Very interesting excerpt from "The Republican War On Science"
waronscience.com
"...Clearly, ID proponents follow in the footsteps of their “creation science” forebears, especially when it comes to conveying the impression that they are doing science, instead of trying to advance religious and moral goals. Yet the express strategic objectives of the Discovery Institute; the writings, careers, and affiliations of ID’s lead proponents; and the movement’s funding sources all betray a clear moral and religious agenda. That might be a mere oddity if ID were actually producing good science, but it isn’t. In their book Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross exhaustively demonstrate that the movement is all religion and no science. The remainder of this chapter will take a similarly two-pronged argumentative approach.
First, ID is unmistakably a religious movement. The most eloquent documentation of this comes in the form of a Discovery Institute strategic memo that made its way onto the Web in 1999: the so-called Wedge Document. This seven-page paper represents the antievolutionist equivalent of the tobacco industry documents revealed as a result of litigation, or the American Petroleum Institute’s internal memo laying out a strategy to undermine mainstream climate science. The Wedge Document, though, outlines an agenda to undercut science not in the service of corporate goals, but rather to further those based on religion—or as the document states, “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.“
A broad attack on “scientific materialism,” Discovery’s manifesto asserts that modern science has had “devastating” cultural consequences, such as the denial of objective moral standards and the undermining of religious belief. In contrast, the document states that intelligent design “promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” In order to achieve this objective, the ID movement will “function as a ’wedge’” that will “split the trunk [of scientific materialism] . . . at its weakest points.” Much like the strategy implicit in the American Petroleum Institute memo, part of the Wedge strategy involves currying influence with “individuals in print and broadcast media.” The document actually expends far more energy outlining media strategies and achievements than in describing a program of scientific research.
The Wedge Document puts ID proponents in an uncomfortable position. Discovery Institute representatives balk at being judged on religious grounds, and accuse those who probe their motivations of engaging in ad hominem attacks. Yet given the express language of the Wedge Document, it is hard to see why we shouldn’t take them at their own word. Discovery’s ultimate agenda—the Wedge—clearly has far more to do with the renewal of religiously based culture by the overthrow of key tenets of modern science than with the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Discovery’s antievolutionist branch, the Center for Science and Culture, was even previously named the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture..." |
