Introduction to "Creationism's Trojan Horse"

Butterflies and Wheels ^ | December 1, 2004 | Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross

[snarks_when_bored]

Introduction to Creationism's Trojan Horse

Introduction

It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws.We don’t yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can’t work out the consequences of all the laws we know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can’t predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can’t always calculate the consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.

Steven Weinberg,
1979 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Dr. Fox’s Lecture

Nearly thirty years ago one of the funniest articles ever published in a respectable medical journal appeared. Of course, it was not meant to be funny. Its purposes were serious and sober enough. The conclusions, moreover, were trustworthy and had important implications for education at all levels. In fact, the conclusions had implications for all conveyance of knowledge by experts to intelligent, but nonexpert, audiences. In the Journal of Medical Education, D. H. Naftulin, M.D., and colleagues published a research study entitled “The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction.”¹ There is no better way to explain the intention and the results of this work than to quote from its abstract:

[T]he authors programmed an actor to teach charismatically and nonsubstantively on a topic about which he knew nothing. The authors hypothesized that given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm, even experienced educators participating in a new learning experience can be seduced into feeling satisfied that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content conveyed by the lecturer. The hypothesis was supported when 55 subjects responded favorably at the significant level to an eight-item questionnaire concerning their attitudes toward the lecture.(emphasis added)

For purposes of this experiment, the investigators hired a mature, respectable, scholarly looking fellow, a professional actor. He memorized a prefabricated nonsense lecture entitled “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” The better popular science magazines had recently covered (real) game theory and its possible applications, so the title was appropriate. The silver-haired actor was trained to answer affably all audience questions following his lecture—by means, as the authors explain, of “double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements. All this was to be interspersed with parenthetical humor and meaningless references to unrelated topics.”² In two of the three trials of this experiment, the audience consisted of “psychiatrists, psychologists, and social-worker educators,” while that of the third trial “consisted of 33 educators and administrators enrolled in a graduate level university educational philosophy course.” This counterfeit scholar of “Mathematical Game Theory” was called Dr. Myron L. Fox, and a fraudulent but respectful and laudatory introduction was supplied.

Very interesting data followed from the survey and questionnaire administered after each session in which Fox’s (and other) presentations were made. These were simply the detailed statistics of approval or disapproval. The phony Dr. Fox’s presentations of discoveries in mathematical game theory were strongly approved by these educationally sophisticated, lecture-experienced audiences. But the really funny results are in the “subjective” comments added to the questionnaire, that is, in what listeners wrote as prose responses to the invitation to comment (the following comments are from a number of different respondents). “No respondent [in the first group],” Dr. Naftulin and his co-authors wrote, “reported having read Dr. Fox’s publications. [But] subjective responses included the following: ‘Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening. Has warm manner. Good flow, seems enthusiastic. What about the two types of games, zero-sum and non-zero-sum? Too intellectual a presentation. My orientation is more pragmatic.’” From the largest group of subjects for this experiment, the substantive comments were, if possible, even funnier: “Lively examples. His relaxed manner of presentation was a large factor in holding my interest. Extremely articulate. Interesting, wish he had dwelled more on background. Good analysis of subject that has been personally studied before. Very dramatic presentation. He was certainly captivating. Somewhat disorganized. Frustratingly boring. Unorganized and ineffective. Articulate. Knowledgeable.”³

We highly recommend this article. It should still be possible to find it in any university, especially one with a good medical or education library. The “educational seduction” of the title refers to what “Dr. Fox” did for (and to?) his listeners. This result and many others like it should have affected all schools of education, if not teachers generally. However, such was not the case. The possibility, indeed the likelihood, of intellectual “seduction” in circumstances such as these is probably increasing as specialization increases. Countless clones of Dr. Fox tread the academic and public policy boards today, as always. Readers familiar with the now universal practice in higher education of using end-of-course student evaluations as key evidence in faculty promotion and tenure decisions will know this: evaluations by students, who lack the requisite knowledge but are called on to judge their professors’ expertise in their disciplines, can determine the academic fate of nontenured faculty and the possibility of merit raises for tenured ones. Intellectual seduction by substantive (“content”) nonsense, offered to audiences who want or like to hear what they are being told, or who simply assume that what they don’t understand must be correct if it sounds scholarly, is nearly universal.

This book is about a current, national, intellectual seduction phenomenon, not in mathematical game theory, but close enough to it. It is a case, at least formally, not much different from the Dr. Fox lecture, except that the lecturers here actually believe what they are lecturing about, or at least they want very much to believe it, or are convinced that they must believe it. And they are not actors, but executors of a real and serious political strategy. The “audiences” in this case are large; they consist of decent people: students, parents, teachers, public officials across the length and breadth of the United States (and now in other countries of the “developed world”)-people who don’t, in most cases, know much about science, especially the modern biological sciences. But they are people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about their religious faith, the state of their society, and the education of their children. They include some people for whom “fairness” and openness to the ideas of “the other side” have become the cherished, even the indispensable, characteristics of our civilization. Their insistence on the equal worth of all earnestly held opinions-whether or not those opinions are well founded-makes them relativists whether they know it or not. This book is about the newest form of creationism, named by its proponents “intelligent design” (ID); but it is, especially, about the organization of the system of public and political relations that drives the movement. That system operates on a very detailed plan-a set of well articulated goals, strategies, and tactics-named “The Wedge” by its executors. It offers an upgraded form of the religious fundamentalist creationism long familiar in America.

