Discovery Institute's “Wedge Document” How Darwinist Paranoia Fueled an Urban Legend

Evolution News ^ | 10/07/05 | Staff

[Heartlander]

Discovery Institute's “Wedge Document”: How Darwinist Paranoia Fueled an Urban Legend

In 1999 someone posted on the internet an early fundraising proposal for Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Dubbed the “Wedge Document,” this proposal soon took on a life of its own, popping up in all sorts of places and eventually spawning what can only be called a giant urban legend. Among true-believers on the Darwinist fringe the document came to be viewed as evidence for a secret conspiracy to fuse religion with science and impose a theocracy. These claims were so outlandish that for a long time we simply ignored them. But because some credulous Darwinists seem willing to believe almost anything, we decided we should set the record straight.

1. The Background

• In 1996 Discovery Institute established the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Its main purposes were (1) to support research by scientists and other scholars who were critical of neo-Darwinism and by those who were developing the emerging scientific theory of intelligent design; and (2) to explore, in various ways, the multiple connections between science and culture.
• To raise financial support for the Center, Discovery Institute prepared a fundraising proposal that explained the overall rationale for the Center and why a think tank like Discovery would want to start such an entity in the first place. Like most fundraising proposals, this one included a multi-year budget and a list of goals to be achieved.

2. The Rise of an Urban Legend

• In 1999 a copy of this fundraising proposal was posted by someone on the internet. The document soon spread across the world wide web, gaining almost mythic status among some Darwinists.
• That’s when members of the Darwinist fringe began saying rather loopy things. For example, one group claimed that the document supplied evidence of a frightening twenty-year master plan “to have religion control not only science, but also everyday life, laws, and education”!
• Barbara Forrest, a Louisiana professor on the board of a group called the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, similarly championed the document as proof positive of a sinister conspiracy to abolish civil liberties and unify church and state. Forrest insisted that the document was “crucially important,” and she played up its supposed secrecy, claiming at one point that its “authenticity…has been neither affirmed nor denied by the Discovery Institute.” Poor Prof. Forrest—if she really wanted to know whether the document was authentic, all she had to do was ask. (She didn’t.)
• There were lots of ironies as this urban legend began to grow, but Darwinist true-believers didn’t seem capable of appreciating them:
  --Discovery Institute, the supposed mastermind of this “religious” conspiracy, is in fact a secular organization that sponsored programs on a wide array of issues, including mass transit, technology policy, the environment, and national defense.
  --At the time the “Wedge Document” was being used by Darwinists to stoke fears about Christian theocracy, the Chairman of Discovery’s Board was Jewish, its President was an Episcopalian, and its various Fellows represented an eclectic range of religious views ranging from Roman Catholic to agnostic. It would have been news to them that they were all part of a fundamentalist cabal.
  --Far from promoting a union between church and state, Discovery Institute sponsored for several years a seminar for college students that advocated religious liberty and the separation between church and state.

3. What the Document Actually Says

• The best way to dispel the paranoia of the conspiracy-mongers is to actually look at the document in question. It simply doesn’t advocate the views they attribute to it.
  First and foremost, and contrary to the hysterical claims of some Darwinists, this document does not attack “science” or the “scientific method.” In fact, it is pro-science.
• What the document critiques is “scientific materialism,” which is the abuse of genuine science by those who claim that science supports the unscientific philosophy of materialism.
• Second, the document does not propose replacing “science” or the “scientific method” with “God” or “religion.” Instead, it supports a science that is “consonant” (i.e., harmonious) with theism, rather than hostile to it. To support a science that is “consonant” with religion is not to claim that religion and science are the same thing. They clearly aren’t. But it is to deny the claim of scientific materialists that science is somehow anti-religious.

