2008 Woodie Awards
Intelligent design part of effort to restore faith
Teaching issue changes courtroom battle into new-age cultural warfare
Issue date: 10/13/05 Section: News
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PHILADELPHIA _ The advocates of "intelligent design," spotlighted in the current courtroom battle over the teaching of evolution in Dover, Pa., have much larger goals than biology textbooks.
They hope to discredit Darwin's theory as part of a bigger push to restore faith to a more central role in American life. "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," says a strategy document written in 1999 by the Seattle think tank at the forefront of the movement.
The authors said they seek "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."Intelligent-design advocates have focused publicly on "teaching the controversy," urging that students be taught about weaknesses in evolutionary theory. The 1999 strategy document, though, goes well beyond that.
That "wedge document," outlining a five-year plan for promoting intelligent design and attacking evolution, has figured prominently in the trial now under way in federal court in Harrisburg, Pa. Eleven parents sued the Dover school board over a requirement to introduce intelligent design to high school biology students as an alternative to evolutionary theory.
Intelligent design holds that natural selection cannot explain all of the complex developments observed in nature and that an unspecified intelligent designer must be involved.
Its critics, including civil libertarians and the nation's science organizations, say intelligent design is not science, but creationism in a new guise. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that public schools could not teach creationism in science classrooms because it unconstitutionally promoted a particular religious viewpoint.
Advocates of intelligent design say it is a scientific, not a religious, concept based on scientific observations, though they acknowledge its theological implications.
The push for cultural change has not distracted intelligent-design advocates from their core education mission: to change the way biology is taught.
"That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a wedge that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points."
contributed by KRT
They hope to discredit Darwin's theory as part of a bigger push to restore faith to a more central role in American life. "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," says a strategy document written in 1999 by the Seattle think tank at the forefront of the movement.
The authors said they seek "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."Intelligent-design advocates have focused publicly on "teaching the controversy," urging that students be taught about weaknesses in evolutionary theory. The 1999 strategy document, though, goes well beyond that.
That "wedge document," outlining a five-year plan for promoting intelligent design and attacking evolution, has figured prominently in the trial now under way in federal court in Harrisburg, Pa. Eleven parents sued the Dover school board over a requirement to introduce intelligent design to high school biology students as an alternative to evolutionary theory.
Intelligent design holds that natural selection cannot explain all of the complex developments observed in nature and that an unspecified intelligent designer must be involved.
Its critics, including civil libertarians and the nation's science organizations, say intelligent design is not science, but creationism in a new guise. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that public schools could not teach creationism in science classrooms because it unconstitutionally promoted a particular religious viewpoint.
Advocates of intelligent design say it is a scientific, not a religious, concept based on scientific observations, though they acknowledge its theological implications.
The push for cultural change has not distracted intelligent-design advocates from their core education mission: to change the way biology is taught.
"That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a wedge that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points."
contributed by KRT