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.

[js1138]

Not at all, js1138. Eric Voegelin has suggested that history is the story of the emergence or unfolding of Being, preeminently of human being.

I note your affinity for John Kerryisms. Is common descent a fact or not? According to the most careful and fully considered interpretation of the evidence.

[malakhi]

There is "history" in the context of the recording of human experience. And there is "history" in the context of what has happened in the past, even in the distant past long before human existence. You are conflating the two.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your excellent, informative post!!!

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."

Exactly! That is the problem among the biology-related disciplines. The good news is that the more the mathematicians and physicists engage in biology questions - the further they will push the boundary away from "microscope to telescope".

Even so, the deepest questions remain - the theological questions. As you say, the questions Leibniz asked "Why is there something, and not nothing? And why are things the way they are, and not some other way?"

God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, in the indwelling Spirit, in Scripture and in Nature. Even primitives will be held to account if they fail to notice His revelation in nature (Romans 1:20).

[xzins]

And my point is that sometimes, because things are unknown, we don't even know the questions to ask...much less, the methods to use.

[js1138]

...findings in thermodynamics which may have started out being called "theories" but are now called "laws".

I rather doubt that historical progression. the concept of theory and law do not involve a progression from one to another. One is an explanatory statement and one is a description of a relationship.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply! You can ask the threshhold question either way - bottom up or top down.

[js1138]

And my point is that sometimes, because things are unknown, we don't even know the questions to ask...much less, the methods to use.

And my point would be that such problems are not part of science, which is limited in scope to questions that can be addressed by observation.

[xzins]

That doesn't change the basic statement:

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

[betty boop]

Is common descent a fact or not?

I have already told you I don't know. Do you read my posts?

[malakhi]

Briefly, that there is always a beginning of real space and real time regardless of cosmology.

The only way to avoid the void is to prove up an infinite past.

There was a beginning to this real spacetime. But what evidence is there that it came from a void with "no space, no time, no energy, no matter, no mathematical structures, no logic, no physical laws, no physical constants"? What evidence is there that it came from a "void" at all? What if our universe began as a bubble off of a different universe?

Perhaps at some point science will be able to investigate what is beyond our universe. But at this time, such conversation is purely speculative. And so saying our spacetime came from a void lacking the list of things you mentioned is likewise purely speculative.

[betty boop]

You are conflating the two.

I am not, malakhi. The second type of "history" you mention is not "history" at all. History is based on contemporaneous observers who record their observations. Absent that, there is only myth.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your engaging reply!

Indeed, a proper redefinition of "science" would include the wisdom of the Greeks and myths which are likely stories. Theories from all the historical sciences are myths because they are theories of continuums based on quantizations.

I seriously wonder about this myself, A-G. Is the theory a kind of "Procrustean bed" into which evidence is "forced" to fit? Further, parts of it seem to have a mythical quality -- e.g., the Common Ancestor.

Indeed. If science would only give up the presupposition of naturalism then there could be no complaints that the conclusion drawn was kluged to fit the orthodoxy.

[js1138]

What prevents you from forming an opinion?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your posts, but, er, I seem to be having some difficulty in communicating with you.

On one post you assert that cosmology is speculative and on a previous post that I should not accept cosmology as speculative. In actuality, my post 237 explores the host of physical cosmologies and how the notion of an infinite past has been debunked by observations in astronomy and in math.

Mathematics is all about logic. The most sure statements we can make about physical reality are mathematical. The universe is intelligible because it is mathematical. The point raised by Eugene Wigner (and affirmed by Cumrun Vafa) is there is no reason why mathematics should be so effective wrt physics.

For Lurkers: A good meditation on the unreasonable effectiveness of math includes Mandelbrot sets, mirror images and dualities which suggest that two different physical systems with completely different looking properties can nevertheless be isomorphic if one considers quantum geometry on either side. Other examples include mirror symmetries (Calabi-Yau manifolds) and S-dualities.

Max Tegmark suggests that the symmetry holds so completely that this physical reality actually consists of mathematical structures which exist beyond space and time. Another way to look at it is this: from the view within 4D space/time a particle may appear to be on a fixed trajectory which is actually a line with a beginning and an end from the view beyond space/time. Likewise two particles orbiting would appear to be two lines in a double helix. You and I and every physical existent would correspond to just such a mathematical structure.

