The Constitutionality of the Monkey Wrench: Exploring the Case for Intelligent Design
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Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals
UNDERSTANDING THE INTELLIGENT DESIGN CREATIONIST MOVEMENT: ITS TRUE NATURE AND GOALS A POSITION PAPER FROM THE CENTER FOR INQUIRY OFFICE OF PUBLIC POLICY AUTHOR: BARBARA FORREST, Ph.D. Reviewing Committee: Paul Kurtz, Ph.D.; Austin Dacey, Ph.D.; Stuart D. Jordan, Ph.D.; Ronald A. Lindsay, J. D., Ph.D.; John Shook, Ph.D.; Toni Van Pelt DATED: MAY 2007 ( AMENDED JULY 2007) Copyright © 2007 Center for Inquiry, Inc. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for noncommercial, educational purposes, provided that this notice appears on the reproduced materials, the full authoritative version is retained, and copies are not altered. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the Center for Inquiry, Inc. Table of Contents Section I. Introduction: What is at stake in the dispute over intelligent design?.................. 1 Section II. What is the intelligent design creationist movement? ........................................ 2 Section III. The historical and legal background of intelligent design creationism ................ 6 Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) ............................................................................ 6 McLean v. Arkansas (1982) .............................................................................. 6 Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) ............................................................................. 7 Section IV. The ID movement’s aims and strategy .............................................................. 9 The “Wedge Strategy” ..................................................................................... -
Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Washington University St. Louis: Open Scholarship Washington University Law Review Volume 83 Issue 1 2005 Is It Science Yet?: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution Matthew J. Brauer Princeton University Barbara Forrest Southeastern Louisiana University Steven G. Gey Florida State University Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, Education Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, Religion Law Commons, and the Science and Technology Law Commons Recommended Citation Matthew J. Brauer, Barbara Forrest, and Steven G. Gey, Is It Science Yet?: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution, 83 WASH. U. L. Q. 1 (2005). Available at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol83/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington University Law Review by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Washington University Law Quarterly VOLUME 83 NUMBER 1 2005 IS IT SCIENCE YET?: INTELLIGENT DESIGN CREATIONISM AND THE CONSTITUTION MATTHEW J. BRAUER BARBARA FORREST STEVEN G. GEY* TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................... 3 INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................. -
The College Student's Back to School Guide to Intelligent Design
Revised November, 2014 Part I: Letter of Introduction: Why this Student’s Guide? Part II: What is Intelligent Design? Part III: Answers to Your Professors’ 10 Most Common Misinformed Objections to Intelligent Design (1) Intelligent Design is Not Science (2) Intelligent Design is just a Negative Argument against Evolution (3) Intelligent Design Rejects All of Evolutionary Biology (4) Intelligent Design was Banned from Schools by the U.S. Supreme Court (5) Intelligent Design is Just Politics (6) Intelligent Design is a Science Stopper (7) Intelligent Design is “Creationism” and Based on Religion (8) Intelligent Design is Religiously Motivated (9) Intelligent Design Proponents Don’t Conduct or Publish Scientific Research (10) Intelligent Design is Refuted by the Overwhelming Evidence for Neo-Darwinian Evolution Part IV: Information About the Discovery Institute’s Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design COPYRIGHT © DISCOVERY INSTITUTE, 2014 — WWW.INTELLIGENTDESIGN.ORG PERMISSION GRANTED TO COPY AND DISTRIBUTE FOR NONPROFIT EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. 2 Part I: Letter of Introduction: Why this Student’s Guide? Welcome to College, Goodbye to Intelligent Design? The famous Pink Floyd song that laments, “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control,” is not just the rant of a rebellious mind; it is also a commentary on the failure of education to teach students how to think critically and evaluate both sides of controversial issues. Few scientists understood the importance of critical thinking better than Charles Darwin. When he first proposed his theory of evolution in Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin faced intense intellectual opposition from both the scientific community and the culture of his day. -
