Why Darwin Matters (18 page)

The principal exception to my earlier generalization that Intelligent Design creationists are Christians is the author of the Top Ten
list of evolutionary “icons,” Jonathan Wells. Wells is a Moonie—a member of the Unification Church and a follower of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who assigned Wells the task of destroying evolution. “Father’s [the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism,” Wells confesses. “When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.” Wells went out and earned his doctorate and penned
The Icons of Evolution
.

Beyond the legal and religious angling, a motivation for Intelligent Design theorists to distance themselves from the creationists of old is that no one took the creationists seriously. Dembski, who has no qualms about contesting creationist beliefs of other stripes to further his cause, explained the problem in a 2005 debate with the Young Earth creationist Henry Morris. The first step, he says, involves “dismantling materialism. . . . Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology, which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I’ve found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ. Indeed, once materialism is no longer an option, Christianity again becomes an option.” The objective then is to find a foothold for ridding the world of materialism. In Dembski’s view, “intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.”
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The new creationism may differ in the details from the old creationism, but their ultimate goals run parallel. The veneer of science in Intelligent Design theory is there purposely to cover up the religious agenda. Indeed, when you press Intelligent Design creationists on what science, precisely, they are practicing, they admit in person
that they have not yet developed “that part” of their program. For a similarly honest self-appraisal of the Intelligent Design movement recorded in print, Dembski’s 2004 book,
The Design Revolution
, provides the money quote (or the confession): “Because of intelligent design’s outstanding success at gaining a cultural hearing, the cultural and political component of intelligent design is now running ahead of the scientific and intellectual component.”
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At a 2004 meeting of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Paul Nelson confirmed Dembski’s assessment. “Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design,” Nelson said. “We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem. . . . Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’—but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.”
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The true measure of a scientific theory is whether any scientists use it or not, and no scientists are using Intelligent Design theory. Even vocally Christian scientists do not use the intuitions of Intelligent Design in place of the scientific method. Lee Anne Chaney, a professor of biology at the Christian-based Whitworth College, sums it up:

As a Christian, part of my belief system is that God is ultimately responsible. But as a biologist, I need to look at the evidence. Scientifically speaking, I don’t think intelligent design is very helpful because it does not provide things that are refutable—there is no way in the world you can show it’s not true. Drawing inferences about the deity does not seem to me to be the function of science because it’s very subjective.
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The Intelligent Design movement “does not provide things that are refutable” because its real objective is not to prove a scientific theory but to gain ground for religious ideology.

Science or no science, to illuminate the agenda behind Intelligent Design we can employ the tried-and-true method of political analysis: Follow the money. According to an extensive investigation by
The New York Times
, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute—the nonprofit organization that has been the hammer of the Wedge movement—has been funded primarily by right-wing religious groups. The Ahmanson Foundation, for example, donated $750,000 through its executor, Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who once said his goal is “the total integration of biblical law into our lives.” The MacLellan Foundation, a group that commits itself to “the infallibility of the Scripture” and gives grants to organizations “committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ,” donated $450,000 to the Discovery Institute. In 1998, Howard F. Ahmanson’s conservative philanthropy, Fieldstead & Company, granted the Discovery Institute $300,000 per year for five years, and in 1999 the Stewardship Foundation increased its grant to $200,000 per year for five years. According to its Web site, the Stewardship Foundation was established “to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by evangelical and missionary work.” Most of the other twenty-two foundations supporting the Discovery Institute with financial contributions were identified by the
Times
as politically conservative, including the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose Web site describes its mission as “the teaching and active extension of the doctrines of evangelical Christianity,” and the AMDG Foundation in Virginia, whose initials stand for
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
, Latin for “To the greater glory of God.”

