Reflectorites
Here is an article in World Magazine discussing the ID movement with biographical details
about some of its leaders.
I like this bit:
"Once evolutionists read his book, they were eager to sink their teeth into Mr. Johnson, whom
they saw as a middle-aged, Harvard-educated dilettante sticking his unscientific nose where it
didn't belong. Critics lined up to debate him. But once engaged, his adversaries found him to
be both ruthlessly intelligent and maddeningly congenial. With his agreeable, favorite-uncle
face, wire-rimmed specs, and a perpetual smile in his voice, it was hard not to like Mr.
Johnson as he shredded their arguments. And, of all things, he even wanted to be friends when
the debates were through."
Steve
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http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/02-26-00/national_1.asp
[...]
WORLD Magazine
Feb 26, 2000
Volume 15
Number 8
[...]
Science vs. science
The debate over the teaching of evolution isn't just in Kansas anymore, as other states take up
the issue. While these battles make headlines, they are the fruit of a scholarly movement that
has shaken up the scientific establishment. WORLD talked to four "Intelligent Design"
revolutionaries who are fighting Darwinists on their own terms
By Lynn Vincent
The evolution debate reignited this month as Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson
ruled that Oklahoma's State Textbook Committee doesn't have the authority to require that
biology textbooks carry a disclaimer that calls Darwinism a "controversial theory."
(Committee members plan to challenge the ruling.) Meanwhile, in Louisiana, the Tangipahoa
School Board voted 5-4 against taking a defense of a similar disclaimer to the U.S. Supreme
Court after an appeals court declared that the disclaimer is unconstitutional.
While none of this is good news for those who question Darwinism, one thing is clear:
Darwinists are being forced to play defense. A major reason why is the emergence over the
last few years of the Intelligent Design movement-a group of scholars and writers who argue
that the world and its creatures show evidence of design. Who are some of the authors behind
this movement? WORLD spoke with four of them.
Ignore That Man Behind the Curtain
In 1987, when UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson asked God what he should do with
the rest of his life, he didn't know he'd wind up playing Toto to the ersatz wizards of
Darwinism. But a fateful trip by a London bookstore hooked Mr. Johnson on a comparative
study of evolutionary theory. And by 1993, Mr. Johnson's book Darwin on Trial had begun
peeling back the thin curtain of science that shielded evolution to reveal what lay behind:
Darwinian philosophers churning out a powerful scientific mirage.
Darwin on Trial was the result of Mr. Johnson's years-long, lawyerly dissection of arguments
for evolution. The forensic strategies of prominent evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and
Stephen Jay Gould reminded Mr. Johnson of courtroom sleight-of-hand: Their materialist
definition of terms decided the debate before opening arguments could begin. "I could see," he
said, "that evolution was not so much science as a philosophy that Darwinists had adopted in
the teeth of the facts."
Once evolutionists read his book, they were eager to sink their teeth into Mr. Johnson, whom
they saw as a middle-aged, Harvard-educated dilettante sticking his unscientific nose where it
didn't belong. Critics lined up to debate him. But once engaged, his adversaries found him to
be both ruthlessly intelligent and maddeningly congenial. With his agreeable, favorite-uncle
face, wire-rimmed specs, and a perpetual smile in his voice, it was hard not to like Mr.
Johnson as he shredded their arguments. And, of all things, he even wanted to be friends when
the debates were through.
"I've been overplayed as a controversialist," said Mr. Johnson, who sees such bridge-building
as his greatest strength. (God built a bridge to him during the failure of his first marriage,
when he became a Christian believer. He met his second wife Kathie at a Presbyterian church
conference.) "I see myself as a person who tries to build alliances and friendships. To win the
debate, you have to carry both the moral high ground and the intellectual high ground rather
than try to win by any sort of power tactics. That's really what we're trying to teach people."
