Intelligent Design the Future

On this ID the Future from the vault, host Sarah Chaffee talks with Center for Science and Culture Research Coordinator Brian Miller about the growing ID underground. Miller says that as many as one-quarter of Harvard post-docs in relevant fields privately express sympathy for intelligent design. And more and more scientists who don’t agree with ID are at least standing up against common sound-bite misrepresentations. In their conversation Miller also reviews what he describes as three “major pillars” of evolutionary theory that in recent years have been “dramatically shaken.” The conversation cues off of Miller’s Evolution News article on the subject.

On today’s ID the Future, Miracle of Man author and biologist Michael Denton continues his conversation with host Eric Anderson. Here Denton does a rapid flyover of several more anthropic “coincidences” in chemistry, biochemistry, and Earth science that are fine tuned to allow air-breathing, bipedal, technology-developing terrestrial creatures like ourselves to exist and thrive. The fine tuning, what Denton calls anthropic prior fitness, would seem to require foresight and planning on literally a cosmic scale. The wide-ranging conversation, the final one in a four-part series, gives a flavor for the breadth—if not the depth and richness—of Denton’s new book from Discovery Institute Press, available here.

On today’s ID the Future, distinguished British physician and author David Galloway explains why he’s convinced that the human fetal circulatory system is irreducibly complex and therefore beyond the reach of blind gradualistic evolution to have built. In his conversation with host and fellow physician Geoffrey Simmons, Galloway also mentions some molecular machines that he’s convinced are irreducibly complex and shout intelligent design. The occasion for the conversation is Galloway’s new book, Design Dissected.

On this ID the Future from the vault, geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, former research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, talks with host Casey Luskin about Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance, how they clashed with the thinking of Charles Darwin, and how acceptance of Darwinism greatly hindered acceptance of Mendel’s great insights. Listen in as Dr. Lönnig explains Mendel’s laws and why they’re still relevant for biology, and particularly genetics.

In Part 3 of The Miracle of Man interview with author Michael Denton, the Australian biologist and MD explores with host Eric Anderson some of the bioengineering marvels of the human lung and, more fundamentally, some of the many things about chemistry, the sun, and planet Earth that had to be just so to allow our respiratory and circulatory systems to work—not merely as well as they do but at all. It’s fine tuning for creatures very much like ourselves, what Denton terms The Miracle of Man. “Denton provides the a scientific underpinning for a theistic real humanism far beyond the nihilistic implications of so-called secular humanism,” writes German paleontologist Günter Bechly. “The book deserves to become a game changer Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, host Andrew McDiarmid interviews science historian and author Michael Keas about Keas’ ISI book Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion. The myth they tackle on this episode is the notion that the Catholic Church willfully ignored incontrovertible scientific evidence against geocentrism and tortured the astronomer Galileo for promoting a sun-centered model of the solar system, and that they opposed him on purely religious grounds. As Keas explains, in fact Galileo had found support for heliocentrism but hadn’t proved it scientifically; there were scientists and theologians both against him and for him; and he wasn’t tortured anyway.

This ID the Future continues Miracle of Man author Michael Denton’s conversation with host Eric Anderson about his latest book. The focus of this capstone work in his Privileged Species series is, as the subtitle explains, The Fine-Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. Here Denton and Anderson dive deeper into the book’s argument that science has uncovered multiple ensembles of fitness for creatures much like ourselves—land-going, airbreathing, intelligent bipeds capable of controlling fire and developing new technologies. In other words, it’s not just a handful of things about nature that appear fine tuned for our existence. It’s a long list of things, and indeed, a long list of interdependent ensembles of prior fitness—what Denton sometimes refers to as a “primal Read More ›

Today’s ID the Future brings onto the show Scottish physician David Galloway, author of the recent book Design Dissected and former president of Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. In his conversation with guest host and fellow physician/author Geoffrey Simmons, Galloway describes how he found himself in the evolution/design controversy and eventually presented his doubts about Darwin to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. In this first half of a two-part conversation, Galloway and Simmons briefly summarize the content of Design Dissected, and Galloway homes in on one section in particular where he tells the tragic story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a nineteenth-century Hungarian physician who pioneered life-saving antiseptic procedures in hospitals, but whose ideas were Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, Jay Richards and astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez discuss several discoveries made since 2004 supporting the conclusions of their 2004 book The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery.Gonzalez and Richards show how the book’s thesis — that conditions for life and scientific discovery meet on Earth to a fine-tuned degree that strongly points toward design — has been confirmed multiple times.

On today’s ID the Future, host Eric Anderson sits down with Australian biologist and MD Michael Denton to discuss his new book, The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. As Denton notes, throughout the Middle Ages, humans were viewed as central to the cosmic scheme of things, but this anthropocentric view began to fall out of favor in the sixteenth century, and few if any scientific discoveries in the subsequent two centuries offered any apparent aid or comfort to the view. That, however, isn’t the end of the story. According to Denton, even as Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection seemed to be draining from the idea what little life remained Read More ›