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]

This is the Introduction to the book, Creationism's Trojan Horse:  The Wedge of Intelligent Design.

Here is the Oxford University Press description of the book:

Forrest and Gross expose the scientific failure, the religious essence, and the political ambitions of "intelligent design" creationism. They examine the movement's "Wedge Strategy," which has advanced and is succeeding through public relations rather than through scientific research. Analyzing the content and character of "intelligent design theory," they highlight its threat to public education and to the separation of church and state.

[snarks_when_bored]

Ping.

[Samurai_Jack]

This Book Sucks,

It's condescending to creationists. It's not written to convince the creationist that darwinism is wrong, it's written to provide ammunition for darwinists to defend their lofty and humanist positions.

[snarks_when_bored]

It's not written to convince the creationist that darwinism is wrong...

Creationists don't need to be convinced that Darwinism is wrong—they already believe that. Perhaps you meant that the book's not written to convince the creationist that Darwinism is right. If so, you're correct; the authors are doubtless aware that creationists are largely impervious to evidence and argument.

[FederalistVet]

Darwinists are the religious fanatics. Am I the only one who gone back far enough in the historical record to link the Freemason, Baptist, Unitarian, Puritan, Quaker, and social gospel movement to the forced instruction in the Dogma called Evolution? Let's be real. Evolution was elevated to a theory not by scientists but by protestant, unitarian and freemason nutcases.

[ThirstyMan]

I can't believe I am entering this discussion again. Oh well.

"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..."

Yes, I'd call that condescending.

"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."

When discussion enters the realm of Origins, (the code word used by the author is "fundamentals"), then the science teacher must admit that he may not have all the facts at his disposal using the reductionist's definition/ version of the scientific method.

For example, I can give two scientific explanations for my existence.
I was created by the coming together of a sperm and an egg.
It is also true that my parents are Al and Mary Lou.
Both are scientific facts. One view is how a reductionist describes my arrival.
The other is more personal.

Science should not be used to rule out the personal explanation for my existence. Is this a wedge? a wedgie perhaps? Only for those who want a reductionist world view...which is a drift beyond science into a pseudo-scientific world... a philosophical perspective.

John Polkinhorne, a physicist and a priest has written (extremely paraphrased): "The water in the teapot is boiling because the gas fire is heating it up. The water is also boiling because I want a cup of tea."

Tell me which of these two true facts is not scientific.

[PatrickHenry]

Evolution Ping! This list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and maybe other science topics like cosmology.
See the list's description in my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail me to be added or dropped.

[snarks_when_bored]

It's very simple:  if creationists could present evidence that evolution didn't happen, they would. Since they haven't, they can't (because there isn't any). Biblical passages are not scientific evidence of anything (except perhaps the beliefs of the authors of the passages).

But I don't defend polemical use of scientific results on either side.

[Fatalis]

I'll stipulate that Intelligent Design is a Trojan Horse for Creationism.

Now look at this statement from the top of the article, placed there with no aparent sense of irony:

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

"Impersonal laws" are a Trojan Horse for atheism.

Weinberg has reached a completely ascientific conclusion. He has stepped boldly into metaphysics with that staterment, and about the mind of man, no less. Science can not inform us about purpose in the Universe, nor whether the laws of it are personal or not.

Hilarity ensues when the author of this otherwise reasonable critique of the nonscientific underpinnings of I.D. unwittingly chooses to highlight Weinberg's equally egregious revelation.

[Fatalis]

An open challenge:

Design an experiment utilizing the scientific method to test whether the natural laws of the Universe are impersonal or not.

If it can't be done, then the assertion of "impersonal laws" by Weinberg is non-falsifiable.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Some good points. The article does elucidate the essential identity of Creationism, PostModernDeconstructionism, and New-Ageism, (along with Scientology and a few others.) All are soul-mates in their desire to destroy the idea that the scientific method is a legitimate means of inquiry.

[snarks_when_bored]

Weinberg's words are, as usual, carefully chosen:

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.

The scientific enterprise is the attempt to understand the laws which govern the appearances of the natural world. This attempt proceeds by trying to make the smallest number of hypotheses necessary to account for the phenomena. The leap to 'explanation by deity' is such a huge one, and is so far-reaching in its explanatory presumption, that it explains nothing. Any phenomenon at all can be deemed understood with the utterance of the phrase, "That's the way God made it". That's just not science.

Would you suggest that studies of brain function and consciousness (and also perhaps studies of the weather) should be abandoned? I hope not.

