Charles Thaxton

Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

Charles Thaxton received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Iowa State University. He completed two post-doctoral programs, one in history of science at Harvard University and the second in the molecular biology laboratories of Brandeis University.

He has specialized in the origin of life and in science’s relationship with Christianity through history.

He is co-author of The Mystery of Life’s Origin and also The Soul of Science. He is Academic Editor of the high school biology book Of Pandas and People. He has contributed significant chapters to the books God and Culture and The Creation Hypothesis.

He has published technical articles in Journal of Inorganic Chemistry, Journal of Scientific Instruments, and Journal of Cell Biology.

He has lectured widely in American universities including Princeton University, Yale University, University of Michigan, University of Delaware, Rice University, Texas Universtiy, Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University, and Harvard Law School.

He has lectured outside the country at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science, the Russian Academy of Science, and in various universities in Mongolia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia.

He has held appointments at Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, the Biomathematical Institute in Craiova, Romania, and at Charles University in Prague, where he was a Templeton scholar in the department of natural sciences.

He is a member of American Chemical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Fellow of American Institute of Chemistry, American Scientific Affiliation, and Discovery Institute.

He and his wife Carole homeschooled two sons, both of whom are college graduates. He is a survivor of two bouts of cancer, which left him with one leg and one lung. He and his wife reside near Atlanta, Georgia, where they teach homeschooled teens at Konos Academy. He also is writing two books, punctuated by speaking stints.

Archives

Crisis in the Chemistry of Origins

The impressive complexities of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biological molecules are presently developed in nature only in living things.

Charles Thaxton on The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Then and Now

On this episode of ID the Future, Robert J. Marks interviews chemist Charles Thaxton about a seminal 1984 book he co-authored, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, foundational to the intelligent design movement, and a later project, Of Pandas and People. The main body of Mystery was generally praised, Thaxton explains. It was the epilogue that proved controversial. There the three authors reviewed five proposed explanations for life’s origins and suggested that the best explanation was that the first life originated through an act of creative intelligence. The Mystery of Life’s Origin is now being re-released in an updated and greatly expanded version, with new contributions by Stephen Meyer, James Tour, and others.

The Mystery of Life’s Origin: An Interview with Dr. Charles Thaxton, Part Two 

This episode of ID the Future features part two of an interview with Dr. Charles Thaxton, one of the first intelligent design scientists in the modern ID movement. Critics of intelligent design often try to frame ID as a political response to court rulings striking down the teaching of creationism. Today origin of life theorist and chemist Charles Thaxton tells the true history of intelligent design as a modern scientific movement fueled by new discoveries and critical examination of the evidence by open minds. Listen in as Dr. Thaxton explains what led him to ID and tells the story behind Of Pandas and People, the textbook that so disturbed Eugenie Scott because “it looks legitimate!” Charles Thaxton is a member of the American Chemical Society, the American

The Mystery of Life’s Origin: An Interview with Dr. Charles Thaxton, Part One

This episode of ID the Future features part one of an interview by Casey Luskin with CSC Fellow Charles Thaxton, co-author of The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984), a foundational work for the intelligent design movement. Listen in as Dr. Thaxton takes us back to the first stirrings of the modern intelligent design movement and discusses the chemical challenge to naturalistic origin of life theories. Charles Thaxton is a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Scientific Affiliation and a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemistry.