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

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2004 by Chris Mooney

But anti-evolutionists didn't abandon their strategy. Instead, they stripped their ideas still further of any religious content while jacking up the scientific rhetoric. Key to their efforts was the repackaging of a concept with a respectable philosophical lineage, once called "natural theology" but now known as "intelligent design" (ID). In a cosmological sense, intelligent design proponents hold that the universe itself shows proof of God's handiwork, a claim naturalistic science can neither confirm nor refute. But in the hands of religious conservatives, intelligent design eclipsed creation science as the main challenge to evolutionary theory, with proponents arguing that they can detect scientific proof of "design" in living creatures and that evolutionists themselves are "religiously" addicted to an atheistic worldview.

ID has moved into the public debate via one well-funded think-tank, Seattle's Discovery Institute, founded in 1990 by a former Reagan administration official and generously funded by financial backers of other religious right causes. As with creation science, ID's most credentialed practitioners appear motivated by theology rather than research. Leading proponent Jonathan Wells, for instance, is a member of the Unification Church and has written that the words of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon helped convince him to "devote my life to destroying Darwinism"--the reason, according to Wells, that he attended the University of California at Berkeley. to obtain a second Ph.D. in biology (his first was in theology). After receiving his second doctorate, Wells quickly began "writing articles critical of Darwinism," according to an article he published on a Unificationist Web site, although he doesn't seem too interested in peer-reviewed research. In a 2001 interview shortly after publishing his book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?, Wells said "I am not now doing laboratory research. I have begun several ... experimental projects, but they are on hold until the current controversy is resolved." True scientist, of course, tend to think that research is how you resolve such controversies.

Although the arguments for intelligent design have enjoyed some influence among religiously-inclined mathematicians and philosophers, they have failed to convince its core scientific audience: working biologists. As Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, himself a practicing Catholic, has put it, "The scientific community has not embraced the explanation of design because it is quite clear, on the basis of the evidence, that it is wrong." Nevertheless, ID proponents have deployed across the nation arguing that we should "teach the controversy" over evolution by allowing ID-style "scientific" critiques into classrooms. Given its clear religious motivations, ID ultimately seems destined to suffer the same legal late as creationism. But in the meantime, it has sparked controversy and school board battles in states ranging from Ohio to Montana.

Steered science