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Evo Edu Outreach (2010) 3:170–182 DOI 10.1007/s12052-010-0217-1 ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE It's Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Intelligent Design Movement's Recycling of Creationist Strategies Barbara Forrest Published online: 14 April 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract The intelligent design (ID) creationist movement terminology—are the recycled tactics of their creation is now a quarter of a century old. ID proponents at the science predecessors. Discovery Institute, headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA, insist that ID is not creationism. However, it is the direct Keywords Creationism . Intelligent design . Discovery descendant of the creation science movement that began in Institute . Balanced treatment laws . Academic freedom the 1960s and continued until the definitive ruling against legislation . Louisiana Science Education Act . Bobby creationism by the US Supreme Court in Edwards v. Jindal . Louisiana Family Forum . Aguillard 1987, which struck down laws that required National Center for Science Education balancing the teaching of evolution with creationism in public schools. Already anticipating in the early 1980s that Arkansas and Louisiana “balanced treatment” laws would Introduction be declared unconstitutional, a group of creationists led by Charles Thaxton began laying the groundwork for what is The intelligent design (ID) creationist movement has now now the ID movement. After Edwards, Thaxton and his existed long enough for a child to be born, grow up, finish associates promoted ID aggressively until it, too, was college, earn a master's degree, and begin a career. ID is a declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Kitzmiller quarter of a century old, having formally begun in 1984 with et al. -
An Interview with Dr. William A. Dembski File:///C:/Documents%20And%20Settings/Marksb/My%20Documents/W
An Interview with Dr. William A. Dembski file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/marksb/My%20Documents/W... An Interview with Dr. William A. Dembski () Mario Lopez This interview was originally conducted in two parts by IDEA Center staffer, Mario A. Lopez, with collaboration from Eduardo Arroyo Pardo for the Pro-ID Spanish website, Ciencia Alternativa. (http://www.ciencia-alternativa.org/) Introduction A mathematician and philosopher, William A. Dembski is Research Professor in Philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth. He is also a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle as well as the executive director of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design. Previously he was the Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Theology and Science at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, where he founded its Center for Theology and Science. Before that he was Associate Research Professor in the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Baylor University, where he also headed the first intelligent design think-tank at a major research university: The Michael Polanyi Center. Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. -
The Top-Ten Misinformed Objections to ID 1
The Top-Ten Misinformed Objections to ID 1. Intelligent Design is not true because there are no “real scientists” who support it. First, the truth-value of a proposition does not depend upon whom or how many people believe it. Secondly, this objection is overwhelmingly contradicted by the actual facts. For instance, leading ID theorist Michael Behe (Ph.D. Biochemistry, University of Pennsylvania) has published over 35 articles in refereed biochemical journals, and is a tenured professor of biochemistry in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University. Scott Minnich (Ph.D. Microbiology, Iowa State University), another highly respected and widely published scientist, is associate professor of microbiology at the University of Idaho and a staunch proponent of ID. Paul Chien (Ph.D. Biology, University of California at Irvine's Department of Developmental & Cell Biology), professor in the Department of Biology at the University of San Francisco, supports ID as well. He has held postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Environmental Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (CIT) the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is a consultant to both the Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory of the CIT and the Scanning Electron Microscopy & Micro X-ray Analyst in the Biology Department of Santa Clara University. While Dr. Chien's work has been published in over fifty technical journals, another ID proponent has him out-published by 1000 articles: the computational chemist Henry F. Schaefer III (B.S. chemical physics MIT, Ph.D. chemical physics, Stanford University). Schaefer, whom the Science Citation Index reports to have been cited more than 39,000 times, has been awarded and has held more prestigious positions within the scientific community than can be reasonably listed here. -
Expert Report
Expert Witness Report Barbara Forrest, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy Southeastern Louisiana University April 1, 2005 I. Conclusions about the intelligent design creationist movement. My area of expertise is the nature and strategy of the intelligent design (ID) creationist movement. Based on the research I have done, I have concluded that its program is a fundamentally religious one. This conclusion is based primarily on ID leaders’ and their supporters’ views of it as stated in their own words. It is also based upon their total rejection of naturalism. Anti-naturalism is an integral part of ID. Its proponents reject not only philosophical naturalism (the metaphysical view that nothing exists beyond the natural world) but also the naturalistic methodology of science (the scientific procedural protocol of seeking only natural explanations of natural phenomena). ID’s rejection of naturalism in any form logically entails its appeal to the only alternative, supernaturalism, as a putatively scientific explanation for natural phenomena. This makes ID a religious belief. In addition, my research reveals that ID is not science, but the newest variant of traditional American creationism. With only a few exceptions, it continues the usual complaints of creationists against the theory of evolution and comprises virtually all the elements of traditional creationism. A. “The Wedge Strategy.” In this report, I refer frequently to a document entitled “The Wedge Strategy” that outlines the ID movement’s plan to promote mainstream acceptance of ID creationism and, subsequently, the teaching of ID in public school science classes.1 The document states ID’s religious mission: “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.” It also explains the short- and long-term goals of the Discovery Institute’s creationist subsidiary, established in 1996 as the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) and now called the Center for Science and Culture (CSC). -
