Author: Ophelia Benson

Introduction

It used to be obvious that the world
was designed by some sort of intelligence.
What else could account for fire
and rain and lightning and earthquakes?
Above all, the wonderful abilities
of living things seemed to point to a
creator who had a special interest in
life. Today we understand most of these
things in terms of physical forces acting
under impersonal laws.We don’t yet
know the most fundamental laws, and
we can’t work out the consequences of
all the laws we know. The human
mind remains extraordinarily difficult
to understand, but so is the weather.
We can’t predict whether it will rain
one month from today, but we do know
the rules that govern the rain, even
though we can’t always calculate the
consequences. I see nothing about the
human mind any more than about
the weather that stands out as beyond
the hope of understanding as a consequence
of impersonal laws acting over
billions of years.

Steven Weinberg,
1979 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Dr. Fox’s Lecture

Nearly thirty years ago one of the
funniest articles ever published in
a respectable medical journal appeared.
Of course, it was not meant
to be funny. Its purposes were serious
and sober enough. The conclusions,
moreover, were trustworthy and had
important implications for education at all levels. In fact, the conclusions
had implications for all conveyance of knowledge by experts to intelligent,
but nonexpert, audiences. In the Journal of Medical Education, D. H.
Naftulin, M.D., and colleagues published a research study entitled “The
Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction.”1 There is no
better way to explain the intention and the results of this work than to
quote from its abstract:

[T]he authors programmed an actor to teach charismatically and nonsubstantively
on a topic about which he knew nothing. The authors hypothesized that
given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm, even experienced educators
participating in a new learning experience can be seduced into feeling satisfied
that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content
conveyed by the lecturer. The hypothesis was supported when 55 subjects responded
favorably at the significant level to an eight-item questionnaire concerning
their attitudes toward the lecture.(emphasis added)

For purposes of this experiment, the investigators hired a mature, respectable,
scholarly looking fellow, a professional actor. He memorized a
prefabricated nonsense lecture entitled “Mathematical Game Theory as
Applied to Physician Education.” The better popular science magazines
had recently covered (real) game theory and its possible applications, so
the title was appropriate. The silver-haired actor was trained to answer
affably all audience questions following his lecture-by means, as the authors
explain, of “double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory
statements. All this was to be interspersed with parenthetical humor
and meaningless references to unrelated topics.”2 In two of the three trials
of this experiment, the audience consisted of “psychiatrists, psychologists,
and social-worker educators,” while that of the third trial “consisted
of 33 educators and administrators enrolled in a graduate level university
educational philosophy course.” This counterfeit scholar of “Mathematical
Game Theory” was called Dr. Myron L. Fox, and a fraudulent but respectful
and laudatory introduction was supplied.

Very interesting data followed from the survey and questionnaire administered
after each session in which Fox’s (and other) presentations
were made. These were simply the detailed statistics of approval or disapproval.
The phony Dr. Fox’s presentations of discoveries in mathematical
game theory were strongly approved by these educationally sophisticated,
lecture-experienced audiences. But the really funny results are in
the “subjective” comments added to the questionnaire, that is, in what
listeners wrote as prose responses to the invitation to comment (the following
comments are from a number of different respondents). “No respondent
[in the first group],” Dr. Naftulin and his co-authors wrote, “reported
having read Dr. Fox’s publications. [But] subjective responses
included the following: ‘Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening. Has
warm manner. Good flow, seems enthusiastic. What about the two types
of games, zero-sum and non-zero-sum? Too intellectual a presentation.
My orientation is more pragmatic.’” From the largest group of subjects
for this experiment, the substantive comments were, if possible, even
funnier: “Lively examples. His relaxed manner of presentation was a large
factor in holding my interest. Extremely articulate. Interesting, wish he
had dwelled more on background. Good analysis of subject that has been
personally studied before. Very dramatic presentation. He was certainly
captivating. Somewhat disorganized. Frustratingly boring. Unorganized
and ineffective.Articulate. Knowledgeable.”3

We highly recommend this article. It should still be possible to find it
in any university, especially one with a good medical or education library.
The “educational seduction” of the title refers to what “Dr. Fox” did for
(and to?) his listeners. This result and many others like it should have affected
all schools of education, if not teachers generally. However, such
was not the case. The possibility, indeed the likelihood, of intellectual “seduction”
in circumstances such as these is probably increasing as specialization
increases. Countless clones of Dr. Fox tread the academic and
public policy boards today, as always. Readers familiar with the now universal
practice in higher education of using end-of-course student
evaluations as key evidence in faculty promotion and tenure decisions
will know this: evaluations by students, who lack the requisite knowledge
but are called on to judge their professors’ expertise in their disciplines,
can determine the academic fate of nontenured faculty and the possibility
of merit raises for tenured ones. Intellectual seduction by substantive
(“content”) nonsense, offered to audiences who want or like to hear what
they are being told, or who simply assume that what they don’t understand
must be correct if it sounds scholarly, is nearly universal.

