Science Education and Religion
President Bush Endorses "Intelligent Design" as
Equal to "Other Scientific Theories."
President Bush has taken another step backwards towards the Dark Ages by endorsing the teaching
of "Intelligent Design" in the nation's classrooms. Already
our schools lag behind most of the developed world in science education, and
introducing a non-scientific belief in a master intelligence to explain
physical phenomena is not a way to lead this nation back into prominence.
It is important to remember that the scientific method of discovery is a
constant progress of challenges to accepted theory through carefully
controlled experimentation. The scientific term "Theory" is more than
just an idea or a hunch. It is a precisely structured statement of
testable fact. A fact built upon other known facts and upon which
other facts can be built and tested. In a single experiment a theory
can be vanquished. One failure, one contradiction, and the theory is
no longer valid and must be replaced by another.
The courts have struck down the teaching of "Creationism," a literal
interpretation of Genesis, and so "Intelligent Design" was put forth to
sidestep the courts.
For religious fundamentalists, their belief in the literal interpretation
of the Bible is so fragile, that any evidence that might provide a more
robust interpretation of the creation of the universe is blasphemy.
While they are free to hold such beliefs, and have that freedom guaranteed
by the First Amendment to the Constitution that
AU works so tirelessly to defend,
they do not offer the same respect for other beliefs, or even for the
teaching of scientific facts.
President Bush compared the
current debate to earlier disputes over "creationism." As governor of
Texas, Bush said "students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution."
But
The New
York Times reports that the president's "science adviser"
John H. Marburger III said that Bush's comments had been misinterpreted.
Marburger told the Times that "evolution is the cornerstone of
biology" and "intelligent design is not a scientific concept."
The National Academy of Sciences has also weighed in. In its guidebook
issued to public school officials in the late 1990s, the NAS states that,
"Evolution is the central organizing principle that biologists use to
understand the world. If we want our children to have a good grasp of
science, we need to help teachers, parents, school administrators, and
policy-makers understand both evolution and the nature of science."
And the
Smithsonian Museum has backed off
its plan to co-sponsor a film on Intelligent Design. "We have determined that the content of the film is not consistent with the
mission of the Smithsonian Institution's scientific research," observed a museum
statement, as reported in The Washington Post.
For a political history of Intelligent Design, and the political forces
that have shaped it, see the New York Times article by Jodi Wilgoren,
"Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on
the Defensive."
And just for fun, check out the
parody of
Intelligent Design on "The Onion" website.
BUSH ENDORSEMENT OF ‘INTELLIGENT DESIGN’ IN PUBLIC
SCHOOLS IS IRRESPONSIBLE, SAYS AMERICANS UNITED
AU’s Lynn Criticizes President’s Support For
Teaching Religion In Science
Class
President George W. Bush’s endorsement of teaching “intelligent design” in
the public schools is irresponsible and undermines sound science education, says
Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
During a White House interview with a group of reporters yesterday, Bush was
asked whether “intelligent design,” the latest version of “creationism,” should
be taught in public school science courses.
Bush told the reporters that he favors teaching intelligent design “so people
can understand what the debate is about.”
“I think part of education is to expose people to different schools of
thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed
to different ideas, the answer is yes.”
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, called the
president’s comments uninformed and reckless.
“The young people of America are ill served by a president who confuses
religion with science,” Lynn said. “Bush has used his presidential pulpit to
advance the ludicrous notion that evolution is in controversy and that
‘intelligent design’ is legitimate science. Surely, he knows that most religious
people see no conflict between Bible teachings and the evidence of science.
“His irresponsible comments will likely score big points with Religious Right
leaders, but they undermine the teaching of sound science in the nation’s public
schools,” Lynn said. “The president has demonstrated a disturbing degree of
scientific illiteracy, which may also explain his ideologically driven positions
in other areas of scientific policy including stem cell research.”
Added Lynn, “As a Yale graduate, President Bush should know basic science.
Maybe he signed up for Biology 101 but didn’t report for duty.”
Americans United and the Pennsylvania ACLU are currently challenging an
intelligent design mandate in public schools in Dover, Pa. The case is set to go
to trial on Sept. 26.
The National Academy of Sciences, which was created in 1863 to provide
information on the sciences to Congress and other branches of the federal
government, has staunchly opposed teaching religious concepts as if they were
sciences. In a 1999 statement, the Academy said, “Creationism, intelligent
design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or
of aspects are not science because they are not testable by the methods of
science.”
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 ruled that public schools may not teach
creationism or “creation science” alongside evolution. In Edwards v. Aguillard,
the high court invalidated a state law requiring “creation science” to be taught
if evolution were taught. The Court said the state law violated the separation
of church and state because it sought “to employ the symbolic and financial
support of government to achieve a religious purpose.”
Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: August 21, 2005
SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of
evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he
seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the
conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier
in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for
Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and
strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school
districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the
controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed
the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between
biology and religion.
Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution
even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting
that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology
curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win
the White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of
scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of
life's origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the
bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front
pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a
carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs - and millions of
dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta
Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an
office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public
relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the
center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science
recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor's being punished for
criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant view of
our culture."
For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican
turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian,
futuristic sensibilities - and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like
the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring.
More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution
controversy as the institute's signature issue precisely because of its
unpopularity in the establishment.
"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I want
to talk about," said Mr. Chapman, 64.
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design
challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms
are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility
of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the
existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design
is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as
untestable in laboratories.
Entering the Public Policy Sphere
From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an
institutional home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in
fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the science
center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on intelligent design,
many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or Crossway, and two
documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But even as the
institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent design, it has
staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states and school
boards simply to include criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually
teach intelligent design.
Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and
evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts,
with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states,
more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at
the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal
place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance
the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the
universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May
to require criticism of evolution.
