With the 250th anniversary of our nation upon us, many are reflecting on the past while also considering the future. What makes America unique? Where is the great American experiment headed? Are our best days behind us? Is America doomed to decline? Despite all America has overcome and achieved in the past, many people hold a pessimistic outlook for our nation’s future.
On this ID The Future from the vault, host David Boze interviews filmmaker Fred Foote, writer and producer of the feature-length drama Alleged, which seeks to tell the real story behind the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which pitched Darwinian evolution against belief in God. After seeing the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, starring Gene Kelly and Spencer Tracy, Foote did his own research into the trial and discovered that Inherit the Wind was highly misleading on many crucial points, an assessment corroborated by the 1997 Pulitzer-prize winning book about the trial, Summer for the Gods. So Foote set out to make another movie that would set the record straight and explore how media can influence, and profoundly distort, society’s view of historical events. Boze and …
Today, guest host Pat Flynn welcomes Dr. J.P. Moreland to the Mind Matters News podcast to discuss which of the main metaphysical theories can best account for the existence of the soul. Moreland argues that the soul is a real, non-physical entity that has consciousness and exists separately from the physical brain. He presents three empirically equivalent theories – strict physicalism, mirror property dualism, and substance dualism – that can all account for the neuroscientific data on consciousness and the self. Moreland advocates for a substance dualist view, which posits that the brain and the soul are distinct entities, with the soul having mental properties like thoughts, sensations, and desires. He sees this metaphysical framework as crucial for grounding important …
The Scopes “Monkey” trial of 1925 has cast a long shadow over the evolution debate in the last century, thanks in large part to the Hollywood film Inherit the Wind, which caricatured the trial and promoted stereotypes that still persist today. On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid continues a conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin about the long history of the Scopes effect in science and how intelligent design has managed to flourish in spite of it. In Part 2, Dr. Luskin explains that even as Scopes stereotypes were crystallizing in the public consciousness, skepticism about the power of Darwin’s selection/mutation mechanism continued to mount, and not just in intelligent design circles. Prominent evolutionary biologists were also voicing concern about the …