This book is about a current, national, intellectual seduction phenomenon,
not in mathematical game theory, but close enough to it. It is a
case, at least formally, not much different from the Dr. Fox lecture, except
that the lecturers here actually believe what they are lecturing
about, or at least they want very much to believe it, or are convinced that
they must believe it. And they are not actors, but executors of a real and
serious political strategy. The “audiences” in this case are large; they consist
of decent people: students, parents, teachers, public officials across
the length and breadth of the United States (and now in other countries
of the “developed world”)-people who don’t, in most cases, know much
about science, especially the modern biological sciences. But they are
people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about their religious
faith, the state of their society, and the education of their children. They
include some people for whom “fairness” and openness to the ideas of
“the other side” have become the cherished, even the indispensable, characteristics
of our civilization. Their insistence on the equal worth of all
earnestly held opinions-whether or not those opinions are well
founded-makes them relativists whether they know it or not. This book
is about the newest form of creationism, named by its proponents “intelligent
design” (ID); but it is, especially, about the organization of the system
of public and political relations that drives the movement. That system
operates on a very detailed plan-a set of well articulated goals,
strategies, and tactics-named “The Wedge” by its executors. It offers an
upgraded form of the religious fundamentalist creationism long familiar
in America.

Neo-creationism

Creationism has been a perennial nuisance for American science education.
Despite the persistent fecklessness of creationist arguments and
their continued failure in the courts since 1925, the creationists refuse
to go away. The attempts to insert religion into public elementary and
secondary science education are unceasing, and they now include direct
efforts to influence college students as well. Efforts to force it into curricula-
especially those having anything at all to do with biology and the
history of Earth-have been unremitting since the late nineteenth century,
and they have continued into the present. The most notorious recent,
nearly successful, attempt was the 1999 deletion of evolution and
all immediately relevant geology and cosmology from the Kansas public
school science standards, by action of the state board of education. Scientific
integrity was restored to those defaced standards only after a protracted
political effort to defeat creationist board members and replace
them with moderates-who eventually undid the damage to science
teaching and to the state’s reputation.

The defeated have not given up, however; today they are more active
than ever in the politics and public affairs of Kansas and other states.And
increasingly it appears that pro-evolution (pro-science) victories are secure
only until the next election, when old battles may be revived by
“stealth” candidates who do not disclose their anti-evolution agenda until
after they are elected to office. Soon after the restoration of the integrity
of science standards in Kansas, new efforts, even more forceful and better
organized than those in Kansas, were mounted in Ohio. More are brewing
in several other states, gaining added impetus from the Wedge’s efforts
in the United States Congress. Nor is the phenomenon likely to remain
limited to the United States; similar efforts are in progress or being
planned in a number of other countries.

This struggle is cyclic; there have been short periods of relative quiet
after major creationist failures in the courts. But the effects of the struggle
are being felt today far beyond pedagogy in the schools. They are
everywhere visible, and except for a few conscientious media outlets,
they also threaten to lower the already variable and uncertain standards
of science journalism. Contrary to the perception of most scientifically
literate people, creationism as a cultural presence has in the recent past
grown generally stronger-even as its arguments, in the face of scientific
progress, have grown steadily weaker and more hypocritical. Despite the
intense activity of creationists, no faction, nor any individual advocate of
one, and no modern creationist “research” program has as yet come up
with a new, verifiable, fruitful, and important fact about the mechanisms
or the history of life or the ancestral relationships among living things on
Earth. For that reason, the scorecard of scientific successes for any form
of creationism, including ID theory, is blank.

Creationists, including the newest kind-the neo-creationist “intelligent
design theorists” who are the subject of this book-offer an abundance
of theories. These theories are often decorated with open or only
thinly disguised religious allusions, and they always include the nowstandard
rejection of naturalism, which is, in these circumstances, the indirect
admission of supernaturalism. Their contributions to ongoing science
consist of nit-picking and the extraction of trivialities from the vast
literature of biology and of unsupported statements about what-they
insist-cannot happen: “Darwinism”-organic evolution shaped by natural
selection and reflecting the common ancestry of all life forms. In the
face of the extraordinary and often highly practical twentieth-century
progress of the life sciences under the unifying concepts of evolution,
their “science” consists of quote-mining-minute searching of the biological
literature-including outdated literature-for minor slips and inconsistencies
and for polemically promising examples of internal arguments.
These internal disagreements, fundamental to the working of all
natural science, are then presented dramatically to lay audiences as evidence
of the fraudulence and impending collapse of “Darwinism.” How
are such audiences to know that modern biology is not a house of cards,
not founded on a “dying theory”?

