Barbara Forrest and Glenn Branch, "Wedging Creationism into the Academy" (2005)

Wedging Creationism into the Academy
http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jfforr.htm
Proponents of a controversial theory struggle to gain purchase within
academia. A case study of the quest for academic legitimacy.

By Barbara Forrest and Glenn Branch

In 1999, William Dembski became director of the newly established
Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University, thanks to the support of
Baylor's president Robert Sloan. The center was, as Dembski observed,
"the first intelligent design think tank at a research university." As
such, it fulfilled a crucial objective of the "intelligent design"
movement, which aims to discredit the evolutionary sciences and to
promote the notion that scientific evidence exists for intelligent
design in nature.

Calling themselves "the Wedge," adherents of the movement are avidly
pursuing a twenty-year plan to convince the public that intelligent
design is "an accepted alternative in the sciences" and to promote "the
influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science." The
sobriquet "the Wedge" reflects movement leader Phillip Johnson's desire
to insert "the thin edge of a wedge" into "the ruling philosophy of
modern culture." For Johnson, a retired professor of law from the
University of California, Berkeley, the Christian gospel is what will
follow the thin edge.

The group's plan, outlined in a manifesto informally called the "Wedge
Document," involves cultivating "potential academic allies," initiating
"direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science," and
holding "challenge conferences in significant academic settings" in
order to "draw scientific materialists into open debate with design
theorists." Once ensconced at Baylor, a Baptist university known for its
excellent science departments, Dembski was in a perfect position to
advance the Wedge.

From its beginning, however, the Polanyi Center was embroiled in
controversy. Baylor faculty members complained that Sloan behaved
autocratically in establishing the center without soliciting their
advice and consent. Moreover, especially in the science departments,
faculty expressed dismay over the center's association with intelligent
design, which they regarded as a thinly disguised form of creationism,
likely to damage the reputation of Baylor's science and medical
programs. A review committee Sloan appointed to address faculty concerns
reached a conciliatory but lukewarm solution: the center was to be
renamed, reconstituted within Baylor's Institute for Faith and Learning,
and supervised by a faculty advisory committee.

In a press release, however, Dembski publicly celebrated what he called
the committee's "unqualified affirmation" of intelligent design,
gloating that his opponents "have met their Waterloo." Outraged, the
faculty protested, and Sloan asked Dembski to withdraw his remarks. In a
second press release, Dembski refused, accusing the administration of
"intellectual McCarthyism" and Sloan himself of "the utmost of bad
faith." He was removed as the center's director.

Despite this debacle, it is evident that the Wedge still envisions
Baylor as a base for in-telligent design. Dembski remains as an
asso-ciate research professor, although he is slated to begin a new
position at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in June 2005. His
Polanyi Center associate Bruce Gordon remains as acting director of the
Baylor Center for Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Baylor also hired
two additional members of the Wedge, mechanical engineering professor
Walter Bradley and philosopher Francis J. Beckwith.

Shortly after his appointment as associate director of the J. M. Dawson
Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor, Beckwith was involved in a
controversy of his own, when twenty-nine members of the Dawson family
complained that Beckwith's views on church-state separation rendered him
inappropriate for the post. Particularly troublesome to them was his
affiliation with the Discovery Institute, the institutional home of
intelligent design, which they described as promoting "the latest
version of creationist theory."

Smoke Without Fire
As the Dawson family recognized, intelligent design is the latest face
of the antievolution movement, formerly dominated by "young-earth"
creationists. Committed to a literal reading of the biblical book of
Genesis, such creationists believe that the earth is about ten thousand
years old, that species of living things were specially and separately
created by God, and that speciation is possible only within biblical
"kinds." Intelligent design, however, is not officially committed to
such a literal reading of Genesis; in their assaults on evolution,
Johnson and Dembski prefer instead to invoke the mystic language of the
Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word." Learning from the
repeated failures of young-earth creationism, subscribers to intelligent
design­who include a handful of young-earth creationists­seek to
distance themselves from the public image of creationism as a sectarian
and retrogressive pseudoscience. They thus take no official stand on the
age of the earth, common descent, and the possibility of macroevolution.