In the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania
Case 4:04-cv-02688-JEJ Document 338 Filed 12/07/2005 Page 1 of 30 IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA TAMMY KITZMILLER; BRYAN AND CHRISTY REHM; DEBORAH FENIMORE : AND JOEL LIEB; STEVEN STOUGH; BETH EVELAND; CYNTHIA SNEATH; JULIE SMITH; AND ARALENE (“BARRIE”)D. AND FREDERICK B. CALLAHAN, CIVIL ACTION Plaintiffs, vs . NO. 4:04-~~-2688 DOVER AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT; (JUDGE JONES) DOVER AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT BOARD OF DIRECTORS, (Filed Electronically) Defendants. PLAINTIFFS’ RESPONSE TO AMICUS BRIEFS Plaintiffs submit this brief in response to the amicus curiae briefs of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (the “FTE”), the Discovery Institute, and a collection of scientists, all of which are designed to persuade the Court that it should issue a ruling that does not take any position about whether intelligent design is religious or scientific. Case 4:04-cv-02688-JEJ Document 338 Filed 12/07/2005 Page 2 of 30 Consistent with the incestuous relationships among the amicis, the briefs of the FTE and the Discovery Institute, arguing that intelligent design has nothing to do with religion, are written by the same attorney, Randy Wenger of the Alliance Defense Fund (“ADF”), a legal organization dedicated to advocating the rights of Christians.’ Mr. Wenger’s co-author on the Discovery Institute brief, David K. DeWolf, also wrote the brief for Amici Curiae Biologists and Other Scientists, a number of whom are Discovery Institute fellows. As a fellow of the Discovery Institute himself, Mr. DeWolf has advocated the incorporation of intelligent design into public school curriculums,2 but, now that the Dover board has followed that suggestion, the Discovery Institute has abandoned that position (indeed, neither it nor the FTE styles its brief as being “in support of defendants”), 1 According to its website, “ADF is Christ-Centered. -
Intelligent Design in Public University Science Departments: Academic Freedom Or Establishment of Religion
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal Volume 16 (2007-2008) Issue 4 Article 6 April 2008 Intelligent Design in Public University Science Departments: Academic Freedom or Establishment of Religion Frank S. Ravitch Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, and the First Amendment Commons Repository Citation Frank S. Ravitch, Intelligent Design in Public University Science Departments: Academic Freedom or Establishment of Religion, 16 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 1061 (2008), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol16/iss4/6 Copyright c 2008 by the authors. This article is brought to you by the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj INTELLIGENT DESIGN IN PUBLIC UNIVERSITY SCIENCE DEPARTMENTS: ACADEMIC FREEDOM OR ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION Frank S. Ravitch* INTRODUCTION In recent years issues surrounding intelligent design theory in the public schools have come to the fore.' Intelligent design theory (ID) devolved/evolved from the creation science movement,2 itself a descendent of creationism.3 Most of the cases involving creation science or ID concern either the direct teaching of the subject in public secondary school science courses4 or the use of disclaimers when evolution is taught which state that it is only a theory and often allude to creation science, crea- tionism, or ID.' Yet, a number of "experts" cited by ID proponents are professors at public universities.6 While some of these experts are in philosophy or religion * Professor of Law, Michigan State University College of Law. The author is grateful to Lane Dilg, Stephen Feldman, Chip Lupu, Ken Marcus, Bill Marshall, Robert Tuttle, and William Van Alstyne, fellow participants in the symposium. -
Mormonism and Intelligent Design
Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011 Volume 18 Number 2 Article 4 2006 Mormonism and Intelligent Design Richard Sherlock Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Sherlock, Richard (2006) "Mormonism and Intelligent Design," Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011: Vol. 18 : No. 2 , Article 4. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol18/iss2/4 This Science and Religion is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011 by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Title Mormonism and Intelligent Design Author(s) Richard Sherlock Reference FARMS Review 18/2 (2006): 45–81. ISSN 1550-3194 (print), 2156-8049 (online) Abstract The theory of intelligent design is an explanation for the origin and evolution of life on earth. Latter- day Saints should be sympathetic toward intelligent design. Mormonism and Intelligent Design Richard Sherlock ver the last fifteen years, and especially in the last four or five, the Oconcept of intelligent design in nature has emerged as an intensely controversial alternative to the standard neo-Darwinian account of the emergence and evolution of life on earth. Whether intelligent design succeeds in replacing what Larry Laudan has called “a research tradi- tion” with another is at this point unknown. It is, however, a frame- work with which Latter-day Saints have much to engage. -
FAQ: Is Intelligent Design Just Creationism (Or Creationism "In Disguise")?