Intelligent Design

Until a few years ago, “scientific” creationism was led by biblical literalists
like Duane Gish and Henry Morris, whose Bible-thumping and logicchopping
were easy to discount, even for ordinary (nonscience) journalists,
by exposing the obvious errors of fact and logic-independently of
the gross errors of actual science. But those old-timers have now been
eclipsed by a new brand of creationists who have absorbed a part of their
following: the new boys are intelligent design promoters, mainly those associated
with the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science
and Culture (now Center for Science and Culture), based in Seattle,
Washington. This group operates under a detailed and ambitious plan of
action: “The Wedge.” Through relentlessly energetic programs of publication,
conferences, and public appearances, all aimed at impressing lay audiences
and political people, the Wedge is working its way into the
American cultural mainstream. Editorials and opinion pieces in national
journals, prime-time television interviews, and other high-profile public
appearances, offhand but highly visible negative judgments on evolution
or “Darwinism” from conservative politicians and sympathetic public intellectuals
(assisted in their anti-science by a scattering of “feminist epistemologists,”
postmodernists, and Marxists)-all these contribute to a rising
receptiveness to ID claims by those who do not know, or who simply
refuse to consider, the actual state of the relevant sciences. In documenting
and analyzing the political and religious nature of the Wedge, and
bringing together expert comment on the ID “science” claims, we show
that such grateful reception of the glad tidings of intelligent design is entirely
unjustified by either the scientific, the mathematical, or the philosophic
weight of any evidence offered.

THE WEDGE’S HAMMERS

Under cover of advanced degrees, including a few in science, obtained in
some of the major universities, the Wedge’s workers have been carving
out a habitable and expanding niche within higher education, cultivating
cells of followers-students as well as (primarily nonbiology) faculty-on
campus after campus. This is the first real success of creationism in the
formerly hostile grove of academe. Furthermore, the Wedge’s political alliances
reach into a large, partisan elite among the nation’s legislators and
other political leaders. Armed thus with a potentially huge base of popular
support that includes most of the Religious Right, wielding a new
legal strategy with which it hopes to win in the litigation certain to follow
insertion of ID into public school science anywhere-and lawyers
ready to go to work when it does-the Wedge of ID creationism is, indeed,
intelligently designed. To be sure, its science component is not. But
in a public relations-driven and mass-communications world, that is not
a disadvantage. In the West, opinions, perceptions, loyalties, and, ultimately,
votes are what matter when the goal is to change public policy-
or for that matter, cultural patterns. Serious inquiry and questions of
truth are often a mere diversion.

This newly energized, intellectually reactionary enterprise will not
fade quietly away as the current team of ID promoters ages. It is already
too well organized and funded, and the leading Wedge figures have invested
too much of themselves for that to happen. Moreover, there is
every reason to think that religiously conservative, anti-science agitation
will increase, especially as the life sciences and medical research continue
to probe the fundamentals of human behavior. As that happens, the general
public uneasiness with evolutionary biology and the underlying genetics
and cell biology becomes simple hostility, not just on the political
right. Some of the far-left intelligentsia help to fuel the hostility, at least
in academia. Therefore, we have undertaken to document very thoroughly,
largely but not exclusively by means of the Wedge’s own announcements
and productions, its steadily increasing output of antievolution
and more broadly anti-science materials.

The Discovery Institute’s creationists are younger and better educated
than most of the traditional “young-earth” creationists. Their public
relations tricks are up to date and skillful; they know how to manipulate
the media. They are very well funded, and their commitment is fired by
the same sincere religious fervor that characterized earlier and less affluent
versions of creationism. This combination makes them crusaders, just
as inspired as, but much more effective than, the old literalists, whose
pseudo-science was easily recognized as ludicrous. And the Wedge carries
out its program as a part of the evangelical Christian community, which
William Dembski credits with “for now providing the safest haven for intelligent
design.”4 The welcoming voices within this community have all
but drowned out those of its many members who are honest in their approach
to science, sincere in their Christian faith, and appreciative of the
protection afforded to both by secular, constitutional democracy. Dembski
admits that the Wedge’s acceptance among evangelicals is not “particularly
safe by any absolute standard.”5 Yet in our survey of this issue,
we see that the evangelical voices most prominently heard, with a few
notable exceptions, support the Wedge.

