On this episode of ID the Future, James M. Tour, Rice University professor of chemistry, materials science and nanoengineering, and a recipient of multiple scientific awards, continues a conversation with Signature in the Cell author Stephen C. Meyer about research into the origin of life. In this second of three parts, Tour insists that the scientific community remains clueless as to how life could have arisen naturalistically, and that all the public spin to the contrary is only so much storytelling. Even the most hopeful research shows that chemistry doesn’t move in life-friendly directions without investigator interference. Meyer goes further, arguing that these mindful interferences themselves exemplify the unique causal power of intelligent agency in action, suggesting that intelligent design is the only causally adequate explanation for the origin of the first life. The two also discuss Jeremy England, dissipation theorems, and Brian Miller’s work on the origin of life and the second law of thermodynamics. The episode is excerpted from a longer interview in Tour’s excellent new video series The Science & Faith Podcast: Follow the Evidence.

On this episode of ID the Future,  James M. Tour and Stephen C. Meyer begin a discussion about the hard problems facing researchers trying to discover how the first life could have come about naturalistically. Meyer is the director of the Center for Science and Culture; Tour is a world-renowned synthetic organic chemist with over 700 research publications and multiple major recognitions, including TheBestSchools.org naming him one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world today. Though he doesn’t sign on to ID theory, he says he’s sympathetic with the idea, and certainly not impressed with any naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. In this first of a three-part series, they explore problems ranging from the extreme improbabilities associated with protein assembly, to what precisely has gone missing in the nanosecond when a cell dies. The episode is excerpted from a longer interview Dr. Tour conducted with Meyer as part of his excellent new video series The Science & Faith Podcast: Follow the Evidence.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, we hear from two contributors to the Crossway anthology, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, Molecular biologist Douglas Axe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer explain how Carbon Valley Trumps Silicon Valley, and shouts intelligent design. They compare some of today’s technological marvels to living technology, and show how even “simple cells” far exceed even the best silicon valley has to offer.

On this episode of ID the Future, Rob Crowther speaks with David Klinghoffer, editor of Evolution News and Science Today, about contemporary “cancel culture” that’s attempting to push disfavored ideas and people out of the public square, and how the cancel-culture phenomenon struck intelligent design long before cancel culture was a household term. The term — and the movie title — more commonly used in ID circles has been “expelled.” It’s happened to Richard Sternberg, Günter Bechly, Douglas Axe, and other ID-friendly researchers, to the point that many ID-sympathizing scientists have to hide their beliefs to protect research funding and careers. Klinghoffer emphasizes that this isn’t just a debate off in the corner. Rather, ID is a “hard-core truth,” meaning it’s one of those on which our entire culture of freedom rests, for what else does it mean that we were “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights”?

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Jorn Dyerberg, the Danish biologist and co-discoverer of the role of omega-3 fatty acids in human health and nutrition, talks with Brian Miller about finding irreducible complexity in cells 40 years ago.

On this episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson talks with scientist and fellow engineer Rob Stadler about a recent origin-of-life paper and how the authors paint themselves into a corner. The context for the paper is this: Decades of research have undermined the three great hopes for a purely naturalistic origin of life — scenarios starting with some sort of metabolism, scenarios starting with some kind of membrane, and scenarios starting with RNA. All three are necessary for cellular life; none seems able to have come ahead of the others. So now some recent work described in an article in New Scientist suggests it all happened at once in a sort of “chemical big bang.” It’s the return of an old idea long ago dismissed as too improbable. Is this “hopeful monster” plausible after all? As Anderson and Stadler show, there are numerous hidden assumptions and imaginary entities lurking in the proposal, which when surfaced, call its soundness into question.

On this episode of ID the Future, Robert Crowther interviews Eric Holloway, Associate Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, about Holloway’s recent article answering a common criticism of intelligent design theory. The criticism centers on William Dembski’s explanatory filter for detecting design, especially Dembski’s crucial innovation, which was to include specification as the filter’s final step. Critics say specification is an ad hoc addition, conjured up by ID theorists for no good reason except to prop up ID theory. No one else uses it, they say. They’re wrong, says Holloway. Dembski accurately formalized a filter we use so often that we’re like fish in the sea. We are unaware of it because it’s ubiquitous. To prove his point, Holloway comes armed with powerful examples from information theory, communication theory, and cryptography.

On this episode of ID the Future, physician Howard Glicksman explains the hugely complex blood flow systems required to keep us clear-headed and alive even while doing everything from gymnastics to simply getting up in the morning. There are various methods the heart and blood vessels use to keep the body properly supplied. It’s also about hormones and nervous-system signaling. Does Darwinism provide a satisfactory explanation for such an intricately coordinated system? Dr. Glicksman argues that it does not, and that a far better explanation is intelligent design.

On this episode of ID the Future, we bring you the second half of John West's documentary The Magician's Twin: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism. Lewis wrote with great concern about scientism’s totalitarian potential, but never more prophetically than in That Hideous Strength, published 75 years ago this month, in which scientists forget the limits of their discipline, cast off ethical restraints, and assume control of public policy. According to Lewis, science steps dangerously outside its bounds when it assumes it has all knowledge, especially moral knowledge.

On this episode of ID the Future, we recognize the 75th anniversary this month of the publication of C. S. Lewis's prophetic science fiction novel That Hideous Strength, with the first slightly abridged part of John West's documentary The Magician's Twin: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism. Several scholars were interviewed for the film, including Jay Richards, Angus Menuge, Victor Reppert, John West, and Michael Aeschliman. Scientism is the idea that science is the ultimate path to knowledge and wisdom -- the only sure path -- and that the spiritual realm is a mirage. Lewis never criticized science, only scientism, the abuse of science that bears an unexpected twinship with magic.