We frequently hear from students that our Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design is a major highlight of their year — but it’s also a major highlight for us. Interacting with the students who attend this generously subsidized seminar is not only fun, but it encourages us with the knowledge that intelligent design (ID) has a bright future. How do we know it’s bright? Primarily, it’s the quality of the students that we see who want to become the next generation of ID researchers and scholars. 

Every year we admit a highly qualified class of applicants to participate in our Summer Seminars. But there’s an eye-opening trend in the applicant pool that we’ve observed over the past few years — it’s an exciting trend but it has an upside and a downside: 

• The upside is that each year we have been receiving more and more extremely qualified applicants — PhD students, recent PhD graduates now doing postdocs, and even some faculty. 
• The downside is that there are so many highly qualified applicants that after we admit all of them into the seminar, there are often only a few slots left for gifted undergraduates to attend the program!

This points to why the future of ID is so bright: with so many budding scientists and scholars now trained through our Summer Seminar, we are seeing a veritable army of future pro-ID academics growing into a sizeable force to be reckoned with. 

Rest Assured

But we don’t want up-and-coming undergraduates to be “left out” of the program just because they aren’t yet very far advanced in their studies. So rest assured — every year we reserve slots for undergraduates. We don’t want them to be discouraged from applying to the program! We also have an Online International Seminar, which allows more students to participate who were not able to attend the in-person seminar. 

If you attend, you’ll learn about key topics in the scientific debate over intelligent design and Darwinian evolution, including:

• Teleological vs. Materialist Views of Man and Nature
• Methods of Design Detection
• Evidence for Design in Physics and Cosmology
• Evidence for Design in the Origin of Life
• Evidence for Design in the Development of Life
• Evidence for Design in Human Origins
• Updates from the ID 3.0 Research Program

This is just a sampling of some of the many topics we cover in the Summer Seminar. You don’t want to miss this exciting opportunity, so be sure to apply by submitting an application here. Applications are due by March 31 so be sure to apply now!