FOCUS ON EDUCATION

Unfortunately, ID, by now quite familiar among scientifically qualified
and religiously neutral observers as the recycled, old-fashioned creationism
it is, drapes its religious skeleton in the fancy-dress language of modern
science, albeit without having contributed to science, at least so far,
any data or any testable theoretical notions. Therefore, ID creationism is
most unlikely in the short term to change genuine science as practiced in
industry, universities, and independent research laboratories. But the
Wedge’s public relations blitz (intended to revolutionize public opinion);
its legal strategizing (intended as groundwork for major court cases yet to
come); and its feverish political alliance-building (through which the
Discovery Institute hopes to shape public policy) all constitute a threat
to the integrity of education and in the end to the ability of the public to
judge scientific and technological claims. This last threat is not just a secondary,
long-term worry. Competent, honest scientific thinking is critically
important now, not only to the intellectual maturation of our
species, especially of its children, but also to optimal management of
such current, urgent policy problems as environmental preservation and
improvement, energy resources, management and support of scientific
research, financing medicine and public health (including human heredity
and reproduction), and, in general, the support and use of advanced
technology.

Led by Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe, and
Jonathan Wells-the four current top names of the Discovery Institute’s
Center for Science and Culture-with a growing group of like-minded
fellows and co-workers, this movement seeks nothing less than to overthrow
the system of rules and procedures of modern science and those
intellectual footings of our culture laid down in the Enlightenment and
over some 300 years. If this sounds overwrought, we ask our readers to
proceed at least a little way into the following chapters to judge for
themselves. In any case, the Wedge admits that this is its aim. By its own
boastful reports, the Wedge has undertaken to discredit the naturalistic
methodology that has been the working principle of all effective science
since the seventeenth century. It desires to substitute for it a particular
version of “theistic science,” whose chief argument is that nothing about
nature is to be understood or taught without reference to supernatural or
at least unknowable causes-in effect, to God. The evidence that this is a
fundamental goal follows within the pages of this book. No matter that
these creationists have produced not even a research program, despite
their endlessly repeated scientific claims. Pretensions to the contrary, this
strategy is not really aimed at science and scientists, whom they consider
lost in grievous error and whom they regularly accuse of fraud (as we will
demonstrate), of conspiring to hide from a gulled public the failures of
modern science, especially of “Darwinism.” It is aimed, rather, at a vast,
mostly science-innocent populace and at the public officials and lawmakers
who depend on it for votes.

A Neo-creationist’s Progress

In April 2001, ID movement founder Phillip Johnson released on the creationist
Access Research Network website “The Wedge: A Progress Report.”
6 There he reviewed the Wedge’s goals: “to legitimate the topic of
intelligent design . . . within the mainstream intellectual community”
and “to make naturalism the central focus of discussion [meaning “of attack”]
in the religious world.” He cited the establishment of a “beachhead”
in American journalism, exemplified by articles in major newspapers.
He declared that “the Wedge is lodged securely in the crack”
between empirical science and naturalistic philosophy, which he calls
“the dominant naturalistic system of thought control.” According to
Johnson, “the [Wedge] train is already moving along the logical track and
it will not stop until it reaches its destination. . . . The initial goals of
the Wedge strategy have been accomplished. . . . [I]t’s not the beginning
of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.”7

There is some justification for this aggressive show of confidence. As
Johnson says, ID has won significant coverage in major U.S. newspapers
and, more recently, abroad as well. In the New York Times, James Glanz
wrote that “evolutionists find themselves arrayed not against traditional
creationism, with its roots in biblical literalism, but against a more sophisticated
idea: the intelligent design theory.” On the front page of the
Los Angeles Times, Teresa Watanabe wrote that “a new breed of mostly
Christian scholars redefines the old evolution-versus-creationism debate
and fashions a movement with more intellectual firepower, mainstream
appeal, and academic respectability.”8 And Robert Wright (author of The
Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, Vintage Books,
1994) points out in a critical Slate article that while ID presents no new
ideas of any significance, the New York Times article “has granted official
significance to the latest form of opposition to Darwinism.” Wright concludes
that although ID is just a new label, a marketing device for an old
product, it is also an effective one.9

