“What does a think tank think about?” What is a think tank, anyway? And what binds together the work of one think tank, Discovery Institute, unifying its range of programs, including the Center for Science and Culture? Discovery’s president, Steven Buri, talked with Wesley J. Smith about these questions on a new episode of the podcast Humanize. 

I want to draw your attention to it because Buri spells out the vision that animates the CSC as well as the Center for Wealth and Poverty, the Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, the Center on Human Exceptionalism, and other DI projects. As Discovery co-founders Bruce Chapman and George Gilder first established it, that vision is ultimately about the question, “What is a human being?” Our culture is of two minds on that, and much hangs on the answer. Is a human just another animal in the forest, cast up by evolutionary blind processes, whose life has no objective meaning? Or is a human a creator, fashioned in his own creator’s spiritual image, “a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5)? 

A Twisted Tribute to Human Exceptionalism

The relevance to intelligent design is obvious. Another standout illustration is Jonathan Choe’s guerrilla journalism (for the Center for Wealth and Poverty), focusing on homelessness. He fearlessly documents that a current in our culture is perfectly happy to see men and women, afflicted by mental illness and drug addiction, living in sub-animal conditions on the street. Even animals don’t live that way! Why is the toxic current happy with this? In fact, I think they’re in love with it. It’s as if the homeless population made their point for them: “Look, see, humans are nothing special!” In cities like Seattle, they want to rub your face in it.

That politicians and activists can watch their fellow men wallow in degradation — while uselessly going on about “harm reduction” and “housing first,” and they know it’s useless — is itself a twisted tribute to human exceptionalism. Only humans, not animals, could be so foolish and perverse. Listen to Buri and Smith on Humanize and decide for yourself what a human being is, and can be, and ought to be.