Following are the document’s major points, which we still are happy to affirm:

1. “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization is built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.” As a historical matter, this statement happens to be true. The idea that humans are created in the image of God has had powerful positive cultural consequences. Only a member of a group with a name like the “New Orleans Secular Humanist Association” could find anything objectionable here. (By the way, isn’t it strange that a group supposedly promoting “theocracy” would praise “representative democracy” and “human rights”?)
2. “Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed 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 throughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment.” This statement highlights one of the animating concerns of Discovery Institute as a public policy think tank. Leading nineteenth century intellectuals tried to hijack science to promote their own anti-religious agenda. This attempt to enlist science to support an anti-religious agenda continues to this day with Darwinists like Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, who boldly insists that Darwinism supports atheism. We continue to think that such claims are an abuse of genuine science, and that this abuse of real science has led to pernicious social consequences (such as the eugenics crusade pushed by Darwinist biologists early in the twentieth century).
3. "Discovery Institute’s Center... seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.” It wants to “reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." We admit it: We want to end the abuse of science by Darwinists like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson who try to use science to debunk religion, and we want to provide support for scientists and philosophers who think that real science is actually “consonant with… theistic convictions.” Please note, however: “Consonant with” means “in harmony with.” It does not mean “same as.” Recent developments in physics, cosmology, biochemistry, and related sciences may lead to a new harmony between science and religion. But that doesn’t mean we think religion and science are the same thing. We don’t.
4. “Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.” It is precisely because we are interested in encouraging intellectual exploration that the “Wedge Document” identified the “essential” component of its program as the support of scholarly “research, writing and publication.” The document makes clear that the primary goal of Discovery Institute’s program in this area is to support scholars so they can engage in research and publication Scholarship comes first. Accordingly, by far the largest program in the Center’s budget has been the awarding of research fellowships to biologists, philosophers of science, and other scholars to engage in research and writing.
5. “The best and truest research can languish unread and unused unless it is properly publicized.” It’s shocking but true—Discovery Institute actually promised to publicize the work of its scholars in the broader culture! What’s more, it wanted to engage Darwinists in academic debates at colleges and universities! We are happy to say that we still believe in vigorous and open discussion of our ideas, and we still do whatever we can to publicize the work of those we support. So much for the “secret” part of our supposed “conspiracy.”

A final thought: Don’t Darwinists have better ways to spend their time than inventing absurd conspiracy theories about their opponents? The longer Darwinists persist in spinning such urban legends, the more likely it is that fair-minded people will begin to question whether Darwinists know what they are talking about.

Read the Wedge document for yourself, along with a more detailed point by point response and clarification of falacious allegations.

[malakhi]

I know the difference between theory, fact, and law.

Good, then you know that evolution is both a fact and a theory. And that theories do not "graduate" into laws. Right?

My "back-handed swipe" at the fossil record goes to the people who have thought to "augment it" by illegitimate means. It is a fact that there have been some people like this. It is also a fact that hoaxes have been exposed. It is a "swipe" to simply mention such things, when they are true?

As a means to try to cast a negative light on the entire fossil record, yes. The only "evolutionist fraud" of which I am aware was "Piltdown man", and this fraud was in fact exposed by other scientists.

[xzins]

Science investigate ways to study that which is heretofore unstudyable.


ANYTHING that is true or real is a subject for science.

[Liberal Classic]

Who ya gonna call?

[xzins]

****Where there's a will, there's a way.****

Scientist spooked by ghost study

Prof Wiseman does not believe the experiences were paranormal

A scientist investigating one of the UK's "most haunted" locations has said "something quite odd" was going on.
Professor Richard Wiseman used 200 volunteers to carry out a study of Mary King's Close in Edinburgh.

It yielded reports of apparitions, phantom footsteps, unexplained cold spots and unseen hands.

But Prof Wiseman does not believe the experiences were paranormal. He said environmental and psychological factors were responsible for the hauntings.

Strong reputation

Mary King's Close is a warren of underground streets sealed off from the outside world more than two centuries ago.

It became entombed when Edinburgh's Royal Exchange - now the City Chambers - was built in 1753.

The top floors of the houses were demolished and the lower floors incorporated into its foundations.

The rooms of many houses still exist, and according to some reports, so do a number of their former residents.

Prof Wisemen sent groups of volunteers to four locations, without telling them that only two sites had a strong reputation for being haunted.

The aim was to compare reports from the different sites.


More than 200 people visited Mary King's Close for the study

About 70% of those visiting the "haunted" locations reported unusual phenomena.

In contrast, only 48% of people exploring the locations not reputed to be haunted had spooky experiences.

At the "most haunted" site, where a sinister figure in black has repeatedly been seen, more than 80% of the volunteers reported something strange happening.

[xzins]

Actually, I have looked that up in the past, and discovered that there is some support for the idea that "theory graduates to law."

