I. D. the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Welcome to I. D. The Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. On this episode, Dr Richard Weicart reads selections from his new book, Unnatural Death, Medicine's Des descent from healing to killing.

Dr. Weicard is a emeritus professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus,

and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

He is author of From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler's Ethic, Hitler's Religion and the Death of Humanity. In unnatural death, Dr.

Weicard gives us a wide-ranging history of euthanasia and assisted suicide. He takes us from

the ancient Jews, Greeks and Romans to the contemporary scene where the urge to help people kill themselves has intensified even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death.

How did we reach this place? Unnatural death answers this question by

tracing a complex and fascinating history of ideas, attitudes, and legal wranglings

stretching from Socrates to Peter Singer and beyond.

Along the way, Whitehart shows diverse thinkers wrestling with the tension between the

unalienable preciousness of human life and the longing to escape. with the

tension between the unalienable preciousness of human life and the longing to escape

suffering and despair. As the author shows, the Judeo-Christian

tradition encouraged a culture of life, but the secular enlightenment and Darwinian materialism

have tugged us in a different direction. In the book's final pages, Whitecar considers where

these currents are pulling us and what can be done to reverse course.

Before we get to Dr. Weikart's reading, let me share just a couple of the endorsements the book has received already.

Michael Agnor, Professor of neurosurgery at

Stony Brook University, writes,

euthanasia and assisted suicide are gaining respectability with appalling speed.

And Richard Whitehart's superb new book

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