The "we" is the cadre of intelligent design (ID) proponents for whom Mr. Johnson acted as an
early fulcrum. In the early 1990s, as formidable scientists and theoreticians like Michael Behe,
William Dembski, and others emerged in support of design theory, Mr. Johnson made contact,
exchanged flurries of email, and arranged personal meetings. He frames these alliances as a
"wedge strategy," with himself as lead blocker and ID scientists carrying the ball in behind
him.
"We're unifying the divided people and dividing the unified people," he said, adding that the
"unified people" refers to Darwinists who at present occupy increasingly dissonant camps. The
debate, he argues, is being successfully reformulated in a way that changes the balance of
influence and "puts the right questions on the table."
Evidence of an influence shift comes in varied forms: For example, Paul Nelson, a graduate
student in philosophy at the University of Chicago, was able to get approval for a Ph.D.
dissertation arguing against the theory of common ancestry-a mighty feat at a liberal, secular
university. (Mr. Nelson's book on the same topic will be published this year.) And Baylor
mathematician William Dembski is spearheading a conference in April at which heavy-hitting
secular academics will present papers on both sides of the evolutionary argument.
Such double-edged debates delight Mr. Johnson. "The whole 'wedge' philosophy isn't that you
present answers and people listen. It's that you get people debating the right questions, like
'How can you tell reason from rationalization?' and 'Can natural processes create genetic
information?'" This summer, Mr. Johnson will publish a new book, The Wedge of Truth, a
volume that frames fundamental questions he feels people ought to be debating in the
controversy over origins.
"Once you get the right questions on the table," Mr. Johnson said, "you can relax a bit,
because if people are discussing the right questions instead of the wrong ones, then the
discussion will be moving in the direction of truth instead of away from it."
The Third Atom Bomb
The reeducation of Michael Behe began in a green recliner. On a chill fall night in the same
year Mr. Johnson was seeking direction from God, Mr. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at
Pennsylvania's Lehigh University, sat at home in that recliner, transfixed by a book that shook
the very foundations of his own understanding of science. It was three in the morning before
he finished Michael Denton's book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, and turned out the lights.
Nine years later, Mr. Behe himself published a book that began turning out the lights on the
theory of evolution.
"Although I had pretty much believed evolution, because that's what I was taught, I always
had an uneasy feeling and questions in my mind," said Mr. Behe, a Roman Catholic who grew
up in a family of eight children in Harrisburg, Penn. "After reading Denton's book, and seeing
his rational, scientific approach to the problem, I decided I had signed on to something that
just was not well-supported. And, since evolution is such a strong component of many
people's view of how the world works, I started to wonder: What else have I been told that is
unsupported, or not true? It was a very intense, intellectual time."
That intensity ultimately gelled into Darwin's Black Box (Free Press 1996), a book that hit
secular scientists like an atom bomb. Charles Darwin himself had already provided a pass-fail
test for his theory: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could
not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would
absolutely break down." Mr. Behe's book (now in its 16th printing) was the first to administer
Mr. Darwin's own test at the molecular level. Using simple yet scientifically bulletproof
analyses, Mr. Behe showed that even at the cellular level many structures are "irreducibly
complex," meaning that all parts of a structure have to be present in order for the structure to
function at all. Thus, the slow, gradual changes proposed by Darwin were as likely to have led
to the spontaneous formation of complex structures as are flour, sugar, eggs, and milk likely
to gradually coalesce into a wedding cake.
Mr. Behe wrote: "Applying Darwin's test to the ultra-complex world of molecular machinery
and systems that have been discovered over the past 40 years, we can say that Darwin's theory
has 'absolutely broken down.'"
Most of Mr. Behe's secular critics did not, of course, agree. His work has been the target of
both scholarly rebuttal and brainless invective. But on the whole, Darwin's Black Box received
surprisingly respectful treatment. Not only did many Christian groups name it one of the most
important books of the 20th century, but reporters from the mainstream press also flocked to
Bethlehem, Penn., to see what made Mr. Behe tick. Secular universities slated him for
speaking engagements. The venerable New York Times even shocked Mr. Behe by inviting
him to submit an article explaining the main thesis of his book.
