Intelligent Design the Future

On this ID the Future, intelligent design scientist Casey Luskin sits down with Summit Ministries podcast host Dr. Jeff Myers to explain the heart of intelligent design theory and why it should matter to Christians and to anyone who prizes a culture committed to the view that life is meaningful and human beings more than matter in motion.

On today’s ID the Future, radio host Michael Medved spotlights Your Designed Body, the new book from Discovery Institute Press by systems engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman. Laufmann joins Medved on the show to offer a quick flyover of the book and to explain why he sees the human body as not only designed but designed by a master engineer, light years ahead of our best human engineers. Laufmann says that the human body is an interdependent system of systems that poses grave challenges for the Darwinian mechanism of gradual evolution by natural selection, but more than this, when the human body is studied using well-established engineering principles, we find that it anticipates numerous advanced engineering concepts and Read More ›

Today’s ID the Future takes us to a conference in Turin, Italy, where scholar John West speaks about the roots of intelligent design, roots that stretch back to ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. In his talk, West also makes the case that design thinking was crucial to the rise of modern science, and he traces how Darwinism has eroded design thinking, fueled scientific racism, and undermined belief in human exceptionalism. West celebrates some of Italy’s contributions to Western civilization but also calls attention to Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who championed various racist ideas undergirded by Darwinian thinking, disturbing work that West learned more about when he visited the Cesare Lombroso Museum in Turin. On the bright side, there has been Read More ›

On this classic ID the Future, Robert J. Marks interviews Roger Olsen, co-author of the groundbreaking book The Mystery of Life’s Origin. In the work’s epilogue the authors suggested that a designing intelligence stands as the best explanation for the origin of life. And with a revised and greatly expanded new edition of the book now available, Olsen says that more than thirty-five years of additional research from the origin-of-life community have left their conclusions stronger than ever. Olsen is now an environmental scientist, and in a latter part of the interview, he tells a hair-raising story about his work abroad trying to protect families and communities from the ravages of environmental pollution.

On this ID the Future, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson further explores AlphaFold 2, a cutting edge computer program from Google’s DeepMind designed to rapidly suss out important secrets in the realm of proteins, indispensable molecular biological workhorses that come in thousands of different shapes and sizes. Nelson enthuses about AlphaFold 2 but also explains why he is convinced that AlphaFold’s creators have hit a series of immovable obstacles. The watchword here—orphans. Tune in to learn what these mischievous orphan proteins are about, and what they suggest for AlphaFold, evolution, and intelligent design.

Today’s ID the Future spotlights AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence program in the news for its impressive breakthroughs at predicting a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. Philosopher of Biology Paul Nelson walks listeners through the importance of this “amazing breakthrough,” as he describes it in a recent Evolution News article; but don’t uncork the champagne bottles just yet. The reason, according to Nelson, is that while proteins, protein sequences, and protein folding promise to reveal much that is still mysterious in molecular biology, we now know that biological information involves far more than just an organism’s proteome—that is, far more than the full suite of proteins expressed by an organism. Nelson uses analogies to manmade machines and cognates Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, host Robert J. Marks interviews chemist Charles Thaxton about a seminal 1984 book he co-authored, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, foundational to the intelligent design movement. The main body of Mystery was generally praised, Thaxton explains. It was the epilogue that proved controversial. There the three authors reviewed five proposed explanations for life’s origins and suggested that the best explanation was that the first life originated through an act of creative intelligence. Thaxton also tells a little about the recently revised and expanded edition of the book, with new contributions from Stephen Meyer, Brian Miller, James Tour, and others.

On this ID the Future, mathematician William Dembski and host Eric Anderson explore whether design detection tools shed any light on the recent chess scandal involving world chess champion Magnus Carlsen and American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann. Did Niemann cheat in a match where he beat Carlson, as some have claimed? There is no smoking gun in the case, so how might one determine if cheating occurred? At first glance the problem might seem far removed from the design detecting rules and tools Dembski laid out in his Cambridge University Press monograph The Design Inference. But actually there is some intriguing overlap. Is there a way to dig into the chess data and determine whether Niemann secretly used a computer chess engine to Read More ›

On this ID the Future, mathematician and philosopher William Dembski shares with host Eric Anderson about a revised and updated edition of Dembski’s pioneering 1998 Cambridge University Press book, The Design Inference. Dembski says he stands by that work and his early contributions to intelligent design theory, but adds that he has learned a lot more in the intervening years, particularly from his work with Robert J. Marks and Winston Ewert at the Evolutionary Informatics lab. Lessons from that and other work, Dembski explains, will enrich the new edition. What light do these design-detecting methods shed on modern evolutionary theory? Tune in as Dembski explains.

On this ID the Future from the vault, Nancy Pearcey, author of numerous books, including The Soul of Science (co-authored with Charles Thaxton) and Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, challenges the common belief that Darwin’s leading early supporters were convinced of the main pillars of his theory. Many in the nineteenth century were already primed to accept a theory of evolution, but not necessarily by natural selection. As Pearcey explains, some of Darwin’s chief supporters had grave doubts about natural selection’s role, and some of them believed that God or a “vital force” guided evolution. But Darwin would have none of it. And what do evolutionary scientists think today? The disagreements persist and, if anything, have Read More ›