[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a Podcast about Evolution.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: And Intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker C: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution. My name is Kate Kavanaugh and I serve on the Education and Outreach team here at the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. I'll be your host for today's episode at the center for Science and Culture. We love connecting teachers and students with ID resources and encouraging them to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Recently we heard from Jill, a high school science teacher in North Carolina and CSC Summer Seminar alumnus who brought Intelligent Design to her classroom using the Discovering Intelligent Design curriculum written by Hallie Kemper, Gary Kemper and Casey Luskin.
In this episode, I will be interviewing Jill and her students about their experience with the curriculum and their thoughts on Intelligent design.
Jill attended our 2023 CSE Summer Seminar program where she learned in depth about the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design.
Inspired to bring what she learned to her students, she used the Discovering Intelligent Design textbook with her biology class.
Before we jump into the interview, I want to share with our listeners some of the education and outreach initiatives we do here, namely our Summer Seminar program and our curriculum.
Our Summer Seminar program was launched in 2007 and to date has hosted hundreds of students and professionals from across the United States and world. Historically, the program offers two seminars, the Seminar on Intelligent Design in the Natural sciences in the C.S. lewis Fellows Program on Science and Society.
The program is offered through a self paced online course and for us participants it culminates with a week of in person seminars at a beautiful conference center in Colorado. I was fortunate enough to attend the program this past summer and it is intellectually transformative if you are an upper division undergraduate student, a graduate student, scientist, teacher, pastor, or other professional interested in exploring a wide range of questions related to the origin of the universe and life. Applications for the 2025 program will open January 1st.
To learn more about the Summer Seminar program, go to discovery.org id summer seminars.
Jill was a participant in the program and it was there that she learned about our curriculum.
The Discovering Intelligent Design curriculum is designed for middle school aged children to adults and presents both the biological and cosmological evidence in support of Intelligent design. It allows young people to critically analyze the arguments in the debate over evolution and Intelligent Design and it encourages them to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. The textbook is packed with good science, yet explained in an engaging and understandable way. One of my favorite features of the textbook are the discussion questions at the end of every chapter which really help you to evaluate and solidify what you have learned. These are great for class discussions. The curriculum offers a textbook, a workbook with learning activities, and a DVD with video clips keyed to the content of the textbook. You can purchase any of these individually or altogether on our website.
And please note that the curriculum is not restricted to teachers in the classroom alone. If you lead a roots group or intelligent design group, this is a great resource to use to teach id.
To learn more about the curriculum or to purchase it, you can go to Discovering Design.
I do want to note that Discovery Institute does not recommend using this textbook in public schools. In fact, this is stated in the introduction of the textbook on page 10 that quote, this supplemental textbook is not intended for use in public schools. ID is a scientific theory and is not religiously based, but we live in a highly charged political climate that is often hostile to id. End quote. And you can learn more about the reasons for why we don't encourage its use in the public schools on page 1011 of the textbook. But Jill is a great teacher at a Christian school in North Carolina. With that, let's meet Jill and her students.
[00:04:33] Speaker D: Well, hi Jill and students. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy school day to be with us on the podcast. It's really a pleasure to have you here today. I'd like to start off talking with you, Jill, and I'm just curious to learn more about yourself, your teaching background, and the classes you teach now.
[00:04:52] Speaker E: I've taught for over 20 years. I'm a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where I studied biology and English and I have a master's degree in religion from Southern Evangelical. And I've taught in both public and private schools. And right now I'm teaching at Christian Academy. And it's been wonderful because I can really teach what's true as far as what I believe is true as far as evolution and intelligent design. And it's been awesome to be able to give my students both sides. So if they were just in the public school, they would only learn the evolution side and they wouldn't be taught to think critically or see what are any of the possible negatives. And then so ID provides a really nice counterpoint so they can see both sides and decide for themselves what makes more sense. And for me it's, it's kind of personal because I went, I was studying biology in college and I got in a debate with one of my biology professors about evolution and he was like, what do you think this is a conspiracy? And just the idea that evolution wasn't true was Just there's no questioning it.
[00:05:52] Speaker D: And it.
