Jay W. Richards

Senior Fellow at Discovery, Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation

Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is the Director of the DeVos Center and William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute.

Richards is author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012); The Human Advantage; Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; The Hobbit Party with Jonathan Witt; The Privileged Planet with Guillermo Gonzalez, coming out in a second edition in 2024; The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe with Douglas Axe and William Briggs; and Eat, Fast, Feast. His most recent book, with James Robison, is Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.

Richards is also executive producer of several documentaries, including The Call of the Entrepreneur, The Birth of Freedom, and Effective Stewardship (Acton Media and Zondervan, 2009). He has been featured in several television-broadcast documentaries, including The Call of the Entrepreneur, The Case for a Creator, The Wonder of Soil, and The Privileged Planet, based on his book, The Privileged Planet, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez.

Richards' articles and essays have been published in The Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Washington Post, Forbes, National Review Online, Investor's Business Daily, Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Huffington Post, The Federalist, The American Spectator, The Daily Caller, The Imaginative Conservative and many other publications. His topics range from culture, economics, and public policy to natural science, technology, and the environment. He has appeared on many national radio and TV programs, including Larry King Live; and he has lectured worldwide on a variety of subjects, including to Members of the US Congress.

Richards has a Ph.D., with honors, in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. He also has an M.Div. (Master of Divinity), a Th.M. (Master of Theology), and a B.A. with majors in Political Science and Religion. He lives with his family in the Washington DC Metro area.

Archives

Jay Richards on the “Ground Clearing” Work of Jonathan Wells

Jay Richards
June 9, 2025
Before the positive case for intelligent design can be received effectively, the case against the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism must be clearly laid out. One man who was instrumental in this initial "ground clearing operation" was biologist Dr. Jonathan Wells, our friend and colleague who passed away in 2024. On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid welcomes Dr. Jay Richards back to the podcast to share his memories of Dr. Wells and discuss the significance of Wells's life and work.

Jay Richards on New Expanded Edition of The Privileged Planet

Jay Richards
September 2, 2024
In 2004, Dr. Jay Richards and Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez published a bold hypothesis: not only is Planet Earth well-suited for advanced life like ourselves, it's also finely tuned for scientific discovery. Materialists put this down to cosmic coincidence, but the array of evidence Richards and Gonzalez marshal in support of their argument suggests otherwise. On this episode of ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid speaks with Dr. Jay Richards about his work on a revised, rewritten, and updated 20th anniversary edition of The Privileged Planet.

Rarefied Design: The Privileged Planet, 20 Years On

Jay Richards
February 9, 2024
It's a big universe out there. Could life exist on another planet? Maybe, but it's not just the size of the universe that matters, it's also the size of the chasm between non-life and life. On this ID The Future, bestselling author and radio host Michael Medved sits down with philosopher of science Dr. Jay Richards to preview the theme of this year’s Dallas Science and Faith Conference and discuss the arguments of his popular book The Privileged Planet, written 20 years ago with co-author and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez.

Jay Richards on the Art of Answering Theistic Evolutionists

Jay Richards
March 14, 2022
On today’s ID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards offers advices on engaging with evolutionists over the issues of origins, evolution, and intelligent design. In his conversation with host Casey Luskin, he says that if someone tells you he’s a theistic evolutionist, first find out what he means by theism and evolution. The latter term, in particular, can have widely varying meanings, and the average lay persons who see themselves as theistic evolutionists likely see God as actively and creatively working in the history of life to steer evolutionary outcomes, including the origin of humanity. What they may not realize is that such a view takes them well outside the bounds of what academic theistic evolutionists generally mean by the term evolution, particularly those theistic …

Jay Richards Dismantles Carl Sagan’s Passive Theist

Jay Richards
August 9, 2021
On today’s ID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards and host Eric Anderson wrap up their conversation about a video where Carl Sagan plumps for atheism. At one point Sagan suggests that if we give up on the belief in God, then we realize that we’re on our own and instead of waiting around for God to save us, we can roll up our sleeves and save ourselves and our planet. Richards notes that Sagan’s argument involves a strawman view of the Judeo-Christian worldview, which is miles apart from the idea of sitting around doing nothing while waiting for God to save us. As Richards and Anderson discuss, it’s no coincidence that the Christian West invented universities, hospitals, and science. What about hypocritical Christians and relatively virtuous atheists? Richards and Anderson also …

Jay Richards Talks God, Carl Sagan, and Word Games

Jay Richards
August 6, 2021
On today’s ID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards, co-author of The Privileged Planet, continues a conversation with host Eric Anderson about Carl Sagan and a short video clip where Sagan fields questions about God. Sagan points out that there are different conceptions of God, but Jay asks, what’s his point? There are different conceptions of nature. That doesn’t mean that nature isn’t out there and that there aren’t true and false things that can be said about it. Also, when the vast majority of people speak about God, they have in mind a powerful, conscious Creator of nature. Sagan plays definitional games by redefining the meaning of “God.” Listen in to learn how, to what purpose, and to hear what Richards thinks would be a better approach for atheists such as Sagan. …