Neo-creationism

Creationism has been a perennial nuisance for American science education. Despite the persistent fecklessness of creationist arguments and their continued failure in the courts since 1925, the creationists refuse to go away. The attempts to insert religion into public elementary and secondary science education are unceasing, and they now include direct efforts to influence college students as well. Efforts to force it into curricula- especially those having anything at all to do with biology and the history of Earth-have been unremitting since the late nineteenth century, and they have continued into the present. The most notorious recent, nearly successful, attempt was the 1999 deletion of evolution and all immediately relevant geology and cosmology from the Kansas public school science standards, by action of the state board of education. Scientific integrity was restored to those defaced standards only after a protracted political effort to defeat creationist board members and replace them with moderates-who eventually undid the damage to science teaching and to the state’s reputation.

The defeated have not given up, however; today they are more active than ever in the politics and public affairs of Kansas and other states.And increasingly it appears that pro-evolution (pro-science) victories are secure only until the next election, when old battles may be revived by “stealth” candidates who do not disclose their anti-evolution agenda until after they are elected to office. Soon after the restoration of the integrity of science standards in Kansas, new efforts, even more forceful and better organized than those in Kansas, were mounted in Ohio. More are brewing in several other states, gaining added impetus from the Wedge’s efforts in the United States Congress. Nor is the phenomenon likely to remain limited to the United States; similar efforts are in progress or being planned in a number of other countries.

This struggle is cyclic; there have been short periods of relative quiet after major creationist failures in the courts. But the effects of the struggle are being felt today far beyond pedagogy in the schools. They are everywhere visible, and except for a few conscientious media outlets, they also threaten to lower the already variable and uncertain standards of science journalism. Contrary to the perception of most scientifically literate people, creationism as a cultural presence has in the recent past grown generally stronger-even as its arguments, in the face of scientific progress, have grown steadily weaker and more hypocritical. Despite the intense activity of creationists, no faction, nor any individual advocate of one, and no modern creationist “research” program has as yet come up with a new, verifiable, fruitful, and important fact about the mechanisms or the history of life or the ancestral relationships among living things on Earth. For that reason, the scorecard of scientific successes for any form of creationism, including ID theory, is blank.

Creationists, including the newest kind-the neo-creationist “intelligent design theorists” who are the subject of this book-offer an abundance of theories. These theories are often decorated with open or only thinly disguised religious allusions, and they always include the nowstandard rejection of naturalism, which is, in these circumstances, the indirect admission of supernaturalism. Their contributions to ongoing science consist of nit-picking and the extraction of trivialities from the vast literature of biology and of unsupported statements about what-they insist-cannot happen: “Darwinism”-organic evolution shaped by natural selection and reflecting the common ancestry of all life forms. In the face of the extraordinary and often highly practical twentieth-century progress of the life sciences under the unifying concepts of evolution, their “science” consists of quote-mining-minute searching of the biological literature-including outdated literature-for minor slips and inconsistencies and for polemically promising examples of internal arguments. These internal disagreements, fundamental to the working of all natural science, are then presented dramatically to lay audiences as evidence of the fraudulence and impending collapse of “Darwinism.” How are such audiences to know that modern biology is not a house of cards, not founded on a “dying theory”?

Intelligent Design

Until a few years ago, “scientific” creationism was led by biblical literalists like Duane Gish and Henry Morris, whose Bible-thumping and logicchopping were easy to discount, even for ordinary (nonscience) journalists, by exposing the obvious errors of fact and logic-independently of the gross errors of actual science. But those old-timers have now been eclipsed by a new brand of creationists who have absorbed a part of their following: the new boys are intelligent design promoters, mainly those associated with the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (now Center for Science and Culture), based in Seattle, Washington. This group operates under a detailed and ambitious plan of action: “The Wedge.” Through relentlessly energetic programs of publication, conferences, and public appearances, all aimed at impressing lay audiences and political people, the Wedge is working its way into the American cultural mainstream. Editorials and opinion pieces in national journals, prime-time television interviews, and other high-profile public appearances, offhand but highly visible negative judgments on evolution or “Darwinism” from conservative politicians and sympathetic public intellectuals (assisted in their anti-science by a scattering of “feminist epistemologists,” postmodernists, and Marxists)-all these contribute to a rising receptiveness to ID claims by those who do not know, or who simply refuse to consider, the actual state of the relevant sciences. In documenting and analyzing the political and religious nature of the Wedge, and bringing together expert comment on the ID “science” claims, we show that such grateful reception of the glad tidings of intelligent design is entirely unjustified by either the scientific, the mathematical, or the philosophic weight of any evidence offered.

