The New Creationism
By Sally Morem
When we think of creationism, we think of the six days of creation in the Bible; the 6,000-year-old Earth; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah and his family, and all those animals in the Ark floating atop the Great Flood. Laughable stuff, really. Most religious people don’t take those old Biblical fairy tales seriously either. And as such, they’re not a real threat to evolution as an intellectually satisfying explanation of our origins.
However, there’s a new creationism in town. It’s called Intelligent Design (ID). ID advocates depict it as the latest scientific theory explaining the existence of life. Actually, it’s the latest argument for religious creationism against biological evolution, the newest version of the old theological argument from design. I contend what the ID crowd is pushing is far more dangerous to our science educational well being than anything the Young Earthers ever advocated.
It behooves us Humanists to become well acquainted with the arguments for and against ID. In a society in which science matters more and more to our prosperity and general well being, and in which sound critical thinking is even more essential, the continued maintenance and dissemination of modern evolutionary theory to the general public becomes even more important than before.
One possible source of confusion for Humanists is the fact that most ID advocates accept standard scientific explanations for the existence of galaxies, stars, planets, and geological formations, but then insist that there must be an Intelligent Designer for life due to what they perceived as design deep within.
The Intelligent Design movement really began in 1996 with the publication of “Darwin’s Black Box,” a book in which Michael Behe, a molecular biologist at Lehigh University, claimed that the theory of evolution can’t account for complex organelles found within the cell. He said that recent advances in molecular biology and biochemistry reveal the existence of what he called “irreducible complexity.”
“By irreducible complexity I mean a single system composed of several well matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” (1)
Behe, unlike earlier creationists, does admit common descent of all life on Earth, but insists that natural selection is incapable of evolving the first living systems incrementally. They can only come into existence as an integrated unit—a package deal. And so, only an Intelligent Designer could have devised the first ancestral cell—hence the name of the movement, Intelligent Design.
Phillip Johnson, Law Professor at Berkeley, who had written such anti-evolution books as “Darwin on Trial” and “Defeating Darwinism,” immediately took note of the impact Behe was having on the debate on evolution in America and joined forces with him and other creationists to push the development and organization of ID as a force in American intellectual circles. Johnson is a full-fledged creationist who never reveals his precise creationist beliefs in his books or speeches. He developed what he calls the Wedge strategy for getting people to doubt evolution and admit the teaching of ID in science classes in American public schools as a genuine scientific theory.
The core of Johnson’s anti-evolution stance is described by Robert Pennock this way: “…the only reason Darwinian evolution is accepted is that the alternative theory of intelligent design is never considered since scientific naturalism bans all supernatural possibilities from consideration. An ‘open-minded science’ that allows theistic interventions would, they say, immediately hear the loud cry of ‘Design!’”” (2)
As a result of these developments, several proponents of ID founded the Discover Center and the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, organizations dedicated to the further development of arguments for ID and promotion of ID as an alternative to evolutionary theory. Apparently, this is an advocacy center and very little real science is done there.