IDEA Man

A Conversation with Casey Luskin

Casey Luskin serves as Associate Director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, where he oversees the ID 3.0 Research Program and assists and defends scientists, educators, and students who seek to freely study, research, and teach about the scientific debate over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design (ID). As a PhD scientist and an attorney, he brings a unique perspective to this debate.

You studied evolution extensively at a state university. How did you become an advocate of intelligent design?

As an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), I took lots of courses in evolution. I wanted to understand the evolutionary viewpoint. We would learn about the complexity of the cell and the amazing diversity of living organisms. But we would never get adequate or clear evolutionary explanations for how these complex living features arose. I would sit there thinking, Yes, they can show me pictures of the vertebrate limb, or talk about this similarity and that similarity, but how do these structures actually evolve? That was never discussed.

In my freshman brain, I was trying to work this out. I would have fun late-night dorm conversations with friends of all different backgrounds and worldviews. At the end of my freshman year, one dorm friend suggested I read Darwin’s Black Box, by Michael Behe, which had come out the previous year. I felt like Behe was putting into words the challenges and questions that my freshman brain was trying to articulate. With his idea of irreducible complexity, Behe identified the core problem with Darwinian evolution: Multiple parts are necessary for many complex biological features to function, but how could you evolve these features in a step-by-step Darwinian manner if a single missing part rendered them non-functional? Behe explained the answer: you couldn’t.

As college progressed, I read more ID books and articles. I discovered that there was this fascinating debate between ID and mainstream evolutionary biology. The ID literature was engaging with it at a high level, and pro-ID scientists were well-informed about what the other “camp” was saying. I couldn’t say the same for my professors. My courses would only discuss the pro-evolution view and usually ignored the debate over intelligent design.

But at the end of my junior year, there was a one-unit seminar offered on evolution and ID, taught by a Christian professor at the UCSD medical school. I jumped at the chance to take a class that would finally cover this debate. The seminar brought in the influential early-ID author Phillip Johnson to teach a lecture and speak to the campus. There was a huge turnout for Johnson’s presentation, and I began organizing post-lecture discussion groups for people who wanted to talk further. It was super fun, and it was clear other people felt like me—eager to have conversations about origins, but without a good avenue for doing so. Our discussion groups attracted undergraduates, graduate students, even faculty; participants spanned the worldview spectrum—atheists, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews—everyone. We were having a great time, so some friends and I decided to start a student club—the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness, or IDEA Club.

Our club had a website, which soon accumulated multiple articles about ID. This was the early days of Google and at one point we were the top hit for searches on “Intelligent Design.” While I was working on my master’s degree, we were contacted by a New York Times reporter. I was interviewed, and amazingly our student club got mentioned in a Sunday front page New York Times story on ID. We started hearing from folks around the country saying, “We found your IDEA club online. How can I start one at my school?” So some club members and I started a nonprofit to help students start similar clubs on their own university and high school campuses. We called it the IDEA Center. I took a year off from school to get the IDEA Center off the ground and then ran it out of my little apartment for three years during law school.

After law school, my plan was to practice environmental law, but Discovery Institute contacted me and basically said, “Casey, we need a young attorney to work long hours for low pay traveling around the country talking to teachers and school board members about how to teach evolution objectively without getting into legal trouble.” At the time I was young, single, and looking for a job. Plus, this sounded fun! So I moved to Seattle, and here I am 20 years later still involved with Discovery Institute and ID.

Tell me about your faith formation.

I did not grow up in a typical religious home. My dad is probably best described as an agnostic Jew. My mom is a Christian. She took me to church, and I accepted Christ at a young age. But it was not until high school that I hit one of those faith crises where I asked myself, Is this the faith of somebody else? Or is this my own?

I asked a lot of my own questions and went through a period of major doubt and searching for answers. But God was there, even in the doubts.

I came out of that knowing that God was real, that he loved me, and that Jesus was my Lord and Savior. My faith had become my own.