What they insist on is the bankruptcy of mainstream evolutionary
science. The idea is to unite antievolutionists under the noncommittal
banner of "mere creation" (consciously echoing popular Christian
apologist C.S. Lewis's "mere Christianity"), affirming their common
belief in God as creator while avoiding discussion of divisive details.
They want to defer doctrinal disputes, such as those involving the age
of the earth, until the public is convinced that intelligent design is a
legitimate scientific alternative to evolution. Indeed, according to the
Wedge's repeated announcements, intelligent design is on the cutting
edge of science.

Its most conspicuous feature, however, is its scientific sterility. The
Wedge's most notable attempts to provide a case for intelligent design
appear in books for the general reader, such as Dembski's Intelligent
Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology and Lehigh University
biochemist Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge
to Evolution. The few university presses (such as Cambridge and Michigan
State) that have published intelligent design books classify them as
philosophy, rhetoric, or public affairs, not science. There are no
peer-reviewed studies supporting intelligent design in the scientific
research literature. The scientific community as a whole is unimpressed
and unconvinced, and intelligent design's credentials as a scientific
research program appear negligible. Indeed, Dembski himself recently
conceded that "the scientific research part" of intelligent design is
now "lagging behind" its success in influencing popular opinion. So the
Wedge needs another way to persuade education policy makers that
intelligent design is academically respectable.

Thanks in part to the Wedge's academic networking, a fair number of
academics with religious and political convictions similar to those of
Wedge advocates support intelligent design, even if they are not
necessarily active proponents. Many­such as Robert Kaita of Princeton,
Henry Schaefer III of the University of Georgia, Robert Koons and J.
Budziszewski of the University of Texas at Austin, and Guillermo
Gonzalez of Iowa State­are fellows of the Discovery Institute's Center
for Science and Culture (CSC), the main institutional home of
intelligent design. Prominent academics who, although not officially
associated with the CSC, sympathize with the Wedge's aims include Alvin
Plantinga of Notre Dame, Huston Smith of Syracuse, and Frank Tipler of
Tulane. And efforts are under way to recruit students to the cause:
according to the "Wedge Document," what intelligent design needs is "an
initially small and relatively young group of scientists . . . able to
do creative work at the pressure points." In a 1999 interview with
Communiqué, a quarterly journal for Christian artists and writers,
Johnson advised such students to "keep your head down while you're
getting your PhD."

What are the academic supporters of intelligent design doing to advance
its cause? Significantly, they are not teaching it in mainstream science
courses, despite Behe's declaration that it "must be ranked as one of
the greatest achievements in the history of science." Access Research
Network, a Wedge auxiliary, lists only two "[intelligent design]
colleges": Oklahoma Baptist University (home to CSC fellow Michael
Newton Keas) and Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los
Angeles and home to CSC fellows William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and
John Mark Reynolds).

On the rare occasions when intelligent design is taught as science in
mainstream academia, it appears in venues not subject to the same
scrutiny as regular courses: honors seminars, independent study,
continuing education, not-for-credit minicourses, and
interdisciplinary­especially science-and-religion­courses. Science
faculty are typically not thrilled. For example, an honors course at the
University of New Mexico in which intelligent design was treated
respectfully was reclassified as a humanities course after the science
faculty protested that students in the class were presented with
material that they were not equipped to evaluate on its scientific
merits, such as they were.

Conference or Congregation?
Despite the scientific sterility of intelligent design, its proponents
regularly hold conferences, usually on campuses, with a view to
establishing contact with sympathetic faculty and students. Early
conferences, such as the Wedge's 1996 "Mere Creation" conference at
Biola, were essentially "in-house" meetings of those eager to found a
new antievolution movement with a broader appeal than young-earth
creationism. In his introduction to the conference proceedings,
published in 1998 as Mere Creation: Science, Faith, and Intelligent
Design, Dembski describes the purpose of the conference asformulating "a
theory of creation that puts Christians in the strongest possible
position to defeat the common enemy of creation." He added that "mere
creation is a golden opportunity for a new generation of Christian
scholars." The list of contributors to Mere Creation is a veritable
who's who of the Wedge.

