Americans’ Lack of Scientific Literacy Opens Door to Creationist Assault

Why is Father Dan pissed off a lot of the time? Here’s one reason: If you don’t know the background of the Creation “Science” assault on common sense, this opinion piece by Robert Weitzel does a good job of introducing it. This is some very, VERY frightening stuff. Theory puts a serpent in the garden of education (captimes.com): “The latest incarnation of the creation story is something called intelligent design creationism. The teaching of it in public schools has been at the center of controversy in at least five states in the last few years. The most recent are Louisiana and Texas, whose state school boards are currently considering requiring all biology textbooks to discuss alternative creation ‘theories.’ This is significant because Texas is such a large textbook market. Its decision will affect school districts in dozens of states.

Intelligent design creationism maintains that life on Earth was designed by a supernatural intelligence. Unlike with creationism past, the ‘designer’ of intelligent design creationism is never identified as God nor is the Book of Genesis mentioned. This break with traditional creationism is a tactic designed to give intelligent design creationism both a scientific facade and immunity from First Amendment challenges.

Another tactic of intelligent design creationists, similar to old-school creationists, is their reliance on the negative argument. They attempt to find and exploit supposed weaknesses in the evolution theory, the logic being that if evolution, or any part of it, is wrong, then intelligent design creationism is right. Tellingly, these new age creationists have produced no original research or scientific data to support their position. A survey of 200 articles in Nature, a leading scientific journal, found no articles authored by intelligent design creationists.

What these creationists lack in research and peer-reviewed literature they make up for in what is known as “The Wedge Strategy.” The Wedge is the public relations brainchild of Phillip Johnson, a law professor at UC-Berkeley and born-again Christian, and is funded by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, a fundamentalist think tank.

The Wedge is a 20-year, three-phase strategy (accessible on the Web) that exploits Americans’ lack of scientific literacy and their sense of fair play. It relies on the fact that most Americans know little about evolutionary theory and even less about neo-Darwinism.

The Wedge Strategy’s focus and funding are not on the research necessary to cause a shift in the prevailing scientific paradigm. Rather, they are aimed at convincing an uninformed public that intelligent design creationism deserves equal consideration as a “scientific theory.” This is the “wedge” that intelligent design creationists hope will split the authority of the First Amendment and allow the Christian creation story to substitute for science in our country’s public schools.

One of the governing goals of the Wedge is “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” More unsettling still is its 20-year goal “to see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.”

But is it science? Science assumes that the universe and its constituent parts operate by natural laws. Our understanding of these laws is based on inferential and empirical evidence obtained through observation and experimentation. Scientific knowledge increases when hypotheses and theories are confirmed by scientific peer review and are found to have practical or heuristic application. So far, intelligent design creationism has not met this standard.

Will the folks at the Discovery Institute be satisfied once they have insinuated their theistic influence into public schools? Not likely if their second 20-year goal “to see design theory application in the fields of … psychology, ethics, politics, theology, philosophy, humanities and the fine arts” is to be believed. In short, their goal seems to be nothing less than to turn a pluralistic democracy into a fundamentalist theocracy.

With the born-again Bush administration giving billions of tax dollars to religious organizations and its touting of tuition vouchers, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that it will also gladly turn over our publicly funded schools to fundamentalists one subject at a time.”