The current assault is targeted mainly at educational institutions and science education in particular. However, it is an important fragment of a much larger rejection of the secular, rational, democratic ideals of the Enlightenment upon which the United States was founded. The chief weapon in this war is a version of creation science known as intelligent design theory
Its central proponents are often academics with credentials from, and positions at, reputable universities. They are most assuredly not the cranks and buffoons of the church hall debating circuit of yesteryear who led the early assaults on science and science education. But the ultimate aim is the same.
The proponents of intelligent design are openly pursuing what they call a wedge strategy. First, get intelligent design taught alongside the natural sciences. Once the wedge has found this crack and gained respectability, it can be driven ever deeper to transform the end of the educational enterprise itself into a system more open with respect to its aim of religious instruction. As the wedge is driven still deeper, it is hoped that the consequent cracks will spread to other institutions, such as our legal and political institutions. At the fat end of the wedge lurks the specter of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. This book, however, is about the thin end of the wedge: supernatural science. Ultimately, it is about two basic questions: Is intelligent design theory a scientific theory? Is there any credible evidence to support its claims?
The debate in the legislature made Tennessee an international laughingstock. My debate took place about ninety miles from Dayton, Tennessee, where the infamous Scopes trial occurred, thereby showing that even those who know history are condemned to repeat it—again and again!
This is a challenge that needs to be taken seriously and not dismissed. Accordingly, my colleague Karl Joplin and I have been engaged in a series of academic exchanges in various journals with biochemist Michael Behe, the author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (see Behe 2000, 2001a; Shanks and Joplin 1999, 2000, 2001a, 2001b). I have also had an exchange with academic lawyer Phillip Johnson in the pages of the journal Metascience (Johnson 2000b; Shanks 2000). Johnson and Behe are the leading lights of the modern intelligent design movement in the United States (they are both senior members of the Discovery Institute)