On this ID the Future award-winning actor Max McLean joins host John West to discuss his new film, The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis. West and McLean discuss how McClean came to do stage plays focused on Lewis’s work, and how he and filmmaker Norman Stone came to create a feature-length dramatic film in the midst of the coronavirus shutdown. McLean tells about Lewis’s long and winding conversion from agnosticism to Christianity, and then he and West focus on those aspects of Lewis’s conversion centered on science, evolutionary theory, and rational theism. Key to Lewis’s move from agnosticism to idealism and eventually Judeo-Christian theism—his friend Owen Barfield and the question of the origin of reason. Lewis Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, Casey Luskin continues his review of Karl Giberson and Francis Collins’s The Language of Science and Faith. Giberson and Collins point to the feather as a prime example of a novel feature arising via blind evolution. According to them, it evolved from elongated scales. But Luskin points to recent findings from developmental biology that have led even many evolutionists to abandon the proposal.

Today’s ID the Future spotlights The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and specifically, an essay in the new anthology by biologist Jonathan Wells, “Is Darwinism a Theory in Crisis?” As Wells and host Casey Luskin note, the essay title alludes to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued there that if one studies the history of scientific revolutions, one finds that when the scientific evidence has begun to turn against a dominant scientific paradigm—when its days are numbered— its adherents do not simply concede defeat. Instead they use all their institutional power to suppress dissent and punish proponents of any competing paradigm. This is the period of crisis, which can last Read More ›

On this ID the Future, Baylor University computer engineering professor Robert J. Marks hosts Ola Hössjer of Stockholm University and Daniel Díaz of the University of Miami to discuss a recent research paper the three contributed to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, “Is Cosmological Tuning Fine or Coarse?” It turns out that’s no easy question to answer rigorously, but this is where the new paper comes in. In this episode the three unpack the long answer. What about the short answer? It’s akin to a description in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Space,” it informs us, “is big. Really big.” Measuring how finely tuned our universe is for life is all about searching large spaces of possibilities; Read More ›

On this classic ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses how theistic Darwinists Francis Collins and Karl Giberson rely on the argument that pseudogenes are junk, “broken DNA.” The pseudogene is their centerpiece evidence for common descent and macroevolution in their book The Language of Science and Faith. This leaves them hard-pressed as researchers discover more and more functions for non-coding DNA, including pseudogenes.

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a new book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos, and specifically a chapter by biologist Jonathan Wells titled “What are the Top Scientific Problems with Evolution?” Wells is the guest, and the host is geologist and Center for Science and Culture associate director Casey Luskin, who co-edited the anthology from Harvest House Publishers. In this episode the first problem that Wells highlights concerns homology and convergence. A second problem involves fossils. Darwin anticipated “innumerable transitions” in the fossil record, but such a rainbow of transitional forms has never been found. Not even close. Another problem, molecular phylogenies. Another: the lack of observational evidence that natural Read More ›

On this ID the Future, Zombie Science author and biologist Jonathan Wells and host Andrew McDiarmid explore the seductive but misleading appeal to consensus science. This is when someone makes a bandwagon appeal to support a scientific hypothesis rather than offering evidence and arguments—as in, “All serious scientists agree that X is the case.” Wells says history makes hash of the consensus-science appeal because the history of scientific progress is all about a consensus view being overthrown by a newer, more accurate view that for a time was a minority view. Wells also draws a distinction between evidence-based empirical science and ideologically driven science. The example he gives for the latter: scientific materialism. Instead of a search for truth about Read More ›

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, host Ira Berkowitz continues a conversation with Rabbi Moshe Averick about the rabbi’s book Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism. Averick answers the who-designed-the-designer objection, shows how questions about God and intelligent design can’t be shoved aside as unimportant, and has a bit of fun recounting a dustup he had with evolutionist Jerry Coyne.

On today’s ID the Future, Casey Luskin, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, discusses his Evolution News article about the recently deceased Steven Weinberg. On Weinberg’s view, one of science’s social functions is to undermine religion, which he sees as superstition. Luskin takes the opposite view and points to skilled and successful scientists he got to know in Africa. He says these scientists are convinced that the supernatural is real and would find Weinberg’s secular Western rejection of the supernatural as blinkered. Luskin and host Robert Crowther also discuss a hopeful trend among some atheists toward a more civil and respectful way of engaging intelligent design, even to the point of acknowledging that design theorists are Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future host Emily Reeves talks with geologist and intelligent design theorist Casey Luskin about his PhD. Luskin says his dissertation wasn’t focused on intelligent design at all; but the knowledge he gained and the methodology he employed well might provide him grist for ID-oriented work down the road. The wide-ranging conversation takes Luskin and Reeves from his geological work in Africa and the method known as uniformitarianism to plate tectonics, paleomagnetism, crustal recycling, and some books on how Earth appears fine-tuned for life. Luskin also tells about some astonishing beauty that lies hidden right under our feet, and how we can discover it for ourselves.