[00:05:52] Speaker E: So it shook me up for a while. And so it was studying intelligent design and finding it through a friend intelligent design book. It kind of helped me feel more centered in what I believed, and so I didn't have to just accept the evolution that was taught. So I want to help reach my students in high school before they go off to college so they have a framework to evaluate all these ideas that they're getting and to think critically about it.
[00:06:16] Speaker D: I taught high school science for a bit and really admire teachers who genuinely care about and are intentional about teaching their students how to think and not just what. What to think and equipping them with critical thinking skills, like you said, rather than just letting them accept something is true because, you know, you've always been told it's true. So could you tell us about your experience at the summer seminar program and how did it prepare you to bring ID to your classroom?
[00:06:49] Speaker E: Sure, yeah. I had a friend who went to it first and she told me about it and. And I knew I wanted to teach science in some way, and I thought I was going to be teaching my son's middle school biology class and I just wanted to learn. I mean, I've been reading some of the intelligent design books. I read a little bit of Denton's book, and then I found Michael Behe and all the rest.
But I hadn't really had the time to focus just on that. So it was nice. It was a very rigorous preparation with all the readings and the classwork first and then getting to come and meet the professors like Dr. Stephen Meyer. Like, he sat and talked to me for half an hour and it was really cool. He signed my book and everything. But it's just people to talk to the people and see that there's rigor behind this. This is not just people slapping something together. These are real scientists. These are real people with PhDs. And it answered a lot of questions I'd had since college and some of the little doubts jangling around in my mind to kind of put those to rest. So help me be more excited about science and to see how cool it is to view it through that paradigm and also helped me in my faith as well, because I think the design argument is one of the best and most intuitive and kind of readily available arguments, but it's been kind of obscured by evolution. So to make that clear is really cool.
[00:08:05] Speaker D: I attended this past summer's program, and you really do get to hear from so many of the leading experts in id, from many different fields, physics, biochemistry, astronomy. Really are able to study the evidence for ID across these areas.
There were several teachers in my program, like you, who were just so excited to bring ID to their classroom after the week was over, because the evidence is overwhelming and it's a tragedy that so many students, even in private schools, are not taught or even introduced to this.
[00:08:41] Speaker E: Yeah. Another thing really cool about the seminar was meeting all the people from different walks of life. I mean, you had college students, you know, and people with their PhDs and everywhere in between and just. And other teachers. And that was really neat just to. Because you feel like you're going back to college, where you have time to just sit at lunch and dinner and just talk through it. To have people to, like, nerd out with and talk to about all the ID stuff is really cool.
[00:09:01] Speaker D: Oh, absolutely.
[00:09:02] Speaker E: As well.
[00:09:03] Speaker D: That was one of my favorite parts too. Yeah.
[00:09:05] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:09:06] Speaker D: So I know one of the takeaways from the summer seminar program for you was learning about the Discovering Intelligent Design curriculum. And bringing that to your classroom is a great curriculum, but I know as a teacher, it could be very difficult to fit any more material into an already packed schedule. So how did you implement this curriculum and teach Intelligent Design in your classroom? And could you share maybe some of the activities or assignments you did with your class?
[00:09:36] Speaker E: Sure, yeah. So I kind of do like, Intelligent Design and evolution crash course at the beginning where we do some of the first several chapters. This is kind of lay the groundwork.