The admirable, but in this particular case misguided, concern of most
Americans to be fair, “even-handed,” to consider both sides of a dispute
respectfully, especially the side claiming to suffer discrimination, creates
a fertile field for ID activists. They have enough financial backing and
self-righteous zeal to outlast what little effectively organized opposition
to them presently exists, especially in the higher education community,
which one would quite reasonably expect to be in the forefront of opposition
to the Wedge. There is, of course, the further-and very real-
possibility that the demographics of the judiciary will shift toward creationism
should there be appointments of judges with strong doctrinal or
emotional ties to the Religious Right, where one’s views on evolution are
once again, as they were in the 1920s, a “litmus test.” There is no doubt
that the Wedge’s immediate goal is to change what is taught in classrooms
about the basics of biology and the history of life, as we show here
from its own documents, sources of support, and productions. But based
on our demonstration in chapter 9 of the religious foundation of the intelligent
design movement and the importance of this foundation to the
Wedge’s goal of “renewing” American culture, we also believe that its ultimate
goal is to create a theocratic state, which would provide a protective
framework for its pedagogical goals. In an important respect, the
Wedge is another strand in the well organized Religious Right network,
whose own well documented but poorly understood purposes are
strongly antagonistic to the constitutional barriers between church and
state.

As of March 2001, creationists had launched programs to change
public school curricula in one out of five states across the nation. During
the writing of this book, creationists were causing significant problems in
Ohio,Washington, Idaho, Montana, Kansas, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia,
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.10 At present, there are renewed
rumblings in New Mexico, where a hard-fought battle was presumably
resolved. These programs have not yet attained their broadest goals, but
they continue to divert precious educational resources, time, and energy
from the real problems of public education in the United States toward
the work of responding to creationist attacks. Even in the small, rural
state of Louisiana, ID advocates seem to be waiting in the wings to initiate
a sequel to recent attempts by Representative Sharon Weston-
Broome to declare the idea of evolution “racist.”11 In Kansas, where creationist
changes to the state’s science standards have finally been
reversed, the Discovery Institute is nevertheless actively assisting a satellite
group, the Intelligent Design Network (IDnet), in pushing ID more
aggressively than ever. In June 2001, IDnet held its Second Annual Symposium,
“Darwin, Design, and Democracy II: Teaching the Evidence in
Science Education,” featuring three key Wedge campaigners-Phillip
Johnson,William Dembski, and Jonathan Wells.12 The great public universities
are now a main target of wedge efforts: a Discovery Institute fellow,
Jed Macosko, taught ID in a for-credit course at the University of
California-Berkeley; his father, Chris Macosko, has been doing the same
at the University of Minnesota.13

Concern about the Wedge is building, very late but finally, in scientific
and academic quarters. The American Geophysical Union considered
ID a problem serious enough to require scheduling at least six presentations
on it at the spring 2001 conference.14 Philosopher Robert
Pennock’s eye-opening book, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the
New Creationism (MIT, 1999), analyzed and recounted the philosophical
and scientific flaws of ID creationism. It is followed by his anthology, Intelligent
Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and
Scientific Perspectives (MIT, 2001). These books seem to be making a contribution
in awakening academics to the need for an effective counterstrategy.
Similar books are on the way; and in book reviews and a spate of
recent writings, distinguished scientists are at last taking the trouble (and
it is troublesome, and time-consuming, and costly!) to rebut, point by
point, the new creationist claims. Of course, those claims are not really
new. They are rather pretentious variants of the ancient, and discredited,
argument from design (aptly renamed for our era, by Richard Dawkins,
the argument from personal incredulity).

So far, however, no book has documented the genesis, the support,
the real goals, and the remarkable sheer volume of Wedge activities.We
have come to believe that such a chronicle is needed if people of good
will toward science and toward honest inquiry are to understand the
magnitude of this threat-not only to education but to the principle of
separation of church and state. The chapters that follow are our effort
to supply the facts: as complete an account, within the limits of a single
volume and the reader’s patience, as can be assembled-and checked
independently-from easily accessible public sources. To convince those
with the indispensable basic knowledge who are in a position to act, that
they must do so, we must first make the case that (1) a formal intelligent
design strategy, apart from and above the familiar creationist carping
about evolutionary and historical science, does exist, and (2) it is being
executed successfully in all respects except the production of hard scientific
results-data. To accomplish these aims, we have had to accumulate
the evidence, which consists of the massive schedule of the Wedge’s own
activities in execution of the strategy, together with the actual pronouncements
of Wedge members. We have allowed them to speak for
themselves here at length and as often as possible.