THE WEDGE’S HAMMERS

Under cover of advanced degrees, including a few in science, obtained in some of the major universities, the Wedge’s workers have been carving out a habitable and expanding niche within higher education, cultivating cells of followers-students as well as (primarily nonbiology) faculty-on campus after campus. This is the first real success of creationism in the formerly hostile grove of academe. Furthermore, the Wedge’s political alliances reach into a large, partisan elite among the nation’s legislators and other political leaders. Armed thus with a potentially huge base of popular support that includes most of the Religious Right, wielding a new legal strategy with which it hopes to win in the litigation certain to follow insertion of ID into public school science anywhere-and lawyers ready to go to work when it does-the Wedge of ID creationism is, indeed, intelligently designed. To be sure, its science component is not. But in a public relations-driven and mass-communications world, that is not a disadvantage. In the West, opinions, perceptions, loyalties, and, ultimately, votes are what matter when the goal is to change public policy- or for that matter, cultural patterns. Serious inquiry and questions of truth are often a mere diversion.

This newly energized, intellectually reactionary enterprise will not fade quietly away as the current team of ID promoters ages. It is already too well organized and funded, and the leading Wedge figures have invested too much of themselves for that to happen. Moreover, there is every reason to think that religiously conservative, anti-science agitation will increase, especially as the life sciences and medical research continue to probe the fundamentals of human behavior. As that happens, the general public uneasiness with evolutionary biology and the underlying genetics and cell biology becomes simple hostility, not just on the political right. Some of the far-left intelligentsia help to fuel the hostility, at least in academia. Therefore, we have undertaken to document very thoroughly, largely but not exclusively by means of the Wedge’s own announcements and productions, its steadily increasing output of antievolution and more broadly anti-science materials.

The Discovery Institute’s creationists are younger and better educated than most of the traditional “young-earth” creationists. Their public relations tricks are up to date and skillful; they know how to manipulate the media. They are very well funded, and their commitment is fired by the same sincere religious fervor that characterized earlier and less affluent versions of creationism. This combination makes them crusaders, just as inspired as, but much more effective than, the old literalists, whose pseudo-science was easily recognized as ludicrous. And the Wedge carries out its program as a part of the evangelical Christian community, which William Dembski credits with “for now providing the safest haven for intelligent design.”⁴ The welcoming voices within this community have all but drowned out those of its many members who are honest in their approach to science, sincere in their Christian faith, and appreciative of the protection afforded to both by secular, constitutional democracy. Dembski admits that the Wedge’s acceptance among evangelicals is not “particularly safe by any absolute standard.”⁵ Yet in our survey of this issue, we see that the evangelical voices most prominently heard, with a few notable exceptions, support the Wedge.

FOCUS ON EDUCATION

Unfortunately, ID, by now quite familiar among scientifically qualified and religiously neutral observers as the recycled, old-fashioned creationism it is, drapes its religious skeleton in the fancy-dress language of modern science, albeit without having contributed to science, at least so far, any data or any testable theoretical notions. Therefore, ID creationism is most unlikely in the short term to change genuine science as practiced in industry, universities, and independent research laboratories. But the Wedge’s public relations blitz (intended to revolutionize public opinion); its legal strategizing (intended as groundwork for major court cases yet to come); and its feverish political alliance-building (through which the Discovery Institute hopes to shape public policy) all constitute a threat to the integrity of education and in the end to the ability of the public to judge scientific and technological claims. This last threat is not just a secondary, long-term worry. Competent, honest scientific thinking is critically important now, not only to the intellectual maturation of our species, especially of its children, but also to optimal management of such current, urgent policy problems as environmental preservation and improvement, energy resources, management and support of scientific research, financing medicine and public health (including human heredity and reproduction), and, in general, the support and use of advanced technology.

Led by Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe, and Jonathan Wells-the four current top names of the Discovery Institute’s

Center for Science and Culture-with a growing group of like-minded fellows and co-workers, this movement seeks nothing less than to overthrow the system of rules and procedures of modern science and those intellectual footings of our culture laid down in the Enlightenment and over some 300 years. If this sounds overwrought, we ask our readers to proceed at least a little way into the following chapters to judge for themselves. In any case, the Wedge admits that this is its aim. By its own boastful reports, the Wedge has undertaken to discredit the naturalistic methodology that has been the working principle of all effective science since the seventeenth century. It desires to substitute for it a particular version of “theistic science,” whose chief argument is that nothing about nature is to be understood or taught without reference to supernatural or at least unknowable causes-in effect, to God. The evidence that this is a fundamental goal follows within the pages of this book. No matter that these creationists have produced not even a research program, despite their endlessly repeated scientific claims. Pretensions to the contrary, this strategy is not really aimed at science and scientists, whom they consider lost in grievous error and whom they regularly accuse of fraud (as we will demonstrate), of conspiring to hide from a gulled public the failures of modern science, especially of “Darwinism.” It is aimed, rather, at a vast, mostly science-innocent populace and at the public officials and lawmakers who depend on it for votes.

