Does Intelligent Design Have Merit?

As a graduate student at the University of California at?San Diego, I heard Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), speak against intelligent design (ID) to?a graduate seminar I was enrolled in at Scripps Institution for Oceanography.? As an ID-proponent, I didn’t know what to expect from the nation’s leading anti-ID activist.? I didn’t know whether she was going to blow ID out of the water or come up short.? After hearing her talk, I was surprised to discover just how weak her arguments were.? I expected more!? Instead, what I heard from Dr. Scott was:

• (1) Appealing to Authority
• (2) Blatantly Twisting and Misrepresenting ID
• (3) Puffing about the Glory of Evolution
• (4) Rewriting History
• (5) Promoting False Conspiracy Theories about ID
• (6) Hypocritically Harping on the Religious Associations of ID while Ignoring her Own Side’s Use (and Abuse) of Religion
• (7) Evading the Real Issues

Little has changed in the NCSE's strategy since that time.  And as it has turned out, my initial impressions about the NCSE’s strategies were not unique: since that seminar, I recall multiple times when people have told me that upon first hearing the arguments put forth by the NCSE, they are surprised to see how weak and assertion-based their arguments are.

These 7 common components of the NCSE’s strategy will be frequently revisited throughout my rebuttals to the NCSE's 5 opening statements.

For example, in its first opening statement, the NCSE combines tactics #2 and #3 stating by stating, “ID unabashedly rejects the methods and results of the well-established scientific discipline of evolutionary biology.”  Of course that isn’t true because ID accepts the evolutionary concepts of change over time and is even compatible with common descent.  But what if there are core aspects of evolutionary biology which should be questioned and rejected, such as the claim that random mutation and natural selection are the driving force producing life's adaptive complexity?  While the NCSE commits other errors in its first opening statement, this rebuttal will focus on the NCSE’s use of Tactic #6 listed above.

The NCSE Hypocritically Harps on the Religious Associations of ID while Ignoring Their Own Side’s Use (and Abuse) of Religion, Part 1
Darwinists often attack ID proponents for allegedly making religious arguments in favor of their position.? In fact, the title of the NCSE's first opening statement is that ID should be rejected because it is a “religiously motivated attack on science.” (More on this below.)? Yet in its first opening statement, the NCSE promotes religious viewpoints--in order to support evolution!? The NCSE is entitled to use religious arguments for evolution if it wishes, but it is immense hypocrisy for them to go and attack others for allegedly using religious arguments.

But is the NCSE always so religion-friendly? Not as much as they would like you to think.

This summer, Gregory A. Petsko, president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), published a similar editorial in ASBMB Today asserting that “there is no controversy” about evolution, while maintaining that people believe in religion due to “insecurity and need for certainty.”(1) Petsko suggests that if public schools can challenge evolution, then students at Christian private schools should “be forced to consider the possibility that there is no God, or that the Muslim faith, or Hindu faith, or Jewish faith, might be the true one” or consider the possibility that “that there are so many different translations and versions of the Bible that there is no way of knowing which one is the 'word of God.'"(2) The NCSE heartily promoted Petsko’s anti-religious article on its website.(3)

But anti-religious motives run much deeper at the NCSE. The NCSE’s executive director Eugenie Scott acknowledges that she is a “philosophical naturalist”(4) but far more importantly, she's a notable public signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto, an aggressive statement of the humanist agenda to create a world with “without supernaturalism” based upon the view that “[h]umans are … the result of unguided evolutionary change” and the universe is “self-existing.”(5)

Despite the NCSE’s secular humanist ties, it is friendly to religion provided that you support certain brands of religion.

The common stereotype that the NCSE wants you to believe is that Darwin-skeptics are the ones pushing religion into the science classroom. Yet Eugenie Scott has in fact recommended that teachers use lesson plans to explicitly promote pro-evolution theology in the classroom.?

Scott recommends a lesson plan that sends students into the community to interview religious leaders to learn about their perspectives on evolution.? Then students bring their interviews back into the science classroom to discuss the religious views of local ministers—in the science classroom!

But in this activity, some religious viewpoints about evolution are more equal than others.? The lesson plan blatantly favors discussing religious viewpoints that are friendly towards evolution. When Scott described the lesson plan, she praised one teacher who performed the exercise so as to promote pro-evolution theology:

“[O]ne teacher presented students with a short quiz wherein they were asked, "Which statement was made by the Pope?" or "which statement was made by an Episcopal Bishop?" and given an "a, b, c" multiple choice selection. All the statements from theologians, of course, stressed the compatibility of theology with the science of evolution.”(6)

If there were any doubts as to whether Scott wanted to promote a particular brand of theology in the science classroom, consider her warning that “[t]he survey-of-ministers approach may not work if the community is religiously homogeneous, especially if that homogeneity is conservative Christian.”(7)

Of course Dr. Scott has every right to hold her secular humanist viewpoints. But isn’t it a little odd that organizations headed by secular humanists are telling teachers what kind of religion to promote to students?

The NCSE may work hard to create a religion-friendly image, but it’s clear that they are only friendly to certain religious viewpoints.  Moreover, it’s highly hypocritical for the NCSE to oppose ID on the grounds that it is a religious viewpoint, when their executive director has unashamedly advocated for teachers to assign classroom exercises that promote theology!

Unfortunately, Eugenie Scott is not the only leading proponent of evolution who encourages teachers to discuss pro-evolution theology in the classroom.

