Science and Creationism 47a long post bragging about their “accomplishments” in the past ten years that is a monu-
ment to special pleading and selective misuse of facts. They mostly brag about how their
lawyers have won nuisance suits against real scientists and real museums who crossed
them, and about their books (mostly by Stephen Meyer, one of their leading authors),
which have been roundly criticized and mostly ignored by the real scientific community
for their scientific incompetence, dishonesty, and outright deception.
And what about their actual scientific research program? Back in the late 1990s when
the Discovery Institute was founded, their Wedge Document proposed to get 100 scientific
articles published in the next ten years. Now, almost 20 years later, their latest post touts
their “80 peer-reviewed publications” as if it’s some great accomplishment. Most produc-
tive individual scientists have at least that many papers, and the Discovery Institute is a
giant propaganda mill with many contributors. In fact, I have more than 300 peer-reviewed
publications, almost four times their total, all by myself. Moreover, if you look through the
list in the Discovery Institute post, it is almost entirely papers for their own house journal
BIO-Complexity, or unreviewed online fringe sites like the Journal of Cosmology, or some other
predatory online journals that will publish anything for a fee. Only one or two articles are
found in reputable journals, and the titles of those articles indicate that their content isn’t
really about ID at all.
Ironically, the point is largely moot in Dover, Pennsylvania, because in November 2005,
the citizens of Dover (embarrassed by all the negative publicity) voted the conservatives off
the school board and voted in a new school board that was opposed to teaching intelligent
design in its schools. Naturally, this new school board did not wish to appeal the judge’s rul-
ing, but applauded it—but they were still stuck with the legal bills that the folly of the old
school board had generated.
The Monkey Business of Creationism
Creation is, of course, unproven and unprovable by the methods of experimental sci-
ence. Neither can it qualify as a scientific theory.
—Duane Gish, “Creation, Evolution, and the Historical Evidence”Creation isn’t a theory. The fact that God created the universe is not a theory—it’s
true. However, some of the details are not specifically nailed down in Scripture. Some
issues—such as creation, a global Flood, and a young age for the earth—are deter-
mined by Scripture, so they are not theories. My understanding from Scripture is
that the universe is in the order of 6,000 years old. Once that has been determined by
Scripture, it is a starting point that we build theories upon.
—Kurt Wise, 1995Ultimately, creationism has nothing to do with science, except that the creationists want to
replace a valid scientific idea with their own religious dogmas. It is all about politics and
power and promoting their cherished ideas whatever the cost. Creationists don’t do nor-
mal science, don’t publish their anti-evolutionary ideas in peer-reviewed scientific journals,
don’t present their results at legitimate scientific meetings, and more importantly, don’t
even begin to follow the basic precept of science: there is no final truth, and all ideas must be