Intelligent Design the Future

On this ID the Future Stephen Meyer sits down with talk show host and bestselling novelist Andrew Klavan to discuss Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. In this fast-paced conversation the pair touch on the Judeo-Christian roots of science, how fine tuning in physics and cosmology point to intelligent design, and how a great many scientists held out hope that the universe was eternal and therefore did not require a creator, but eventually threw in the towel as evidence mounted for a cosmic beginning. What about the multiverse hypothesis as an escape for atheists wishing to explain away the evidence for a cosmic designer? Meyer explains why it fails Occam’s Razor, and then he and Klavan discuss a noted atheist Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, Casey Luskin finishes up his look at Francis Collins’s and Karl Giberson’s The Language of Science and Faith, a book arguing for theistic Darwinism. In this sixth and final installment in the series, Luskin reviews the contradictions and fallacious bandwagon appeals that he says permeate the book. He praises the two authors for their intelligence and professional achievements, but he encourages readers of the book to also read one or more works skeptical of theistic Darwinism in order to better assess how Giberson and Collins’s case holds up when pressed. Head over to Discovery Institute Press for some good options.

On today’s ID the Future, Animal Algorithms author Eric Cassell delves into another fascinating portion of his new book, the programmed social behaviors of colony insects and the challenge these instinctive behaviors pose for modern evolutionary theory. Cassell and host Robert J. Marks discuss the complex caste system of these colonies, the impressive signaling systems they use to communicate, and how technologists study these tiny-brained creatures to learn tricks for developing and improving drone swarm technology. How could a mindless evolutionary process have evolved these sophisticated colonies, where various castes appear essential to the functioning and survival of the colony, and possess their division-of-labor skills instinctively? Some colony members also behave altruistically, a fact that Charles Darwin himself conceded posed Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez and host Casey Luskin discuss the idea of undirected panspermia. Gonzalez explains the basic idea and what the best current evidence says about its plausibility. The occasion is his chapter on panspermia in the new anthology A Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, co-edited by Casey Luskin, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Undirected panspermia is the idea that the first life on our planet came from outer space, carried by chance processes from a faraway living planet on space dust, asteroids, or comets either from within our solar system, or from another star system to here. The idea of panspermia was inspired by the extreme difficulty of Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, Casey Luskin highlights a glaring logical error in the pro-evolution book The Language of Science and Faith by Francis Collins and Karl Giberson. There Collins and Giberson assert that macroevolution is merely microevolution over long ages, and to cinch their argument they point to the observed macroevolution of … birds? No. Whales? No. A new land mammal? A fundamentally new type of bacteria? No again, and understandably so since no one has observed the macroevolution of any biological form. The idea is conjectural. So what example do Collins and Giberson offer? The evolution of automobiles from the Model T to the Toyota Prius hybrid. But as Luskin notes, such an evolutionary path illustrates Read More ›

Today’s ID the Future spotlights the new book Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts. The author, Eric Cassell, joins host and Baylor computer engineering professor Robert J. Marks to discuss the groundbreaking book and, in particular, the chapters on some of the animal kingdom’s most stunning navigators—the arctic tern, homing pigeons, the monarch butterfly, and the desert ant, among others. Cassell has degrees in biology and engineering, and he draws on these and his decades of professional expertise in aircraft navigation systems to show that these creatures instinctively employ navigational technologies that humans have only recently mastered. According to Cassell, their skills are driven by sophisticated algorithms embedded in their brains. But what created these algorithms Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future, astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez unpacks one of his chapters in the new book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, edited by episode host Casey Luskin. Gonzalez and Luskin look at how our atmosphere as well as the sun, moon, distance from our host star, and position in the Milky Way are all curiously fine tuned not only for life but also for allowing  Earth’s human inhabitants to observe and discover things near and far about nature. It’s as if a master designer made the Earth not merely for life but for curious and intelligent beings. What about the fact that Earth is such a tiny part of a vast universe, a “pale blue dot” as Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, Casey Luskin tackles another neo-Darwinian assertion Francis Collins and Karl Giberson make in The Language of Science and Faith. In their book, Giberson and Collins capitalize on the popular notion of Neanderthals as pre-human, cavemen-like beasts in order to bolster their claims for common ancestry. But what sort of common ancestry? And do experts even agree that Neanderthals are drastically different from early homo sapiens? Luskin explores the connection between Neanderthals and humans and points to the growing evidence that Neanderthals interbred with homo sapiens, buried their dead, mastered technology, had a brain size equal to and even slightly larger than homo sapiens, and were essentially just another race of humans. Some have Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future, award-winning British producer and director Norman Stone joins host John West to discuss Stone’s new biopic on C.S. Lewis, The Most Reluctant Convert. The freewheeling conversation covers a wide range of topics, including Lewis’s view of science, the problems of reductionist science, Lewis’s attraction to and rejection of the occult (and the strange connection between the occult and scientific materialism), Bertrand Russell’s atheism, the women in C.S. Lewis’s life (not just Joy Gresham), and even the strange fate of C.S. Lewis’s old rooms in Oxford (you’ll never guess what’s in there now!). Plus, West tries his best to convince Stone that he should do a film version of a certain C.S. Lewis science fiction novel. Read More ›

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a new origin-of-life video showing that researchers aren’t anywhere close to creating life from non-life, despite the fact most Americans seem to believe otherwise. In the episode, host Eric Anderson interviews Stairway to Life co-author Rob Stadler, who helped create the new Long Story Short animated video. Stadler and Anderson explore how origin-of-life papers and popular media reports have misled the public, evidenced by a survey underscored by Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour. Then they discuss several daunting origin-of-life hurdles beyond the synthesis of key chemical building blocks. These are hurdles significant enough that each alone may doom the idea of life having once emerged from non-life spontaneously. Indeed, it is now a Read More ›