Intelligent design movement
The Intelligent Design movement is a viewpoint advocating that certain features of the universe and living beings are best explained by an intelligent cause, rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. Emerging in the late 1980s, this movement was partly a response to the Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which prohibited the teaching of "creation science" in public schools, leaving space for alternative scientific theories. Key figures in the movement include Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, and William A. Dembski, who argue against Darwinian evolution by suggesting that complex biological structures exhibit signs of design. Their ideas have sparked significant debate, particularly among scientists who contend that intelligent design lacks empirical support and is considered pseudoscience. The movement has influenced educational policies in various communities, leading to both support and opposition from different sectors of society. Notably, legal challenges, such as the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, have ruled against the inclusion of intelligent design in school curricula, citing its religious foundations. Despite setbacks, intelligent design remains a contentious topic, reflecting broader discussions on science, religion, and education in the United States.
Intelligent design movement
Neocreationist campaign to convince educators and others of a purposeful universe
Instigated by a Supreme Court ruling that “creation science” is religion, not science, a group of dedicated Christians argued that natural evidence exists that the universe and all life within it bear witness to a wise designer and that this theory should play a role in public school science classes, a proposal that was successfully challenged by the scientific community.
The modern intelligent design movement began after the Supreme Court decided, in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), that “creation science,” which proposed that scientific facts and theories supported the biblical view of God’s creative power, was religion and not science, and that teaching this doctrine in public schools violated the separation of church and state. However, the ruling left open the possibility of teaching a variety of scientific theories about the ways in which the universe, life, and humankind developed. Several Christian scholars realized that they would now have to devise a new strategy to attack what they viewed as the materialistic evolutionary theory originated by Charles Darwin. In the late 1980’s, a supplementary high school textbook, Of Pandas and People (1989), contained several arguments that supposedly proved that life on Earth was intelligently, not randomly, designed. Christian groups were able to get this book accepted in several school districts, a campaign that continued throughout the 1990’s.
The Controversy over Intelligent Design
According to several Christian scholars, the intelligent design movement’s most influential proponent was Phillip E. Johnson, a Berkeley law professor. In 1991, Johnson published Darwin on Trial, which emphasized that Darwinism was nothing but applied materialism and that evidence exists for an intelligent agent’s hand in forging the highly organized complexities of various life-forms. Johnson continued to refine his case in his later books, Reason in the Balance (1995) and Defeating Darwinism (1997). Johnson has been called “the father of the intelligent design movement,” but he also had several important followers, including William A. Dembski, a mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, and Michael J. Behe, a biochemist.
Dembski, a convert from Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity, developed, in his books and articles, mathematical arguments to distinguish intelligently designed phenomena from those resulting from random natural causation. Several mathematicians and scientists challenged Dembski’s contention that law, chance, and design are mutually exclusive. They also argued that natural laws are able to explain the complexities of life-forms without needing to appeal to an intelligent designer. Michael Behe, a Roman Catholic who contributed to Of Pandas and People’s second edition, maintained, in Darwin’s Black Box (1996), that random causes are unable to explain the development of “irreducibly complex” cellular structures—that is, those unable to function when a single part is missing. For example, flagella, cellular devices used for locomotion and composed of several different proteins, could not have originated via the accidental, incremental additions required by natural selection. However, Kenneth R. Miller, a Roman Catholic biology professor at Brown University, showed that flagella are not irreducibly complex since a small group of proteins from a flagellum can be used by bacteria for activities different from self-propulsion.
Impact
Through their books and articles and through such organizations as the Discovery Institute, which created the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in 1996 to manage the intelligent design campaign, the neocreationists were able to influence many American communities to adopt intelligent design in their secondary school science curricula. Many members of the scientific community attacked these adoptions. For example, the National Academy of Sciences issued documents stating that intelligent design is not science because its claims cannot be tested by experiment. The American Association for the Advancement of Science argued in its publications that intelligent design is pseudoscience. Throughout the 1990’s, the consensus of most members of the scientific community remained that intelligent design is covert religion and that Darwinism, in one form or another, was unscathed by neocreationist attacks.
Subsequent Events
The controversy over intelligent design continued into the twenty-first century. In 2002, the Ohio State Board of Education held a public debate between prominent Darwinian evolutionists and neocreationists. In 2005, several people in this debate were called as expert witnesses in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case. A group of parents of high school students had challenged the Dover district’s requirement for biology teachers to present intelligent design arguments as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. In a well-documented decision, Judge John E. Jones III ruled in favor of the parents, concluding that intelligent design was unable to uncouple itself from its religious roots. Therefore, the school district’s promotion of intelligent design violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Despite these and other defeats suffered by the intelligent design movement, it continued to garner support and advocacy by many members of the conservative Christian community, proving that the concept of intelligent design remained a contested issue.
Intelligent design remained controversial over the next several decades, and in 2021 Arkansas's House of Representatives voted to pass legislature that would allow the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. However, the Arkansas Senate ultimately voted to reject the bill.
Bibliography
Behe, Michael J. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. New York: Free Press, 2007. This successor to Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996) extends his arguments from cell structures that are “beyond random mutation and natural selection” to the “edge of evolution,” where Darwinian explanations are inadequate. Extensive notes, four appendixes, and an index.
Branch, Glenn. "Creationism Bill Narrowly Defeated in Arkansas." National Center for Science Education, 21 Apr. 2021, ncse.ngo/creationism-bill-narrowly-defeated-arkansas. Accessed 21 Set. 2022.
Davis, Percival, and Dean H. Kenyon. Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins. Dallas: Haughton, 1993. This revised edition edited by Charles B. Thaxton was, in this and other versions, at the center of the controversy over an intelligent design textbook in high school science courses. Glossary and index.
Johnson, Phillip E. Darwin on Trial. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991. This book has been called the “founding document” of the intelligent design movement. Research notes and an index.
Pennock, Robert T. Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. The author, a philosopher of science, has written “the most detailed and comprehensive” critique of the intelligent design movement while elucidating the context within which it originated and developed. Notes, references, and an index.
Scott, Eugenie C. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Written by a committed evolutionist, this book provides an accessible primer to the debate over the teaching of evolution in the United States. “References for Further Exploration,” name index, and subject index.