intelligent design
After the Discovery Institute staff Christmas lunch last week, Stephen Meyer sat down with me for a quick video discussion of an extensive research project that, until now, has been deliberately kept from public. It's Intelligent Design 3.0, an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly but, instead, to use design insights to open up avenues for new scientific discoveries. It is being supported by the Center for Science & Culture, thanks to the generosity of our donors:



Dr. Meyer introduces ID 3.0 by telling the remarkable story of how he first got to know German paleontologist Günter Bechly, formerly of the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, but expelled after Bechly came out as an ID proponent. Dr. Bechly is now leading the charge with an ID 3.0 research initiative, teamed with population geneticist Ola Hössjer and biologists Richard Sternberg and Ann Gauger. Meyer explains more.

Bechly, Sternberg, and Gauger, in being affiliated with Discovery Institute, are free to pursue their research interests without fear of the censors. That's not true of most of the senior and younger scientists in the ID 3.0 program. (How Professor Hössjer manages at Stockholm University, for one, I'm not quite sure.) In fact, the same day that Steve and I recorded this message, we recorded a second video about another project in the same research portfolio — a really cool and quite important one. However, the sober decision was made to hold this news back, for now. Darwinists will do whatever they can to punish university researchers who take an independent view of biological origins. It was better not to take that chance — again, for now.

Dr. Meyer appeals here for your generous support of these efforts. Why? Because seeing the day when the work we support can be discussed openly cannot come soon enough. We'll someday reach the tipping point: that is, where enough scientists have come forward as Darwin skeptics, and enough evidence entered in our record of publications, demonstrating the value of design thinking as a framework for new discoveries, that a whole scientific paradigm will shift. Those skeptical scientists who have waited for the day will drop the cloak of secrecy. The materialist Darwinian story that scientists, educators, and media spokesmen have been telling themselves, and telling everyone else, will lose its power to compel belief.

Such things happen with a startling rapidity, when the time is right. As we know from the history of science, they have done so in the past. You can hasten that time with your gift now to advance Intelligent Design 3.0!


Comment: Meyer also lists the number of advances in ID research that have been pushing the tipping point towards greater understanding...


The other day Steve Meyer and I sat down to review the year's accomplishments by Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture. It's pretty amazing. As our Discovery colleague Rob Crowther pointed out, there were things Meyer talked about that neither Rob nor I had heard about before. Take a look at this:

How Discovery's scientists and scholars manage to do it all is a wonder. I'm not going to try to name any portion of them, lest I forget someone. But surely our leadership at DI should be singled out: Steve Buri, Bruce Chapman, Steve Meyer, and John West. We are going to be enjoying a staff appreciation lunch today, and at these events I always feel it's our leaders who get shortchanged on the appreciation. So let me say that while Discovery accomplishes a huge amount on a modest budget, this is primarily because of the focus, inspiration, and hard work supplied by the four gentlemen mentioned above.

I hope you will take the opportunity right now to add your own part to next year's work. Here on my desk, I'm looking at a printed overview of 2020, and it will be a tremendous year, with new books by Meyer, Denton, Behe, and others, major conferences, ID Education Day, the Summer Seminar, new video releases, our own work at Evolution News, the daily voice of the intelligent design movement, and more. Some of these things I'm not able to reveal at the moment, but you will see.

Your Life in Your Hands

We are reaching people in a big way. That's the case whether you're talking about the young woman on the video crew at the 2019 Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, who wept — not just felt intellectually stimulated or merely enjoyed herself — but wept in relief when she heard Stephen Meyer and Eric Metaxas discussing evidence for design in the origins of the cosmos and of biology; or whether you're talking about the prominent Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, who publicly disavowed Darwinian theory this year, causing a great stir, having come to appreciate the arguments and evidence advanced by Meyer and David Berlinski. Brave man. As Gelernter has said of Darwinism, "You take your life in your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you if you challenge it."

A Tipping Point

Yes, that is true. Or at least they will try. Those scientists who have signed the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism list (their number topped 1,000 back in February) know the risk they are taking with their careers and livelihood. It would be so much easier to go along with the Darwinian establishment and avoid the attention of the enforcers! Be good yes-men, and good yes-women, for Darwin!

Other evolution skeptics, more careful or more vulnerable than the open doubters, are keeping quiet, unknown to others in their science department or on their university campus. Some of them are graduates of our Summer Seminar. As I have written before, for every scientist ready to go public, there is some large multiplier of others who are waiting for the right time. When will it come?

Your gift represents the possibility of advancing that time, bringing it closer to tomorrow. I'm talking about a tipping point. At some moment in the future, enough prominent scholars will have come forward as David Gelernter did this year, that others will take courage and step up and speak. Then the illusion of the Darwinist "consensus" will blow away. Please help us make that happen — happen soon — by giving to the Center for Science & Culture now!