The "Nature of Nature" conference, held in 2000 at Baylor under the
auspices of the Polanyi Center, purported to be "an interdisciplinary
conference on the role of naturalism in science." Although "naturalism"
refers to a number of distinct positions in a variety of disciplines, it
means only one thing to the Wedge: the enemy. (In Mere Creation, Dembski
describes "mere creation" as "a theory of creation aimed specifically at
defeating naturalism and its consequences," a definition that describes
intelligent design as well.)

The Wedge lost no time in appropriating the prestige of the conference
attendees (including two Nobel laureates) to advertise intelligent
design and its crusade against naturalism. In Christianity Today, a
magazine devoted to news and culture from an evangelical perspective,
CSC fellow Nancy Pearcey boasted, "These scientists' willingness even to
address such questions, alongside design proponents such as Alvin
Plantinga and William Lane Craig, gives enormous credibility to the
[intelligent design] movement."

Like the "Nature of Nature" conference, "Design and Its Critics," held
in 2000 at Concordia University, featured presentations by both
proponents and opponents of intelligent design. At subsequent
conferences, however­such as those held at Yale and the University of
San Francisco­only proponents of intelligent design spoke. It is
difficult to avoid the impression that the settings for these
conferences were chosen not only for convenience but also for their aura
of academic legitimacy. Commenting on the Yale conference, for example,
a student auxiliary of the Access Research Network gushed, "Basically,
the conference, beside being a statement (after all we were meeting at
Yale University), proved to be very promising." (Emphasis in original.)
Yet such conferences are typically not sponsored by the universities at
which they are held but by associated religious organizations­at Yale, a
ministry calling itself the Rivendell Institute for Christian Thought
and Learning.

Although intelligent design conferences will probably continue to be
held under such auspices on campuses across the country, recent
gatherings have returned to the sectarian institutions that nurture the
movement. Two major conferences­"Research and Progress in Intelligent
Design" (RAPID), held in 2002, and "ID and the Future of Science," held
in April 2004­were hosted by Biola, which is increasingly invested in
intelligent design. Perhaps unable to find a suitable academic venue,
the organizers of "Dispelling the Myth of Darwinism" held the June 2004
event at a North Carolina church; the speakers included both intelligent
design stalwarts such as Behe and unreconstructed young-earth
creationists such as John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research.

The Culture Wars
In his keynote address to the RAPID conference, William Dembski
described intelligent design's "dual role as a constructive scientific
project and as a means for cultural renaissance." (Emphasis added.)
Reflecting a similar revivalist spirit, the Discovery Institute's Center
for Science and Culture had been the Center for the Renewal of Science
and Culture until 2002. Explaining the name change, a spokesperson for
the CSC unconvincingly insisted that the old name was simply too long.
Significantly, however, the change followed hard on the heels of
accusations that the center's real interest was not science but
reforming culture along lines favored by conservative Christians.

Such accusations appear extremely plausible, not only in the absence of
any scientific research supporting intelligent design, but also in light
of Phillip Johnson's claim that "Darwinian evolution is not primarily
im-portant as a scientific theory but as a culturally dominant creation
story. . . . When there is radical disagreement in a commonwealth about
the creation story, the stage is set for intense conflict, the kind . .
. known as 'culture war.'" Similarly, the "Wedge Document" states that
the goals of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (as it
then was) were to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive
moral, cultural, and political legacies. To replace materialistic
explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human
beings are created by God."

For Johnson, the Wedge is waging a Kulturkampf: "We're trying to go into
enemy territory ... [to] blow up the ammunition dump. What is their
ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation." The
battlefield extends to politics, and the Discovery Institute is
politically connected: its president, Bruce Chapman, held positions in
the federal government during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and U.S.
Representatives John Boehner, Steve Chabot, and Mark Souder and Senators
Judd Gregg and Rick Santorum have expressed sympathy for intelligent
design. Indeed, Santorum proposed a symbolic "sense of the Senate"
amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that
tendentiously described evolution as controversial.

