But there was a time, early on in the movement's life, when they were young, brash, and refreshingly upfront about their true agenda.
The DI formed the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in November, 1996. The press release explained how the center came to be and its purpose. (NOTE: These references come from the Wayback Machine archive.)
Major grants help establish Center for Renewal of Science and CultureFrom November 1996 through the end of 1998, here's the text you'd find when you came to the CRSC homepage:For over a century, Western science has been influenced by the idea that God is either dead or irrelevant. Two foundations recently awarded Discovery Institute nearly a million dollars in grants to examine and confront this materialistic bias in science, law, and the humanities. The grants will be used to establish the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at Discovery, which will award research fellowships to scholars, hold conferences, and disseminate research findings among opinionmakers and the general public.
...
The new Center grew out of last summer's "Death of Materialism" conference that Discovery organized and which has gathered increased attention since the four keynote addresses were published by the Intercollegiate Review earlier this year.
"The conference pointed the way," Discovery President Bruce Chapman says, "and helped us mobilize support to attack the scientific argument for the 20th century's ideology of materialism and the host of social 'isms' that attend it."...
Life After MaterialismBut that's just the cliff-notes version. Click on "About the Center", and you get the full, blistering indictment:For more than a century, science attempted to explain all human behaviour as the subrational product of unbending chemical, genetic, or environmental forces. The spiritual side of human nature was ignored, if not denied outright.
This rigid scientific materialism infected all other areas of human knowledge, laying the foundations for much of modern psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Yet today new developments in biology, physics, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural.
What do these exciting developments mean for the social sciences that were built upon the foundation of materialism? This project brings together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences in order to explore what the demise of materialism means for reviving the various disciplines.
THE proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was 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.This text was later lifted whole to become the Introduction of the infamous Wedge Document.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 human beings not as eternal and accountable beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by chance and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and music.
The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective standards binding on all cultures, claiming that environment dictates our moral beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.
Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.
Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for the supernatural. The Center awards fellowships for original research, holds conferences, and briefs policymakers about the opportunities for life after materialism.
The Center is directed by Discovery Senior Fellow Dr. Stephen Meyer. An Associate Professor of Philosophy at Whitworth College, Dr. Meyer holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. He formerly worked as a geophysicist for the Atlantic Richfield Company.
They also helpfully explained themselves further in their "What is Materialism?" FAQ:
For these purposes, it has little to do with greed. Or wanting to buy too much at the mall to boost your self-esteem.
Materialism is the modern day philosophy that holds that matter is all there is. It's the philosophy that says "If you can't touch it, smell it, taste it or explain it through the hard sciences, it doesn't exist." Men are merely complex machines and not spiritual beings.
And it's approved by most intellectuals around the world.
One other thing: we're out to topple it.
It's another word for materialism. There are no discernible differences. Kind of like "soda and pop," " shrimp and prawns." Naturalism states that nature is " all there is."
Darwinism is the belief that we evolved not only from the apes, but that we started from nothing other than purposeless mass. As late Harvard evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson said, "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned."
Charles Darwin is to Materialism like Karl Marx is to Communism. Like Adam Smith is to Capitalism. This is not to say that Darwin himself is responsible for the full course of Darwinism since his death. But he opened the door.
what do they have to do with me and my life?
Materialism teaches us that God is dead. It follows that divine revelation cannot be the basis of human law.
Human law can only be based on upon the current opinion of the people who have the power to make and interpret laws. In our society, that power rests in the hands of an elite class of judges, lawmakers and other experts.
" We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" quickly loses much validity if our "Creator" does not exist. Result: a culture of irresponsibility and victimhood.
The present culture took decades to develop. Look at a 1930s text in criminal law that upholds the materialist foundation:
"Man is no more responsible for becoming willful and committing a crime than a flower for becoming red and fragrant. In both instances, the end products are predetermined by nature."
Dating back to the 1960s, those who conceived the war on poverty believed that poverty could be eradicated because they believed its root causes were material: poverty, educational deprivation, crime, etc. Thirty five years later, we realize that throwing material resources at the problem has made it worse, not better.
By ignoring the moral and spiritual dimensions of poverty, we have ignored the real problems of poverty: family breakdown, illegitimacy and government-fostered dependency.
If morals are relative and nothing is absolute, anything goes. It requires no deep intellectual digging to see how materialism has assaulted popular culture.
Popular culture seldom portrays religion favorably yet often with disdain. Those characters who seem to hold traditional or conservative values will surely be mocked, seen as "square" and even "oppressors" of some sort of unalienable right bestowed upon humankind from Hollywood.
