Posted on 10/10/2005 5:00:39 AM PDT by gobucks
The advocates of "intelligent design," spotlighted in the current courtroom battle over the teaching of evolution in Dover, Pa., have much larger goals than biology textbooks.
They hope to discredit Darwin's theory as part of a bigger push to restore faith to a more central role in American life. "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," says a strategy document written in 1999 by the Seattle think tank at the forefront of the movement.
The authors said they seek "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."
Intelligent-design advocates have focused publicly on "teaching the controversy," urging that students be taught about weaknesses in evolutionary theory. The 1999 strategy document, though, goes well beyond that.
That "wedge document," outlining a five-year plan for promoting intelligent design and attacking evolution, has figured prominently in the trial now under way in federal court in Harrisburg. Eleven parents sued the Dover school board over a requirement to introduce intelligent design to high school biology students as an alternative to evolutionary theory.
"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating... . We are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source," wrote the authors of the strategy plan for the Center for Science and Culture, an arm of the Discovery Institute and the leader of the effort to promote intelligent design. "That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a wedge that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points."
The center and the Discovery Institute, financed primarily by Christian philanthropists and foundations, have succeeded in putting evolutionary theory on the hot seat in many school districts and state legislatures. By sponsoring books, forums and research by a group of about 40 college professors around the country, they have made intelligent design a prominent player in the nation's culture wars.
Intelligent design holds that natural selection cannot explain all of the complex developments observed in nature and that an unspecified intelligent designer must be involved.
Its critics, including civil libertarians and the nation's science organizations, say intelligent design is not science, but creationism in a new guise. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that public schools could not teach creationism in science classrooms because it unconstitutionally promoted a particular religious viewpoint.
Advocates of intelligent design say it is a scientific, not a religious, concept based on scientific observations, though they acknowledge its theological implications.
And they say the wedge document was written as a fund-raising tool, articulating a plan for reasoned persuasion, not political control. Critics, they say, have an agenda of their own - to promote a worldview in which God is nonexistent or irrelevant.
"The Center for Science and Culture does not have a secret plan to influence science and culture. It has a highly and intentionally public program for 'challenging scientific materialism and its destructive cultural legacies,' " the center says on its Web site.
John G. West, associate director of the center, said last week that those destructive legacies have included such things as defense of infanticide, the notions that ethics are an illusion and morality merely a reproductive survival tactic, support of eugenics, and the over-reliance on psychoactive drugs to control behavior.
The center was founded in 1996, with grants from conservative Southern California billionaire Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., and the Maclellan Foundation, which says that it supports groups "committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ."
The wedge document was written three years later and outlined a three-phase plan for advancing its goals: (1) scientific research, writing and publication, (2) publicity and opinion-making, and (3) cultural confrontation and renewal.
William Dembski, director of the Center for Science and Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and a leading intelligent-design advocate, argues that "virtually every discipline and endeavor is presently under a naturalistic pall.
"To lift that pall will require a new generation of scholars and professionals who explicitly reject naturalism and consciously seek to understand the design that God has placed in the world,"Dembski writes in his book, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology. "The possibilities for transforming the intellectual life of our culture are immense."
The wedge document calls the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God "one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization is built." It also says that thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud undermined the idea by 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."
The wedge document was highlighted in the Dover trial in Harrisburg last week. One witness, Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor who wrote Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, used the document to buttress her contention that intelligent design is creationism and that "it is essentially religious."
Defense lawyer Richard Thompson said the Dover school-board members had never heard of the wedge document when they changed the biology curriculum to include a mention of intelligent design.
The intelligent-design movement's activist approach has alienated some likely allies.
The John Templeton Foundation, of West Conshohocken, spends millions each year to explore and encourage a link between science and religion. But, except for a contribution to fund a debate forum in 1999, the foundation has declined to give money to the Discovery Institute.
Charles Harper Jr., senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, said Discovery's involvement in "political issues" was troublesome.
"We want to advance real scientific research," Harper said. "Discovery Institute has never done - has never moved forward - any scientific research. On these deep issues, they've done absolutely nothing."
The push for cultural change has not distracted intelligent-design advocates from their core education mission: to change the way biology is taught.
The intelligent-design textbook at the heart of the Dover case, Of Pandas and People, is being rewritten and updated by Dembski and is slated for publication later this year by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, a Christian organization in Texas. It will be renamed The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems.
So it was Darwinism that influenced Sears Robucks creation of the modern Santa Clause to push goods back in the early 1900s? Oh please, what pure BS. Blaming materialism on evolution is like blaming the rising of the sun on the crowing of a rooster.
It certainly seems that way. However, this leads to a chicken-egg dilemma. Which came first, religion or the faith necessary to sustain religion?
