Witness: Movement's roots in creationism (Dover trial 10/6/05)

HARRISBURG — Intelligent design did not spring from Genesis, an expert testified Wednesday in the federal lawsuit against the Dover Area School District.

Rather, its inspiration came from the Gospel of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

In the sixth day of the trial in U.S. Middle District Court, plaintiffs' attorneys used the testimony of Barbara Forrest, a Southeastern Louisiana University philosophy professor, to connect a series of dots regarding the history of the intelligent design movement and creationism.

The author of "Creationism's Trojan Horse," Forrest painted a picture of a covert religious movement — one that presented itself as scientific to the media and mainstream public. But under the surface, she said, leaders plotted not only a revolution in science, but also of modern culture.

In repeated accounts, she outlined how intelligent design's founders wanted nothing more than to have their concept permeate all religious, cultural and political life.

Forrest also pointed to an inherent contradiction in the movement — even as it presented intelligent design as science, its proponents actively courted Christians and promoted creationist beliefs.

"Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," William Dembski, one of the movement's chief proponents, said in a 1999 interview in Touchstone, a Christian magazine that Forrest cited in her testimony.

While its supporters maintain that intelligent design — the idea that the complexity of life requires a guiding hand — is not religious because God is never mentioned, Forrest also referenced numerous examples where the name of the designer is clearly spelled out.

"Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory, but always a completion," Dembski wrote in his book, "Intelligent Design."

Forrest, under questioning by plaintiffs' attorney Eric Rothschild, spoke of the "wedge strategy," the brainchild of Phillip Johnson, founder of the intelligent design movement and now-retired Berkley University law professor.

Johnson wrote that he believed that evolution contradicts not only the Book of Genesis "but every word in the Bible." In his article, "How the evolution debate can be won," which was presented in court, Johnson proposed an intellectual movement "in the universities and churches."

Johnson's strategy was later outlined in a fundraising document produced by the pro-intelligent-design Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, posted on the Internet in 1999.

The first sentence of the document states: "The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built."

It also lists one of Discovery's long-range goals to use intelligent design "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

To accomplish Discovery's mission, the wedge document lists alliance building with churches and religious groups and speaking at seminars of apologetics, the branch of theology that deals with the defense and proofs of Christian beliefs.

Discovery, in a statement issued Wednesday night, denied any links to creationism.

"The scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text," the statement said.

Also, during cross-examination, Dover's attorney Richard Thompson pointed out that Dover's board members all have signed affidavits saying they had never heard of the wedge strategy before voting to include intelligent design in the district's biology curriculum.

After the board changed the curriculum in October, 11 district parents filed suit against the district, arguing board members were trying to get God into science class.

And while Thompson didn't discount any of the quotes attributed to the movement's leaders, he spoke of philosophical statements espousing secular humanism — the rejection of religious faith — made by evolutionary supporters.

Thompson equated their remarks with Johnson's and Dembski's religious statements regarding intelligent design.

Under repeated questioning, Forrest disagreed. Her cross-examination continues today. Following defense attorneys' protracted attempts to disqualify Forrest's qualifications and over their objections, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled to allow her to testify.

In addition to the wedge strategy, many of her remarks also focused on early drafts of the pro-intelligent-design textbook "Of Pandas and People."

Using exhibits plaintiffs' attorneys had subpoenaed from the book's publisher, Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Forrest showed how references to "creation science" in earlier drafts were changed to "intelligent design" after the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the teachings of creation science in 1987.

WHAT IS THE WEDGE STRATEGY?

During testimony in federal court Wednesday, Southeastern Louisiana University professor Barbara Forrest cited, among other things, the Discovery Institute's wedge strategy document to show the link between creationism and intelligent design. The institute says the document was used in a fundraising campaign.

Created in 1999, the document outlined the goal of seeing the end of what it calls "scientific materialism," which it described as "(portraying) humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment."

1. A major public debate between design theorists and Darwinists by 2003
2. Thirty published books on design and its cultural implications, such as sex, gender issues, medicine, law and religion
3. One hundred scientific, academic and technical articles by Discovery Institute's fellows
4. Significant coverage in national media
5. Spiritual and cultural renewal, including:

6. Ten states begin to rectify ideological imbalance in their science curricula and include design theory For more details

To read the complete wedge strategy document, go to http://www.biosurvey.ou.edu/oese/WEDGE_STRATEGY.html To read the Discovery Institute's response to criticism of the wedge strategy, go to http://www.discovery.org/. Click on search and type "wedge" into the "Search by: Title/Sub-Title" line. Then follow the prompts.

"Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," William Dembski, one of the movement's chief proponents, said in a 1999 interview in Touchstone, a Christian magazine that Forrest cited in her testimony."

It was only a matter of time before the truth came out. Those of us who follow the creation-evolution debate closely have known about the Wedge document for years, but it is always nice to see ID's most visible proponents admitting the religious core of ID in their own words.

Even beyond the now obvious theocratic agenda of ID, there is also the basic problem that ID cannot work as science. Science is based on naturalistic explanations, and by definition ID assumes that NO natural explanation for the origin and complexity of life could ever be accepted. Dembski writes:

Intelligent design regards intelligence as an irreducible feature of reality. Consequently it regards any attempt to subsume intelligent agency under natural causes as fundamentally misguided and regards the natural laws that characterize natural causes as fundamentally incomplete. This is not to deny derived intentionality, in which artifacts, though functioning according to natural laws and operating by natural causes, nonetheless accomplish the aims of their designers and thus exhibit design. Yet whenever anything exhibits design in this way, the chain of natural causes leading up to it is incomplete and must presuppose the activity of a designing intelligence.
William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, pp. 326-327. (Emphasis added)

In other words, according to Dembski, ID in the science classroom (or science journal) would require that any part of the natural world deemed to exhibit design must have a supernatural explanation.

That would mean that teachers would be required to teach supernaturalism, and supernaturalism only, in science classes. (That is, their lessons would be incomplete until they brought in the supernatural explanation.) Not only in biology, but also in physics and chemistry, since IDers have also claimed that chemistry and physics (invoking what are called fine-tuning arguments) support their intelligent design argument, too.

Dembski's quotation about John's Gospel merely makes clear just who the supernatural agent is required to be, and exposes the real theocratic mission behind ID.

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Defense lawyers said Dover board members didn't know the history before their vote.

WHAT IS THE WEDGE STRATEGY?