And then we jump to the chapter on the bacterial flagellum with behe and the irreducible complexity. So I introduced like, specified complexity first. And then we see all about Darwin and all about Alfred Russell Wallace and, you know, and that. That's kind of our. Our father. I was like, they have an old dude. So do we, right? And a guy from way back in the day. He's our poster child. So. So seeing that these different ideas have been around for a while and kind of showing some of the history. And then we also look at the units where, you know, did the universe as a whole begin to exist? You know, just randomly or, you know, some of the evidence from the big bang that that couldn't have happened by chance and some of the fine tuning. So it kind of gives it that framework. So when we study in the biological world, it makes sense. And then what I do is, as I teach each chapter in our biology textbook, I'll bring in the corresponding chapters. So, like, right now I'm teaching my 10th graders, and I teach the 10th grade biology and then 12th grade anatomy. And so with my 10th graders, we're doing basically biochemistry and so and introducing D DNA and all that stuff. So when we're done with this, this unit, I'll bring in the unit from the ID book from Discovering Intelligent Design on DNA and we'll talk about Stephen Meyer's thing about all the specified complexity that's in DNA and how can you have information come about without an intelligent agent. Right. And then we'll do the chapter on how do you go from non life to life right before we start studying the cell. So we'll just kind of bring it in through the year and then later in the years we study the different animals in zoology, we'll bring in the fossil stuff, we'll bring in the, you know, our. Did we come from apes? You know, that. That kind of thing. And then I'll integrate like the human zoos video with that. And I find that, I know that impacted my students a lot when they saw not only is evolution problematic as a scientific theory for explaining life, but look at all these things it's led to. How can it lead to racism and human zoos? That's really very impactful. And then we also, at the beginning, when I'm introducing it, I'll. I do this butterfly thing where we go from butter butterfly caterpillars all the way to butterfly. And we study the whole life cyc. And then we watched the metamorphosis video that the Discovery Institute has put out about the intelligent design in a caterpillar pillar and how it liquefies in the cocoon and how do you rebuild? And there's only. You have certain cells that have to stay the same to rebuild in the butterfly, but everything else is liquid. How do you build that without some kind of plan behind that? So I try to like illustrate, you know, through nature and through what we're studying the intelligent design. And then at the very end of the year, we go to the zoo. And there's a zoo near here where we can observe animals. And so I have them study a certain animal and so we can see, you know, how could that animal come about a random evolution? How do we have all the diversity that we have and all the complexity of life if it just randomly evolved?
[00:12:38] Speaker D: Oh, wow. Jill, you. Your class sounds amazing. I wish I had taken it in high school.
What fabulous ideas for teachers in our audience. And I love that you raise caterpillars into butterflies and then you watch the metamorphosis movie. It's such a great way to demonstrate irreducible complexity.
[00:12:59] Speaker E: Every little thing has to be right or it doesn't work. So that's. It's really neat. And then once you teach it and once you see it, see the design inference, like everything else I teach the rest of the year is an illustration and we talk about it. Could this evolve? Does it. Does design make more sense? And it's really cool. Once you kind of open your eyes, are open to it, you see it everywhere.
[00:13:16] Speaker D: Well, that's great. Thank you so much. Now, I would love to hear from your students directly about their thoughts on the textbook and intelligent Design.
First off, thank you guys again for taking time out of your lunch break to be on the podcast. So wonderful to speak with you all today. Could a few students share their thoughts on the textbook Discovering Intelligent Design? What were some things you really appreciated and found helpful or fun?
[00:13:43] Speaker F: Okay, so I'm Lilia. The question about the textbook, I thought it was really. The textbook was really helpful when learning about this because it made the evidence. There was so much evidence about intelligent design, and there was so much to go off of, and it made it super easy to, like, understand and to reference. Yeah, I just. I just felt like there was so much evidence in it, and there was just no way you could think that Intelligent Design wasn't real because of how much truth was in the book.
[00:14:13] Speaker G: My name is Ellie, and I really enjoyed Discovering Intelligent Design, the textbook, because I was able to learn about the scientific evidence for intelligent design, but also at the same time, learn about the contrasting theory of evolution, like, what it is and why it didn't make sense to me. And I was actually able to understand this text more than others just because it was written for high schoolers, which was very helpful.
[00:14:35] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:14:35] Speaker G: And it gives a great overview of the current debate between, like, ID and evolution. And they point out why it is valid explanation without, like, resorting to attacking other people's beliefs and views, which I thought was refreshing. And there was a lot of evidence, but on every page, supporting id, which helped me understand the facts behind the claims. And it also gave evidence to show why evolution is not the answer to the beginnings. So great.
[00:15:01] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Charles, and I really enjoyed the textbook because, well, it showed you both arguments, as they said, and the evidence it gave was very substantial. And one example of that for me, and it made it so simple, like something so complex. It made it seem so simple, like the bacterial flagellum. The way it described it as like a motor. It really, like, it showed the design that it had because, like, Humans made motors and there's pretty much like a motor inside our cells. That was one thing that was really awesome to me.
