The ID Report

When I spoke to him last night, California attorney Larry Caldwell told me that it sure helps to be a lawyer. Especially when it comes to dealing with a series of non-fact-based allegations against one’s good judgement and character.

Caldwell, a parent who thinks that students should be taught the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the Darwinian theory of evolution, was accused by a leading Darwinist of, among other things, proposing odd little books for adoption by the school system, books that he had never seen!

The article was authored by Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, Inc. (NCSE). Scott's article, entitled “In My Backyard: Creationists in California,” appeared in the Spring print and online editions of the Academy’s California Wild magazine, and was linked on the NCSE website.

Caldwell filed suit, but the California Academy of Sciences has settled by agreeing to 1) permanently remove all on-line access to the Scott article, 2) publish a lengthy letter by Caldwell and 3) publish a retraction letter by Scott in the upcoming Summer 2005 edition of California Wild , which will be available in print and on the Internet in early July.

Caldwell says that his letter will correct a number of factual misstatements in the Scott article.

He also says that

Unfortunately, Scott and the NCSE have a long history of libeling people in the debate over how evolution should be taught in our public schools; my case is only the most recent example. Hopefully, it won't take any more libel lawsuits to teach them how to stick to the truth.

Other critics of Darwin's theory have been personally attacked on the basis of misrepresentations in similar cases where the Darwinists claim that the critics' professional statements or qualifications are false.

The difference between them and me is that I decided to take legal action. Darwinists need to get the message: engage in civil discourse without defamation or prepare to answer in court.

Personally, I am delighted by this turn of events. As a journalist, I initially found it difficult to cover the intelligent design controversy, on account of the swamp of false allegations about what intelligent design theorists thought, said, and did.

I wish I could be surprised that it took the threat of a libel suit to get a science organization to correct a record that should never have been so wrong in the first place.

Unfortunately, I am not surprised.

Here’s another example of the kind of stuff that irks me: David Berlinski, a secular Jewish mathematician who disputes Darwinism, has been called in some quarters, a creationist [http://www.2think.org/letters.shtml], about which he says, “Some readers seem to have been persuaded that in criticizing the Darwinian theory of evolution, I intended to uphold a doctrine of creationism. This is a mistake, supported by nothing that I have written.”

Similarly, ID theorist Michael Behe, a Roman Catholic biochemist, has been called a creationist [http://www.freeinquiry.com/behe-npr.html], even though he has told me explicitly that he thinks that all the information in the universe was probably coded in at the Big Bang. That would make him a theistic evolutionist, of course. His doubts about Darwinism are based on biochemistry, not religion, just as Berlinski’s doubts are based on mathematics, not religion.

As I understand it, creationism means the effort to align science findings with a sacred text (Bible, Koran, tribal tradition about origins). I don’t see anything wrong with such an enterprise, but anyone who does not acknowledge a given sacred text won’t care, so it’s not properly a public project.

However, while covering the intelligent design controversy, I met a number of scientists and mathematicians who had very good, non-religious reasons, based in their own disciplines, for doubting Darwinian evolution (from goo to you in a zillion easy steps).

I suspect some Darwinists resort to name calling and misrepresentation, in the hope that future evidence will vindicate a theory that they themselves have privately begun to doubt.

Whether Darwinism turns out to be right or wrong, it must face scrutiny without the help of all the name-calling. Maybe the California settlement will help in that process.

At the Write! Canada convention awards night (June 17, 2004), By Design or by Chance?, an overview of the intelligent design controversy, won two Canadian Christian Writing Awards, one in the category of books on culture and the other in the category of personal growth/Bible study & theology. The culture award was shared with Dianne B. Stinton of Nairobi, Kenya, for Jesus of Africa.

By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), by Toronto journalist, Denyse O’Leary, was first published in Canada, but the US edition followed a month later.

“What makes the wins especially gratifying is that we had such a strong field this year,” O’Leary said. “The number of books that honestly deserve prizes rapidly outstripped the number of prizes available. It seems that Christians in Canada are beginning to find their literary voice.”

For the first time, Quill and Quire, the Canadian book publishing industry’s publication, sent a reporter to the Write! Canada convention. The reporter interviewed O’Leary and others at some length on the growth of high quality writing among Canadian Christians.

Write! Canada is sponsored by The Word Guild (www.thewordguild.com), which aims at “connecting, developing & promoting Canadian writers & editors who are Christian.”

You can read excerpts from By Design or by Chance? at www.designorchance.com/press.html, and purchase it at http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Last time, I wrote about the uproar over the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s plans to co-host the “national premiere and evening reception” for an ID-friendly film, The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe . The Smithsonian was to co-host with the ID-promoting Discovery Institute of Seattle in late June.