The Wedge’s busy schedule of ID activities and its increasing public
visibility have been accompanied by a steadily evolving public relations
effort to present itself as a mainstream organization. In August 2002, the
CRSC changed its name, now calling itself simply the “Center for Science
and Culture.” This move parallels the Wedge’s low-key phase-out of the
overtly religious banners on its early web pages: from Michelangelo’s
God creating Adam, to Michelangelo’s God creating DNA, to the current
Hubble telescope photo of the MyCn18 Hourglass Nebula.15 But despite
the attempt to alter its public face, the Wedge’s substantive identity
remains. Thus, we refer henceforth to the Center for Science and Culture
by the name under which it has been known during the period covered
in this book: the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).

The readers’ patience may well be tried at times by the repetitiousness
of Wedge activities: conferences, websites, trade book and media
publications and appearances, testimony before legislative bodies and
education committees, summonses to religious and cultural renewal
predicated on anti-science. The Wedge’s efficient and planned repetitiousness
is itself one of our main points. In fact, it is one of the most remarkable
examples in our time of naked public relations management substituting
successfully for knowledge and the facts of the case – substituting for
the truth. For that reason alone, it is both interesting and important. It
must be known and understood if there is to be recognition-among scientists
as well as the literate nonscientist public-of current anti-evolutionism
and its aims.

The Issue

The issue, then, is not-as ID creationists insist it is, to their increasingly
large and credulous audiences nationwide-that the biological sciences
are in deep trouble due to a collapse of Darwinism. The issue is that the
public relations work, but not the “science,” of the Wedge and of ID
“theorists” is proving all too effective. It is not refutations or technical dismissals
of ID scientific claims that are needed. The literature of science
and the book review pages of excellent journals are already replete with
those: expert reviews of ID books and other public products are readily
available to anyone.We provide here what we hope is an adequate sampling
of those technical dismissals and expert scientific opinions, and we
document the sound science and the ID anti-science as needed. But in
the past few years, very detailed disproof has been provided, again and
again, by the commentators best qualified to speak to the substance:
some of the world’s most honored evolutionary and physical scientists, as
well as some of the most distinguished philosophers of mind and science.
Rather, what is needed now is documentation of the Wedge itself, from its
own internal and public relations documents, so that the public may understand
its purposes and the magnitude of its impact, current and projected.
The issue is not Darwinism or science: the issue is the Wedge
itself.

Providing the necessary documentation, including the minutiae that
can turn out to be important, is always a writer’s strategic problem when
the intended audience is broader than a small group of specialists. Even
scholars who demand and are accustomed to copious documentation can
find it off-putting. Others, members of the most important audience of
all-curious, able, and genuinely fair-minded general readers-who rarely
if ever read with constant eye and hand movement between text and references,
are strongly tempted to give up when confronted with profuse
supporting data and the necessary but distracting scholarly apparatus of
notes and references.We do not have a good solution to this problem. The
endnotes can be taken, however, as running commentary, supplementary
to, but not essential for, the main text. Our references to literature include,
whenever possible and therefore in abundance, pointers to sites on
the World Wide Web.

No reader needs to use the notes to apprehend the argument and to
judge its broad justifications-or lack of them. The main text can usefully
and properly be read for itself alone. But for those readers who decide
that this argument is to be taken seriously, and who feel the need to arm
themselves with facts, they are here; or there is a pointer to them, immediately
serviceable for anyone with access to a computer and an Internet
connection. Initially, we envisioned a much shorter response than this
book to the Wedge’s campaign.We have delayed work on other projects
to write it, even though we would have preferred not to have found it
necessary. The more we examined the situation, the more expansive and
invasive the Wedge’s program proved to be, and the greater, therefore,
was the need we saw for full public examination and for a proper response
to it. We have watched and waited for the coalescence of an
appropriately organized counter-movement, and, indeed, a few small
organizations and individual members of the scientific and academic
communities, as well as concerned citizens, have recently mounted admirable
efforts, with only a minute fraction of the resources available to
the Wedge. But those active people are few, and they need the help of
everyone who has a stake in the high quality of our civic, scientific, and
educational cultures.

Notes

1. Donald H. Naftulin, John E. Ware, Jr., and Frank A. Donnelly, “The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm
of Educational Seduction,” Journal of Medical Education 48 (July 1973), 630-635.

2. Naftulin et al., 631.

3. Naftulin et al., 633.

4. William A. Dembski, “Intelligent Design Coming Clean.” Posted on Metaviews in November 2000.
Accessed on May 4, 2002, at this site.

5. Dembski, “Intelligent Design Coming Clean.”

6. Phillip E. Johnson, “The Wedge: A Progress Report,” Access Research Network. Accessed on April 21,
2001, at this site.