I don't feel like tracking it down again, but it was fairly easy to google up.

And very reputable sources, too.

[malakhi]

“Matter in all its motions” cannot address questions which are more intrinsically mathematical – whether information theoretics, dimensionality or other geometric physics, or the “unreasonable effectiveness of math” vis-Ã -vis physics.

So you assume.

Indeed, physics does not yet have an explanation for matter itself: ordinary matter (potentially Higgs field/boson or supersymmetry), dark matter (high gravity regions such as black holes) or dark energy (potentially negative, interdimensional gravity causing acceleration of the universe).

Which is not to say that explanations will not be forthcoming.

BTW, there is some interesting thinking being done on gravity, and some of these hypotheses will be tested when the Large Hadron Collider comes online.

The golden key is that the void in which "all that there is" began (regardless of physical cosmology) - has no space, no time, no energy, no matter, no mathematical structures, no logic, no physical laws, no physical constants.

And your evidence for this is?

[malakhi]

That is the issue, isn't it? "Because we cannot study it, that means it doesn't exist" is not a logical statement.

I didn't say "because we cannot study it, that means it doesn't exist". I asked you "to explain how science can proceed to investigate supernatural causes".

In the area of soft research, I remember a few years back I ran across some British research. One of the questions was something like, "Have you ever experienced or been influenced by what many would refer to as divine or supernatural intervention." There was a very large positive response to the question that cut across religious/non-religious lines.

I'm sure you could get similar "soft research" results by asking about UFO encounters. Such research might be interesting for psychology, but offers little in the way of evidence for the reality of the experiences.

You mentioned that the study tools range from hard to soft. If the above is an example of soft research, then what "hard research" tools can be used to investigate supernatural causes?

[xzins]

Soft methods sometimes lead to hard ones.

I've seen any number of survey approaches to people with medical problems that can then be used to diagnose medical conditions that could be confirmed with hard tools.

The point: you've got to start someplace. Inevitably that will open up more information, that will open more questions, more research, different methods....etc.

Isn't that what was learned about space technology. The goal of reaching the moon led to a host of offshoot discoveries.

[Alamo-Girl]

IMHO, the major problem with the theory of evolution in the minds of many is that it is a historical science like archeology, Egyptology and anthropology.

IOW it is a theory that there exists a continuum of life (or tree of life) which corresponds to the quantizations (fossils) of the geologic continuum (time).

That theorized continuum becomes the blueprint into which the empiral evidence is fit - e.g. DNA, molecular biology, etc. Thus in this respect it is different from the other historical sciences.

Enter the distrust.

On the one hand, there is no complete record (every creature did not leave a fossil). And there is no independent observer/witness to the process. Therefore, the common ancestry along various branches is questioned and the questions cannot be defeated because the evolution scientists do not have a complete record. The challenges come not only from the religious but from the panspermiasts as well and raise such questions as whether a particular branch was created or seeded rather than evolved from an apparant ancestor.

On the other hand, because it is treated as a blueprint for a whole range of disciplines which can be empirically tested (DNA, etc.) - the repeating challenge is whether the conclusions being drawn are "kluged" - made to fit the blueprint or orthodoxy of a presumed continuum?

That would be my main complaint about investigations in biology. Biology insists on a preferred status, an autonomy among the sciences, which is not in the interest of the public which funds so much of the research.

In my view, biology (et al) should become as epistemologically pure as physics and math - and not go into any investigation with presuppositions which are not required for the investigation at hand. Drop scientific materialism and the presumption of the continuum, add axioms and postulates strictly applicable to the investigation. Go where the evidence, or lack of evidence, leads.

That would dismiss the second complaint above and it would achieve the objective of the intelligent design movement, i.e. to remove the presupposition of methodological naturalism.

[js1138]

It is a "swipe" to simply mention such things, when they are true?

I don't know, Betty. Is it a swipe simply to mention the Inquisition? Is it a swipe simply to mention the rather high incidence of pedophelia in the ministry? Is it a swipe to mention that one of the suspects in the Piltown hoax was a priest and an advocate of intelligent design? You figure it out. If these comments belong in a discussion of science, then I suppose they aren't swipes.