Well, the story has got a lot wilder.

Essentially, Discovery Institute had wanted to rent space from the Smithsonian to show the film, but the Smithsonian’s policy required it to cosponsor the film. The film passed all the usual screening processes.

I naturally wondered (and I was not alone in this) whether the Smithsonian was trying to be nice to the friends of beleaguered scientist Richard Sternberg (http://www.rsternberg.net), the science journal editor whose treatment at the Smithsonian caused him to appeal to the US government for help (because he had published an ID-friendly paper).

Sternberg himself is not an advocate of the view that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design, but ID advocates are no doubt grateful to him for not censoring a paper that had passed peer review. So the Smithsonian would look good if it co-sponsored an ID-friendly film. That would suggest that, despite appearances, they are not out to get Sternberg (http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006220).

We’ll never know now.

Alarmists who — so far as I can determine from reading their comments —have mostly never seen the film and do not know what it is about, besieged the Smithsonian, demanding that the institution withdraw co-sponsorship, despite its own rules.

For example, many alarmists have assumed that the film attacks Darwinian evolution. In fact, it has nothing to say about Darwinian evolution. It argues that the universe itself (not life forms) shows evidence of intelligent design.

Admittedly, a person who is committed to the view that life forms show no evidence of intelligent design will naturally not welcome evidence of design from the universe itself. But the fact that so many people were willing to raise heck with the Smithsonian about a film they knew virtually nothing about tells you how committed they are to Darwinism as a sort of secular religion. I called these people the “Darwinbots” and I stand by my judgement in this matter. Many of these people consider themselves liberals, but as I told them (http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/06/note-from-denyse-re-darwinbots.html), it is difficult to be further from classical liberalism than they are.

For example, when I instituted a new policy on my blog, that I will not, on principle, respond to anyone who has not seen the film because “I simply do not have time to correspond with anyone who will not make such a minimal contribution to a free society” and also will not tolerate “cussing, dissing, undefended accusations, rude words, et cetera”, the rain of posts stopped abruptly. I have only heard from two people since, who both indicated that they had indeed seen the film. Good for them, ... but if this is what Darwinism has come to, I can certainly see why so many American states now want to teach intelligent design as an alternative. I would too. (See http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/06/further-updated-privileged-planet.html, scroll down to the bottom for new policy)

In any event, the Smithsonian has decided to ignore its own policy and is not co-sponsoring the film [http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/06/smithsonian-tries-to-disown-privileged.html] after all. It suddenly claimed to have found some fault with the film that was not evident when it was screened there by staff earlier ...

It has also returned Discovery Institute’s $16000 donation, which means (so far as I can see) that the Discovery Institute is getting the space for free. American taxpayer rights groups should be just wild with institutional joy now, because the Smithsonian is mostly government-funded.

Anyway, I decided to re-view the film and provide a detailed account at my blog, The Post-Darwinist [http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com]. That’s a lot of work because, unlike some, I want to be quite sure of what I am seeing, and saying.

But it is a good thing I started doing that (as a free public service), because I am finally beginning to understand what is going on.

The Smithsonian is the Church of St. Carl (Sagan) and it presented a big tribute to him in 1997 (he died in 1996). (See http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/fa01-153.html, scroll down to 1997.)

Sagan was that Cosmos astronomer that everyone who watches a lot of TV seems to know about. He wrote, “Because of the reflection of sunlight the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world ... but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. Look again at that dot. That’s here. Home. That’s us. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

Privileged Planet quotes Sagan—and then proceeds to blow up his ideas, showing that, actually, Earth is in a very special and favorable position. So the Smithsonian has a good reason to avoid association with Privileged Planet. Maybe the Darwin groupies were doing the institution a favor by screaming about it.

But that raises a very interesting question: Has the United States actually established a secularist religion which depends on Darwinism and on a whole cluster of ideas associated with it, including Sagan’s?

Put another way: Is secularism a state religion, of which the Church of St. Carl is merely a local parish? In that case, American taxpayers are essentially funding a state religion.

If you don’t happen to believe in the doctrines of the state religion, you have every right to object to the situation, and shouldn’t allow anyone to put you down for complaining about it.

The intelligent design controversy, far from going away, is getting hotter all the time because it is now moving beyond the stuff science profs squabble over. It is now raising fundamental political issues.

I will be going to the Church of St. Carl in Washington, D.C., on June 23, not to pray but to attend the Privileged Planet screening.

(Note: Scooping the The New York Times has been a lot of work, but fun. It annoys me that the Times now makes you sign up if you want to see the article that their reporter wrote as a result of reading my blog, though he did his own research too. But you can still see the original account and all the subsequent information for free at the blog. - cheers, Denyse)