7. See the archive of “Phillip Johnson’s Weekly Wedge Update”.

8. See James Glanz, “Evolutionists Battle New Theory on Creation,” New York Times, April 8, 2001.
Accessed on April 22, 2001, at this page. See also Teresa
Watanabe, “Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator: Believers in ‘Intelligent Design’ Try to Redirect
Evolution Disputes Along Intellectual Lines,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2001. Accessed on April 22, 2001, at
http://www.discovery.org/news/EnlistingScience.html.

9. Robert Wright, “The ‘New’ Creationism,” Slate, April 16, 2001. Accessed on April 22, 2001, at
http://slate.msn.com/Earthling/01-04-16/Earthling.asp.

10. “2001 Church/State Legislation,” Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, April 18,
2001.

11. Will Sentell, “Baton Rouge Legislator Calls Theory Racist,” The Advocate, April 18, 2001. Accessed
on April 26, 2001, at http://www.theadvocate.com/news/story.asp?StoryID=20792. At Weston-Broome’s April 17,
2001, public meeting, when a questioner asked her what alternatives to teaching evolution she would consider, she
mentioned “the design intelligence [sic] theory.”

12. Intelligent Design Network, “Second Annual IDNet Symposium.” Accessed on April 26, 2001, at
this site.

13. See references to the two Macoskos’ teaching activities in Newsletter of the American Scientific
Affiliation and Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation, January/February 2001. Accessed on April 23, 2003, at
this site.

14. “2001 Spring Meeting,” American Geophysical Union. Accessed on April 26, 2001, at
this site.

15. National Center for Science Education, “Evolving Banners at the Discovery Institute.” Accessed on
August 29, 2002, at this site.

Barbara Forrest is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department of History and Government, Southeastern Louisiana University. Paul R. Gross is University Professor of Life Sciences, University of Virginia (Emeritus).

This Introduction to Creationism’s Trojan Horse: the Wedge of Intelligent Design, Oxford University Press, is republished by permission. Creationism’s Trojan Horse can be ordered at the OUP website.

There is a website about Creationism’s Trojan Horse here, with reviews and other material.

…has been working overtime to salvage the reputation of their man. Things are so bad that Joan Scott–who I’m told is a substantial historian, but apparently not much of a philosopher–actually wrote the following to The New York Times:

[Your obituary writer] is embarrassingly illiterate in the history of philosophy. His obituary is also terribly one sided. I thought the Times was committed to balance. Where are the appreciative quotes from American philosophers and literary critics? From those (and there are many) who have used his work to great effect and taught whole generations of students how to read [sic] differently [i.e., badly]?

The obituary author may, indeed, be ignorant of the history of philosophy, but certainly no more so than Professor Scott, whose ignorance extends to the present: there are no “appreciative quotes” from “American philosophers,” because American philosophers thought he was a fraud, a betrayal to philosophy’s grand history. Consider this letter from philosopher Bryan Frances (Philosophy, Leeds), who reports he sent his own letter to The New York Times; there is no doubt he speaks for most philosophers here:

To the Editor:

Re ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’ (obituary, Oct. 9):

What if philosophy was baseball and Jacques Derrida a baseball player? Judging by your obituary of Derrida, the reader would get the impression that Derrida was a superstar, with a lifetime .330 batting average and over 500 home runs. In reality, he was a substitute second baseman, hitting about .255 over his career with no more than 100 homers or any other baseball accomplishments. He was a particularly flamboyant and outspoken baseball player, for certain, but one who failed to earn respect for his baseball skills.

Contrary to your obituary, Derrida’s influence in philosophy is very slim indeed in the US, UK, and Australia. In literature and other areas he might have held some respect, but in virtually all the world’s English-speaking philosophy departments, in which you’ll find attempts to formulate relatively precise views accompanied by rigorous supporting arguments, he is viewed as more a charlatan than a philosopher.

Tough language, but certainly well-supported by the biggest coup for the Derrida Industry, the opinion piece by Mark Taylor (yet another non-philosopher) in The New York Times proclaiming Derrida one of the three great philosophers of the 20th-century, along with Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Of course, even Wittgenstein and Heidegger are controversial choices, though in terms of sheer impact, they are plainly in a wholly different league from Derrida, so much so that anyone knowledgeable about 20th-century European and Anglophone philosophy and intellectual culture must laugh out loud at Professor Taylor’s dishonest hyperbole. (Why do those in literary studies think the intellectual world revolves around their once proud discipline, now enfeebled by three decades of bad philosophy, bad history, and bad social science?)

