In our culture, the old have failed the young. Hate-driven shootings in schools and houses of worship, rising suicide and addiction rates — these are the most dramatic indications. But a quieter sense of numbness and despair, concealed in mindless social media and the omnipresent screens, is far more widespread.
What Lies Behind It All?
Questions about biological origins are NOT of merely scientific importance. These questions go to the heart of how we think about the value of individual human beings. Increasingly evident is the relationship between noxious racial theories, devaluing or demonizing whole classes of men and women, and the philosophy of scientific materialism.
As the news hammers home to us, young people are especially vulnerable to poisonous, Internet-mediated messages. That’s one reason Discovery Institute has teamed up with a gifted cinematographer who wanted to create a new video series, Science Uprising, that would be relevant to viewers in their thirties and younger.
Science Uprising is premised on the idea that a majority of us share a skepticism about the claims of materialism — the claims that people are just “robots made of meat, with a really sophisticated onboard guidance system,” lacking souls, lacking free will or moral responsibility, having emerged from the ancient mud without purpose or guidance.
And yet, however skeptical we may be, the media labor intensively to correct our skepticism. Popular science spokesmen like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson insist that people are anything but designed children of a loving, intelligent creator.
Each episode features a masked narrator. Why? Because much of the burden of resisting materialism falls to scientists and others in the universities who have been made to fear speaking out in favor of the design hypothesis.
Scientists and scholars who have spoken out, pulling the mask off materialist mythology, share the truth with viewers. From episode to episode, they include chemist James Tour, philosopher Jay Richards, neuroscientist Michael Egnor, biochemist Michael Behe, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, physicist Frank Tipler, and others.