These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the
Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and
its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."
President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind, also
helped, as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum standards.
Ohio, New Mexico and Minnesota have embraced the institute's "teach the
controversy" approach; Kansas is expected to follow suit in the fall.
Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design
as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning
creationism from curriculums. But the institute's approach is more nuanced,
scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors in the
century-long battle over biology.
A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary
and mainstream groups - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1
million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary - and
asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and
foreign affairs.
Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed, devout
and determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the moral
crusader and former drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some leaders
have ties to movement mainstays like Focus on the Family. All but a few in the
organization are Republicans, though these include moderates drawn by the
institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on nonideological topics like
technology.
But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the
institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to
distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add
intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to
promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe
for students.
The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to
Holocaust deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's
Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation and is the recipient
of the large grant from the Gates Foundation, created its own Web site to ensure
an individual identity.
"All ideas go through three stages - first they're ignored, then they're
attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the
institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're
somewhere in the attack."
Origins of an Institute
Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis,
the institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in
1792. Mr. Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's
anti-civil-rights campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a liberal
Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor, but moved to
the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as director of the
Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.
In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr.
Meyer, who was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning a
biologist yanked from a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design. About a
year later, over dinner at the Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and George Gilder,
Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate and his writing partner, discovered
parallel theories of mind over materialism in their separate studies of biology
and economics.
"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,' " Dr.
Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation, there
was a common metaphysic in these two ideas."
That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a
representative of the Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange County,
Calif., who had previously given a small grant to the institute and underwritten
an early conclave of intelligent design scholars. Dr. Meyer, who had grown
friendly enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young son in science, recalled
being asked, "What could you do if you had some financial backing?"
So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons
and a smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports organizations
"committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to its Web site, the
institute's Center for Science and Culture was born.
"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J.
Larson, the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes
Monkey Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in part because
of its drift to the right. "The institute was living hand-to-mouth. Here was an
academic, credible activity that involved funders. It interested conservatives.
It brought in money."
Support From Religious Groups
The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get
harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on www.guidestar.org,
a Web site that collects data on foundations, showed its grants and gifts jumped
to $4.1 million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997, the most recent and oldest
years available. The records show financial support from 22 foundations, at
least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions.
There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose
Web site describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the
doctrines of evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation in
Virginia, run by Mark Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice
president: the initials stand for Ad Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To the
greater glory of God," which Pope John Paul II etched in the corner of all his
papers.
And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says
it was created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by
evangelical and missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million between
1999 and 2003.
By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the
Ahmansons, who have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million
since its inception and now underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual
operations. Mr. Ahmanson also sits on Discovery's board.
The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan
Foundation, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive
director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science. Darwin
was about a metaphysical view of the world."
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon
Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged
$9.35 million over 10 years in 2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates
Foundation, said the money was "exclusive to the Cascadia project" on regional
transportation.
But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt
Foundation, based here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as well
as the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site defines it as
devoted to pursuing "new insights between theology and science."
Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an
e-mail message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell,"
saying, "I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would
fund anything at Discovery today."
Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation,
said he had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999
for a conference in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics.
"They're political - that for us is problematic," Mr. Harper said. While
Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the science," he added, "what I
see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational
advocacy and so forth."
For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski
could not find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called "a
standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year.
"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr. Dembski,
whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago,
one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and a master's of divinity
from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Money for Teachers and Students
Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its
$9.3 million on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often
just paying universities to release professors from some teaching
responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine
years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology
or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology,
linguistics, history and philosophy.
The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group,
including David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who
described his only religion to be "having a good time all the time," and
Jonathan Wells, a member of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung
Moon, who once wrote in an essay, "My prayers convinced me that I should devote
my life to destroying Darwinism."
Their credentials - advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the
University of Texas, the University of California - are impressive, but their
ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world.
"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in - no one else is,"
Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his
colleagues at Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most of my
colleagues. It's not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do." Other than Dr.
Berlinski, most fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist Christians,
though they insist their work is serious science, not closet creationism.
"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I don't
know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask myself the tough
questions."
Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a
diversionary tactic by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and they
want to talk about us," Dr. Meyer said.
But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had
grown increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a
religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian
conservatism," he said.
That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page
outline of a five-year plan for the science center that originated as a
fund-raising pitch but was soon posted on the Internet by critics.
"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," the document says. Among its promises are seminars "to
encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support the
faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."
One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to
act on their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That, according
to institute officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new conservative
majority on the Kansas Board of Education shocked the nation - and their
potential allies here at the institute - by dropping all references to evolution
from the state's science standards.
"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was
silly, outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director of
the science center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999 move in
Kansas from newspaper accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're going to be
stigmatized with what everyone does if we don't make our position clear.' "
Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which
endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum - so long as criticism
of Darwin is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian conservatives but
also appealed to Republican moderates and, under the First Amendment banner,
much of the public (71 percent in a Discovery-commissioned Zogby poll in 2001
whose results were mirrored in newspaper polls).
"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation
science people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for
Science Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present themselves
as being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light."
A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind
Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the
institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the
curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much
continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of
Pennsylvania, tried to include.
Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles
in pushing the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy"
approach and helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year, they
successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for
evolution, and they have been consulted in numerous other cases as school
districts or states consider changing their approach to biology.
But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly
frustrated as his supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent
design.
John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based
in Kansas, said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources to
"lead the movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They want to
avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the focus on the
science," he said.
Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did
not support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was
not yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the
institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes
intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.
"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the
right," Dr. West said.
Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.
"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart
whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people keep
knocking away at it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish those
people."
Jack Begg, David Bernstein and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting for
this article.
| 