A Neo-creationist’s Progress

In April 2001, ID movement founder Phillip Johnson released on the creationist Access Research Network website “The Wedge: A Progress Report.” ⁶ There he reviewed the Wedge’s goals: “to legitimate the topic of intelligent design . . . within the mainstream intellectual community” and “to make naturalism the central focus of discussion [meaning “of attack”] in the religious world.” He cited the establishment of a “beachhead” in American journalism, exemplified by articles in major newspapers. He declared that “the Wedge is lodged securely in the crack” between empirical science and naturalistic philosophy, which he calls “the dominant naturalistic system of thought control.” According to Johnson, “the [Wedge] train is already moving along the logical track and it will not stop until it reaches its destination. . . . The initial goals of the Wedge strategy have been accomplished. . . . [I]t’s not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.”⁷

There is some justification for this aggressive show of confidence. As Johnson says, ID has won significant coverage in major U.S. newspapers and, more recently, abroad as well. In the New York Times, James Glanz wrote that “evolutionists find themselves arrayed not against traditional creationism, with its roots in biblical literalism, but against a more sophisticated idea: the intelligent design theory.” On the front page of the Los Angeles Times, Teresa Watanabe wrote that “a new breed of mostly Christian scholars redefines the old evolution-versus-creationism debate and fashions a movement with more intellectual firepower, mainstream appeal, and academic respectability.”⁸ And Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, Vintage Books, 1994) points out in a critical Slate article that while ID presents no new ideas of any significance, the New York Times article “has granted official significance to the latest form of opposition to Darwinism.” Wright concludes that although ID is just a new label, a marketing device for an old product, it is also an effective one.⁹

The admirable, but in this particular case misguided, concern of most Americans to be fair, “even-handed,” to consider both sides of a dispute respectfully, especially the side claiming to suffer discrimination, creates a fertile field for ID activists. They have enough financial backing and self-righteous zeal to outlast what little effectively organized opposition to them presently exists, especially in the higher education community, which one would quite reasonably expect to be in the forefront of opposition to the Wedge. There is, of course, the further-and very real- possibility that the demographics of the judiciary will shift toward creationism should there be appointments of judges with strong doctrinal or emotional ties to the Religious Right, where one’s views on evolution are once again, as they were in the 1920s, a “litmus test.” There is no doubt that the Wedge’s immediate goal is to change what is taught in classrooms about the basics of biology and the history of life, as we show here from its own documents, sources of support, and productions. But based on our demonstration in chapter 9 of the religious foundation of the intelligent design movement and the importance of this foundation to the Wedge’s goal of “renewing” American culture, we also believe that its ultimate goal is to create a theocratic state, which would provide a protective framework for its pedagogical goals. In an important respect, the Wedge is another strand in the well organized Religious Right network, whose own well documented but poorly understood purposes are strongly antagonistic to the constitutional barriers between church and state.

As of March 2001, creationists had launched programs to change public school curricula in one out of five states across the nation. During the writing of this book, creationists were causing significant problems in Ohio,Washington, Idaho, Montana, Kansas, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.¹⁰ At present, there are renewed rumblings in New Mexico, where a hard-fought battle was presumably resolved. These programs have not yet attained their broadest goals, but they continue to divert precious educational resources, time, and energy from the real problems of public education in the United States toward the work of responding to creationist attacks. Even in the small, rural state of Louisiana, ID advocates seem to be waiting in the wings to initiate a sequel to recent attempts by Representative Sharon Weston- Broome to declare the idea of evolution “racist.”¹¹ In Kansas, where creationist changes to the state’s science standards have finally been reversed, the Discovery Institute is nevertheless actively assisting a satellite group, the Intelligent Design Network (IDnet), in pushing ID more aggressively than ever. In June 2001, IDnet held its Second Annual Symposium, “Darwin, Design, and Democracy II: Teaching the Evidence in Science Education,” featuring three key Wedge campaigners-Phillip Johnson,William Dembski, and Jonathan Wells.¹² The great public universities are now a main target of wedge efforts: a Discovery Institute fellow, Jed Macosko, taught ID in a for-credit course at the University of California-Berkeley; his father, Chris Macosko, has been doing the same at the University of Minnesota.¹³

Concern about the Wedge is building, very late but finally, in scientific and academic quarters. The American Geophysical Union considered ID a problem serious enough to require scheduling at least six presentations on it at the spring 2001 conference.¹⁴ Philosopher Robert Pennock’s eye-opening book, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (MIT, 1999), analyzed and recounted the philosophical and scientific flaws of ID creationism. It is followed by his anthology, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives (MIT, 2001). These books seem to be making a contribution in awakening academics to the need for an effective counterstrategy. Similar books are on the way; and in book reviews and a spate of recent writings, distinguished scientists are at last taking the trouble (and it is troublesome, and time-consuming, and costly!) to rebut, point by point, the new creationist claims. Of course, those claims are not really new. They are rather pretentious variants of the ancient, and discredited, argument from design (aptly renamed for our era, by Richard Dawkins, the argument from personal incredulity).