Far more interesting, though, is the quality of argumentation offered in support of Derrida’s importance. Let’s take a few representative paragraphs, to see what it is that accounts for Derrida’s importance according to this PR man for intellectual charlatancy:

Taylor: “Most of his infamously demanding texts consist of careful interpretations of canonical writers in the Western philosophical, literary and artistic traditions – from Plato to Joyce. By reading familiar works against the grain, he disclosed concealed meanings that created new possibilities for imaginative expression.”

Leiter: It is impossible in the abstract to assess this proposition, but surely it bears noting that a primary reason for skepticism about Derrida is that overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on. Derrida was the bad reader par excellence, who had the gall to conceal his scholarly recklessness within a theoretical framework. He was the figure who did more violence than any other to what Nietzsche had aptly called “the great, the incomparable art of reading well,” “of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire to understand” (The Antichrist, sections 59 and 52).

Taylor: “When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure – be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious – that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out.”

Leiter: This isn’t an insight, it’s a tautology. Necessarily, every X excludes not-X, else it would not be X. As even Professor Taylor notes: “something else inevitably [i.e., necessarily] gets left out.” (Whether as an hypothesis about the fundamental workings of language–as Saussure originally conceived it–it is a more substantial hypothesis is a different question, not implicated in Taylor’s formulation.)

Taylor: These exclusive structures can become repressive – and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems.

Leiter: Whether the “excluded” elements “return” depends on the plausiblity of Derridean readings of texts–and thus we are back at the first point, which can only be adjudicated by contrasting Derridean readings of texts with readings by other scholars. The resemblance to the Freudian conception of repression is superficial and misleading: Freud presents a scientific account of the psychic economy of the mind, according to which, necessarily, certain kinds of psychic energy and the ideas to which they were originally attached manifest themselves in human behavior long after their original occurrence. It is a straightforward empirical hypothesis, for which various kinds of empirical evidence have been offered, both for and against. There is nothing empirical about the Derridean claim, and no theoretical grounding for a claim that necessarily that which has been “excluded” from a text will return.

Taylor: To his critics, Mr. Derrida appeared to be a pernicious nihilist who threatened the very foundation of Western society and culture. By insisting that truth and absolute value cannot be known with certainty, his detractors argue, he undercut the very possibility of moral judgment. To follow Mr. Derrida, they maintain, is to start down the slippery slope of skepticism and relativism that inevitably leaves us powerless to act responsibly.

Leiter: Perhaps this is what has been at issue among anti-intellectual right-wingers, who generally rival Derrida for dialectical feebleness and scholarly shoddiness. But this has never been the philosophoical issue about Derrida–after all, skepticism about the existence of truth and/or absolute value, and our knowledge of either, has been a staple of Western philosophy in one form or another, from the Sophists to Hume to Michael Dummett. The problem with Derrida is that, unlike these other important philosophers, Derrida has no arguments that are both good and original; his case for skepticism is the stuff of bad sophomore-year philosophy papers.

Professor Taylor ends with an homage to Derrida’s personal kindness and consideration–something I’ve had confirmed by others who knew him. There seems no doubt that unlike, say, Heidegger, who was a personal and moral monster, Derrida really was a decent human being in his interpersonal dealings. But that, I’m afraid, is not what is at issue here. If he had become a football player as he had apparently hoped, or taken up honest work of some other kind, then we might simply remember him as a “good man.” But he devoted his professional life to obfuscation and increasing the amount of ignorance in the world: by “teaching” legions of earnest individuals how to read badly and think carelessly. He may have been a morally decent man, but he led a bad life, and his legacy is one of shame for the humanities.

Was it entirely an accident that at the same time that deconstruction became the rage in literary studies (namely, the 1980s), American politics went off the rails with the Great Prevaricator, Ronald Reagan? Is it simply coincidental that the total corruption of public discourse and language–which we may only hope has reached its peak at the present moment–coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines? These are important questions, and I wonder whether they have been, or will be, addressed.

UPDATE: A student at Yale Law School writes: “They are most certainly important questions, and one book that deals with them is a book by a Yale professor of English, David Bromwich; it’s entitled Politics by Other Means. It gives a good and thoughtful lashing both to academic identity politics and to the Reagan administration’s corruption of the public sphere. I commend it to your attention.”

[Ed.: See this In the Library for another recommendation of David Bromwich’s Politics by Other Means.]

This article first appeared on The Leiter Report October 31 and is republished here by permission. Brian Leiter is Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program
at the University of Texas at Austin. The Leiter Report is here.