Intelligent Design the Future

This classic ID the Future resurfaces just in time to celebrate human creative capacity, and a blockbuster movie, for Labor Day weekend. Host Robert Crowther talks with Rachel Adams about Thanos, the arch-villain from Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, and a couple of real-life thinkers, Eric Pianka and Paul Ehrlich, who share the villain’s view that the world would be a better place with far fewer humans. Thanos, Pianka, and Ehrlich appear to share a materialistic view of the human person, one that ignores the inherent dignity and worth of every person as well as humanity’s capacity to generate solutions and new resources through creative labor, growing the resource pie. Thanks to this, life is not a zero-sum game. The human Read More ›

On today’s ID the Future physicist Brian Miller and host Eric Anderson explore a recent conversation between physicists Jeremy England and Paul Davies on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? radio show. Davies admitted he doesn’t want the origin of life to require divine design, while England argued that his work on non-equilibrium systems offers a promising avenue for explaining the origin of the first life in naturalistic terms. Miller and Anderson demur on both counts. They hold out hope that Davies, having recognized his philosophical bias, will eventually decide to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if doing so has theistic implications. And as for Jeremy England’s approach, Miller says it’s fascinating work but fails to solve the origin-of-life challenge in Read More ›

On this ID the Future, Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas and host Jonathan Witt continue their conversation about Thomas’s journey from Darwinian materialism to theistic humanism and a thorough skepticism of Darwinian theory. Here Thomas links the heroic posturing of modern atheists Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell, on the one hand, and on the other, the heroic fatalism of poetry stretching back to the early Middle Ages and, further still, to the ancient Greeks. Thomas also draws a link between the animistic thinking of much ancient pagan thought and the magical powers attributed to the Darwinian mechanism. Thomas explains why he now views the latter as essentially “crypto-animism.” In their wide-ranging conversation, Thomas and Witt also touch on Read More ›

This ID the Future from the vault features an interview with filmmaker John West on the Michael Medved Show, about West’s powerful documentary Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism, now streaming on YouTube and with more than three million views. Medved and West explore the tragic story of Ota Benga, and the prominent role that the Bronx Zoo, the pro-Darwinian scientific establishment, and the New York Times played in that tragedy. As West explains, there are lessons here about the danger of letting the voices of “science” confuse our grasp of moral truth. 

On this ID the Future, Icons of Evolution author Jonathan Wells sat down with host and fellow biologist Ray Bohlin at the August 2021 Insiders’ Briefing near Seattle to discuss some fresh discoveries into the workings of the human genome detailed in a recent article in the journal Axios, “Diving into the Genome’s Uncharted Territories.” As the article details, researchers continue to discover important functions in the noncoding regions of the human genome, once regarded by evolutionists as junk DNA. Wells and Bohlin explore the exciting new findings and some of their implications for modern evolutionary theory and intelligent design.

On today’s ID the Future, meet Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas, not at all the sort of person one might expect to find waging a campaign against modern evolutionary theory. An erudite and settled Darwinist living comfortably in a thoroughly secular English academic culture, Thomas nevertheless came to reject Darwinian materialism and, as he insists, did so on purely rationalist grounds. Listen in to learn about his journey and about his new book from Discovery Institute Press, Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Casey Luskin offers tips for when diversity doesn’t extend into the biology classroom. Casey suggests never opting out of learning evolution — in fact, both students and parents should learn as much as they can in order to be proactively informed about a variety of scientific viewpoints. A great way to learn about credible perspectives other than Darwinism is to look at the multimedia curriculum Discovering ID, which is designed for educational use by home schools and private schools.

On this ID the Future, physician Howard Glicksman and host Eric Anderson dive deeper into the body’s exquisite blood pressure control system, cueing off a new discovery described at Science Daily as uncovering “the location of natural blood-pressure barometers inside our bodies that have eluded scientists for more than 60 years.” According to the primary research paper at Circulation Research, “Renin-expressing cells are essential for survival, perfected throughout evolution to maintain blood pressure (BP) and fluid-electrolyte homeostasis.” How did evolution perfect the system? How did it originate the system? The paper never says. The mention of evolution appears to be little more than a de rigueur genuflection before the reigning paradigm of blind evolution. What is bearing actual fruit, according to Glicksman Read More ›

On this ID the Future, physician and Evolution News writer Howard Glicksman discusses an exciting new discovery by researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, described at Science Daily as uncovering “the location of natural blood-pressure barometers inside our bodies that have eluded scientists for more than 60 years.” As the article reports, “The existence of a pressure sensor inside renin cells was first proposed back in 1957. It made sense: The cells had to know when to release renin, a hormone that helps regulate blood pressure. But even though scientists suspected this cellular barometer had to exist, they couldn’t tell what it was and whether it was located in renin cells or surrounding cells.” Dr. Glicksman and Read More ›

On this ID the Future from the vault, Discovery Institute’s John West discusses his book Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. Most conservatives are presumed to be critical of Darwin’s theory, yet a number of thinkers on the right, such as George Will, James Q. Wilson, and Larry Arnhart, have mounted a vigorous defense of Darwinism. West shows that the attempts to reconcile conservatism and Darwinian biology ultimately misunderstand both.