If you noticed a copy of Charles Darwin’s famous 19th-century volume On the Origin of Species in someone’s house, what would you think? Perhaps they’re committed materialists. Perhaps they simply admire Darwin’s work as a naturalist. Or perhaps they keep it around as a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific hubris. Either way, you’d want to consider whether their experiences of the world around them matched their scientific worldview. Today on ID the Future, I explore the tenets of scientific materialism to see if they match our observations of the world around us.
I kick things off by reading my recent article about a remarkable family in the Marvel comic universe — the Fantastic Four. A brief cameo for Darwin’s famous book Origin of Species in a post-credits scene of the movie Fantastic Four: First Steps left me wondering: would the experiences of the Fantastic Four better align with Darwinian materialism or intelligent design? I answer this question by providing examples of the Four’s heroism and pointing out the telltale signs that they’re actually living in a universe teeming with intelligent design.
And What About Our World?
Scientific materialism continues to have a strong hold on our culture today, as does the atheism that it fuels. Over the last century and a half, a completely materialistic view of life and the universe has been built up around Darwin’s evolutionary proposal. But in the last century, three crucial scientific discoveries have undermined the claims of scientific materialism and strengthened the argument for intelligent design. Here, I play for you a clip from philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer as he unpacks just one of those scientific discoveries showing that the 19th century science that produced today’s scientific atheism has been eclipsed. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Dig Deeper
- There’s plenty more where this came from in Dr. Meyer ‘s latest book, Return of the God Hypothesis.
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