Troubles in Paradise “In the Beginning” James Downard 1.7 Teach the Kulturkampf (Updated 12 March 2017)
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Troubles in Paradise “In the Beginning” James Downard 1.7 Teach the Kulturkampf (Updated 12 March 2017) 1.7 Section 1: The Intelligent Design movement comes along to save the day (& hide the ball). Applied Intelligent Design I—The Danny Phillips case and slouching toward Robert Bork 6 Tom Willis Hammering the Wedge—Kansas 1999 and a world not in motion 11 The Sense (and Nonsense) of the Senate—The Santorum Amendment as catspaw 17 Applied Intelligent Design II—How to GetEquipped in Pennsylvania 19 Creationism 2.0—State antievolution efforts and the traveling Kent Hovind fun house 25 Taking “Critical Analysis” Seriously—How about starting with Joe Baker 32 Applied Intelligent Design III—John Calvert and William Harris come to Ohio 35 Preaching ID to the Choir—Debating the Discovery Institute in Ohio and elsewhere 41 Bumper Sticker Antievolutionism—The Cobb County disclaimer as TTC archetype 47 Tweaking “Science” Just a Bit—Distinguishing Operational from Historical science 53 Taking “Critical Analysis” Seriously II—Baillieul vets the 2004 Ohio recommendations 55 Applied Intelligent Design IV—Texas textbook wars (enter Don McLeroy) 58 Applied Intelligent Design V—Witness for the Prosecution miscued at Kansas II 65 Martyrs for Design—Nancy Bryson and Roger DeHart testify at Kansas II 74 The ACLJ as Perry Mason (Not)—Rod LeVake and “The Case of the Bedeviled Creationist” 82 Intelligent Design Goes to Court—Kitzmiller v. Dover and reading between the lines 90 From at least one Horse’s Mouth—Winging it with Michael Behe 109 Venturing Further into the Bacterial Maze—Creationist history lessons on religion & politics 115 Origins or Bust—Pasteur, evolution and religion in the French scientific tradition 119 Armed and Dangerous—Behe and the pitfalls of a little knowledge 122 Life on the Intelligent Design Mobius Strip—Skirting the creationist traffic jam 125 Just as evolutionists were gearing up to joust with Creation Science, along came the Intelligent Design movement to turn the tables. In a way, it was the revenge of the American Scientific Affiliation approach to creation, which had never clutched at the deadening anchor of Flood Geology to begin with. Distracted by the glare of Henry Morris’ fireworks, evolutionary writers were often too busy targeting the carrying capacity of Noah’s Ark to notice the subdued emergence of religiously devout scientists and philosophers from the halls of academe. These new antievolutionists were holding up the Big Bang as the ultimate act of creation, while endeavoring to undermine the viability of naturalistic theories on the origin of life by challenging its very chemistry. The first player on this new field came in 1984: Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen’s The Mystery of Life’s Origin picking through the limited research on prebiotic chemistry to argue that life could not have originated naturally. While the origin of life was an inevitable target for antievolutionary apologetics, the aforementioned Of Pandas and People filled another important niche. Put out by a group of Texas creationists for John Buell’s Foundation for Thought and Ethics, it was written by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon and intended as a supplementary school textbook. After the court losses in the 1980s its text went through iterative revisions to replace references to “creationism” with an even more neutral phrase: “Intelligent Design” (which creative evolution would come back to haunt the ID movement at the Dover trial in 2005, discussed below). Even though its argument hadn’t changed, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics thought Pandas could serve as a secular resource along with the Thaxton book because, after all, neither explicitly mentioned any Creator, Matzke (2009d). The absence of Bible references satisfied Phillip Johnson (1991, 188) too, declaring ‘its methodology is far more empirical that of the Framework” used by the California State Board of Education. That characterization may be kept in mind in subsequent chapters 1 when the empirical claims of Pandas are explored regarding such fossil matters as the reptile-mammal transition and bird origins. The idea that showing “design” in nature implicitly favored Creation was an unspoken presumption that would immediately fall on receptive creationist ears, such as the premiere issue of Think & Believe (1984a) at Dave Nutting’s Alpha Omega Institute, which would extol the virtues of Pandas in Shaver et al. (1996) without ever acknowledging that scientists could object to the content of that work as factually flawed. Instead, their Kulturkampf perspective positioned Pandas only as a chip in the game they were playing with “the Humanist Left and their markedly evolutionist texts complete with naked apes and ‘evolving’ humans.” Of course, the invigorated antievolutionary movement still had to deal with that pesky fossil record, and resolve its many evolutionary implications. Arguably the most influential work here