Live Not By Lies: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Life Sciences, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Astronomy

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

When one person stands up to lies or oppression, others can become emboldened to do the same. On this classic episode of ID the Future, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses his article about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, penned the short essay "Live Not By Lies" in 1974, just before he was arrested and exiled from Russia. It was his advice, or even strategy, for living under totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn’s basic advice is simply not to participate with lies, and to refuse to speak what one does not believe. It’s unnervingly relevant counsel to us in America today, where “cancel culture” and other silencing tactics, long foreshadowed in the intelligent design debate, are spreading to the broader culture. As Egnor relates, sometimes it takes a single person to stand firm before others will do the same. "There are orders of magnitude more of us than of them," Egnor says. "That is people who feel as we do: who support academic freedom, who support human dignity, who support freedom of speech and freedom of religion...the only way they control us, the only way they oppress us, is with our cooperation."

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:14.3	What do cancel culture, Samadza and Darwinism, have in common?
0:19.7	We'll find out on today's podcast when we hear from a neurosurgeon,
0:24.5	Professor of Neurosurgery at Stony Brook University, and a prolific contributing writer at both
0:30.8	Evolution News and Science Today, as well as at Mind Matters.a.I. Welcome and thank you for being here, Dr. Michael Agner.
0:40.9	Hi. Thank you, Rob. Thank you.
0:43.0	Recently, you wrote an essay that was published at Evolution News titled, Live Not by Lies,
0:51.2	Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Intelligent Design. And in that, you were looking at our
0:56.5	current cancel culture and how that relates to the debate over intelligent design and evolution,
1:03.2	the censoring of pro-ID scientists and scholars that we've seen. And you were also reflecting on the
1:10.3	great Russian writer, dissident,
1:12.7	Nobel Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and specifically an essay he wrote,
1:19.0	Live Not by Lies, and how those lies and our participation in them results in the stifling of
1:26.2	speech and thought. And so I want to jump into that with you today.
1:31.5	And you posed at the beginning of your piece, which I have to say that one reason we're talking about
1:38.0	this is that piece has been amazingly popular for us. It's been shared tens of thousands of times on social media. I don't know if you knew that. It has over 7,000 likes just on the evolution news page itself. And I think you really struck a nerve with people on this. And so I want to ask you the question that you pose at the beginning of your
2:01.8	piece. And you were writing this kind of as we were in the beginning of the throes of the protests
2:07.4	and riots that, you know, have now swept across so many cities. And you were asking how people
2:13.5	like our listeners, like you and me, anyone who cherishes free speech, academic freedom,
2:19.2	and scientific integrity, you ask, what can we do to protect those things in this sort of
2:25.0	environment?
2:26.9	Yes.
	...

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