Creationists Hijack Intelligent Design

SEATTLE — Critics of intelligent design seem to think it’s a code word for “creationism.” It’s no wonder they think so, say some of its proponents. Many creationists are making the same mistake.

The organization behind the intelligent design movement is distancing itself from the recent court ruling in the Dover, Pa., School Board decision.

The Discovery Institute claims the school board hijacked intelligent design to gain credibility for their frankly religious objectives — and their losing cause.

However, at least one Catholic scientist claims that intelligent design, also referred to as ID, is a broad philosophical and Christian concept that the movement has itself hijacked to pursue one narrow goal: undermining evolution.

Catholic scientists testified on behalf of both sides in the Dover trial late last year — for the school board, which had required science classrooms to read a statement about intelligent design and evolution’s evidentiary weaknesses, and for the parents who successfully claimed that such a reference violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on the establishment of religion.

And both The New York Times and the Christian journal First Things have featured the debate at a more thoughtful level — this one involving more Catholic scientists taking on Cardinal Christopher Schönborn of Vienna.

Cardinal Schönborn in an op-ed piece for The New York Times last year declared “neo-Darwinism” incompatible with Catholic teaching.

The push behind intelligent design is widely acknowledged to be coming from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which is headed by Catholic Bruce Chapman. Once a local politician and later a Republican who headed the U.S. Census Bureau under President Ronald Reagan, Chapman founded the institute in 1990. But not until three years later did he adopt intelligent design as the institute’s most prominent cause.

To promote it, according to a recent New York Times article, he attracted funding from a number of Christian foundations, most notably, according to The Times, that of the Ahmansons, a prominent California banking family. The Discovery Institute’s public relations firm, according to The Times, also placed the cardinal’s article in that paper.

Chapman told the Register what led him to intelligent design was the struggle of a university biologist with his job after “losing his faith in Darwinism. It was a classic academic freedom issue.” Chapman soon linked up with Stephen Meyer, a philosophy of science teacher at Spokane’s Whitworth College, and through him with a handful of scientists with doubts about Darwinism.

Creationism

For Chapman the intelligent design-evolution debate is part of a larger one about the role of religion in public life.

“Faith should inform our public values,” he said, “but we have to argue public policy in secular terms.” For example, the pro-life position could be argued on health grounds rather than Scriptural ones.

Similarly, intelligent design is a way, in the words of the institute’s 1999 “Wedge Document,” of “challenging scientific materialism — the simplistic philosophy or worldview that claims that all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone.”

“Intelligent design doesn’t dispute evolution if all it means is gradual change over time,” said Chapman. What proponents of intelligent design challenge is the Darwinian explanation for what made the change happen. Proponents argue that existing life forms all the way from human beings in toto down through discrete organs, like the eye to single-celled animals, are too “irreducibly complex” to have ever evolved by the Darwinian mechanisms of random genetic variation and natural selection. There must have been a design, either built-in or externally imposed.

So far, Chapman said, the Discovery Institute has not advocated teaching intelligent design in the classroom because evidence for it is lacking. Instead, schools should “teach the controversy,” informing students that some scientists doubt the Darwinian explanation for evolution and explaining why.

The Dover School Board, however, went beyond this, ordering a statement be read in classes not only referring to evolution’s evidentiary gaps but outlining their idea of the intelligent design position.

“They didn’t even know what ID was,” Chapman said. “They couldn’t explain it. They were almost certainly creationists.”

Creationism is the position held by some fundamentalist Protestants that the Bible’s account of creation in Genesis is scientifically true. In 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that so-called creation science could not be taught in public schools. Though intelligent design was itself developed in the late 1970s by scientists studying DNA molecules, the scientific establishment has consistently lumped the two together.

One who does exactly that is Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biology professor and leading expert witness for the anti-intelligent design plaintiffs at the Dover trial. “Intelligent design is creationism in disguise,” said Miller, a Catholic. There was no hijacking, in his view. At the trial, the plaintiff’s lawyers introduced as evidence two versions of a leading creationist biology text that had been transformed into an intelligent design text simply by replacing “creator” with “designer.”

While the Discovery Institute provided expert witnesses like Catholic scientist Michael Behe to support the school board, it became unhappy enough with the defense, reportedly, to withdraw its support.

Church Involvement

Though the Dover ruling has no legal application outside Pennsylvania, Chapman admitted, “It is a propaganda victory.” And when school boards or legislators in other states consider the issue, they will be told, wrongly, that the issue has been decided once and for all by the Dover case.

“It could have a chilling effect,” Chapman said.

Miller said serious scientific propositions do not need school boards or state legislators to mandate their inclusion in school curricula. Proponents win over the scientific community “in the free market of ideas. They go to scientific meetings, they seek grants, they make their cases.” But intelligent design proponents, he added, do none of these things because they have no case.

What worries Miller about intelligent design and creationism is that they are playing into the hands of those who contend that evolution invalidates the case for God.

Miller has argued to the contrary in his book Finding Darwin’s God. After its publication he received many e-mails from people who “thanked me for helping restore their faith.” They had been taught as children that Christianity and evolution were inconsistent, so when they became convinced of the truth of evolution, they had reluctantly abandoned their faith.

Miller also received “impassioned appeals from (zealous) atheists seeking to save my soul” from theism.

Another Catholic scientist who found himself caught between intelligent design proponents and atheistic evolutionists is Stephen Barr, a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Institute of the University of Delaware. The Church “has never had an issue with evolution,” Barr has said in articles written for First Things, a journal devoted to issues of religion and public policy, as well as in a slide show on religion and science he presents to high schools.

In fact, apart from the singular episode with Galileo over heliocentrism, the Church has left scientific matters to scientists. Barr finds “disturbing” the number of Catholics involved with intelligent design.

“It will not help the Church to get embroiled in this kind of dispute,” he said. “And officially it’s not.

“Intelligent design is a reasonable hypothesis,” added Barr, “but it is not a scientific hypothesis even though it uses scientific evidence.”

He compared it with people who use science to prove that cures at Lourdes defy medical knowledge and then argue that this also proves the miraculous. Natural science can make the first claim, Barr contended, but not the second.

Barr said he believes that there is an intelligent design to the universe. But it is a philosophical belief long held by the Church. Now it is being misused as a narrow weapon to bash the scientific theory of evolution.

Barr responded in First Things to the op-ed piece by Cardinal Schönborn. He noted that the “neo-Darwinism” the cardinal criticized is a term for a specific branch of evolutionary science. The cardinal subsequently clarified that he meant to condemn only the atheistic philosophy which has been piggybacked onto evolution.

“I’ve attacked that position myself,” says Barr.“ You have to distinguish between what science is saying and the philosophical conclusions people base on it. Intelligent design, I’m afraid, muddies the distinction.”

Steve Weatherbe is based in

Victoria, British Columbia.