And concerning my analysis of the objections to evolution theory, please notice that my objection is to unnecessary presuppositions (the second point) not to the quantization of continuums (the first point). Indeed, without such quantizations we would not have telecommunications, computers and such – because they all rely on analog to digital conversion (quantizations). Those who consider quantizations of continuums to be a logical fallacy are on the “evolution” side of the debate on this forum.

For evidence of biology seeing itself as autonomous, please refer to Ernst Mayr’s discussion of “what is science?” and this by H.H. Pattee: The physics of symbols: Bridging the epistemic cut

I do find physics and mathematics to be epistemologically pure. All presuppositions made in those two disciplines are stated as axioms and postulates related to the investigation at hand.

In those disciplines, no theory is treated as Holy writ. If the Higgs field/boson is not found or created, the standard model will be replaced without a whimper because the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If the answer is undecideable – then undecideability is the answer – as in wave/particle duality.

[Diamond]

...and the Yankee collapse in last years' AL playoffs?

How about the Yankee collapse in this years' AL playoffs?

Cordially,

[betty boop]

What prevents you from forming an opinion?

Nothing "prevents me." But the fact is I am entirely comfortable with leaving the question wide open, awaiting future developments.

Anyhoot, what would one more "opinion" mean in the grand scope of things? We've already got plenty enough "opinion" in this world. And often enough, opinion turns out to be wrong, sometimes deadly so.

I'm not entirely sure of this, js; but I suspect that you do not much value the legacy we have from classical Greece, while I value it enormously. Reason and logic were first articulated during this period and were seen both by Plato and Aristotle as "mapping" reality. The Greeks -- especially Plato -- drew the distinction between episteme -- that is, "true knowledge" -- and doxa -- that is, "opinion."

The point is episteme and doxa are not "relative terms"; i.e., they do not refer to different degrees of truth. For Plato, they were mutually exclusive.

[Alamo-Girl]

Excellent, excellent post betty boop!!!

Wouldn't it be great if science had a "truth in labeling" ethic such that it would distinguish its own pronouncements as being either episteme or doxa?

[js1138]

I'm not asking for truth. I'm asking for your opinion. Just your best guess.

[Alamo-Girl]

If I may get "two cents" into your "is common descent a fact?" challenge...

I would say that the fact of a beginning establishes a common descent from the uncaused cause. The only possible uncaused cause is God. OTOH, we also exist in Him (His will) because there is nothing else of which anything could be made in the void.

But I suspect you were asking the question wrt biology.

And there, the question cannot be answered without first answering the question "what is life v non-life/death in nature?"

Of course, I have already answered that question to my own satisfaction - that the difference between that which is alive and that which is non-life/death is successful communication (information). Thus the answer would be that the common ancestor is the source of information in the universe. By Spiritual revelation, I know this source also to be God (Logos, Jesus Christ).

Or to be more "microscope to telescope" perhaps you are wondering about origin of species?

If two dogs breed, I do not expect them to give birth to a litter of cats.

OTOH, for the continuum of evolution to be true - somewhere in the past snakes bred and gave birth to enough lizards to make a whole new branch of the tree. One species as parents, another species as offspring.

I've never seen that happen though I've certainly seen evidence of creatures adapting to their environment. So on that, it could be either creation by evolution or special creation or a combination. Spiritual revelation speaks to both, so that is my episteme on the matter (for me, Spiritual knowledge is more sure than all other kinds of knowledge).

[Diamond]

Science is a method for investigating material phenomena. It is concerned with what is directly or indirectly observable, testable and falsifiable. Supernatural causes are simply outside its purview.

The third proposition does not neccesarily or logically follow from the first two. What non-circular reason is there to disqualify theories that invoke instances of agency or intelligent design? To assert that such theories are not scientific because they are not naturalistic simply assumes the thing in question. The postulate that there was agency involved in the origin of life and its diversity is no more outside the bounds of that which is directly or indirectly observable, testable and falsifiable than is the postulate of unobservable genealogical connections between organisms as the result of purely mechanistic processes. Presumably, you do not deny that it is possible that the actions of an unobservable agent could have empirical consequences in the present, do you?

Cordially,