Intelligent design movement
Definition Neocreationist campaign to convince
educators and others of a purposeful universe
Instigated by a Supreme Court ruling that “creation sci-
ence” is religion, not science, a group of dedicated Chris-
tians argued that natural evidence exists that the universe
and all life within it bear witness to a wise designer and that
this theor y should play a role in public school science classes,
a proposal that was successfully challenged by the scientific
community.
Although the argument for God’s existence from
the well-ordered world He created has a long his-
tory, the modern intelligent design movement be-
gan after the Supreme Court decided, inEdwards v.
Aguillard(1987), that “creation science,” which pro-
posed that scientific facts and theories supported
the biblical view of God’s creative power, was religion
and not science, and that teaching this doctrine in
public schools violated the separation of church and
state. However, the ruling left open the possibility of
teaching a variety of scientific theories about the
ways in which the universe, life, and humankind de-
veloped. Several Christian scholars realized that
they would now have to devise a new strategy to at-
tack what they viewed as the materialistic evolution-
ary theory originated by Charles Darwin. In the late
1980’s, a supplementary high school textbook,Of
Pandas and People(1989), contained several argu-
ments that supposedly proved that life on Earth
was intelligently, not randomly, designed. Christian
groups were able to get this book accepted in several
school districts, a campaign that continued through-
out the 1990’s.
The Controversy over Intelligent Design According
to several Christian scholars, the intelligent design
movement’s most influential proponent was Phillip
E. Johnson, a Berkeley law professor. In 1991, John-
son publishedDarwin on Trial, which emphasized
that Darwinism was nothing but applied materialism
and that evidence exists for an intelligent agent’s
hand in forging the highly organized complexities
of various life-forms. Johnson continued to refine
his case in his later books,Reason in the Balance
(1995) andDefeating Darwinism(1997). Johnson has
been called “the father of the intelligent design
movement,” but he also had several important fol-
lowers, including William A. Dembski, a mathemati-
cian, philosopher, and theologian, and Michael J.
Behe, a biochemist.
Dembski, a convert from Catholicism to Evangeli-
cal Christianity, developed, in his books and articles,
mathematical arguments to distinguish intelligently
designed phenomena from those resulting from
random natural causation. Several mathematicians
and scientists challenged Dembski’s contention that
law, chance, and design are mutually exclusive. They
also argued that natural laws are able to explain the
complexities of life-forms without needing to appeal
to an intelligent designer. Michael Behe, a Roman
Catholic who contributed toOf Pandas and People’s
second edition, maintained, inDarwin’s Black Box
(1996), that random causes are unable to explain
the development of “irreducibly complex” cellular
structures—that is, those unable to function when a
single part is missing. For example, flagella, cellular
devices used for locomotion and composed of sev-
eral different proteins, could not have originated via
the accidental, incremental additions required by
natural selection. However, Kenneth R. Miller, a Ro-
man Catholic biology professor at Brown University,
showed that flagella are not irreducibly complex
since a small group of proteins from a flagellum can
be used by bacteria for activities different from self-
propulsion.
Impact Through their books and articles and
through such organizations as the Discovery Insti-
tute, which created the Center for the Renewal of
Science and Culture in 1996 to manage the intelli-
gent design campaign, the neocreationists were able
to influence many American communities to adopt
intelligent design in their secondary school science
curricula. Many members of the scientific commu-
nity attacked these adoptions. For example, the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences issued documents stat-
ing that intelligent design is not science because its
claims cannot be tested by experiment. The Ameri-
can Association for the Advancement of Science ar-
gued in its publications that intelligent design is
pseudoscience. Throughout the 1990’s, the consen-
sus of most members of the scientific community re-
mained that intelligent design is covert religion and
that Darwinism, in one form or another, was un-
scathed by neocreationist attacks.
Subsequent Events The controversy over intelli-
gent design continued into the twenty-first century.
In 2002, the Ohio State Board of Education held a452 Intelligent design movement The Nineties in America