But I also highly value my Jewish heritage. My wife and I host a yearly Passover Seder for friends (both Christian and non-Christian). Within my family there is a diversity of beliefs and backgrounds. I’ve never been someone who feels you need to think like I do in order for me to love you and for us to have a relationship.

Your work subjects you to the ire of ID critics, which can be quite vicious. What keeps you going?

One of the reasons I co-founded the IDEA Club is because I enjoy having friendly, civil conversations with people who think differently than I do. A core value of IDEA’s mission was to “facilitate discussion, debate, and dialogue” in a “warm, friendly, and open atmosphere where individuals feel free to speak their personal views.” This basically reflects who I am and how I was raised. I consider that a good thing, but it probably left me a bit naïve and underprepared for the internet onslaught of ID-critics.

The attacks largely began around 2003, 2004, when the blog was invented. One blog called Panda’s Thumb became an early rallying point to attack ID. Our IDEA Club website was quite visible, so we frequently got attacked by these bloggers. I’m fine with people disagreeing with me, but this was the early days of internet bullying and at that time their vitriol shocked me. They would call us “dishonest,” “liars for Jesus,” and plenty of other names that are probably better left unprinted. As I would later learn, their responses did not signify anything unusual: this is how the pro-evolution internet crowd normally treats anyone who disagrees with them.

What I also didn’t know was something that’s considered common wisdom today: not every troll deserves an answer. I remember pulling all-nighters, responding to comments—which were typically gross distortions of my arguments or just plain crazy accusations like, “Casey thinks women who have had abortions should be killed.” Of course I never said or even thought such a thing, and I was mystified as to why anyone would say something like that simply because I’d made a scientific argument for intelligent design. I grew psychologically and emotionally fatigued from all this. So I asked some friends to pray for me and decided to take the weekend off from engaging the haters.

Immediately after asking for prayer, some interesting things happened. First, the Panda’s Thumb website abruptly went offline, stopping the anti-Casey frenzy. Then, at the invitation of friends, I attended three services that weekend at three different churches. Independently, each service preached on the same Bible passage from 2 Chronicles 20: the story of King Jehoshaphat, where a huge horde is coming against Judah. This felt familiar!

To paraphrase, Jehoshaphat responds, “Lord, how can we possibly fight off this huge, violent, crazed horde that wants to destroy us?” And the Lord tells him, “It’s not your battle to fight. The battle is mine.” On the Saturday evening service, I thought, Okay, Lord, that’s cool—thanks for the encouragement. The second time, on Sunday morning, I thought, Okay, God, this is getting interesting. And by the third service on Sunday night, I said, Okay, I get the message!

All this happened early in my public engagement with the evolution crowd, and it reassured me that God is in control. It is not my battle to fight off all my opponents—at the end of the day, it’s in the Lord’s hands.

Nonetheless, it’s never pleasant to be attacked by hateful people who are saying false things about you. But over time God helps you to learn a bigger-picture perspective, grow thicker skin, and realize that he is ultimately in control—even over the haters! In fact, Jesus promised that if we follow him, we will face persecution. As unpleasant as it is, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

It’s also important to pray for your enemies. This can be hard, but it helps you grow a heart for them. I don’t feel the need to respond to every critic—especially those who substitute distortions and personal attacks for serious engagement. But sometimes the right response to a nasty critic can move the discussion forward, especially when done with civility. Loving your opponents is not only Christ’s command, it’s also quite effective in public debates: it helps you remain more objective, opens people up to hearing what you have to say, and attracts reasonable people in the “undecided middle” by showing that you use arguments rather than name-calling.

(I also find encouragement in the fact that my most vicious and prominent critics primarily misrepresent my arguments and don’t respond to what I’ve actually said. If my arguments are actually so wrong, why must they resort to all the distortion and name-calling?)

By the way, there’s a little epilogue to the story here. By Monday morning the Panda’s Thumb blog was back online. I remember one of the moderators apologizing for the blog being offline for about 48 hours due to “lightning strikes” which affected the server. I smiled. God really is in control.

