Uncloseting the Discovery Institute: The IDea that Dare Not Speak Its Name (Part 3)
November 6th, 2007 Jemmy Button
IN PART 2 OF THIS SERIES, we saw how the Discovery Institute unabashedly endorsed its anti-scientific ‘supernaturalist’ manifesto with extreme forms of Creationism. So far from “ashamed to whisper”, in the 1990’s the Discovery Institute boldly proclaimed not only such Biblically-literalist doctrines as an earth only 6,000 years old and an historic Noah’s Flood, but also plenty of ‘roll-your-own’ armchair science, such as Walt Brown’s “Hydroplate Theory” to hurl comets from the earth into the heavens as well as the candid credo that, in Creation “science”, empirical data issues are “secondary”: primacy is instead afforded to discrediting materialistic “evolutionary theory.”
In 1997, the website for the DI’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture received a fresh lick of paint and a new Frequently Asked Questions Page. The page is more interesting today for its copious ADINCU’s (Answers the Discovery Institute Now Covers-Up):
#1. What is Materialism?
For these purposes, it has little to do with greed. Or wanting to buy too much at the mall to boost your self-esteem.
Materialism is the modern day philosophy that holds that matter is all there is. It’s the philosophy that says “If you can’t touch it, smell it, taste it or explain it through the hard sciences, it doesn’t exist.” Men are merely complex machines and not spiritual beings.
And it’s approved by most intellectuals around the world.
One other thing: we’re out to topple it.
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