Intelligent Design the Future

From the vault: German paleontologist Günter Bechly is co-author (with Stephen C. Meyer) of the chapter titled “The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry” in the book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique.  In this second conversation with Sarah Chaffee on this topic, Bechly moves on from the Cambrian explosion to discuss “life’s second ‘big bang.’” He then touches on other biological explosions, including the Avalon explosion, the Triassic explosion, the origin of flowering plants, and the origin of placental mammals. “There’s no reasonable way,” Bechly concludes, “to get from bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.”

Today’s ID the Future from the vault spotlights some problems the fossil record poses for Darwinism and, specifically, the theory’s idea of universal common ancestry. The guest is distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly, who was a proponent of Darwinism until he discovered, well into his career, what he sees as significant scientific reasons to doubt the evolutionary story. The occasion for his conversation with host Sarah Chaffee is an essay he and Stephen Meyer contributed to Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, an anthology from Crossway books.

On today’s ID the Future, radio host Hank Hanegraaff continues his conversation with Animal Algorithms author Eric Cassell. Here they look at more insects with strikingly sophisticated innate behavior, suggesting intricate algorithms encoded into their brains from birth, all of which cannot be effectively explained by reference to Darwinian evolution. Cassell and Hanegraaff touch on wasp martial arts; termite altruism and termite architectural skills, including a cooling system that has inspired a human design; interdependent social caste systems that enhance fitness; and spiderweb architecture and the extraordinary properties of spider silk, including the different kinds of silk and the spider’s ability to employ different types precisely tailored for different needs. Cassell looks at evolutionary explanations for these innate abilities that Read More ›

On this ID the Future radio host Hank Hanegraaff interviews Animal Algorithms author Eric Cassell about insects and other small-brained animals with innate behaviors of astonishing sophistication — desert ants, leafcutter ants, honey bees, spiders, monarch butterflies, and many more. These appear to be hard-wired from birth with complex algorithms coded into their neural networks, and some of the algorithms seem to involve complex mathematics. Also mysterious: many of these innate abilities are do or die. So how could they have blindly evolved one small Darwinian step at a time? Also, how would genetic mutations generate the ability to make navigational calculations (as in the case of some birds) that for humans require spherical geometry? Listen in to learn more Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith explores a recent article in the journal Nature, “The Alarming Rise of Complex Genetic Testing in Human Embryo Selection.” As alarming as that title sounds, Smith says the reality is even worse than the Nature article suggests. Using the breakthrough technology known as CRISPR, scientists are not only altering the genes of a given creature, including humans, but are even altering the creature’s germline. This threatens to permanently alter a species, Smith explains, including the human species. There’s the question of whether we have the right play god in this way, of course. There’s also the practical issue of scientists not really knowing what they are doing yet. A gene identified Read More ›

On this ID The Future from the vault, host Sarah Chaffee interviews biologist Ann Gauger about a Crossway Books anthology that Gauger contributed to and helped edit, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Among the tenets of theistic evolution is the idea that humans evolved from a large population of ape-like creatures. But is that idea scientifically plausible? Today’s episode delves into the fossil evidence. Listen in as Gauger describes not a mere gap in the fossil record, but a great gulf between australopithecines (an ancient ape-like creature) and humans.

This ID the Future continues the debate between design theorist Casey Luskin, an editor of The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and science historian Adam Shapiro, co-author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Justin Brierley, of the popular British debate program Unbelievable?, hosts. In this second half of the conversation, Shapiro argues that intelligent design’s popularity seems to have waned. Casey Luskin counters, arguing that the number and frequency of New York Times articles on ID is a superficial metric and that the ID research program is exploding, with the number of peer-reviewed ID papers growing every year, and the number of interested graduate students, ID hubs, and conferences expanding around the world, including ID conferences attended by high-level scientists, including Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future, design theorist Casey Luskin, an editor of The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and science historian Adam Shapiro, co-author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, debate the meaning and prospects of intelligent design. Here in this first half of their conversation with host Justin Brierley of the Unbelievable? podcast, the focus is on how the term intelligent design is used, or misused, and its relationship to theological issues. The interview is used by permission of Justin Brierley.

On this ID The Future from the vault, Zombie Science author and biologist Jonathan Wells dissects some recent hype over Darwin’s finches, an icon of evolution that just won’t stay buried. Seventeen years after Wells’ book Icons of Evolution, a thorn in the side of Darwinists, Darwin’s finches are back in the news and can still be found in biology textbooks despite the fact that, as Wells explains, they illustrate no net evolutionary change nor did they play a role in helping Darwin formulate his theory. As Wells’ Zombie Science book title suggests, the finch-beak icon has been killed by the facts, but like a zombie, it just keeps coming.

On today’s ID the Future, Human Nature author David Berlinski continues his conversation with host Wesley J. Smith. Here Berlinski reflects on the Jewish Holocaust, the destructive nihilism of the Nazis and the SS, and the shortcomings of Neo-Darwinism as an explanation for the diversity of life. Berlinski and Smith also discuss the increasingly widespread attacks on human exceptionalism, the growth of emotivism and why it’s a problem, and the bizarre nature rights movement. This is the second and concluding part of a conversation borrowed, with permission, from Wesley J. Smith’s Humanize podcast.