Our nation’s capital is steeped in lessons from U.S. history. You could spend years there trying to gather up and learn from them all. In a way the whole city is a memorial to the ideas that inspired the American Founding. One of those is intelligent design — the idea, as Thomas Jefferson saw it, that life and the cosmos bear objective evidence of purpose in their design. 

In a new video, political scientist John West, Discovery Institute’s Vice President, leads a concise tour of four major memorials in Washington, DC, explaining how they bear testimony to a design-based understanding of the universe. The thinking of three great Americans — Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. — was shaped in different ways by intelligent design. 

Along with the memorials to Jefferson, Lincoln, and King, we visit the World War II Memorial. Dr. West explains that the war on Nazi Germany was an epic struggle against a twisted regime that drew freely on Darwinism. The genocidal Nazi ideology saw itself as an expression of modern, evolutionary scientific racism. In other words, World War II pitted a nation founded on intelligent design against one inspired by Darwinian thought.

ID has had profound consequences not just for science but for history. Enjoy your Fourth of July tomorrow and take a few minutes of the day to enjoy and share “We Hold These Truths: Exploring Intelligent Design through the Memorials of Washington, DC.”