Although a vestige of the Santorum language appeared in the conference
report, the amendment itself was not included in the legislation that
President George W. Bush signed as the No Child Left Behind Act. But
proponents of intelligent design and creationists generally construed it
as a victory anyway. When the CSC involved itself in a 2003 controversy
over the selection of Texas science textbooks, Santorum, Gregg, and
Boehner wrote a letter to Bruce Chapman­on congressional
stationery­echoing the CSC's interpretation of the amendment. The letter
designates Santorum as the amendment's author, but Johnson asserts in
his 2002 book, The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning, and Public Debate,
that he actually drafted it. Yet he earlier told a reporter, "We
definitely aren't looking for some legislation to support our views, or
anything like that."

The Wedge's political activity, if successful, could have serious
repercussions for academic scientists. In his book Icons of Evolution,
CSC fellow Jonathan Wells accuses evolutionary scientists of
systematically misrepresenting the evidence for evolution, echoing
Johnson's quip, "When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort
of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they
are in trouble." Wells urges his readers to challenge federal funding of
evolutionary biology: "If you object to supporting dogmatic Darwinists
that misrepresent the truth to keep themselves in power . . . call for
congressional hearings on the way federal money is distributed" by the
National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He also warns college and
university alumni, "Voluntary donations by college graduates to their
alma maters often go to departments that indoctrinate students in
Darwinism rather than show them the real evidence."

The main battlefield for intelligent design's culture war, however, is
the public schools. Wedge proponents are already preparing for the
inevitable legal clash over the constitutionality of teaching
intelligent design. In the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that teaching "creation science" in the public
schools is a form of religious advocacy and is thus prohibited by the
Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Wedge advocates therefore
strive to distinguish intelligent design from creationism in the hope
that it will survive constitutional scrutiny. The fact that three
members of the Supreme Court­Chief Justice William Rehnquist and
Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas­have ex-pressed
dissatisfaction with the Edwards decision is doubtless a source of
encouragement.

Meanwhile, despite token concessions by Dembski and Johnson that
intelligent design should prove its worth to the scientific community
before it enters science classrooms in public schools, and despite the
professed qualms of a fewintelligent design advocates, there is steady
activity aimed at introducing the concept into the public school science
curricula­or, failing that, of presenting "evidence against evolution,"
which is essentially the traditional creationist litany of supposed
errors in mainstream science.

In disputes about teaching evolution in school districts across the
country, intelligent design literature is now employed indiscriminately
along with that of young-earth creationists. At the state level,
intelligent design proponents have lobbied diligently to undermine the
place of evolution in state science education standards. They
consistently failed­until March 2004, when the Ohio Board of Education
approved a creationist lesson plan for its new science curriculum. The
lesson, "Critical Analysis of Evolution," written by intelligent design
proponents, reflects a small but exploitable concession to creationists
in the new science standards, which require students to learn how
scientists "critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." Ohio may
now become the Wedge's long-sought legal test case.

Abuse of Academia
In such episodes, intelligent design proponents have flaunted their
academic credentials and affiliations for all they are worth­or beyond.
They frequently mention the ultimate scientific accolade, the Nobel
Prize, in connection with Henry F. Schaefer, who in addition to being a
self-described progressive creationist and CSC fellow is a distinguished
chemist at the University of Georgia. Needlessly inflating his
reputation, the Discovery Institute refers to him as a five-time nominee
for the Nobel Prize, even though the only source for this claim seems to
be an undocumented assertion in U.S. News & World Report. (According to
the Nobel Foundation, nominations remain confidential for fifty years.)

Dembski also gratuitously invokes the laurels, boasting of his
correspondence with a Nobel laureate, bragging that one of his books was
published in a series whose editors include a Nobel laureate, and
exulting that the publisher of the intelligent design book The Mystery
of Life's Origin also published books by eight Nobel laureates. In
contrast, during the Edwards case, seventy-two Nobel laureates endorsed
an amicus brief that noted that the "evolutionary history of organisms
has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as any
biological concept."

