MARGINALIA
Being Stalked by Intelligent Design
Scientists must stop ignoring "Intelligent Design"—religious prejudice disguised as intellectual freedom
Pat Shipman
"Science" by Assumption
The Intelligent Design movement is a deliberate campaign to
undermine the teaching of science in America, and the evidence of
this intent is brazenly posted on ID Web sites. The movement's
founder and chief theorist, lawyer Phillip Johnson, and most of its
advocates are fellows of the Center for Science and Culture at a
conservative think tank called the Discovery Institute. The Center's
publicly stated aims include:
challenging various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory; ...
developing the scientific theory known as intelligent design; ...
[and] encouraging schools to improve science education by teaching
students more fully about the theory of evolution, including the
theory's scientific weaknesses as well strengths [sic].
With these statements, the Center hides its true agenda behind a
false claim that it is promoting intellectual freedom when, in fact,
it is doing the opposite: stunting intellectual growth by
encouraging students to believe that a scientific theory is the same
as a philosophical assertion.
Intelligent Design is part of a calculated strategy that Johnson
calls the "Wedge," referring to the tool used to split a
solid object—in this case, the cornerstone of biological
science. According to a document that appeared on the Discovery
Institute's Web site in 1999, the goal of this plan is "nothing
less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural
legacies." The document also makes sweeping, inaccurate claims
such as "new developments in biology, physics and cognitive
science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have
re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of
nature." This statement is pure propaganda. (The document can
still be found on the Discovery Institute's Web site by searching
for "wedge," although it is now prefaced by 12 pages of
insistent justification.)
In the ID lexicon, "scientific materialism"—the idea
that the world around us can be explained without resorting to
supernatural forces—is the enemy. ID advocates favor instead
something they call "theistic realism," which
"assumes that the universe and all its creatures were brought
into existence for a purpose by God." The most revealing word
in this statement is assumes. Scientists rely not on
assumption but on evidence, and there is none for ID. Theistic
realism and ID are statements of religious faith, which does not
require evidence.
The Discovery Institute promotes Intelligent Design with a
sophisticated scheme that floods the public with academic-sounding
conferences, op-ed pieces (written by Fellows of the Institute who
do not always identify themselves as such), press releases, media
coverage, teacher-training seminars and materials, classes in the
"defense and proof" of Christianity, audiotapes, books,
and special briefings for members of Congress. The core of this
strategy is to keep saying that evolutionary theory is controversial
until—despite all the evidence to the contrary—people
start believing it. As Johnson cynically told an interviewer:
[Y]ou have to have people that talk a lot about the issue
and get it up front and take the punishment and take all the abuse,
and then you get people used to talking about it. It becomes an
issue they are used to hearing about, and you get a few more people
and a few more, and then eventually you've legitimated it as a
regular part of the academic discussion. And that's my goal: to
legitimate the argument over evolution. . . . We're bound to win.
A special five-year goal of the Center is publishing 100 scientific
or technical publications in support of ID, but here they have
failed. Philosopher Barbara Forrest of Southeast Louisiana
University, who has written extensively about the rise of the
movement, searched the peer-reviewed scientific literature
exhaustively and failed to find a single published paper in which
scientific data support Intelligent Design.
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