Intelligent Design the Future

On this ID the Future, Stuart Burgess, one of Britain’s top engineers, explains how the skeletal joints in the human body are masterpieces of intelligent design. He also responds to claims by some evolutionists that human joints are badly designed and supposedly evidence of Darwinian evolution’s blind trial-and-error process. This presentation was taped at the 2022 Westminster Conference on Science and Faith in the greater Philadelphia area, which was jointly sponsored by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and Westminster Theological Seminary. Here in Part 1, Burgess focuses on the ankle joint, showing that it packs an extraordinary amount of functionality into a small space, beyond anything human engineers have managed to achieve either in prosthetics or robotics.

Today’s ID the Future from the vault features “In the Market” radio host Janet Parshall interviewing Jonathan Witt, co-author of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design. Witt and Parshall discuss Heretic, some brave anti-Darwin heretics, and a recent scholarly study claiming to show that greater science education and science literacy encourage acceptance of evolution. Witt highlights what he sees as some glaring problems in the study’s survey and in the way Darwinian evolution is normally taught. Get your copy of the book here.

Today’s ID the Future brings listeners the second half of a panel discussion at the 2022 Center for Science and Culture Insider’s Briefing. This portion begins with bioethicist and Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith making a surprising argument: His own field, bioethics, is at war with true medical ethics. Specifically, its most prominent figures—hailing from elite universities in the United States and Europe—are dedicated to emptying our medical culture of traditional ethical standards that protect human rights and are guided by a commitment to inherent human dignity. Some leading bioethicists see human beings as of no more inherent value than yeast. Smith stands athwart this anti-human trend and urges listeners to wake up and push back. Then John Read More ›

Today’s ID the Future spotlights Darwinian racism, past and present. In this first half of a panel discussion at the 2022 Center for Science and Culture Insider’s Briefing, Darwin Day in America author John West introduces the other panel members, teases an upcoming book, Darwin Comes to Africa, and discusses his experience visiting the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin, Italy, where the work of infamous Darwinian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s racist ideas about evolution and race are on dramatic display. Then historian Richard Weikart, author of Darwinian Racism, debunks the popular media claim that white nationalist racism in America is a Southern evangelical phenomenon. Weikart shows that the most prominent white nationalists show little if any interest in promoting Christianity, Read More ›

On this ID the Future, host Joshua Youngkin interviews the author of I, Charles Darwin, Nickell John Romjue, about his unique book in which a time-traveling Charles Darwin returns to the modern day. What would happen if Charles Darwin were to come back today? I, Charles Darwin examines that issue scientifically and culturally. In this conversation, Romjue describes what drew him to the subject and some of the things he did to prepare for writing the novella. ID the Future ran his audio book as a five-part series. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. And Part 5 is here. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit www.icharlesdarwin.com.

On this ID the Future, Discovery Institute senior fellow Andrew McDiarmid explores the roots of the idea that our universe is just one of many universes, an idea stretching back to the ancient atomists and given new life in the modern era, first by physicist Hugh Everett. McDiarmid then looks at how the idea percolated into comic books and from there into popular culture. He caps off the episode with a reading of a recent article about the multiverse hypothesis by Stephen Meyer, author of the recent bestseller, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. Meyer shows why some atheist scientists are attracted to the multiverse idea. As he explains, there is Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future biologist Michael Behe and Philosophy for the People host Pat Flynn conclude their conversation (posted by permission here) about some of the best objections to Behe’s central case for intelligent design. One objection Behe and Flynn tackle in this episode: the idea of evolution overcoming the irreducible-complexity hurdle through co-option. That is, maybe the precursors to what would become one of today’s molecular machines, such as the bacterial flagellum motor, co-opted simpler machines being used for other purposes, allowing evolution to build a bacterial flagellum motor one small step at a time over thousands or millions of generations, even though the completed bacterial flagellum ceases to function at all when just one of its many key parts Read More ›

On this ID the Future, hear the concluding episode of I, Charles Darwin, in which author Nickell John Romjue’s time-traveling Darwin returns to his family home and offers some final reflections on his eye-opening visit to the twenty-first century. Part 1 of the audio series is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit www.icharlesdarwin.com.

Today’s ID the Future continues A Mousetrap for Darwin author Michael Behe’s conversation with philosopher Pat Flynn, focused on some of the more substantive objections to Behe’s case for intelligent design in biology. In this segment the pair discuss the bacterial flagellum, the cilium, and the blood clotting cascade, and tackle critiques from Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Russell Doolittle, Kenneth Miller, and others. This interview is posted here by permission of Pat Flynn.

On today’s ID the Future Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe addresses what Philosophy for the People host Pat Flynn considers some of the best objections to Behe’s central intelligent design argument. As far back as the 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, Behe has argued that certain features in biology are irreducibly complex. That is, they require numerous essential parts, each carefully fitted to its task and integrated with the other parts, in order for the molecular machine or system to function at all. Two examples are the bacterial flagellum motor and the blood clotting cascade. Such systems are, in Behe’s words, irreducibly complex and could not have arisen through any blind and gradual evolution process. The better explanation for their Read More ›