[ThirstyMan]

"Impersonal laws" are a Trojan Horse for atheism.

Yes!!! Excellent insight sir!

"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." "I see nothing..." says Steven Weinberg, but actually, I think it was Sgt Schultz who said it first....and with a lot more feeling.

It's true, Weinberg is proudly standing on his own limited apprehension. But for him to extrapolate that observation, to make a "proof" statment that nothing outside his apprehension exists...well, he should have stuck with "I see nothing".

Thanks for your observation!

[grey_whiskers]

One more interesting point to me is that by emphasizing his Nobel Prize, he seems to be implicitly relying upon argument-by-authority; I thought that science was supposed to have replaced scholasticism long ago...

It brings to mind the famous perversion of Newton's quote posted upon some graduate student's door:

The reason I cannot see as far as others is that giants are standing on my shoulders.

[Fatalis]

"That's the way God made it". That's just not science.

No kidding, I stipulated that.

"God didn't make it" is also not science, and to assert "impersonal laws" of science is to say "God didn't make the laws."

Would you suggest that studies of brain function and consciousness (and also perhaps studies of the weather) should be abandoned? I hope not.

False dilemma. Brain function can be studied with absolute scientific and academic freedom while remaining agnostic about the the question of purpose in the laws governing those functions.

[Shryke]

Have you noticed how many "new" members to FR are jumping into these threads? From a particular viewpoint? Hard to keep track of 'em all.

[grey_whiskers]

Creationism, PostModernDeconstructionism, and New-Ageism, (along with Scientology and a few others.) All are soul-mates in their desire to destroy the idea that the scientific method is a legitimate means of inquiry.

This sounds like rather a strong statement...

Is this universally true of the adherents to the respective philosophies, or only the more rabid leaders?

By analogy, consider the 'alternative health' or 'preventative nutrition' acolytes who crusade against the medical / pharmaceutical establishment...

Recall there are Nobelists in the sciences who subscribe to nutrition (vitamin C, Pauling) and who challenge paradigms (AIDS, Kary Mullis) who are part of the establishment, all the way down to "channeling and crystal energy healing" people who ARE trying to overthrow science altogether.

Somewhere in your remarks there is an interesting article / book on the various contrasts of various forms of mysticism to disciplined scientific inquiry. Some seek to supplant science; others seek to supplement it; others seek to remove it completely.

OTOH, recall many of the earlier scientists (Brahe, Newton, Faraday) were devout Christians who sought to study Nature so as to better understand the Designer: not that many of the fanatical creationists remember or ever knew this. And Eyring (transition-state theory in chemistry) was a devout Mormon...
And let us not forget Lysenkoism in the athiestic Soviet Union.

Somewhere there was been a parting of the ways between physics and metaphysics. Hence much of the anti-scientific nonsense sprouting since, oh, the 60's and 70's; hence many of the flame wars.

[Shryke]

and to assert "impersonal laws" of science is to say "God didn't make the laws."

Why? What does the subjective nature of man (personality) have to do with the laws of science, or G-d?

[Physicist]

Weinberg has reached a completely ascientific conclusion. He has stepped boldly into metaphysics with that staterment, and about the mind of man, no less.

Non-sequitur. What Weinberg said is "I don't see why the mind can't be understood, in principle." That's the attitude any scientist must take. It has nothing to do with metaphysics. Either the mind is understandable or it is not. Until the mind is proven not to be understandable--a very tall order--we must proceed as if it will someday yield to our probing. To do otherwise is to abandon science.

And whether the mind is understandable or not, I don't see how any of this has to do with atheism. If the mind turns out to be made of only springs and gears, that has nothing to do with whether God exists.

[snarks_when_bored]

I'm fairly sure that by 'impersonal laws', Weinberg means 'laws not dependent upon particular places or particular times or particular sorts of investigators/observers or ... (extend this list as needed)'. And I'm also fairly sure that if Weinberg encountered some sort of evidence that pointed to the existence of a deity, he would find it fascinating and worthy of further study. He's too good a scientist to ignore (or, on the other hand, to make up) evidence.

As for your other point:

Brain function can be studied with absolute scientific and academic freedom while remaining agnostic about the the question of purpose in the laws governing those functions.

I agree, but would add that the question of "purpose in the laws" is not a question that is easy to investigate scientifically. But it's too big a topic to address here and now (it's morning where I am and I'm just not up to writing a mini-opus!).