Academic credentials and affiliations were also used opportunistically
in 2001, when the Discovery Institute purchased advertisements in three
national publications­the New York Review of Books, the New Republic,
and the Weekly Standard­to proclaim the adherence of about a hundred
scientists to a statement reading, "We are skeptical of claims for the
ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the
com-plexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwi-nian
theory should be encouraged." Such statements commonly note the
institutional affiliations of signatories for purposes of
identification. But this statement strategically listed either the
institution that granted a signatory's PhD or the institutions with
which the individual is presently affiliated. Thus the institutions
listed for Raymond G. Bohlin, Fazale Rana, and Jonathan Wells, for
example, were the University of Texas, Ohio University, and the
University of California, Berkeley, where they earned their degrees,
rather than their current affiliations: Probe Ministries for Bohlin, the
Reasons to Believe ministry for Rana, and the CSC for Wells. During
controversies over evolution education in Georgia, New Mexico, Ohio, and
Texas, similar lists of local scientists were circulated.

It is easy for the public, unacquainted with academic life, to suppose
that the existence of a handful of scientists who reject evolution means
that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution. In a
tongue-in-cheek response to statements such as the Discovery
Institute's, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) released a
statement in February 2003, reading in part, "It is scientifically
inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist
pseudoscience, including but not limited to 'intelligent design,' to be
introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools."
The cream of the jest was that only scientists named Steve­or cognates
such as Steven, Stephen, Stephanie, Esteban, and so on­were allowed to
sign. ("Steve" was chosen to honor the late paleontologist Stephen Jay
Gould.) About 1 percent of the U.S. population possess such a first
name, so each signatory represents about a hundred scientists. By
November 2004, the NCSE's "Steve-o-meter" read 515.

Less whimsically, during the controversy over the Ohio science education
standards, researchers at the University of Cincinnati's Internet Public
Opinion Laboratory conducted a poll of science professors at four-year
public and private colleges in Ohio. Of the 460 respondents, 90 percent
said that there was no scientific evidence at all for intelligent
design; 93 percent said that they were unaware of "any scientifically
valid evidence or an [alternative] scientific theory that challenges the
fundamental principles of the theory of evolution"; and a nearly
unanimous 97 percent said that they did not use intelligent design in
their own research. Included among those surveyed were faculty at such
fundamentalist schools as Cedarville University, which accepts a
statement of faith according to which "by definition, no apparent,
perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and
chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record." If
the pollsters had excluded professors with such a dogmatic commitment to
biblical inerrancy, the results would have been even closer to
unanimity.

Over thirty years ago, the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote,
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution," and his
words continue to ring true today. Biologists, and scientists generally,
know that evolutionary biology continues to thrive, despite constant
claims by its ideological opponents that it is a "theory in crisis."
Insofar as biologists are aware of intelligent design, they generally
regard it as they do young-earth creationism: negligible at best, a
nuisance at worst. But unlike young-earth creationism, intelligent
design maintains a not inconsiderable base within academia, whose
members seemingly exploit their academic standing to promote the concept
as intellectually respectable while shirking the task of producing a
scientifically compelling case for it. To be sure, academic supporters
of intelligent design enjoy, and should enjoy, the same degree of
academic freedom conferred on the professoriate in general. But academic
freedom is no excuse for misleading students about the scientific
legitimacy of a view overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific
community. In short, the academic supporters of intelligent design are
enjoying, in the familiar phrase, power without responsibility. It is a
trend that their colleagues ought to be aware of, worry about, and help
to resist.

Barbara Forrest is professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana
University and author, with Paul R. Gross, of Creationism's Trojan
Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, published in 2004. Glenn Branch
is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a
nonprofit organization affiliated with the American Association for the
Advancement of Science that defends the teaching of evolution in the
public schools.