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]

I wonder if a poll has been done to determine how many "Evos" are also socialists in one form or another... Linking evolution and socialism might be a good study...

I bet in your other personality you make fun of sociologists.

[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.

You are playing games with the definitions. Unless, of course, you are saying that nothing existed or happened before it could be recorded by humans?

Accept it or not, call it history or not, spacetime existed before man was around to write about it. And things happened during that time. To say that "X happened around 5 million years ago" is not 'mythmaking'; rather, it is to state a proposition which is objectively either true or false. The evidence suggests that the descent of humans and other apes from a common ancestor is true. To argue the contrary, you must offer a better explanation for the evidence at hand, and support the assertion that it is false. You cannot simply wave your hands and declare, "Oh, that. That's not history. We simply cannot know."

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply! But, er, you might want to read the rest of my post - or perhaps revisit the point made over here.

[js1138]

Amazing how many John Kerrys we find on these threads when you ask an ID advocate whether they accept common descent. At least Behe and Denton have decided to take a stand. Braver than some.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thou art an orthodox, my sister.

Orthodox what, my dear brother in Christ?

[RightWhale]

I wonder if that has been done

Of course. That has been the point all along. The fallacy is to imagine that an ideal positivist system should be implemented in place of the naturally Conservative system as a social system and that it will be better than living in a grass hut on a faultline under a mud cliff during the hurricane season.

[AnalogReigns]

This attitude that religion has nothing to do with science, and science (though it proports to explain everything...) goes straight back to Emanuel Kant, and is the root of liberal lunacy. Put religious over there in that box, don't let it influence real life, and everything will be fine.

Marxists and Fascists alike agreed. Religion was at best used to manipulate people, not something to base life on.

All the great ancient universities were founded by the religious, and even the philosophy that says nature has objective laws that can be discovered (i.e. SCIENCE) is demonstrably from a religious root...that a stable law-giving God made a stable, law-abiding universe.

The whole frantic reaction against someone just putting what can be merely theistic evolution (that God guided evolution) -- on to more specifically creationist models (Intelligent Design is from it foundation a umbrella movement) is evidence of the philosophical, non-scientific basis of much of the professional scientific establisment...

No scientist objected when Carl Sagan (or Dawkins) put atheistic religious dogma into their "science" but let the religious say that just to believe in God says you MUST believe He made the universe--and "ohhh noooooooo! The Muja-Hadin fundamentalists are taking over!!!"

Make no mistake about it, if one is a Christian, Jew or even just a theist, you by your very nature, believe in Intelligent Design.

Either God made the world or He didn't. If He didn't, there simply is no God worthy of any sort of devotion or worship.

Thank God for our Intelligent Designer.

[js1138]

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.

OK (trying to narrow things down) is this how you think evolution works? Or (as in your linked post) do you accept the assumption of evolution, that parent and child are always of the same species.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your excellent post!

...people have lost all sense that episteme and doxa are opposites. Also they have lost sight of the classical perception that truth (Logos) is not approximate or relative, i.e., some kind of sliding scale of value that allows us to say that something is "more true" or "less true"; but is actually realized in the forms and natures of existent entities, and inheres in them...indeed, the Cosmos itself is the reification of Truth; and man, the microcosmos, fully participates in it at all levels of his being.

So very true. The issue of Truth throws people for a loop - they try to ignore it or make cheap substitutes. It cuts too deeply for anyone who doesn't want more than "microscope to telescope" knowledge.

[RightWhale]

Strange that it is the scientists who posit design and the religious grab design as the modern evolution of creation.

[Alamo-Girl]

It is an honor to be on your wavelength, my dear sister in Christ!!! Thank you for the encouragements!

[Liberal Classic]

I find it disturbing on several levels. In another thread I called intelligent design/creationism a religious movement that seeks to use political authority to give a matter of faith the scientific standing which the scientific process has refused to award it. It disturbs me that people are willing to blur the lines between science and religion in order to achieve their political goals. I believe that supporters of ID/creationism are well intentioned, but I caution that we all know where that road leads. It's my opinion that ID/creationism is a response to perceived problems in primary and secondary education. Certainly the public education system merits criticism, some of it harsh. I tend to believe, however, that using the courts to teach biblical creation, even a pseudo-scientifically parameterized biblical creation, in science class is the wrong solution to a misdiagnosed problem.

[malakhi]

Indeed, a proper redefinition of "science" would include the wisdom of the Greeks and myths which are likely stories.

I thought you wanted to make science "epistemologically pure". How does redefining science to include myths and metaphysics, all untestable and unfalsifiable, contribute to the epistemological purity of science?

Theories from all the historical sciences are myths

Theories from the 'historical' sciences have evidence to support them.

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.

The only ones complaining seem to be those who want science to give up the presupposition of naturalism.

[Alamo-Girl]

LOLOLOL! It's not a hypothesis.

[js1138]

I have nothing against teaching creation in science class, to the extent that the methodology employed in forming hypotheses and testing them is emperical and scientific.

I do believe that believers will be disappointed in the results.

[Liberal Classic]

Though most public schools are designed as pure college prep, there are a growing number of vocational high schools. Vocational training doesn't necessarily imply blue-collar work the way it once did. Many vocational high schools offer college credit. In my area off the top of my head I can think of a high school for performing artists, a high school for law enforcement professionals, and a high school for health care professionals. They all offer college credits.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Yes. But there's nothing like that near us.

My kids don't even have wood shop or electronics in their schools. At least I got to do that.

[Liberal Classic]

Disprove it!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your post!

I wonder if a poll has been done to determine how many "Evos" are also socialists in one form or another.. Linking evolution and socialism might be a good study.. Since all socialist political systems historically seem to enhance evolution and discourage "god" based dogma politically... i.e. russia, china, URP, Canada..

I don't think it would do anything more than fuel additional resentments. It's like the presumption of a relationship between Christians and intelligent design.

Correlation is not causation.

As an example, spotting a bunch of storks appearing at the time a bunch of babies are born doesn't establish a causal relationship.

IMHO, the better standard is in the doxa that betty boop was addressing - whether the scientist presents his ideology under the color of science.

Einstein for instance was a socialist but never let his ideology get intermixed with his physics. Dawkins on the other hand is an atheist and drenches his work product with his ideology.

Lewontin drenches his work with his Marxism - that makes his whole work product sour and unacceptable to me. But that doesn't mean I'd dismiss all evolutionary biologists either.

[js1138]

That is sad. In seventh and eighth grades I got to dabble in wood shop, metal shop, printing and leather work. Still have the scars.

Now the schools have specialized, so college bound kids never see shop class, never even get to walk past one.