnson had the courage to speak up when others wouldn’t. “The overweening dynamic of this debate is fear,” Meyer says. “There are many many many people who have come up to the water’s edge, who have seen the problems with Darwinian evolution, have counted the cost, and recoiled.” But one Berkeley law professor did not recoil. As Meyer put it, “Johnson had the guts.”

On this episode of ID the Future, Jonathan Wells remembers Phillip Johnson, “godfather of the intelligent design movement.” Johnson not only attracted scientists’ and other academics’ attention with his groundbreaking Darwin on Trial, he brought them together as a united movement, pushing for a “big tent” for ID theorists to work together. It reflected his own “big heart,” says Wells. The result, he says, is a movement that today is growing internationally, far faster than even Wells realized until recently.

On this episode of ID The Future, we commemorate the passing this weekend of the man called the “godfather of the intelligent design movement,” Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson. In honor of the man we bring you Dr. Johnson speaking at a 2011 Discovery Institute event commemorating the 20th anniversary of his seminal book Darwin on Trial. The book challenged mainstream beliefs about Darwinian evolution and inspired many scientists and scholars of the modern intelligent design movement. Listen in to learn why, according to the self-effacing law professor, he has always been “puzzled when someone describes me as courageous,” and how he got involved in the debate over Darwinism and intelligent design.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, listen to Jonathan Wells and John West answer questions on the intelligent design movement, embryological development, speciation and biomimicry.  For more on Wells’ book Zombie Science, visit iconsofevolution.com.