Still, Mr. Behe, who seems somewhat embarrassed that his name appears on "important
author" lists with the likes of Tolkien and Solzhenitsyn, doesn't see himself as a scientific
crusader. He doesn't look like one either. At a recent conference on intelligent design, the
bearded Mr. Behe emerged as the Anti-Suit. Opting to take the podium in his usual uniform of
a plaid shirt, blue jeans, and workboots, he looked, while lecturing, like what he is: a dad.
"I do not see myself as called to overturn thinking on evolution in the world," Mr. Behe said.
"My primary focus is my marriage and my family. I see myself as called to raise my eight
children, and anything else is gravy."
But what about having written a book that decimated the fallacious underpinnings of modern
science? That, he allows with a smile, is pretty good gravy indeed.
God's Mathematician
It's easy to imagine what William Dembski's wife finds in the dryer lint trap after washing her
husband's pants: equations. Long, elegant equations replete with tangents, vectors, and
permutations tangled unceremoniously with tissue shreds in the lint trap. When Mr. Dembski
speaks, equations come out. When he writes, equations come out. Surely he must keep a few
spare equations in his pockets.
A mathematician with two Ph.D.s and director of Baylor University's Polyani Center, an
information theory research group, Mr. Dembski is a long string-bean of a man who would
rather listen than speak. But swirling behind his glasses and thin, angular face is an intellect
that helped vault intelligent design theory from the realm of the possible to the province of the
probable. His book, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities
(Cambridge University Press 1998), set secular scientists' skirts afire by crafting for the first
time a scientifically rigorous "explanatory filter" for detecting design.
"In the scientific community, there is always the worry that when we make an attribution of
design, that natural causes will end up explaining it," said Mr. Dembski, who is also a
Discovery Institute senior fellow and the man whom author George Gilder once called "God's
mathematician." "There's the sense that we 'can't do science' with design because we can't get
a handle on it, or do it reliably. My work is aimed at refuting that view and showing that we
can have a reliable criterion for detecting design and distinguishing it from other modes of
explanations" of origins.
Mr. Dembski describes his own formative concept of origins as a "vague, theistic belief." The
son of a biologist (he now lives in Irving, Texas, with wife Jana and 8-month old daughter
Chloe), he said: "There was a time when I accepted some form of evolutionary theory." But
his understanding of God as the designer solidified early in his 20-year Christian walk. Still, he
points out that his theories-and intelligent design theory in general-spells designer with a small
d. "Although I would personally identify God as the designer on theological grounds, the Bible
is not entering into these discussions. Intelligent design theorists are trying to make it a fully
rigorous, scientific enterprise."
As a result, Mr. Dembski sees not only a growing acceptance of ID theory among scientific
faculty at Christian colleges, but also an emerging community of theistic academics at secular
universities. But Massimo Pigliucci isn't one of them. A biologist, Mr. Pigliucci's sputtering,
angry review of The Design Inference published in the journal BioScience called Mr.
Dembski's work "trivial," "nonsensical," and "part of a large, well-planned movement whose
object ... is nothing less than the destruction of modern science."
Mr. Dembski loved it. "If the worst humiliation is not to be taken seriously, at least we're
being taken seriously," adding that even fellow Darwinists panned Mr. Pigliucci's intemperate
reaction to Mr. Dembski's book. "If we're generating such strong, visceral responses, we must
be doing something right."
Making It Clear
When it comes to baby toys, Steve Meyer doesn't play favorites. Whether he's lecturing 19-
year-old college freshmen or arguing for intelligent design before science elites, Mr. Meyer has
no qualms about pressing together chains of brightly colored snap-lock beads or launching a
superball across the room.
All, of course, in the name of science.
"I've found that most people, even scientists, don't mind having ideas made clear," said Mr.