Jay Richards: Before Carl Sagan Said It, Science Debunked It

Jay Richards
August 2, 2021
On today’s ID the Future, Privileged Planet co-author Jay W. Richards sits down with host Eric Anderson to discuss the gold rush of extrasolar planet discovery and how the Privileged Planet hypothesis has held up since 2004. Richards teases an anniversary edition of The Privileged Planet in the works, and he and Anderson discuss the statement that Carl Sagan is perhaps most famous for. Richards explains how science had already disproven the famous Sagan claim by the time the astronomer first uttered it to millions of viewers in his documentary series Cosmos. …

Is ID Bad Theology? No, but the Objection Is

Jay Richards
February 17, 2021
On this ID the Future philosopher Jay Richards responds to Mark Vernon’s charge that intelligent design is bad theology. No, Richards says, the charge itself is based on bad theology, bad reasoning, and a faulty understanding of both intelligent design theory and theism. First, the theory of intelligent design doesn’t specify the identify of a designer or the specific means of causation. It merely makes an argument to intelligent design as the best explanation for certain features of the natural world. Second, even if it did involve arguing that the designer was God and that God had intervened at particular points in the history of the cosmos, such as in the origin of life or the emergence of human beings, it would hardly be blasphemy. Far from it. It would be orthodox theism, an …

Bingecast: Jay Richards on The Human Advantage

Jay Richards and Larry L. Linenschmidt
May 28, 2020
Will machines take over human jobs? Jay Richards discusses artificial intelligence, virtue, job displacement, and collaboration using technology with Larry L. Linenschmidt. This interview is about Jay’s book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. This interview was originally aired by the Hill Country Institute and is included here in its entirety. This rebroadcast is offered with the permission of Larry L. Linenschmidt and the Hill Country Institute. Other Larry L. Linenschmidt podcasts from the Hill Country Institute are available at HillCountryInstitute.org. We appreciate the permission of the Hill Country Institute to rebroadcast this podcast on Mind Matters. Show Notes 02:24 | Introducing Jay Richards, Research Assistant …

Why Did Americans Agree to a National Lockdown?

Jay W. Richards
April 27, 2020
Americans take our liberty seriously. We have the idea of limited government enshrined in our founding documents. We say we don’t like the Nanny State. So, why did we agree without a fight or a protest to shelter-in-place orders? To a total lockdown? It’s one thing to agree it would be best to work from home and avoid large crowds, or to quarantine people who are sick or at severe risk. It’s another for cities and states to order healthy, low-risk people not to go to work or church, or even to leave their houses, and to arrest them if they don’t comply. States can rightly do this only in the most extreme emergencies. Most Americans have never witnessed this, or anything like it — even in the middle of a hurricane.

New Cosmos Series Preaches the Religion of Materialism

Jay Richards
April 15, 2020
On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Jay Richards interviews science historian Michael Keas about the new Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos television series and its “very impressionistic storytelling.” Starting with an episode titled “Ladder to the Stars,” Cosmos: Possible Worlds weaves a tale of chemical evolution that, according to Keas, fails to engage the tough problems required to build the first self-reproducing biological entity. Keas says it then it moves into a glib explanation for the origin of mind and human intelligence. As Richards and Keas show, evidence takes a back seat to storytelling in both this latest version of Cosmos and in its predecessors. …

Why Does the Vatican Need Microsoft?

Should the Church really partner with IBM and Microsoft to make pronouncements on tech regulation?
Jay Richards
March 22, 2020

When giant corporate actors like IBM and Microsoft promote “transparency and compliance with ethical principles?”, we run the risk that they are helping to craft regulations that hinder future competitors (“regulatory capture”). Rather than partner with them in making statements, the Church should stay clear.

Jay Richards on Eat, Fast, Feast and Human Design

Jay Richards
January 6, 2020
On this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards discusses his new book Eat, Fast, Feast. Fasting is a traditional religious practice “that’s fallen on hard times,” he says. We “graze” instead. But there’s scientific evidence for the value of intermittent fasting: it reduces total calories while upping adrenaline and human growth hormone, and without reducing metabolic rates. All this in addition to the spiritual benefits that have been recognized across cultures for many centuries. There are simplistic “just-so” evolutionary stories in other diet and health books attempting to explain how our bodies became well adapted for intermittent fasting, but he argues that a much better explanation is that we were intelligently designed this way. In his conversation with host Rob …

Will Self-Driving Cars Change Moral Decision-Making?

It’s time to separate science fact from science fiction about self-driving cars
Jay Richards
December 6, 2019

Irish playwright John Waters warns of a time when we might have to grant moral discretion to computer algorithms, just as Christians now grant to the all-knowing but often inscrutable decrees of God. Not likely.