So far, however, no book has documented the genesis, the support, the real goals, and the remarkable sheer volume of Wedge activities.We have come to believe that such a chronicle is needed if people of good will toward science and toward honest inquiry are to understand the magnitude of this threat-not only to education but to the principle of separation of church and state. The chapters that follow are our effort to supply the facts: as complete an account, within the limits of a single volume and the reader’s patience, as can be assembled-and checked independently-from easily accessible public sources. To convince those with the indispensable basic knowledge who are in a position to act, that they must do so, we must first make the case that (1) a formal intelligent design strategy, apart from and above the familiar creationist carping about evolutionary and historical science, does exist, and (2) it is being executed successfully in all respects except the production of hard scientific results-data. To accomplish these aims, we have had to accumulate the evidence, which consists of the massive schedule of the Wedge’s own activities in execution of the strategy, together with the actual pronouncements of Wedge members. We have allowed them to speak for themselves here at length and as often as possible.

The Wedge’s busy schedule of ID activities and its increasing public visibility have been accompanied by a steadily evolving public relations effort to present itself as a mainstream organization. In August 2002, the CRSC changed its name, now calling itself simply the “Center for Science and Culture.” This move parallels the Wedge’s low-key phase-out of the overtly religious banners on its early web pages: from Michelangelo’s God creating Adam, to Michelangelo’s God creating DNA, to the current Hubble telescope photo of the MyCn18 Hourglass Nebula.15 But despite the attempt to alter its public face, the Wedge’s substantive identity remains. Thus, we refer henceforth to the Center for Science and Culture by the name under which it has been known during the period covered in this book: the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).

The readers’ patience may well be tried at times by the repetitiousness of Wedge activities: conferences, websites, trade book and media publications and appearances, testimony before legislative bodies and education committees, summonses to religious and cultural renewal predicated on anti-science. The Wedge’s efficient and planned repetitiousness is itself one of our main points. In fact, it is one of the most remarkable examples in our time of naked public relations management substituting successfully for knowledge and the facts of the case - substituting for the truth. For that reason alone, it is both interesting and important. It must be known and understood if there is to be recognition-among scientists as well as the literate nonscientist public-of current anti-evolutionism and its aims.

The Issue

The issue, then, is not-as ID creationists insist it is, to their increasingly large and credulous audiences nationwide-that the biological sciences are in deep trouble due to a collapse of Darwinism. The issue is that the public relations work, but not the “science,” of the Wedge and of ID “theorists” is proving all too effective. It is not refutations or technical dismissals of ID scientific claims that are needed. The literature of science and the book review pages of excellent journals are already replete with those: expert reviews of ID books and other public products are readily available to anyone.We provide here what we hope is an adequate sampling of those technical dismissals and expert scientific opinions, and we document the sound science and the ID anti-science as needed. But in the past few years, very detailed disproof has been provided, again and again, by the commentators best qualified to speak to the substance: some of the world’s most honored evolutionary and physical scientists, as well as some of the most distinguished philosophers of mind and science. Rather, what is needed now is documentation of the Wedge itself, from its own internal and public relations documents, so that the public may understand its purposes and the magnitude of its impact, current and projected. The issue is not Darwinism or science: the issue is the Wedge itself.

Providing the necessary documentation, including the minutiae that can turn out to be important, is always a writer’s strategic problem when the intended audience is broader than a small group of specialists. Even scholars who demand and are accustomed to copious documentation can find it off-putting. Others, members of the most important audience of all-curious, able, and genuinely fair-minded general readers-who rarely if ever read with constant eye and hand movement between text and references, are strongly tempted to give up when confronted with profuse supporting data and the necessary but distracting scholarly apparatus of notes and references.We do not have a good solution to this problem. The endnotes can be taken, however, as running commentary, supplementary to, but not essential for, the main text. Our references to literature include, whenever possible and therefore in abundance, pointers to sites on the World Wide Web.

No reader needs to use the notes to apprehend the argument and to judge its broad justifications-or lack of them. The main text can usefully and properly be read for itself alone. But for those readers who decide that this argument is to be taken seriously, and who feel the need to arm themselves with facts, they are here; or there is a pointer to them, immediately serviceable for anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection. Initially, we envisioned a much shorter response than this book to the Wedge’s campaign.We have delayed work on other projects to write it, even though we would have preferred not to have found it necessary. The more we examined the situation, the more expansive and invasive the Wedge’s program proved to be, and the greater, therefore, was the need we saw for full public examination and for a proper response to it. We have watched and waited for the coalescence of an appropriately organized counter-movement, and, indeed, a few small organizations and individual members of the scientific and academic communities, as well as concerned citizens, have recently mounted admirable efforts, with only a minute fraction of the resources available to the Wedge. But those active people are few, and they need the help of everyone who has a stake in the high quality of our civic, scientific, and educational cultures.

Notes

1. Donald H. Naftulin, John E. Ware, Jr., and Frank A. Donnelly, “The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction,” Journal of Medical Education 48 (July 1973), 630-635.

2. Naftulin et al., 631.

3. Naftulin et al., 633.

4. William A. Dembski, “Intelligent Design Coming Clean.” Posted on Metaviews in November 2000. Accessed on May 4, 2002, at this site.

5. Dembski, “Intelligent Design Coming Clean.”

6. Phillip E. Johnson, "The Wedge: A Progress Report," Access Research Network. Accessed on April 21, 2001, at this site.