I reject the premise that ID is non-science.
I reject the notion that your post has anything to do with the debate at hand. We are discussing intelligent design, not bible plausibility. I also propose that you have an itchy trigger finger when it comes to the embolden and italicize HTML tags.
Ehh? Denying science (note this is not the same as technology which is the application of science) while believing in an all power creator God is hypocracy. If you believe in God, then science is the handmaiden of religion, explaining how God created the world to exist.
If you follow this sermon of the mental midgets, best not use any medicens next time you're sick, or drive a car or use a garden hoe or anything else that knowledge of the natural world has created.
One of the main things that made Judeo-Christianity great and allowed our civilizations to move so much ahead is our view of God as the great creator and our order to lead God like lives and thus our drive to figure out how things in God's creation work. In Pagan views, if it doesn't work out, don't try, it's against the gods' will.
Ooops, sorry for directing that tirade at you, should have read the rest of the post before responding.
You mean: equation + equation + equation + A MIRACLE HAPPENS == results?
Could you elaborate on this a bit? What would a "more theistic math" be, exactly? I'm genuinely curious how anyone would even begin to lay an axiomatic foundation for such a system, and how far back you'd have to deconstruct mathematics to do so. Is there some methodolgy you would propose for distinguishing theistic mathematical proofs from materialistic proofs?
It's important to acknowledge that the Creator is responsible for everything around us, including the elegance and beauty of mathematics. It's the unstated axiom, really. I don't mean that there should be a God variable inserted into every equation, or some such, just an acknowledgement that God's reponsible for it all. Really, classes in differential equations already have a strong prayer component to them anyway - why not formalize it?
Well, sure. For example, you can take an entire class in calculus or linear algebra without hearing about the Creator even once. Obviously, this exclusion is a result of the same forces excluding any mention of the Creator from biology - a prior commitment to materialism and/or atheism. This cannot stand. When studying mathematics, we could spend some time acknowledging the true origins of mathematics, and studying the Creator of all mathematics, in order to gain a fuller understanding without the materialist/atheist filters blinding us to Truth. And then, once we've done that, we've laid the groundwork for a theistic understanding of, say, physics or engineering, where we understand that things like Fourier transforms are they way they are because that's the way God wants them. Simple, no?
So, you're not looking to change mathematical foundations in any way other than to say "God made math" at the beginning of Algebra I, is that what I'm understanding? If so, I don't see how that gives you a "theistic math", since unless you actually change the underlying axiomatic basis of "materialistic math", you'll still get exactly the same proofs and results with "theistic math".
I think the good Senator has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
Do you wonder why all the major technological explosions happened in Judeo-Christian Europe, after its conversions and in a rather short time period while the pagan world (which often was even ahead of the pagan Europeans) never progressed even 10% as far?
Can't do science so doing PR instead. What a surprise!
Okay, now I get it. Unfortunately, it's very, very hard to distinguish satire from what some people actually post here in all seriousness. It's like the inverse of John Cleese starting a sentence with "No, but seriously..." ;-)
Satire is no fun unless you do a double-take ;)
A Deep Thought, seldom expressed better.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/shouts/050926sh_shouts
something the Romans never thought of and why should they, it was against the will of the gods (Vulcan's domain, after all, the Titan who brough humanity fire and metallergy was punished by being chained to a mountain for eternity and having his eyes pecked out) and slavery made for an easy work force.
This is a highly ill-informed take on how the Romans viewed and interacted with their gods. They took omens to determine the will of the gods on individual things, not entire schools of thought. There was no "this is such-and-and-such deity's domain so we shouldn't mess with it" kind of thinking. It was more like "Will so-and-so approve of us building an aqueduct in a certain way at such-and-such place?" "It's God's will" on entire subjects, such as science as a whole, is a monotheistic trait - not exclusive to monotheism in the history of the world, but more common, certainly.
Do you wonder why all the major technological explosions happened in Judeo-Christian Europe, after its conversions and in a rather short time period while the pagan world (which often was even ahead of the pagan Europeans) never progressed even 10% as far?
Are you kidding? The Roman Empire collapsed, and with it disappeared much of the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of classical culture, a very short time (relatively) after Christianity became the state religion. We're still recovering the stores of knowledge and learning that were lost, but most of it will never be recovered. The Dark Ages were NOT a period of fantastic innovation in science and engineering - that's one BIG reason they're called the Dark Ages - I can't believe anyone would even try to argue otherwise. Most of the great leaps in thinking in science began to take place until well after the Middle Ages, when the hold of the church finally began to loosen a bit.
That is fair. The existence of God does not follow from religion. It is, rather, the reverse. This means that God needs to be considered cosmoligically, not merely religiously.
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