Meyer, a philosopher of science and a professor at Whitworth College in Spokane. "In
intelligent design, making ideas clear is all to our advantage because the case for Darwinism
really depends a lot on obfuscation. So, if [Darwinists] can conceal that with lots of difficult
jargon and technical terminology, they can keep everybody but the experts out."
It's Mr. Meyer's aim to let the non-experts in. Tall, intense, and personable, he calls himself a
"shameless popularizer" and is the acknowledged PR-guy for the design movement. Speaking
to a mixed group of scientists, philosophers, and journalists at a recent intelligent design
conference in L.A., he blew up balloons and slapped magnetic letters on a child-sized
whiteboard to simplify explanations of evidence for design in DNA. When he was through, the
philosophers and journalists actually understood what he was talking about.
Mr. Meyer arrived at his own understanding of life's origins between shifts at Atlantic
Richfield (ARCO) oilfields in Dallas. After graduating from Whitworth in 1980, Mr. Meyer
went to work for ARCO as a geophysicist. In 1985, a conference convened in Dallas that
brought together top philosophers, cosmologists, and biologists to discuss the interrelationship
of recent scientific findings and religion. Mr. Meyer, who basically wandered in off the street
to listen in, found his own vaguely held notions of theistic evolution dismantled by former big-
gun Darwinists who had themselves concluded that scientific evidence pointed to an intelligent
designer of the universe.
"For me, it was a seminal event, a turning point," Mr. Meyers said. "I saw that there was an
exciting, intellectual program here worth pursuing." It was a turning point that would lead him
to Cambridge University where, in 1991, he earned his doctorate in the history and philosophy
of science for a dissertation on origin-of-life biology.
Now, Mr. Meyer divides his time between Whitworth and his position as director of the
Seattle-based Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. The center, says its mission
statement, "seeks to challenge materialism on specifically scientific grounds." Mr. Meyer said
the center was founded as an academic end-run around secular university research
departments held hostage by Darwinists. With its corps of 40 research fellows in disciplines
ranging from genetics to biology to artificial intelligence, he contends the center has the
academic firepower to engineer a profound shift in the naturalistic paradigm that now
dominates the culture.
For his part, Mr. Meyer stays busy with fundraising, budget management, and his own
research on the evidence for design in DNA. (His book, DNA by Design, will be published this
year). He also keeps design theory alive in public forums. For example, when last year's
controversy regarding the teaching of evolution in Kansas erupted, Mr. Meyer debated
evolutionary biologists on National Public Radio. And his science and op-ed pieces appear in
major papers, including The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
Of course, his critics publish op-eds of their own. He, like his ID colleagues, is regularly
slammed as "anti-scientific" and "anti-intellectual."
"The gatekeepers of evolutionary theory are very worried about the design movement," Mr.
Meyer said. "It's got a huge appeal with students, it's framed in a way that makes their position
very unattractive, and the evidence supports it. When it was religion versus science,
evolutionists won that debate every time."
Now, it's science versus science, he said. And the debate evolutionists had thought was settled
has only just begun.
[...]
(c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 WORLD Magazine. mailbag@worldmag.com
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"It is a mistake to suppose that science is an unswerving pursuit of
objective truth. Partially it is, but only to the extent that the truth does not
turn out to contradict what has already been taught in the educational
process. Students in organic chemistry still learn that in 1828 Friedrich
Woehler destroyed the old doctrine of vitalism by preparing urea from
ammonium cyanate. But the latter almost surely had its origin in the action
of denitrifying bacteria in the soil, so that the claimed production of a
biological product from nonbiological sources was very likely wrong, and
could have been seen to be wrong from Pasteur onward. Mistakes of
scientific history are still more ineradicable. Few students are ever informed
that the concept of evolution through natural selection was under
discussion fully a quarter of a century before Darwin's book on the Origin
of species. Ironically, the theory was then rejected for what was considered
a failure of species to adapt to the environment." (Hoyle F., "Mathematics
of Evolution", [1987], Acorn Enterprises: Memphis TN, 1999, pp104-105).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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