7. See the archive of "Phillip Johnson's Weekly Wedge Update".

8. See James Glanz, "Evolutionists Battle New Theory on Creation," New York Times, April 8, 2001. Accessed on April 22, 2001, at this page. See also Teresa Watanabe, "Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator: Believers in ‘Intelligent Design’ Try to Redirect Evolution Disputes Along Intellectual Lines," Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2001. Accessed on April 22, 2001, at http://www.discovery.org/news/EnlistingScience.html.

9. Robert Wright, "The ‘New’ Creationism," Slate, April 16, 2001. Accessed on April 22, 2001, at http://slate.msn.com/Earthling/01-04-16/Earthling.asp.

10. "2001 Church/State Legislation," Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, April 18, 2001.

11. Will Sentell, "Baton Rouge Legislator Calls Theory Racist," The Advocate, April 18, 2001. Accessed on April 26, 2001, at http://www.theadvocate.com/news/story.asp?StoryID=20792. At Weston-Broome's April 17, 2001, public meeting, when a questioner asked her what alternatives to teaching evolution she would consider, she mentioned "the design intelligence [sic] theory."

12. Intelligent Design Network, “Second Annual IDNet Symposium.” Accessed on April 26, 2001, at this site.

13. See references to the two Macoskos' teaching activities in Newsletter of the American Scientific Affiliation and Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation, January/February 2001. Accessed on April 23, 2003, at this site.

14. "2001 Spring Meeting," American Geophysical Union. Accessed on April 26, 2001, at this site.

15. National Center for Science Education, “Evolving Banners at the Discovery Institute.” Accessed on August 29, 2002, at this site.

Barbara Forrest is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department of History and Government, Southeastern Louisiana University. Paul R. Gross is University Professor of Life Sciences, University of Virginia (Emeritus).

This Introduction to Creationism's Trojan Horse: the Wedge of Intelligent Design, Oxford University Press, is republished by permission. Creationism's Trojan Horse can be ordered at the OUP website.

[snarks_when_bored]

Plato was a man of his time. He appears to have held that living bodies were infused with soul, an agency or power of self-motion that non-living things lacked. His Timaeus is his most sophisticated exposition of this position, but Phaedo, Republic, Philebus and Laws also contain pertinent passages. While Plato didn't invent this doctrine of what came to be called 'vitalism', he certainly gave it its first important written expression. Aristotle in no way disagreed with Plato's view that living things were infused with soul while non-living things were not.

Vitalism lost its vitality in the early decades of the last century (Bergson was perhaps its last well-known proponent), but creationists and ID'ers appear to have been attempting to revivify it.

The claim that there's some special force or substance ("the spark of life") whose presence in matter brings that matter to life is either true or false. Almost all modern biologists think that it's false; creationists and ID'ers seem to think that it's true.

In the next few years, we're likely to hear the announcement of the laboratory creation of a brand-new, never-before-seen living thing. I'd like to think that such an announcement will finally show that vitalism is false. But it's unlikely that everybody will be convinced. And so the wrangling will continue.

[FederalistVet]

Actually, Thomists still accept the existence of the soul because Natural Scientists lack the ability to discredit it.
Philosophy is not the Biologist's area of expertise. In fact, the Natural Sciences have become so specialized they cannot transcend Empirical evidence. Philosophy has even quite specialized in the Universities (where I've given guest lectures in Philosophy) that many Philosophers are not Philosophers if you understand where I'm going. From the perspective of a Philosopher, recent advances in the Natural Sciences have allowed Philosophers to debunk the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-Philosophy's of the last two centuries with ease. The existence of the "soul" is more easily demonstrated today than in Aristotle's and Plato's times.
Don't think because an idea is not fashionable in liberal controlled Universities, that the idea is false. I was ridiculed and spit on by liberals when I wore the Navy uniform and when I was a kid. Unlike the liberal and protestant students, when I was attending the four Universities I attended (so far) acquiring the five majors I acquired, liberal professors ridiculed and discriminated against me every day, but despite that ridicule and discrimination I managed to make the Dean's list every semester, and graduate Magna Cum Laude. And I accomplished it by working a full-time job while attending school full-time.
At the age of seven, I began my instruction in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, History of Philosophy, and Theology.
Over the last twenty-five years I've been repairing the damage caused by liberals in the elementary schools, secondary schools, and universities and I can assure you the work is never-ending. (It can also be heartbreaking.)
By the time that I was twelve I had to ask the librarians to go upstairs to retrieve books about the American Revolution from the adult only section because I had already read everything in the regular section of the library about the American Revolution. By the time I was sixteen the eye doctors were telling me I would go blind if I keep reading so much. By the time I was twenty I had already studied the beliefs of every religion in the world (curiosity).
While attending public high school I had libera teachers take me to the side and inform me to my face that they were deliberately lowering my grade in an attempt to force me to quit the wrestling team. In college, I had a professor inform me in front of all the other students my "Academic career would be taken care of" if I attacked my religion. The same professor was the Democrat Party chairman of the State at the time and he was running the Governor's reelection campaign.
I served in the Armed Forces when it wasn't a good time to serve in the Armed Forces. For twenty years I faced discrimination in employment by liberals because I was a Veteran.
In my spare time I've written a more contemporary version of De Anima.

