Intelligently Designed: How Creationists Built the Campaign against Evolution

Chapter 4: Intelligent Design and Resurgent Creationism

4 Intelligent Design and Resurgent Creationism It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that). —Richard Dawkins We need to replace Dawkins-style and Sagan-style science with a science that is humble about what it can do. —Phillip Johnson Defining “creationism” had become even more problematic by the 1990s. The term could encompass the traditional “young-Earthers,” who believed life and Earth were created spontaneously less than 10,000 years ago and that humans came into being in their present form. The term also could include those who accepted an old Earth, thereby accommodating geologic facts. Political expediency, though, favored a broader definition in order to win a larger constituency. Up to this point, politics had lagged behind religion as a motivating force.1 That, too, was changing, as creationists were turning to more overtly political goals, which could be seen in the New Religious Right of the 1970s and the Moral Majority of the 1980s. Public opinion polls showed that nearly half of Americans believed some variant of creationism to be a viable scientific alternative to evolution.2 Creationists made individual rights and freedom of expression consistent themes in the fight to teach creationism in public schools. This put scientists and their allies in the awkward position of telling a culture based on individual liberty and civil rights that such values were irrelevant to this debate. Antievolutionism was thriving in spite of losing decisively and consistently in court over several decades. Creationists were learning from the 74 . chapter 4 legal setbacks. The most important lesson: It was not a battle for scientific respect, which they kept losing, but a political campaign. Creationists began treating it as such. In 1984, the National Academy of Sciences sent to science teachers and school officials nationwide more than 40,000 copies of a booklet, “Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences.” The Creation Research Society (CRS), in turn, urged the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) to issue its own pamphlet: “Teaching Science in a Climate of Controversy: A View from the American Scientific Affiliation.” To anyone unfamiliar with the pedigrees of the groups, it must have appeared to be a debate between two groups of scientists. But the ASA was largely an antievolution, evangelical group. Their pamphlet sounded moderate as it urged teachers to explore the “broad middle ground” where God and science could coexist.3 Creationists moved away from arguing with scientists and toward providing a scientific-sounding argument for mass consumption. They did not abandon the assertion that science must be subservient to biblical truth. Instead, they cloaked the dictate in the language of science, usually in the guise of “intelligent design.” The term apparently first emerged in 1984 in the Mystery of Life’s Origins.4 The chapter titles included “Crisis in the Chemistry of Origins” (Chapter 1), “Simulation of Prebiotic Monomer Synthesis” (Chapter 3), “The Myth of the Prebiotic Soup” (Chapter 4), and “Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life” (Chapter 8). The authors mentioned the possibility of supernatural origins only in the Foreword and Epilogue. In the Foreword, Dean Kenyon outlined the problems that have dogged researchers in origin-of-life research, especially in chemistry laboratories. Kenyon, a biology professor at San Francisco State University, in 1989 coauthored Of Pandas and People with Percival William Davis. It was the first biology textbook to advocate intelligent design. In Mystery, he cited the “enormous gap between the most complex ‘protocell’ model systems produced in the laboratory and the simplest living cell.” “[T]here is a fundamental flaw in all current theories of the chemical origins of life.” That flaw was the failure to consider the supernatural. Kenyon praised Mystery for its critique of the field and for addressing problems, particularly the spontaneous origin of life “by purely chemical and physical means.”5 The Epilogue summarized the alternative views of life’s origins as 1. new natural laws 2. panspermia 3. directed panspermia intelligent design and resurgent creationism · 75 4. special creation by a creator within the cosmos 5. special creation by a creator beyond the cosmos The first, which included evolution, was dismissed as a failure. The second was the “extraterrestrial view . . . a life spore was driven to earth from somewhere else in the cosmos by electromagnetic radiation pressure.” This...