Much depends on how you define "evolution." Some people think evolution describes how things change over a period of time ( i.e. a finch's beak length, a moth's color etc). Others think that slow and
gradual change to one organism can be translated directly into how life itself was created.
At a very basic level, we think evolution might explain the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest and that it can explain some form of development, but not original development.
Postmodernists of the RightThe Center is the intellectual base for the effort to overthrow materialism. Recruiting leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center promotes the latest scientific research that undercuts materialism. Specifically, the Center awards fellowships for original research, hold conferences and briefs policy and opinion makers about the opportunities for life after materialism.
So, what does it all add up to? The Intelligent Design advocates, like most creationists, are afraid of this scenario happening:
Or to put it another way: Creationists are afraid that the natural world gives us no objective standards by which to judge an action as right or wrong. Creationists believe there is no objective truth down here in the natural world.
Traditional postmodernists of the left also assume there are no objective truths. This is called "moral subjectivism". Postmodernists believe that "truth" is merely a self-serving social convention that's accepted by each interest group as the acutal Truth. They argue that all societal disputes are ultimately won by whichever interest group is more ruthless in pursuit of its own self-interest. So their solution to preventing this Hobbesian "war of all against all" is to support the underdog in any dispute, so as to maintain a tense standoff of equals. (Historically, postmodernists have tended to side with the left in any dispute, causing many people to wonder if postmodernism is itself a self-serving philosophy.)
Amazingly, creationists and the ID advocates - who are mostly political conservatives - largely agree with this moral subjectivism! Their proposed solution is to get the opinion leaders & intelligentsia of society to all believe in the same external Authority Figure, who can declare for all of us what He wants to define as right and wrong. They want His - perhaps arbitrary - pronouncements to stand in for the objective moral truths that the right-wing postmodernists believe don't really exist in the real world.
America's founding fathers would disagree with this philosophy. They believed, rightly, that we are able to use our reason to come to an understanding of objective reality. The Truths may not exactly be self-evident as Jefferson wrote. It may take much wisdom and painful experience in learning from history. But objective Truth is out there for us to discover. It's a pity that conservatives of the creationist stripe have lost confidence in the existence of objective Truth.
Given the overwhelming evidence for evolution and the lack of evidence for ID, how can intelligent people hold such views? Is their faith so strong that it blinds them to all evidence? It is a bit more complicated than that. After all, many theologians and religious people accept evolution. The real issues behind intelligent design--and much of creationism--are purpose and morality: specifically, the fear that if evolution is true, then we are no different from other animals, not the special objects of God's creation but a contingent product of natural selection, and so we lack real purpose, and our morality is just the law of the jungle. Tom DeLay furnished a colorful example of this view on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 16, 1999. Explaining the causes of the massacre at Columbine High School, he read a sarcastic letter in a Texas newspaper that suggested that "it couldn't have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."
The notion that naturalism and materialism are the enemies of morality and a sense of human purpose, and that religion is their only ally, is pervasive in the writings of IDers. As Johnson noted, "Once God is culturally determined to be imaginary, then God's morality loses its foundation and withers away." Nancy Pearcey, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, summarizes why evolution disturbs so many Americans:
Why does the public care so passionately about a theory of biology? Because people sense intuitively that there's much more at stake than a scientific theory. They know that when naturalistic evolution is taught in the science classroom, then a naturalistic view of ethics will be taught down the hallway in the history classroom, the sociology classroom, the family life classroom, and in all areas of the curriculum.Even some parents in Dover, though opposed to teaching ID in school, worry that learning evolution will erode the Christian values that they are trying to instill in their children.But the acceptance of evolution need not efface morality or purpose. Evolution is simply a theory about the process and patterns of life's diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. Philosophers have argued for years about whether ethics should have a basis in nature. There is certainly no logical connection between evolution and immorality. Nor is there a causal connection: in Europe, religion is far less pervasive than in America, and belief in evolution is more widespread, but somehow the continent remains civilized. Most religious scientists, laymen, and theologians have not found the acceptance of evolution to impede living an upright, meaningful life. And the idea that religion provides the sole foundation for meaning and morality also cannot be right: the world is full of skeptics, agnostics, and atheists who live good and meaningful lives.
All that "materialism" junk from DI reminds me of so much socialist pap. I'm amazed that this was sold to American "conservative" Christians. The same ones who voted for Reagan and those materialistic tax cuts.