was Australian biochemist Michael Denton’s 1985 Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. While Morris and Gish were wallpapering over their Biblical convictions to appear innocuous enough for secular consumption, and The Mystery of Life’s Origin and Of Pandas and People were presenting a secularized argument from within the religious community, Denton was not defending a religious position to begin with, and so readily restricted his argument to scientific issues and evidence. Touching (albeit very inadequately, as we’ll see) on topics from paleontology to biology, Denton impressed a lot of people for whom “Creation Scientist” was just a synonym for crank. Though it attracted the cranks too, with Think & Believe (1989c) certain that it “demolishes evolution as usually taught in schools.” The Alpha and Omega Institute could have been let off the hook since Denton’s book was only a few years on the table at that time, were it not for Think & Believe (1995b) still retreading its content, such as his superficial treatment of bird evolution, covered in Chapter 2 of Downard (2004). And decades after Evolution: A Theory in Crisis appeared, the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower (2010c) magazine was still invoking Denton (describing him as a “molecular biologist”) to support the claim that Darwinian evolution was “one of the greatest myths of our time.” Although evolutionary theory wasn’t actually in crisis, as Spieth (1987) noted in his review of Denton’s book, people orbiting the cultural demographic who would very much like to see it that way were inspired by Denton’s example and got the full Intelligent Design ball rolling, starting particularly when Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson put Darwin on Trial in 1991. Johnson’s joining the antievolution campaign was a seminal event, galvanizing a host of activists who ultimately ended up associated with the Discovery Institute approach to antievolutionism. One of the Discovery Institute’s “Dissent from Darwinism” signatories, chemist Leon Combs (2009), went so far as to think that Intelligent Design “is a creation theory developed initially by” Johnson, but views almost as effusive were offered by the various contributors in the laudatory Dembski (2006b) anthology, Darwin’s Nemesis. The Foreword by Senator Rick Santorum (2006) succinctly summarized what Johnson’s “extraordinary leadership” meant: namely, to rid science of false philosophy. The importance of the cause is clear: what could be more important than showing that only a shallow, partisan understanding of science supports the false philosophy of materialist reductionism, with its thoroughly unscientific denial of formal and final causes in nature and its repudiation of the first cause of all being? As the decline of true science has been a major factor in the decline of Western culture, so too the renewal of science will play a big part in cultural renewal. Readers at this point may pick up their jaw. The blithe certainty with which Senator Santorum (whose familiarity with the nuts-and-bolts of current scientific understanding has proven so far undetectable) professes that “true science” has been in decline (all downhill since 1859, Rick, or only since particle physics and plate tectonics?) is no more over top than the Olympian ambitions of the 2 Discovery Institute (2002a) itself, which has declared that “Design theory promises to revitalize many long-stagnant disciplines by recognizing mind, as well as matter, as a causal influence in the world.” But looming over the laughable impression of current “materialist” science as mired in lethargic confusion is the transformation of this pseudo reality into “a major factor” in our cultural slide down into the abyss— and would that be national health care and gay marriage, or the decline in lynchings or pogroms or polio outbreaks, that signals our present iniquity? Make no mistake about it: Rick Santorum and the sundry folk orbiting the Discovery Institute black hole believe exactly what they say. They genuinely are fighting a deeply felt culture war, striving to preserve the very stuff of civilization—or at least the culturally conservative stumps of it that poke through a forest of contemporary diversity many of them find increasingly discordant. However much the Intelligent Design debate plays out on the seemingly technical turf of which gene or fossils exist and what they may signify, behind the techno-babble is an army of culture warriors marching to the barricades in order to save Civilization as Only They Think They Know It. That Johnson’s assault on evolution was going to play out on this fairly narrow Kulturkampf field was illustrated from the get-go by who paid attention to Darwin on Trial and who didn’t. The scientific literature didn’t bother with it after it appeared, presumably under the assumption that it wasn’t actually a work of science and so merited none. It did garner a flock of notice in Christianity Today, though, beginning with the favorable review by Woodward (1991) that August. When the nominees for best Christian books of the year were listed in November (p.