Uncloseting the Discovery Institute: The IDea that Dare Not Speak Its Name (Part 1)

October 17th, 2007 Jemmy Button Posted in News |

DISCOVERY INSTITUTE PUBLICIST ROBERT CROWTHER recently posted an especially self-pitying article on one of the DI’s blogging arms, ”Evolution News and Views”. Entitled Is Intelligent Design Such a Dangerous Idea That It Must Not Be Thought?, it’s a real tear-jerker, wending its way through the DI’s ever-popular “Mom, those mean scientists won’t play with me” themes and — in words echoing those of Lord Alfred Douglas that cost Oscar Wilde so dearly — concluding with the plaintive wail about persecuting “Darwinists” (my bolding):

Try as they might, they can’t ban thinking about intelligent design. Thoughtful students will continue to explore what is so dangerous about this idea that no one can even be allowed to whisper its name.

So poignant a plea could not fail to move even the stony hearts of Darwin Central, the Conspiracy that Cares. And so we at once resolved, not to whisper, but indeed to loudly proclaim, through this present series of articles, all that we have learned about the downtrodden Discovery Institute and its promotion of the IDea that dare not speak its name.

Thanks to some fine internet archaeology by Darwin Central Arch-Conspiratrix JennyP, it is possible to trace, over the last 11 years, how the Discovery Institute has been diligently scrubbing their website of any embarrassing hints about their true motivation for opposing evolution and replacing it with “intelligent design”. Using the Wayback Machine, we can follow how the Discovery Institute has been sanitising its propaganda, from initial call to arms to ‘topple naturalism’ to incessant plaints of ‘persecution’ by the jack-booted Thought Police of the Darwintern.

And lo, what do we find at the very outset? Far from not daring to whisper, in the beginning the Discovery Institute flamboyantly proclaimed its true agenda with an unbridled exuberance to belt even the most ostentatious Gay Pride Parade into drab and lacklustre monochrome. It was quite a smorgasbord they presented, so I hope you’ve brought a goodly appetite as we begin our little feast here.

Let’s kick off with the “Big Bang” itself – the Press Release of 10 August 1996 announcing the creation of the rather Orwellian-sounding Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC). The clarion call begins boldly enough:

Major grants help establish Center for Renewal of Science and Culture

For over a century, Western science has been influenced by the idea that God is either dead or irrelevant. Two foundations recently awarded Discovery Institute nearly a million dollars in grants to examine and confront this materialistic bias in science, law, and the humanities. The grants will be used to establish the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at Discovery, which will award research fellowships to scholars, hold conferences, and disseminate research findings among opinionmakers and the general public.

And that’s just the first blast of the trumpet! Certainly no ‘whisper’ here –- though there is a profound silence about any support for these claims. Eschewing evidence or elaboration, the Discovery Institute simply declares an axiomatic opposition between ‘God’ and science, disregarding both the large number of scientists to be found among each of the world’s major faiths, and the endorsement of science by the leaders of those faiths. Nor does the Discovery Institute even hint that the “over a century” in which this lamentable “materialistic bias” is said to have prevailed also corresponds to the most dramatic expansion of human knowledge, and most profound advancement in human standards of living, in the history of our species.

According to the DI here, the simple fact that science is not in the business of affirming some God or other is sufficient to damn it—and the DI have a million bucks with which to put the world to rights. And the battleground for this epic confrontation with science is clearly stated: not with scientists, but “among opinionmakers and the general public.”

The full text of the Press Release then names the big honchos of the new CRSC: DI Senior Fellow Stephen Meyer (Director) and DI Senior Fellow John West (Co-Director, also in charge of the DI’s “Religion, Liberty & Civic Life” program). Associated “scholars and advisors” include Phillip Johnson ( professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley), chemistry professor Dr. Michael Behe, and full-time research Fellows William Dembski, Paul Nelson and Jonathan Wells.

The Press Release continues:

The new Center grew out of last summer’s “Death of Materialism” conference that Discovery organized and which has gathered increased attention since the four keynote addresses were published by the Intercollegiate Review earlier this year.

Let’s sample a little side dish here, for Stephen C. Meyer’s article in the Intercollegiate Review is available online, and is itself a splendid example of the deliberate distortion and mendacity on which the Discovery Institute’s campaign amongst “opinionmakers and the general public” is based. To give but one taste, have a bite of Meyer’s evidence for his remarkable assertion (p. 27) that (my bolding):

“even scientists known for a staunch commitment to materialistic philosophy now concede that materialistic science in no way suffices to explain the origin of life. As Francis Crick has written, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

Of course Meyers, in what can only appear to be a shameless act of dishonesty, omits Crick’s sentence which immediately follows the one quoted above: “But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions.” Only by deceitfully omitting this follow on sentence can Meyer distort Crick’s affirmation of evolutionary theory. So let us dare to speak the proper name of the rhetoric here — it’s a flat-out lie.

But back to the main meal. The Press Release continues:

“The conference pointed the way,” Discovery President Bruce Chapman says, “and helped us mobilize support to attack the scientific argument for the 20th century’s ideology of materialism and the host of social ‘isms’ that attend it.”

Bruce Chapman’s 1996 call for an “attack” is a far cry from his whining in 2007 of martyrdom and his claim (Who is Anti-Science?) that “Today, the persecutors of scientific dissidents are not in the Church, but in the academy.” How dare scientists resist the DI’s “attack” of falsehoods!

The 1996 Press Release then reveals:

Crucial, start-up funding has come from Fieldstead & Company, and the Stewardship Foundation which also awarded a grant.

One can only whisper the name of “Fieldstead & Company”, for there is no website or even a telephone number for the organisation. It is in fact another front set up by Christian Reconstructionist and primary DI financier Howard Ahmanson, Jr. and his wife, Roberta, to enable this sort of masturbatory (if not downright incestuous) cross-funding.

The additional funds, from the Stewardship Foundation are a little puzzling, in that it is a Christian philanthropic trust with no brief to fund matters of science, but rather (according to its Mission Statement) to provide “resources to Christ-centered organizations that share their faith in Jesus Christ with people throughout the world..” At least, there’s no whisper here!

The Press Release concludes:

The Center for Renewal of Science and Culture fits well with Discovery’s existing programs in high technology and religion. George Gilder, who heads Discovery’s technology program, has a long-standing interest in the interaction of science and culture. The end of his book ”Microcosm” explores the social and spiritual implications of contemporary physics, another one of his works-in-process deals with the cultural necessity of faith.

In the next article in this series, we’ll have a look at the CRSC’s first website, and how it interpreted George Gilder’s notion of “the cultural necessity of faith” – by endorsing, in those early heady days of the attack on science, even the most moonbat varieties of an ‘idea’ which the Discovery Institute is now ashamed to whisper, leave alone name: Young Earth Creationism.