You’re also an attorney—how has that played a role in your ID involvement?

Unfortunately, the intolerance that ID proponents face isn’t always restricted to the internet. It often has real-world consequences, and I have worked on multiple cases where pro-ID scientists have faced discrimination due to their support for ID. I have seen qualified scientists denied tenure, jobs, academic freedom in teaching and research, and even degrees because of their support for intelligent design. Some of these stories were told in the 2008 documentary Expelled featuring Ben Stein. The threat of persecution when you “come out of the closet” and support ID remains very real.

But it’s not all bad news. I’ve also had many opportunities to assist educators in teaching the evidence for and against evolution in public schools. At Discovery Institute we don’t think that ID should be pushed into the public school curriculum—that will ignite a firestorm of controversy that will exacerbate the attacks on academic freedom ID proponents face in the academy. But it’s legal to teach evolution objectively, and so I’ve helped many teachers, school boards, and state legislatures adopt policies that help students hear both the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution.

These are great wins for academic freedom, but at the end of the day I don’t think public policy debates or court cases will decide this issue. Only the science can settle this debate, and so I strongly prefer to focus on the scientific side.

Where have you seen the ID movement make strides?

Having engaged in this debate now for about 25 years, I’m highly encouraged by how ID predictions and assumptions have borne good fruit in science. We’ve discovered that “junk DNA” is both functional and crucial, and that genomes are full of unique “orphan genes.” New layers of information and control have been found in epigenetics, RNA splicing, and the “sugar code” that are now fully accepted by science. Systems bio­logy—a field which uses ID-based assumptions that organisms have a “top-down” hierarchical design—is now widely practiced in biology.

Meanwhile, old evolutionary problems remain unsolved. Evolutionary biology still has not provided stepwise explanations for irreducibly complex features. The fossil record still shows a pattern of explosions—the opposite prediction of Darwinian evolution. The revolution in genome sequencing has produced huge amounts of DNA data that contradict the “tree of life.” And perhaps most importantly, leading evolutionary scientists have begun to acknowledge that the neo-Darwinian model has failed to explain a fundamental aspect of evolution: the origin of new complex biological features.

These failures of neo-Darwinism have led to the emergence of the “Third Way Evolution” camp—a group of mainstream scientists who don’t support ID but recognize the need for new evolutionary models.¹ Some Third Way proponents even acknowledge there is teleology and purpose in living systems. The rise of the Third Way camp is a major step in the right direction.

And then there’s the growth of ID research. A major part of my job at Discovery Institute is to manage our ID 3.0 Research Program where we are funding dozens of projects being conducted by pro-ID scientists worldwide. We’re funding research that is discovering evidence for design in protein complexity, molecular machines, orphan genes, overlapping genes, evolutionary algorithms, the engineering of biology, population genetics, earth’s unique design, cosmic fine-tuning, and much more. The ID community has now published over 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, showing that ID is a viable scientific paradigm to guide research.

Mainstream pundits seem eager to declare ID dead and all but buried. Yet it continues to defy the undertakers’ predictions.

From my vantage, the only thing that’s “dead” here is the old myth that ID doesn’t do research or publish peer-reviewed papers. New scientists join our ranks all the time. Over 1,000 students have now attended Discovery Institute’s seminars on intelligent design, with many of them going on to get PhDs and become faculty members—the next generation of ID researchers.

This is exactly how scientific revolutions happen. The old guard typically is set in their ways and won’t consider new paradigms to solve the problems of the old one. But young, up-and-coming scientists are open to new ideas, and they’re willing to think outside the box. This is precisely what we’re seeing with ID. Much work remains to be done, but I’m grateful to be a part of it and I’m extremely optimistic about what will happen in the coming years!

Note
1. See Casey Luskin, “Still Unexplained: Third Way Evolution & the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” Salvo 73 (2025).