Research and destroy: how the religious right promotes its own "experts" to combat mainstream science

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2004 by Chris Mooney

The id of ID

To understand how the religious right got science, it helps to examine the long-running battle over evolution. Though evolutionary theory has been controversial ever since the 1859 publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, what we now call creationism--America's religiously inspired anti-evolution movement--had its origins in the early decades of the 20th century, when Protestant fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan thumped their Bibles and denounced the spread of evolutionism. Following the famed Scopes Trial of 1925, evolution largely vanished from American science textbooks until the late 1950s, when a post-Sputnik emphasis on science education brought it back with a vengeance. As the political climate changed, creationists also experienced a suing of court defeats, notably the U.S. Supreme Court's 1968 ruling in Epperson v. Arkansas, which declared unconstitutional outright bans on the teaching of evolution.

Soon creationists adopted a new strategy, arguing on secular and scientific grounds for the incorporation of creationism alongside evolution in school curricula. "What they had to do was pretend that it was a science and that it should be given equal time," explains Stephen Brush, a science historian at the University of Maryland. The core tenet of "creation science" emerged from the mind of George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist who had little scientific training but felt God had instructed him to enter what he called the "unworked field" of evolutionary geology. Price acknowledged the existence of an extensive fossil record, but argued that all fossils had been created during a catastrophic worldwide deluge--that is, the Biblical flood from which Noah escaped in his ark.

This claim was, to put it mildly, highly dubious. But it nonetheless allowed creationists to position themselves as believers in an alternative scientific theory rather than mere religious dogma. As leading creationist Henry Morris argued in his 1974 book, Scientific Creationism, creationism could be taught "without reference to the book of Genesis or to other religious literature or religious doctrines." (Morris managed to cover his bases, publishing two versions of his book--a secular edition for public schools and a religious one that cited Scripture.) In the 1960s and 1970s, organizations and think tanks such as the Creation Research Society and later the Institute for Creation Research sprang up to support creation science, while researchers affiliated with these groups published books for popular audiences and pushed their theories to the press without the pressures of peer review or academic rigor.

But though creation science found a few wilting dupes in Washington--including Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 declared evolution "a scientific theory only"--it didn't sway the courts. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring the teaching of creation science ,alongside evolution violated the First Amendment's establishment clause by promoting religion. Instrumental in the case was a statement from the real scientists: 72 Nobel laureates signed an amicus brief favoring the overturn of Louisiana's "equal time" law, and arguing that "teaching religious ideas mislabeled as science is detrimental to scientific education."