FAQ: Is intelligent design just creationism (or creationism "in disguise")? This FAQ is a work progress. In the mean time, please consider the following discussion: To answer this question, we must first define creationism. There are many definitions of "creationism" out there. However, for rhetorical purposes, let's assume a definition of creationism coming from some of the harshest critics of intelligent design, Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross: "An analysis of American creationism of all varieties reveals a number of shared characteristics: (1) belief in the creation of the universe by a supernatural designer and (usually) the designer's continuing intervention in the creation; (2) implacable anti-evolutionism, stemming from opposition to the scientific consensus on the evolution of the universe and life, such opposition being based on theological, moral, ideological, and political, but never scientific grounds; (3) criticism of all or most methodologies underpinning current scientific evidence for the evolution of life, without presenting for peer review any competing theory of origins; and (4) the most fundamental aspect of creationism: the explicit or implicit grounding of anti-evolutionism in religious scripture." (Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse, pg. 283 (Oxford University Press, 2004)) Of their four labeled criteria, it is arguable that intelligent design meets none. Below will be a discussion of each of the criteria: Criteria 1: "(1) belief in the creation of the universe by a supernatural designer and (usually) the designer's continuing intervention in the creation" For intelligent design to meet criteria 1, under Forrest and Gross's definition it must postulate a "supernatural designer." Quotations from many writings from leading scholars in the ID research community clearly indicate that intelligent design theory does not allow one to identify the designer as natural or supernatural, and also consistently give the same reason why that is the case. -
From “Creation Science” to “Intelligent Design”
From “Creation Science” to “Intelligent Design”: Tracing ID’s Creationist Ancestry Barbara Forrest © Barbara Forrest 2005 From “Creation Science” to “Intelligent Design”: Tracing ID’s Creationist Ancestry Barbara Forrest © Barbara Forrest 2005 Creationism has evolved over the last forty years—from the young-earth creationism of the 1960s-70s, to the “creation science” or “scientific creationism” of the 1980s, to “intelligent design,” creationism’s most recent variant. Beginning their self-transformation in the 1980s, creationists emerged publicly as “intelligent design theorists” in the early 1990s in order to execute the “Wedge Strategy,” a 20-year tactical plan developed under the leadership of Phillip E. Johnson and formalized in a document with the same title.1 The landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), which outlawed the teaching of creation science in American public school science classes, meant that creationists had to reinvent themselves yet again if they were to continue their efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution.2 Intelligent design creationists at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (formerly the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture), aided by their followers around the country, are using science education as the vehicle for their effort to “renew,” i.e., overthow, the secular foundation of American culture, which they regard as corrupted by “scientific materialism”: “Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.”3 The following chart reflects the clear commonalities between the substance of ID and its immediate ancestor, “creation science.” Grouped beneath characteristics that have been integral to creationism regardless of its various forms, selected remarks made by prominent creationists clearly show the direct line of descent between creation science outlawed by Edwards v.