Intelligent Design the Future

Intelligent Design the Future

The ID The Future (IDTF) podcast carries on Discovery Institute's mission of exploring the issues central to evolution and intelligent design. IDTF is a short podcast providing you with the most current news and views on evolution and ID. IDTF delivers brief interviews with key scientists and scholars developing the theory of ID, as well as insightful commentary from Discovery Institute senior fellows and staff on the scientific, educational and legal aspects of the debate. Episode notes and archives available at idthefuture.com.

Episodes

December 8, 2025 21 mins
It's easy to be blown away by the examples of engineering prowess in the human body. But it can be challenging to turn that evidence into a robust argument for intelligent design you can share with skeptical friends and colleagues. To help you learn to do that, host Andrew McDiarmid begins a roundtable discussion with not one, not two, not three, but four guests to the podcast, all part of our team of resident scientists at Discove...

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Is natural evil an argument against intelligent design? And is human evil more consistent with naturalism or theism? On this classic ID The Future episode, host Andrew McDiarmid speaks with Dr. Eric Hedin about his article "Thoughts of Evil in a Designed World." First, Dr. Hedin discusses the problem of natural evils like earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, and other natural disasters. He reports that in the last century, the huma...

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On today’s ID The Future, host Brian Miller concludes a two-part conversation with physicist Aaron Zimmer and mathematician Ellie Feder, hosts of the Physics to God podcast, as they critique current explanations for the laws of nature and argue for an intelligent cause of the rules that govern the universe. This half of the conversation tackles the attempts made by scientists to explain these life-friendly laws as the result of cha...

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You might already have heard that the laws that govern our universe are finely tuned to allow for our existence. But beneath the special numbers of the universe lies an even deeper mystery: the laws of nature themselves. On today's ID The Future, join host Brian Miller as he begins a two-part conversation with physicist Aaron Zimmer and mathematician Ellie Feder, hosts of the Physics to God podcast, as they discuss their new work a...

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Progress is an appealing idea, but what happens when we do not all desire the same things? On this ID The Future, we mark the 60th anniversary of the death of British writer C. S. Lewis as host Andrew McDiarmid concludes a conversation with Dr. John West about Lewis's prophetic warnings to us about science and scientism. Dr. West explains how scientism harms real scientific progress and leads to moral relativism. And he discusses h...

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No amount of small, blind, and gradual changes to the steam engine could ever have produced the internal combustion engine. To get to that fundamentally new type of engine, an infusion of new information was required. That analogy can be applied to the origin of biological life too. The spectacular order, complexity, and design we see in life could not have been achieved gradually by a process that lacked foresight. On today's ID T...

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Failed ideas tend to eventually crumble under the weight of contrary evidence. Is modern evolutionary theory heading for the same fate? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid speaks to biochemist Michael J. Behe about his core arguments for intelligent design and his recent experience sharing them at an Ivy League school. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box, recently present...

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What happens when science leaves human values behind? Or when governments become beholden to scientists? On this classic ID The Future out of the vault, we mark the 60th anniversary of the death of British writer C. S. Lewis as host Andrew McDiarmid begins a conversation with Dr. John West about Lewis's prophetic warnings to us about science and scientism. Dr. West discusses what scientism is, what happens when science neglects dee...

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Did God use evolution to create life? On this ID The Future, we’re sharing the second half of a recent conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin that originally aired on the Truthful Hope podcast. Casey is critiquing theistic evolution, the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to create life. In today's episode, he continues by next addressing the inadequacy of natural selection and random mutation to generate biological complexity....

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Some people attempt to reconcile belief in God with the standard evolutionary account of life's origins by combining the two. Theistic evolution is the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to create life. But does this view stand up to scrutiny? Today, Dr. Casey Luskin critiques this perspective in the first half of a conversation that originally aired on the Truthful Hope podcast. The conversation kicks off with some clarit...

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If the phrase "Bayesian calculus" makes you run for the hills, you're not alone! Bayesian logic can sound intimidating at first, but if you give it a little time, you'll understand how useful it can be to evaluate the evidence for design in the natural world. On this ID The Future, Dr. Jonathan McLatchie gives us a beginner's guide to Bayesian thinking and teaches us how it can be used to build a strong cumulative case for intellig...

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Here's an experienced scientist who thinks YOU should have the power to settle the question of design in nature, not the scientific experts. Why? Because the majority of scientific authorities are committed scientific materialists, a view that hinders unbiased scientific inquiry by forbidding explanations outside the material realm. On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his conversation with recently retired bio-sc...

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What you believe about the origin of life and the universe affects everything you do. So it's crucial that you decide for yourself whether the design that's evident in nature is the product of a designer or the outcome of a blind, unguided process. Today on ID The Future, retired bioscientist Dr. Michael Kent explains how we can take back important scientific decisions that belong to us and not to a scientific elite largely guided ...

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Is the world a good place? Is truth relative? Can beauty be defined? On this episode of ID the Future from the archive, host David Klinghoffer speaks with Dr. Ann Gauger, Director of Science Communication and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, about her article “The Transcendental Treasury of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” at Science & Culture Today. These abstract concepts don’t derive from ...

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In 1984, three scientists dared to probe the mystery of life's origin by putting the prevailing theories of prebiotic and chemical evolution to the test. One of those men was engineer Walter Bradley. Today, Dr. Robert J. Marks joins host Andrew McDiarmid to share some of his personal anecdotes and professional insights about Dr. Bradley, a scientist, humanitarian, and trailblazer in the world of intelligent design who passed away t...

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Every day your body must solve hundreds of hard engineering problems simultaneously, or else you’ll die. These problems involve multiple coordinated, integrated systems that have to come online, not gradually, but all at once and at just the right time and place. Can an evolutionary process explain the development of these systems? You be the judge. On today's ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid welcomes Steve Laufmann, co-author ...

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Experiments on the living unborn. Organ harvesting. Reckless biotech. Radical environmentalism. These are not horror stories playing at your local movie theater. They're playing out in labs, hospitals, and institutes across America. On this episode of ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid speaks with bioethicist Wesley J. Smith about frightening abuses of science being done in the name of progress. In this unnerving exchange, Smit...

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For decades, British professor and author Neil Thomas was a card-carrying Darwinist. It wasn't until after he retired from academia that he had the repose to think about things objectively. Then one day, in a scientific flash of inspiration, he came to the conclusion that the standard Darwinian story was "rubbish." In the second half of a conversation with Andrew McDiarmid, Thomas continues to explain why Darwinism fails as an adeq...

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It might surprise you to learn that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection did not triumph on purely scientific grounds. There are other reasons beyond empirical science that gave it broad acceptance and enduring popularity. On today's ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid unpacks those reasons as he begins a conversation with professor emeritus and author Neil Thomas about his new book False Messiah: Darwinism As...

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When one person stands up to lies or oppression, others can become emboldened to do the same. On this classic episode of ID the Future, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses his article about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, penned the short essay "Live Not By Lies" in 1974, just before he was arrested and exiled from Russia. It was his advice, or even s...

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