Podcast: Early intelligent design pioneer Charles Thaxton

Here's Part One and here's Part Two of "The Mystery of Life's Origin: An Interview with Dr. Charles Thaxton"

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.

Yes, indeed. I recall him from By Design or by Chance?, where I wrote,

In the early 1980s, a group of English-speaking, mostly Christian, scientists and intellectuals, including Charles
Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Dean Kenyon, would meet to talk about how best to understand the origin and development of life, in view of the new discoveries of barely fathomable complexity. In their view, the old arguments for design were too bound up with an old-fashioned kind of theology that sought to prove that all design was perfect. Still, the "no-design" option was increasingly unbelievable. They began to construct modern arguments for design.

[ ... ]

A complex form of information that we experience in our daily lives, such as a book, is created by an intelligence-ours. Rather than search for a means by which complex information would somehow organize itself by chance, Thaxton, Bradley, and their colleagues decided to assume that the information was not organized by chance, but by a designing intelligence. Apart from that, they would follow the evidence wherever it led.

And do still.

Warning to Darwinbots: Do not listen to the podcast if your brain is full. It isn't really, of course, but you have doubtless spent many thousands of dollars on the type of education that would lead you to believe that it can be full. So you may feel the need to spend the rest of your life defending nonsense. I won't tell you to resist. You should, of course, but I won't tell you to.