Jonathan Witt

Executive Editor, Discovery Institute Press and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

Jonathan Witt, PhD, is Executive Editor of Discovery Institute Press and a senior fellow and senior project manager with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His latest book is Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design (DI Press, 2018) written with Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola. Witt also authored Intelligent Design Uncensored (IVP, 2010) with William Dembski, and A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature (IVP, 2006) with Benjamin Wiker.

He is also the author of The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot (Ignatius, 2014), written with Jay Richards.

Witt is also the lead writer and associate producer for Poverty, Inc., winner of the $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award and recipient of over 50 international film festival honors.

He also scripted three other documentaries that aired widely on PBS and were translated into multiple languages for airing in countries around the globe: The Privileged Planet (written with Lad Allen), The Birth of Freedom, and The Call of the Entrepreneur.

Additionally, he scripted two Acton Media DVD curricula carried by Zondervan, including Effective Stewardship, and he served as the lead writer for The PovertyCure DVD Series and the PovertyCure initiative, which includes a content-rich website, more than a million Facebook followers, and a network of 400+ poverty-fighting organizations from around the world.

Witt also has provided editing or deep editing work for several successful books, including three New York Times bestsellers.

Before returning to work full time again with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, Witt served as the managing editor for the news and commentary site The Stream, and as a research fellow for the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Witt’s academic essays have appeared in such periodicals as Touchstone, Crisis Magazine, Philosophia Christi, The Princeton Theological Review, The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, and Oxford’s Literature and Theology. His opinion pieces have appeared in The Seattle Times, The Kansas City Star, Science & Theology News, Breakpoint, The Stream, The American Spectator, The Imaginative Conservative and The Federalist.

Also, Witt has been interviewed by numerous regional and national radio programs, including Janet Parshall’s America, Janet Parshall’s In the Market, Hank Hanegraaff’s Bible Answer Man, Janet Mefferd of the Salem Radio Network, and Family News in Focus. He is a regular annual speaker for Discovery Institute’s summer seminar on science and culture and has spoken at universities on a range of topics connected to political and economic freedom, cultural renewal, and the arts.

Witt previously served as a tenured professor of literature and writing at Lubbock Christian University. He has a Ph.D., with honors, in English and Literary Theory from the University of Kansas.

Archives

Janet Parshall and Jonathan Witt Talk Scientific Heretics

Jonathan Witt
July 25, 2018
Today’s episode of ID the Future features “In the Market” radio host Janet Parshall interviewing Center for Science and Culture senior fellow Jonathan Witt, co-author of the recent book Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design. Witt and Parshall discuss the book Heretic, some brave anti-Darwin heretics, and a recent scholarly study claiming to show that greater science education and science literacy encourages acceptance of evolution. Witt highlights what he sees as some glaring problems in the study’s survey, and in the way Darwinian evolution is normally taught.

Intelligent Design is Testable

Jonathan Witt
July 31, 2017
On this episode of ID: The Future, CSC Fellow Jonathan Witt explains how Intelligent Design is testable, contrary to the objections of critics. He discusses predictions from biology and astrobiology, and points listeners to an extended list of testable ID predictions available online.

Did ‘Social Business’ Sink the Cardboard Bike?

Jonathan Witt
June 9, 2014
A sturdy bicycle built of recycled cardboard and sold to the world’s poor for $20 apiece? This story broke in 2012, complete with a YouTube video of inventor Izhar Gafni toodling around his Israeli settlement town on a beautiful white prototype, the cardboard rendered surprisingly strong through an innovative combination of origami-style folds, glue, and varnish. But two years later, Read More ›

Doctors Disappear

The Unaffordable Care Act comes through.
Jonathan Witt
December 5, 2013
A curious feature of recent U.S. health care reform efforts — easily overlooked amidst the daily media grind of canceled plans, crashing websites and new restrictions — is the irrational belief that we can extend more health care to more Americans while rendering a career as a family physician increasingly unappealing. Government has grown increasingly entangled in healthcare markets, complicating Read More ›

Crime and the Nanny State

Jonathan Witt
April 10, 2013
Crime has been in decline — but current government policies are bound to reverse this trend. Against the backdrop of sluggish growth and high unemployment, one bright spot has been declining crime rates, with levels in the United States now about half what they were 20 years ago. This gradual decline holds true even in the perennially high-risk demographic of Read More ›

Social Muddle

Business, justice, and the Gospel are already social.
Jonathan Witt
December 2, 2011
The adjective that economist Friedrich Hayek famously called a “weasel word” is alive and well in the feel-good phrases social business, social justice and the social gospel. In all three of these phrases, the common weasel word sucks some of the essential meaning out of what it modifies by implying that business, justice, and the Christian Gospel are a-social, or even anti-social, until conjoined Read More ›

Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the Controversy

William A. Dembski
June 28, 2010

There are other good books out there that explain the fundamentals of intelligent design (ID) in plain language. But with clarity, elegance, and accuracy, Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the Controversy fills this niche better than most. The authors, Dr. William Dembski (an expert in the technical arguments for ID) and Dr. Jonathan Witt (a writer with a strong grasp of the relevant science) — both Discovery Institute senior fellows — make an ideal team to explain ID for any reader.

Intelligent Design Uncensored

Jonathan Witt
June 22, 2010
In this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards interviews Jonathan Witt about Witt's new book, co-authored with William Dembski, titled Intelligent Design Uncensored.

Bernanke Versus the Austrians

Jonathan Witt
December 7, 2009
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced Wednesday that he is stepping into the path of Ben Bernanke’s nomination to a second term as Federal Reserve chairman. If Sanders sticks to his guns, Bernanke’s supporters will need 60 Senate votes to confirm the nomination. Good for Sanders. We need a robust Senate debate about Bernanke’s policies, since they helped to create the Read More ›

Muddling the Manhattan Declaration

The Need for Firm Foundations
Jonathan Witt
November 27, 2009
The way the New York Times tells it, the Christian leaders behind the Manhattan Declaration have declared same sex couples un-persons. Laurie Goodstein writes: Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to Read More ›

The Mr. Potato Head Constitution

Jonathan Witt
June 4, 2009
As Senate hearings gear up for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, an old question is again current: Is the U.S. Constitution a “living document”? Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes first popularized the idea of the Constitution as protean organism in a 1920 Supreme Court case, Missouri v. Holland. There he argued that judges should have broad interpretative latitude in their efforts Read More ›

A Meaningful World: An Interview with Jonathan Witt

Jonathan Witt
August 18, 2006
A Meaningful World: How the Arts And Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature By Benjamin Wiker & Jonathan Witt Publisher: InterVarsity Press In this podcast CSC fellow Jonathan Witt talks about his new book A Meaningful World which challenges the philosophy of materialism by exploring the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the artistry of ordinary substances like carbon and water, the intricacy of biological organisms, and the drama of scientific enterprise itself. In contrast to contemporary claims that the world is ultimately meaningless, Witt and co-author and CSC fellow Benjamin Wiker reveal a cosmos charged with both meaning and purpose. To learn more about the book and read excerpts go to: www.ameaningfulworld.com