[snarks_when_bored]

You're correct that Thomists accept the existence of soul; I was addressing the secular side of the history. But I'd be interested in seeing your demonstration of the existence of soul. The Athenian Stranger's demonstration in Book X of Plato's Laws is interesting, but not persuasive.

You would appear to have had some unfortunate encounters in your educational career. A threat to lower your grade if you didn't quit the wrestling team? Bizarre (and indefensible). As you know, Plato was a wrestler. Did you point that out to your teacher(s)?

And let me say that I honor your military service to this country. I thank you for it.

Best regards...

[Dataman]

You're not so dense as to have missed the innumerable times people have pointed out that God could have zapped life into existence, and it then proceeded to Evolve.

You fail to perceive the fallacy in your own argument. If God exists, miracles are automatically possible. If miracles are possible, naturalism is both unnecessary and false.

For an evolutionist to appeal to God to explain all the problematic aspects of his irreparable theory is hypocrisy in the absolute sense since he mocks the creationist for doing supposedly the same thing.

[Dataman]

Well, now here we are at the prime directive of Creationists. To create a "scientific aura" around their claims that somehow they've proven God's existence.

You're fabricating again, Narby.

We all know it is a given that the FR evolutionists any argument that dampens their evaporating hope that evolution is true-- no matter what the evidence, proof or source. Darwinism is dead and the pall bearers are waiting for another theory to come along before they drop it in the ground.

We all know that the standards of proof to an FR evolutionist are the thickness of a razor blade for evolution and infinitely high for creation.

We all know that creationists can explain the origin of the universe, evolutionists cannot; creationists can explain the origin of life, evolutionists cannot; creationists can explain the why there are no transitional fossils, evolutionists cannot; creationists can explain the existence of DNA, evolutionists cannot. In fact the entire purpose of evolution seems to be to explain away rather than to explain.

Our Founders noted that the creation and the Creator are self-evident, but you are smarter than the Founders. You know that God doesn't exist because there is no evidence. By "no evidence" you mean no evidence that will persuade you, since there is abundant evidence. There is so much evidence that it has been given a term: The Anthropic Principle.Yet you will believe in extraterrestrials, for which there is no evidence, a self creating universe, for which there is no evidence, spontaneous generation, which has been disproved, macroevolution, for which there is no evidence, etc, etc, etc. IOW your postmodern belief system is inconsistent, contradictory, and absurd.

Aquinas and others have pointed out many proofs for the existence of God. His Prime Mover argument, for example, has never been refuted. It has been answered, but not refuted. Even science would support the Uncaused Cause argument for science has given us the law of cause and effect. But I suppose you prefer to say that there are effects without causes. That is so unscientific, Narby.

The unscientific position, therefore, is to deny the existence of God.

[Dataman]

No, he's just a liar.

Are you afraid to address me?

Your adhominem fallacies are becoming a trademark. It's no wonder you fail to convince anyone. For a change, try refuting anything I say.

[Dataman]

Philosophy is not the Biologist's area of expertise. In fact, the Natural Sciences have become so specialized they cannot transcend Empirical evidence.

As these threads clearly demonstrate.

[FederalistVet]

Yes. Thanks for the info.

[Dimensio]

Are you afraid to address me?

There's no point in addressing you. No matter how often your lies are exposed, you keep repeating them.

You have repeatedly and consistely asserted that the theory of evolution is troubled because -- as you claim -- abiogenesis is impossible. The fact that the theory of evolution does not and has never addressed the ultimate origins of life is irrelevant to your claim, you just keep repeating the lie over and over again. When I asked you for a credible reference that authoratitavely stated that the theory addressed abiogenesis, you provided three website quotes and you were so dishonest that you didn't even bother providing citations for them, telling me to look them up myself. Well, I did look them up. One of them did address both abiogenesis and the theory of evolution, but it clearly treated them as two seperate matters. Another website was about deep ocean life, didn't address evolution at all and only mentioned abiogenesis in passing. The third was a self-styled "pagan creation myth" that, while borrowing from current science, was not itself a scientific theory, much less a stating of the theory of evolution (and, I might add, was not written by a biologist).

You have asserted that evolutionists are "redefining" their theory to get around the alleged impossibility of evolution, yet you haven't provided a single citation showing when the theory ever included abiogenesis. You have also been given references from as far back as Charles Darwin himself, who stated in Origin that evolution began after the "Creator" breathed life into the first organisms.

You have made a false statement. You have been told repeatedly that it is false and does not represent the viewpoint of your opponents. You have been given references to show you that your statement is false. You have lied about references that you claimed supported your assertion and you continue to make the false assertion. I don't see how that makes you anything other than a liar.

[narby]

If miracles are possible, naturalism is both unnecessary and false.

First, miracles must be possible. Many people believe they are, but many people believe in Nessie too. Neither are proven.

Second, you obviously can't comprehend the English language, because my original point was that Evolution could certianly have been "created" by God. Your statement that Evolution is "both unnecessary and false" in that case is not a rebuttal of my point.

