Intelligent Design the Future

On this classic ID the Future, Casey Luskin tackles another neo-Darwinian assertion made by Francis Collins and Karl Giberson in The Language of Science and Faith. There they make an offhand statement that a series of random mutations can lead to such a novel structure as the eye. However, they neglect to give any citation or discuss any evidence to support the claim. Instead of simply accepting the neo-Darwinian explanation of the eye on faith, Luskin leads listeners through an examination of the evidence. As he shows, the more closely we look, the more problems appear for the idea that the eye originated through a process of mindless evolution. For additional evidence that the vertebrate eye was instead intelligently designed, see Read More ›

Today’s ID the Future spotlights the incredible fine tuning of life. Robert J. Marks hosts Stockholm University professor of mathematical statistics Ola Hössjer and University of Miami population geneticist Daniel Díaz. The three discuss strategies for extending the concept of fine tuning to biological systems, and along the way touch on population genetics, entropy, and probability theory. At the center of the discussion are three technical papers—here, here, and here—each co-authored by one or more of the three members of today’s podcast discussion. This episode is reposted with permission from Mind Matters News, a website of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Head over to their podcast site to find the other episodes in this interview Read More ›

On this ID the Future award-winning actor Max McLean joins host John West to discuss his new film, The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis. West and McLean discuss how McClean came to do stage plays focused on Lewis’s work, and how he and filmmaker Norman Stone came to create a feature-length dramatic film in the midst of the coronavirus shutdown. McLean tells about Lewis’s long and winding conversion from agnosticism to Christianity, and then he and West focus on those aspects of Lewis’s conversion centered on science, evolutionary theory, and rational theism. Key to Lewis’s move from agnosticism to idealism and eventually Judeo-Christian theism—his friend Owen Barfield and the question of the origin of reason. Lewis Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, Casey Luskin continues his review of Karl Giberson and Francis Collins’s The Language of Science and Faith. Giberson and Collins point to the feather as a prime example of a novel feature arising via blind evolution. According to them, it evolved from elongated scales. But Luskin points to recent findings from developmental biology that have led even many evolutionists to abandon the proposal.

Today’s ID the Future spotlights The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and specifically, an essay in the new anthology by biologist Jonathan Wells, “Is Darwinism a Theory in Crisis?” As Wells and host Casey Luskin note, the essay title alludes to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued there that if one studies the history of scientific revolutions, one finds that when the scientific evidence has begun to turn against a dominant scientific paradigm—when its days are numbered— its adherents do not simply concede defeat. Instead they use all their institutional power to suppress dissent and punish proponents of any competing paradigm. This is the period of crisis, which can last Read More ›

On this ID the Future, Baylor University computer engineering professor Robert J. Marks hosts Ola Hössjer of Stockholm University and Daniel Díaz of the University of Miami to discuss a recent research paper the three contributed to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, “Is Cosmological Tuning Fine or Coarse?” It turns out that’s no easy question to answer rigorously, but this is where the new paper comes in. In this episode the three unpack the long answer. What about the short answer? It’s akin to a description in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Space,” it informs us, “is big. Really big.” Measuring how finely tuned our universe is for life is all about searching large spaces of possibilities; Read More ›

On this classic ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses how theistic Darwinists Francis Collins and Karl Giberson rely on the argument that pseudogenes are junk, “broken DNA.” The pseudogene is their centerpiece evidence for common descent and macroevolution in their book The Language of Science and Faith. This leaves them hard-pressed as researchers discover more and more functions for non-coding DNA, including pseudogenes.

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a new book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos, and specifically a chapter by biologist Jonathan Wells titled “What are the Top Scientific Problems with Evolution?” Wells is the guest, and the host is geologist and Center for Science and Culture associate director Casey Luskin, who co-edited the anthology from Harvest House Publishers. In this episode the first problem that Wells highlights concerns homology and convergence. A second problem involves fossils. Darwin anticipated “innumerable transitions” in the fossil record, but such a rainbow of transitional forms has never been found. Not even close. Another problem, molecular phylogenies. Another: the lack of observational evidence that natural Read More ›

On this ID the Future, Zombie Science author and biologist Jonathan Wells and host Andrew McDiarmid explore the seductive but misleading appeal to consensus science. This is when someone makes a bandwagon appeal to support a scientific hypothesis rather than offering evidence and arguments—as in, “All serious scientists agree that X is the case.” Wells says history makes hash of the consensus-science appeal because the history of scientific progress is all about a consensus view being overthrown by a newer, more accurate view that for a time was a minority view. Wells also draws a distinction between evidence-based empirical science and ideologically driven science. The example he gives for the latter: scientific materialism. Instead of a search for truth about Read More ›

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, host Ira Berkowitz continues a conversation with Rabbi Moshe Averick about the rabbi’s book Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism. Averick answers the who-designed-the-designer objection, shows how questions about God and intelligent design can’t be shoved aside as unimportant, and has a bit of fun recounting a dustup he had with evolutionist Jerry Coyne.