Dr. Jay Richards, philosopher, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and vice president at the Heritage Foundation, has spent his career dismantling one of the most persistent myths in modern culture — that science and Christianity have always been at war. The founders of almost every sub-discipline of modern science, from Copernicus to Kepler to Newton, were either conventional or devout Christians. The warfare narrative was invented in the 19th century, and the evidence has been moving in the opposite direction ever since.

Design, purpose, and the 20th century discoveries that materialism cannot explain: Dr. Richards walks through why the universe having a beginning in the finite past effectively removes materialism from contention as a worldview, how the fine-tuning of the cosmos points to a transcendent creator, and why the moral argument — the simple fact that you know it is always wrong to torture a child for fun, is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence for God that requires no science at all. He also shares his role in The Story of Everything as the philosophical connective tissue between the film's different streams of scientific evidence, and why he believes audiences who watch it will walk away knowing that the 19th century just-so stories of materialism simply do not hold up to scrutiny.

Highlights

• Why the warfare between science and Christianity was always a myth invented in the 19th century
• How the discovery that the universe had a beginning effectively eliminates the materialist worldview from serious contention
• The moral argument for God, why the certainty that torturing a child is wrong points to a personal, holy, transcendent creator
• How Thomas Aquinas' teleological argument maps onto modern intelligent design evidence from DNA, bacterial flagella, and cosmology
• Why Dr. Richards served as the philosophical connective tissue between the scientists featured in The Story of Everything
• His go-to argument depending on the person, scientific for those interested in evidence, moral for those interested in truth
• Why he is agnostic on extraterrestrial life and what Mars and Venus tell us about how narrow the conditions for life actually are

Resources / Links / CTA

• 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaywrichards
• 🎬 The Story of Everything
• 📖 Book: The Privileged Planet
• 🌐 Discovery Institute: https://www.discovery.org
• 🌐 Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org
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