[malakhi]

I hardly think it can have been established as a "historical fact," js1138. Historiography is a production of contemporaneous observers. Common descent might be true, or it might be false. I really don't know, and don't sweat it either way in any case.

Common descent is either true or false. If you want to quibble about the use of the word "historical", then I'll say that the evidence establishes common descent as a yes-it-really-happened-over-a-previous-chronological-period-in-this-spacetime fact.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Doc, as Alamo-Girl has pointed out on numerous occasions (and I do agree with her observation), randomness may be apparent rather than actual. Knowledge of the system in which it occurs would be necessary in order to tell which.

Been there, done that. At least some components of QM are still random. Complete knowledge of the system does not allow certain predictions. Were these predictions possible, they were contradict experiment.

[Alamo-Girl]

I would not be surprised if that was in reference to findings in thermodynamics which may have started out being called "theories" but are now called "laws".

[Doctor Stochastic]

We run the experiment to validate (falsify) our expectation (hypothesis).

Partially. We run an experiment to see what happens. We measure everything that the budget allows.

[betty boop]

Physico-chemical investigations cannot begin to approach such issues.... Thus the students should understand there is exciting work to be done in science and math - and that doesn’t even consider the overarching theological and philosophical questions as to why the universe exists at all or why it exists this way rather than some other way.

Hello A-G! Hope you had a great Hubby Birthday day yesterday!

Personally, I think that Darwin elucidated a big part of the puzzle of the evolution of life. But he does not account for its origin; that being the case, it seems to me the theory is necessarily incomplete.

The question of origin goes to the issues: Why is there something, and not nothing? And why are things the way they are, and not some other way? -- Leibniz's two great questions. I strongly doubt that methodological naturalism, given its materialist premise, has a way to engage such questions, let alone answer them. I think you're right that such questions fall into the purview of philosophy (metaphysics) and theology.

Prior to the "Cartesian split," science included such questions within its purview. But methodological naturalism took care of that! :^)

I think it's very interesting that the "father of science," Aristotle, named the three greatest sciences as physics, mathematics -- and theology (a word that was coined by his great teacher, Plato). And of the three sciences, theology was preeminent, the greatest of them all. Because it dealt with the highest things in existent nature.

Many people today just want to say that metaphysics and theology deal with "the supernatural." For Aristotle, they deal with the natural world itself -- that part of nature that cannot be reduced to "telescopes and microscopes."

Probably it would do some good to teach the history of science these days, which is an utterly fascinating study in itself, IMHO. It really helps to place the contemporary disputes into some kind of larger context.

Thank you so much for your excellent essay/post!

[js1138]

We know that rocks and rabbits are made of the same particles and fields, but when breaking down rocks and rabbits into their components, what is it that is removed such that a rabbit becomes non-life?

And if one of the 250 million transistors in my CPU fails, what is it that has been removed that it becomes a piece of scrap?

How about phrasing it another way? What is it that is added to minerals, water and air that make them alive when ingested by a plant? Is it anything other than their configuration?

[xzins]

My memory says that Mendel was in the discussion, too.

[js1138]

I hardly think it can have been established as a "historical fact," js1138. Historiography is a production of contemporaneous observers. Common descent might be true, or it might be false. I really don't know, and don't sweat it either way in any case.

So you have joined the postmodernists. History is just a set of texts to be played with like tinkertoys.

[Alamo-Girl]

At least some components of QM are still random.

To the contrary, until we have identified what the "system" is (e.g. dimensions of space/time) - we can only presume randomness in quantum mechanics.

It is the observer problem. We are "in" space/time and thus to us, QM appears random and we can use stochastic methods effectively.

If however (for an example) the "system" or space/time actually consists of such temporal and spatial dimensions and phenomenon that every particle is multiply imaged from a single particle in a fifth dimension (P.S. Wesson) - then QM would be highly determined though we would not be able to discern it from within our selection of coordinates (4D space/time).

For Lurkers: an example is the extension of pi which might appear random to someone who was only able to observe a string of the numbers in the extension. In reality though, those numbers would be highly determined by the calculation of pi. Every time pi is calculated, the same numbers appear in the same position.

[js1138]

ANYTHING that is true or real is a subject for science.

An empty statement. Science deals with the observable and with things inferred from careful and repeatable observation.

Science does not establish truth, just confidence in statements about phenomena.