Last year PBS-NOVA released a “Briefing Packet for Educators” in conjunction with its movie, “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.” (For critical responses, see JudgingPBS.com)? Their briefing?packet claims to provide teachers with “easily digestible information to guide and support you in facing challenges to evolution.”(8) Yet the teacher's guide only provides statements from religious groups that support evolution, and instructs teachers to discuss religion in the science classroom by suggesting that teachers pose questions like “Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion?” and answer “Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently antireligious is simply false.”(9)

If public school teachers followed followed the script recommended in this briefing packet, they would violate the First Amendment's requirement of religious neutrality.  In the case Epperson v. Arkansas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools must maintain “neutrality between religion and religion.”(10)? Since the Briefing Packet encourages teachers to favor religious viewpoints that are friendly towards evolution, it actually would lead teachers to violate the Establishment Clause.(11)

As a final example of hypocrisy, the NCSE asserts that ID proponents insist "that religious belief compels the rejection" of evolution.? But in our opening statements, my co-participants and I have not argued that people should accept ID because of religion, but rather because of science.? Even worse, the NCSE's charge is hypocritical because leading theistic evolutionists, such as George Coyne and Francisco Ayala, have charged that we should reject ID because it is bad religion.? Coyne recently argued that intelligent design "belittles God"(26) and Ayala has argued that "The theory of evolution is better for religion than intelligent design."(27)? If anyone is using "religious belief" to "compel the rejection" of a viewpoint, it's these Darwinists, not the pro-ID participants here on OpposingViews.com.

It is immensely hypocritical for the NCSE to attack ID groups for allegedly pushing religion into the science classroom or for using religious arguments when?leading Darwinists--including?the NCSE--unashamedly use religion to argue for evolution and even suggest that teachers should inject discussions about pro-evolution theology into classroom instruction.

The NCSE Hypocritically Harps on the Religious Associations of ID while Ignoring Their Own Side’s Use (and Abuse) of Religion, Part 2
In the title of its first opening statement, the NCSE charges that ID should be rejected because it "is a Religiously Motivated Attack on Science."  I anticipated this fallacious objection to ID and refuted it in my third opening statement. There, I explained that in science, the motives or personal religious beliefs of scientists don't matter; only the evidence matters. For example, the great scientists Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton were inspired to their scientific work by their religious convictions that God would create an orderly, rational universe with comprehensible physical laws that governed the motion of the planets. They turned out to be right—not because of their religious beliefs—but because the scientific evidence validated their hypotheses. (At least, Newton was thought to be right until Einstein came along.) Their personal religious beliefs, motives, or affiliations did nothing to change the fact that their scientific theories had inestimable scientific merit that helped form the foundation for modern science.

Indeed, if the NCSE wants to harp upon the religious beliefs, motives, affiliations, and implications associated with ID, then they should realize that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Leading proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution frequently discuss their views of the cultural and metaphysical implications of the neo-Darwinian evolution. Moreover, many of them have expressed anti-religious beliefs and motives for advocating evolution, and have close ties to atheist and secular humanist organizations.

As noted earlier, Eugenie Scott is a physical anthropologist who now serves as Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education and was called by the scientific journal Nature “perhaps the nation’s most high-profile Darwinist.”(12) But Scott is also a public signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto, an aggressive statement of the humanist agenda to create a world with “without supernaturalism” based upon the view that “[h]umans are … the result of unguided evolutionary change” and the universe is “self-existing.”(13)

Another leading pro-evolution activist, Barbara Forrest, believes that “philosophical naturalism” is “the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion.”(14) Dr. Forrest not only sits on the Board of Directors of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, an associate member of the American Humanist Association, which publishes the Humanist Manifesto III(15), but she is also a Board Member of the NCSE.(16)

Richard Dawkins is Oxford University’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and is probably the most famous evolutionist in the world. Yet Dawkins argues that belief in God is a “delusion”(17) and that "Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”(18) Dawkins has stated his goal is “to kill religion”(19) and when he received an award from the American Humanist Association, he declared that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”(20)

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, who has been a public advocate of teaching evolution in a one-sided pro-Darwin-only dogmatic fashion in public schools,(21) says that his scientific career is motivated by a desire to disprove religion:

“I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science—to free people from superstition.”(22)
Weinberg elaborates on what he means by “superstition,” as he hopes that “this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas will come to an end, that we’ll see no more of them. I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”(23)

In November, 2006 the New York Times covered a conference held at the scientific research hub The Salk Institute. The story reported a striking agenda on the part of leading scientists present at the conference to stifle religious belief in order to promote Darwinism to the public: “one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief.” The scientists were worried that evolution by natural selection and other views are “losing out in the intellectual marketplace” and one scientist sarcastically said the viewpoints “have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”(24)

I do not raise these examples to argue that one cannot accept evolution and religion or to argue that neo-Darwinism is not science. And I should note that these scientists have every right to hold their anti-religious beliefs and motives. But these examples expose the intense hypocrisy and failure of the NCSE’s harping upon the alleged religious motives of ID proponents.

In fact, the NCSE tacitly admits that it is aware of the problem of anti-religious motives on the part of Darwinists, and at times has publicly admitted that they could have legal implications. In 2006, one of its spokespersons stated:

“We don’t need the anti-creationists going and mixing their views on religion into their science. In fact, this is probably the surest path to disaster politically and in the courts. Anyone who wants to do this has the right to do it, but it ain’t helpful or particularly smart.”(25)

Of course the NCSE considers neo-Darwinism to be scientific.  So if they don't believe that the anti-religious motives of leading Darwinists make neo-Darwinism unscientific, how can they maintain consistency when they argue that the allegedly religious motives of ID proponents make ID unscientific?  The NCSE's harping upon the religious motives of ID proponents is hypocritical and fallacious.