The
Times
also investigated the tax documents for the Discovery
Institute and found that annual giving from conservative groups had increased from $1.4 million in 1997 to $4.1 million in 2003. With an annual budget of $3.6 million a year since 1996, the Discovery Institute has been sponsoring fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to fifty researchers. According to Stephen Meyer, a recipient of Discovery largess, 39 percent of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture budget of $9.3 million since 1996 has gone to underwrite various publishing projects.
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Money talks. At the time of this writing there are no fewer than seventy-eight pending legal clashes between Intelligent Design and evolution in thirty-one different states. Most of these have been fueled by the Discovery Institute’s funding program. Fifty books, countless opinion editorials, essays, reviews, and commentaries, even slick documentaries—two broadcast on public television and one shown at the Smithsonian Institution—have also come down the pipeline.
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As a poignant example of what money can buy, at the urging of the Discovery Institute’s public relations firm—the same firm that promoted conservative congressman Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America—in July 2005, Catholic cardinal Christof Schönborn wrote an opinion editorial in
The New York Times
in which he contradicted Pope John Paul II’s 1996 statement that the theory of evolution is no threat to religion. Schönborn told Catholics that the Church does not accept evolution, a stunning reversal countered by the Vatican itself when Cardinal Paul Poupard held a press conference to declare that Genesis and evolution are “perfectly compatible.”
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The Discovery Institute is about politics, not science. According to its president, Bruce Chapman, described by the
Times
as “a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative” who draws a hefty salary of $141,000 a year, “we are not going through this
exercise just for the fun of it. We think some of these ideas are destined to change the intellectual—and in time the political—world.” He is careful to add that “Fieldstead & Company and the Stewardship Foundation agree, or they would not have given us such substantial funding.”
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The Discovery Institute has become so political, in fact, that the Templeton Foundation—the provider of the largest cash prize available (over $1 million) for “progress in religion”—has withdrawn its support. After giving the Discovery Institute $75,000 for a 1999 conference on Intelligent Design, they have since rejected the institute’s grant proposals. Why? “They’re political—that for us is problematic,” explained the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, Charles L. Harper, Jr., who added that although Discovery has “always claimed to be focused on the science, what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth.”
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Although the motives of the proponents of Intelligent Design are secondary to their arguments, these motives are misplaced.

Let us reconsider the motto of the Christian AMDG Foundation—
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
—“To the greater glory of God.” These are stirring words, even emblazoned on the stationery of Pope John Paul II, the same Pope who granted one billion Catholics permission to accept evolution as a reality of nature that poses no threat to religion.

If you are a theist, what could possibly proclaim the greater glory of God’s creation more than science, the instrument that has illuminated more than any other tool of human knowledge the
grandeur in this evolutionary view of life? There are questions that remain to be answered, to be sure, and controversies still to be resolved, but they are questions and controversies open to all of us—theists and atheists, conservatives and liberals—because science knows no religious or political boundaries. Science, more than any other tradition, follows the motto erected at the Panama Canal:
Aperire Terram Gentibus
, “To Open the World to All People.”

The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.

—Pope John Paul II,
Truth Cannot Contradict Truth
, 1996

In considering the religious implications of the theory of evolution, it is illuminating to consider in greater depth the religious attitudes of the theory’s architect. Charles Darwin’s thoughts and feelings on how science and religion might be reconciled—in his own home and in the larger society—were complex and evolved over time.

Darwin matriculated at Cambridge University in theology, but he did so only after abandoning his medical studies at Edinburgh University because of his distaste for the barbarity of surgery. Darwin’s famous grandfather Erasmus, and his father Robert, both physicians by trade who were deeply schooled in natural history, were confirmed freethinkers, so there was no doctrinaire pressure on the young Charles to choose theology.

In point of fact, Darwin’s selection of theology as his primary course of study allowed him to pursue his passion for natural history through the academic justification of studying “natural theology”—
he was far more interested in God’s works (nature) than God’s words (the Bible). Besides, theology was one of only a handful of professions that a gentleman of the Darwin family’s high social position in the landed gentry of British society could choose. Finally, although Darwin belonged to the Church of England, membership was expected of someone in his social class.

Still, Darwin’s religiosity was not entirely utilitarian. He began and ended his five-year voyage around the world as a creationist, and he regularly attended religious services on board the
Beagle
and even during some land excursions in South America. It was only upon his return home that the loss of his faith came about, and that loss happened gradually—even reluctantly—over many years.

Nagging doubts about the nature and existence of the deity chipped away at Darwin’s faith as a result of his studies of the natural world, particularly many of his observations of the cruel nature of the relationship between predators and prey. “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” Darwin lamented in an 1856 letter to his botanist mentor Joseph Hooker. In 1860 he wrote to his American colleague, the Harvard biologist Asa Gray, about a species of wasp that paralyzes its prey (but does not kill it), then lays its eggs inside the paralyzed insect so that upon birth its offspring can feed on live flesh. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent God would have designedly created the
Ichneumonidae
with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this,” he reflected, “I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed.”
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