[00:15:31] Speaker D: That's great to hear. Wow, I'm so happy to hear that you guys found the science itself to be comprehendable and just within reach. Because I think with science you can really get caught up in the details and the terminology might be unfamiliar, but it sounds like you guys really appreciated that it was just understandable. Okay, could someone share with our listeners what you were asked to do for your final paper assignment?
[00:15:59] Speaker H: I'm Renella, and for our final paper, our instructions were to write an essay on whether intelligent design or evolution better explains the origin, complexity and diversity of life on Earth. We were also asked to provide the best pieces of evidence and counterarguments to each and then evaluate which one better presents the explanation.
[00:16:22] Speaker D: Just so our listeners know, Jill sent me the papers and I was able to read and review them and I was absolutely blown away at the critical thinking skills used by the students and the in depth research that was done to support their arguments. Could a few students share what your thesis or conclusion for the paper was and share one argument or counter argument that you use to support your conclusion?
[00:16:47] Speaker H: Okay, I'm Leia. So my whole goal with the paper was I really wanted to provide sufficient evidence for why IDE better provides an explanation for the complexity of this world. And I mainly wanted to look into evidence for evolution and prove why it is not a valid argument. Yeah, so one of the arguments I looked into was antibiotic resistance. And evolution tends to like keep this argument for themselves. But I feel like within my paper I was able to explain why it can be also used for intelligent design and it's not necessarily a valid argument for evolution.
[00:17:21] Speaker D: Oh, interesting. That's great. Yeah.
[00:17:24] Speaker I: Hi, I'm Liam and I thought that evolution was very much based on outdated facts and discoveries. And one of my arguments that I had, so I'm a computer nerd and I asked the question, how does intelligent life evolve out of nothing? Which it doesn't. Which is why I don't understand how evolutionists can think how we evolved from nothing. But we're intelligent, so how does that intelligence get there? And I said, because of this, evolution does not have enough facts or knowledge to provide for this statement making it wrong.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Lily, and my whole thesis was that even though evolution is tall as fact, it isn't fact. Again, like Liam said, it's based on a lot of outdated evidence and intelligent design is actually rooted in a whole bunch of Scientific evidence and fact. And I just thought that it provides a much better explanation for the origins of the universe, Earth, and life, way more than evolution does. And one of the arguments I put into my paper was that of phylogenetic trees. And these trees are evolutionary trees that they identify relationships between organisms and the characteristics between them, and they essentially link everything back to a common ancestor.
But there's actually a lot of, like, animals that they aren't able to account for in these trees, like the platypus or whales. Whereas in intelligent design, there's a principle called common design that says a designer could apply the same characteristics to multiple organisms. And this makes so much more sense than trying to fit something into an evolutionary tree where there's no link between characteristics. So I thought that was a really good argument for why Intelligent Design is so much better at explaining the origins of the universe and such.
[00:19:23] Speaker D: Yes. Yeah, a better explanation for sure.
[00:19:27] Speaker H: So for my essay, I listed arguments for both sides for evolution and intelligent design, and then provided evidence and then my conclusion, to which one presents more evidence and, like, better explains the history of life. So for id, proposed arguments of fine tuning, the irreducible complexity, the co argument, and the Big Bang theory. And then for evolution, I talked mainly about microevolution and macroevolution. And in my conclusion, I wrote that Intelligent Design makes more sense and is more persuasive as they have more evidence and can explain it better.
[00:20:06] Speaker D: Okay, well done, all of you. These are all great arguments and evidence which support id.
Again, I was able to read your papers and was amazed at the breadth of evidence for ID across subjects that you all use to support your conclusion.
Some of you looked at fossil evidence, some of you, the fine tuning of the universe, DNA replication, microevolution versus macroevolution, irreducible complexity.
And I even recall some students brought in the argument that humans exhibit altruism, that is the phenomenon of sacrificing oneself for another, which is contradictory to Darwinian evolution. Could a few students share how learning about Intelligent Design has impacted the way you study science? Or how has it impacted the way you look at the world around you?
[00:21:01] Speaker B: So the way it's impacted me when I'm studying science is, like, now I'm in chemistry, and chemistry is very complex. It's so confusing. There's so many different elements to it. And, like, the thing is, for me, like, there's all these different. They all fit together so perfectly. Like, we just learned about orbitals of energy. And it's like, it's so complex, it makes your Eyes. Somebody had to have like designed this.
