Episode Details

After last week’s scientific experts cleared up much ID-rhetoric, we ask a rising star in the ID movement — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie — to respond to our reinvigorated questions, concern, and critiques of Intelligent Design

After starting this mini-series with an interview with one leading ID proponent, and then hearing from a number of scientific experts who gave a different perspective on things, we now want to finish this on-going conversation with an interview with another leading ID proponent — a relatively new face — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie. With three graduate degrees in biology and evolutionary biology, he may be a rising leader in that movement. Before the interview, we gave him a list of the anti-ID challenges we’d be raising, so that we could get fully prepared and informed responses to those questions. Here are his answers, and our other points of discussion:

• Challenge #1: for us, ID is still just God-of-the-gaps thinking
• Challenge #2: ID doesn’t explain anything, it just attributes phenomena to an intelligence without saying anything about exactly how that intelligence might have done it. ID proponents often refer to this as an inference to the best explanation, but is it really just an inference to the best attribution?
• Challenge #3: where does the science go after the attribution has been established? Does ID make testable predictions which actually advance scientific knowledge?
• as always happens in discussions with ID proponents, “junk DNA” came up as one of ID’s greatest scientific advances
• Challenge #4: ID proponents often make reference to astronomically huge numbers when refuting evolutionists (“the chances of that happening spontaneously are one in 10 with eighty-nine zeroes behind it“) …. again, this just betrays God-of-the-gaps thinking
• Challenge #5: