Walter Bradley on The Mystery of Life’s Origin

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

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

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

We are grieving the recent loss of Walter Bradley, a longtime Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute and namesake of the Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. So today, out of our archive, we bring you the first half of Robert J. Marks's 2020 interview with Walter Bradley, co-author of the seminal 1984 intelligent design book The Mystery of Life’s Origin. The book is now available in a revised and expanded edition with updates from multiple contributors discussing the progress (or lack of it) in origins science in the 35 years since the book’s original publication. In this first of two podcasts, Bradley discusses the history of the attempts to explain life’s origin naturalistically, and how the three authors of the 1984 book came together to shake up the world of origin-of-life science. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:14.1	Greetings. My name is Robert J. Marks. I'm the guest host today on ID the Future. Our guest
0:20.5	today is Walter Bradley, and I'm the director of the
0:23.9	Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. And of course, Walter Bradley is the
0:29.4	namesake of the Discovery Institute Center. And it's delightful to have you here, Walter.
0:34.7	Thank you, Bob. It is good to be with you. Thank you very much.
0:38.8	We look back in the history and modern intelligent design and see what actually sparked people
0:44.7	into believing that there was something happening in biology that pointed towards God.
0:49.9	1991, Philip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trail, 85. Michael Denton wrote Evolution, a Theory, and Crisis.
0:57.3	1984, Walter Bradley, along with Charles Thaxton and Roger Olson, wrote The Mystery of Life's Origin.
1:04.4	So this was a precursor to all of them. It was much different than evolution, though, wasn't it?
1:09.5	It was, when I was asked by John Buelluell if I would be interested in writing a book,
1:14.3	dealing with the whole question of evolution as a Christian, and I told him that I was not the
1:19.3	right person to do that.
1:20.6	The last biology course I had was when I was in 10th grade in high school.
1:25.5	So Buell, you told me, was one of the founders of probe ministries?
1:29.7	Is that right? Yeah, John Buell was one of the founders with Jimmy Williams. They co-founded
1:34.0	Prob Ministries, which was an organization to try to bridge some of the areas of apparent
1:40.1	dispute between faith and science and in other areas of Christian apologetics. I had known John Buell
1:46.2	because he was the campus director of Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of Texas during the
1:51.6	years I was in graduate school. And that's where you went and got your PhD. That is where I got my
1:56.2	PhD. Okay. You met him there then. Yeah. So he approached you and said, let's write a book on evolution.
	...

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