There's so many factors to it. The fact like, it couldn't all just add up.
[00:21:31] Speaker E: Right.
[00:21:31] Speaker D: It could not be the product of random chance. Yes. That's great idea.
[00:21:38] Speaker F: Has impacted me when I look, I look around at the world, like around me, because you look at nature and you just see so many complex organisms and you like, I remember last year.
[00:21:49] Speaker H: I, after we learned about all of.
[00:21:50] Speaker F: The different stuff, like irritable complexity and everything, I would just look out at nature and be like, wow, like there, there's no way that something like as complex as, like humans, ourselves or like in general, like organisms are so complex. And it just is really impactful because of how complex. Like, there's just. You look around you and you just see, like, there's no way that could evolve from anything.
[00:22:16] Speaker D: No way. Yeah, absolutely. It's. It's really hard to believe that people even think that we could have evolved, like, yeah. By random chance. So, yeah, it's. We have the more plausible theory.
[00:22:30] Speaker H: Yeah.
Intelligent design has impacted my study of science because no matter what your opinion is, you have to follow the evidence where it leads. So seeing like evolution, what they have to say about creation and then what we say about creation, you really see the ID really shows us more evidence of what happened and is more plausible. And also looking around at plants and animals and humans and seeing how intricate they really are really opened my eyes.
[00:23:00] Speaker I: So I had a friend who was an evolutionist and we would occasionally debate on what evolution really was. And I'm not really friends with her now, but looking back on her arguments, they were incredibly weak. After studying intelligent design and it really reaffirmed my faith because it really got me. The debates got me thinking, well, is God real? And studying intelligent design just like, wow, God is real, evolution is wrong. And all that jazz. Yeah.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:23:33] Speaker D: Thanks for sharing.
[00:23:35] Speaker H: So I me, when I was younger, I had a neighbor who like, really believed in evolution. And I was kind of stumped on how to like disprove that because I knew he believed that we evolved from monkeys. And I was like, I don't really know how to disprove it, but I did know it was wrong. And so like, now learning about intelligent design, I actually have a scientific argument to back up what I believe in.
[00:23:58] Speaker D: That's great for any of you. Has learning about intelligent design inspired you to want to study science in college or pursue a career in the sciences one day?
[00:24:09] Speaker G: So I found intelligent design very intriguing and interesting and I definitely want to be able to like, learn more and study it at some point. But right now I'm still figuring out what my plans are going to be in college and after college. So right now it's not my plan. But whenever, when I was able to study this last year, kind of like what Liam was saying in Leah, that it's definitely going to help me, especially with like my faith in knowing how to defend like ID and what I believe in.
[00:24:39] Speaker D: That makes total sense. Yeah.
[00:24:42] Speaker H: So yeah, I am definitely interested in studying sciences, especially medicine. I've wanted to do that since I was young. And learning about ID has really like shown me how our Creator makes us so unique. And I personally just want to explore that even deeper to see how ID really plays a role in so many parts of our lives.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: I've always kind of had a passion for science and topics like biology and anatomy have always really fascinated me. But Intelligent design has really opened my eyes to how in depth and how complex these things really are. So they've actually made me want to pursue careers in like biology, genetics, even biochemistry, even more than I once did, just because researching these things is really again affirms the faith and our beliefs. And I just think that careers in those things would really, would just really help me understand how complex everything is and it will show me how incredible the world really is.
[00:25:53] Speaker D: Gives you a deeper purpose, deeper meaning. When you study science, I can't tell you how insightful it is to hear from you all about what you've learned. Jill Students, thank you again for coming on the podcast. Many of us didn't know about ID until after high school, and so I just want to say that you all are really ahead of the game here and the evidence for intelligent design continues to grow. So I hope you all stay connected with Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture and maybe one day some of you will apply to the summer seminar program again. To learn more about the summer seminars, go to discovery.org id summer seminars. To learn more about or to purchase our Discovering Intelligent Design curriculum, go to Discovering Design for ID the Future. I'm Kate Kavanaugh. Thanks for listening.
[00:26:50] Speaker I: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: Center for Science and Culture.