Third, since my point has abosolutely nothing to do with whether God exists or not, there is no hypocracy accept in your "James Carville" style of argument.

That is you, isn't it Carville? How's Mary and the kids?

[narby]

I've rarely seen a more twisted set of arguments in my life.

[narby]

Dataman has about the believability of James Carville. Granted, many believe Carville is a genius, but the rest of us can easily see that he is a genius only at crafting arguments that beguile the uninformed.

His continual reference to abiogenesis in discussions about Evolution, which has nothing whatsoever to do with abiogenesis is particularly disgusting. See the post by Dimensio to Dataman a bit above here for a concise rebuttal.

And his recent tactic of claiming that if "miracles are possible, then Evolution must be false" is my personal frustration with the man. Any believer that would presume to tell God that it is outside of His power to have created Evolution has an awfully twisted view of God.

[FederalistVet]

Any believer that would presume to tell God that it is outside of His power to have created Evolution has an awfully twisted view of God.

Perhaps, but anyone who claims God must conform to the "fashions" of Natural Scientists also has an awfully twisted view of God and of the qualifications of a Natural
Scientist.

[narby]

Perhaps, but anyone who claims God must conform to the "fashions" of Natural Scientists also has an awfully twisted view of God and of the qualifications of a Natural Scientist.

So your opionion is that God does not have the power to have created Evolution? He put all those fossils in the ground, planted DNA evidence in specific ways, just to mess with our heads? Perhaps you think this is all just a test of our faith.

I think that it is a dangerous game to play for faithful people to attempt to "prove" God through scientific Creationism. In the end, it will still be one opinion against another. Yet this argument will provide the forum where I believe many will reject Him for keeps. I think Christians are shooting themselves in the foot. And I think it's just possible that people like Dataman and other semi-pro Creationists are helping them do it. For what agenda I can't imagine.

[Dataman]

I consider the name-calling and the sour scenario fabrication of the naturalists a complimentary alternative to answering charges or producing evidence. If they could, they would.

This thread is dead so I'll happily engage you all in a future one. Bye.

[balrog666]

I think Christians are shooting themselves in the foot. And I think it's just possible that people like Dataman and other semi-pro Creationists are helping them do it. For what agenda I can't imagine.

There is no explaining it - some people are just evil.

[narby]

I consider the name-calling and the sour scenario fabrication of the naturalists a complimentary alternative to answering charges or producing evidence.

And labeling me a "naturalist" is not "name calling"? It's not the actual label, it's the tone that gives that message.

Your citations where abiogenesis is shown to be within Evolutionary theory are where? Dimensio challenged you multiple times to cite where you get that association and you cannot. So you claim the thread is dead and you bail.

Sore loser, if you ask me. And that's not "name calling", I believe it is a factual description of your state in this argument.

What is your agenda Dataman? Do you just like the emotional jolt of the argument? Perhaps you are a professional Creationist and this is how you make money? By talking to gullible churches who will take up a collection for you, or maybe writing Creationist propaganda.

I've made my agenda known. I believe this is a serious mistake for religious people to make this argument. I think more people will be led to reject God because of it, and that is a tragedy.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but that's what motivates me. What's your reason for being here? Perhaps you agree with me, and your very point of arguing Creationism is to kill the faith of some number of people? Or perhaps to give justification to the people who call Christians "dumb hicks". The more people you can get to repeat your half baked arguments, the worse Christianity will be viewed by many.

I still think you're James Carville over here on FR just having a great time impersonating a Creationist whacko. Your style of "debate" sounds just like him.

[FederalistVet]

It has been my experience that the best argument "against" Darwinism is the Darwinist's own claims.
"Science" comes from the Latin for "Knowledge." Knowledge presupposes something is "knowable." With chaos, or complete "randomness," "knowledge is not possible because if their is no "intelligible order" to the material world, it would not be "knowable."
Science, therefore, presupposes "order" or "intelligent design" as the creationists call it.
Do you think they possess enough knowledge to talk about how to make an atom "super conductive?"

[Dimensio]

Science, therefore, presupposes "order" or "intelligent design" as the creationists call it.

Why are you insisting that "order" requires "intelligent design"?

[narby]

Science, therefore, presupposes "order" or "intelligent design" as the creationists call it.

A windless lake with no waves is a perfect mirror, and very "ordered". You can say that the lake, following God's Intellegent Design for liquids to follow gravity to the lowest point explains this order.

The same can be said for Evolution, which I believe is a fundimental creation no different than Gravity. You can say that God created this process of Evolution, and it follows the order in His Intellegent Design theory.

But the existence of order in Gravity and Evolution does not prove the existence of God any more than it proves the existence of Zeus. That's why they call it "faith". You must believe in Him based solely on His word. He gives no "proof".

If it makes you uncomfortable that the "science" of the creation of the world does not prove the existence of God, then that's the point I've been trying to make in these threads. It is a serious mistake for believers to use "science" in an attempt to prove God's existence. Because for some people, it might "prove" the opposite.

Since the words of Genesis are few, and the word of God very hard for mere humans to comprehend, it is better to say that Genesis and Evolution are not mutually exclusive. And believers should just let it go at that and stop the fighting.