We’re get­ting a lot of traf­fic here, and I expect not every­one knows the broad­er con­text of the debate.

In 1805, when I was but a wee child, William Paley argued for the exis­tence of God because of the appar­ent design of the world. He made an anal­o­gy to a watch found on the heath, that the per­son find­ing it would sure­ly infer the exis­tence of the watch’s design­er since it’s so com­plex. Sim­i­lar­ly, any­one observ­ing the com­plex­i­ty of the bio­log­i­cal world would infer a design­er, and Paley con­sid­ered this an excel­lent argu­ment for God.

In 1859, Charles Dar­win and Alfred Rus­sell Wal­lace pre­sent­ed the con­cept of nat­ur­al selec­tion, the first rig­or­ous mod­el of evo­lu­tion­ary change in the world. This. espe­cial­ly when paired with a good mod­el of genet­ics, rapid­ly over­took the Design argu­ment as an expla­na­tion for bio­log­i­cal complexity.

Because peo­ple thought nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions for biol­o­gy would under­mine Bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ism, there is a his­to­ry of laws for­bid­ding the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion, or requir­ing bib­li­cal cre­ation­ism to be taught. In the 1920s, Ten­nessee teacher John Scopes got con­vict­ed of teach­ing evo­lu­tion, but was acquit­ted on a tech­ni­cal­i­ty. Dur­ing the Cold War race for tech­no­log­i­cal supe­ri­or­i­ty, those laws gen­er­al­ly fell by the way­side. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court estab­lished that there was no sec­u­lar pur­pose served by teach­ing cre­ation­ism, and that it was­n’t sci­ence, so it could­n’t be taught in sci­ence classes.

In response, sev­er­al peo­ple got togeth­er and cre­at­ed the DIs­cov­ery Insti­tute, orga­nized around prin­ci­ples spelled out in “The Wedge Doc­u­ment.” The idea was to renew the idea that “human beings are cre­at­ed in the image of God by grad­u­al­ly push­ing mate­ri­al­ism out of schools and soci­ety. Evo­lu­tion is seen as a key pro­mot­er of mate­ri­al­ism, so these cul­ture war­rior set their sights on that. Rec­og­niz­ing that sci­ence is well regard­ed in gen­er­al, the Wedge strat­e­gy was to cre­ate a broad media dri­ven move­ment to under­mine the cred­i­bil­i­ty of evo­lu­tion­ary sci­ence. One piece of the thin edge of the Wedge is “Intel­li­gent Design” creationism.

IDC holds that there are some­things which are too com­pli­cat­ed to have evolved with­out a super­nat­ur­al design­er at some point. They are care­ful not to spec­i­fy who or what the design­ers are, nor to spec­i­fy any details of the designers. 

Avoid­ing the com­plex­i­ty of the sci­en­tif­ic review process, the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute began push­ing for this new notion to be taught in schools. In 1999, the Kansas Board of Edu­ca­tion revised sci­ence stan­dards to remove evo­lu­tion. The rest is history.

The point of this is that the attacks are not on evo­lu­tion specif­i­cal­ly. The bat­tle in Kansas this time is over the def­i­n­i­tion of evo­lu­tion, it’s true, but also over whether sci­ence is the search for nat­ur­al expla­na­tions of nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na, or the search for any expla­na­tion. The ID advo­cates, who I call IDol­a­tors, see the fact that sci­ence does­n’t have any­thing to say about the super­nat­ur­al as a force for mate­ri­al­ism and atheism.

Sci­en­tists aren’t all athe­ists. It’s a shame we have to say that up front, but there it is. Sci­en­tists don’t think sci­ence can eval­u­ate super­nat­ur­al claims. We can’t exper­i­ment on God, and don’t want to. We study and exper­i­ment on nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na. It is a bizarre form of sci­en­tism to insist that all truth must be with­in sci­ence, so God must fit with­in sci­ence. That’s why this is IDolatry.

The “nat­u­ral­ism” that IDol­a­tors decry is no dif­fer­ent from the every­day com­mit­ment to mechan­ics who look for bro­ken parts rather than grem­lins, or the gen­er­al­ly accept­ed idea that the Earth will rotate around and the sun will rise each morn­ing. The changes they want will lead to a point where, as one wit­ness advo­cat­ed, sci­ence, math, econ, art, eng­lish, and his­to­ry class­es would have to teach reli­gious per­spec­tives on the subject.

“Yes TIm­my, some peo­ple think the Earth rotates so that it seems the sun moves, but oth­ers think it’s the god Apol­lo rid­ing in his char­i­ot across the sky.”

That’s the battle.

Is there a sci­en­tif­ic debate over evo­lu­tion? No. Sci­en­tists stay employed by argu­ing with each oth­er, so any seri­ous debate would make some careers, but all the debate is about what mech­a­nisms evo­lu­tion uses, and how it has act­ed over dif­fer­ent time scales, or on dif­fer­ent plan­ets. The attacks on evo­lu­tion have been con­sid­ered by sci­en­tists, and con­sis­tent­ly found to have fatal log­i­cal flaws. Most are argu­ments from igno­rance, which IDol­a­tors deny, as follows:

“I don’t under­stand how evo­lu­tion could have pro­duced the fla­gel­lum, so my the­o­ry about mag­ic pix­ies should be con­sid­ered.”
“Isn’t that an argu­ment from igno­rance?”
“No, I real­ly, real­ly don’t under­stand how evo­lu­tion could have pro­duced the flagellum.”

And so forth.

In addi­tion, many IDol­a­tors are intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­hon­est, mis­quot­ing or quot­ing with­out rel­e­vant con­text (quotem­i­ning) to argue that sci­en­tists agree with them, when the sci­en­tists are real­ly dis­agree­ing. That makes it hard to take them seriously.

If you want to get more detail, check out Kansas Cit­i­zens for Sci­ence and it’s asso­ci­at­ed groups like the Nation­al Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion, and state cit­i­zens for sci­ence else­where. TalkO­ri­gins is a great col­lec­tion of mate­r­i­al to help under­stand the attacks on evo­lu­tion, as is the Pan­da’s Thumb, an asso­ci­at­ed blog.

I’ve been track­ing this and the broad­er reli­gious and cul­tur­al agen­da, and I’d also rec­om­mend Ed Bray­ton’s blog, Dis­patch­es from the Cul­ture Wars.