The beauty of intelligent-design creationism for the anti-science crowd was that it was supposed to help bridge the divisions within the broader creationist movement. “Young-earth” creationists, who base their views on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, would be happy that ID proponents are pushing an anti-evolution argument that insists on the existence of God. “Old-earth” creationists would find that their arguments have a scientific veneer. It’s a win-win for those who reject modern biology.
Philip Johnson, a law professor at UC Berkeley and the de facto godfather of the ID cause, said his strategy is to use intelligent-design creationism as a “wedge” to peel off religious people from science. As for the divisions among creationists, Johnson said ID would just attack evolution, leaving the young-earth vs. old-earth fight for later.
“People of differing theological views should learn who’s close to them, form alliances and put aside divisive issues ’til later,” Johnson told Christianity Today in 1998. “I say after we’ve settled the issue of a creator, we’ll have a wonderful time arguing about the age of the Earth.”
Except, as the New York Times’ Laurie Goodstein noted the other day, ID advocates are finding that this isn’t working out at all (via Kleiman).
Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement’s credibility.
On college campuses, the movement’s theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.
“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. “From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.
Evangelicals aren’t impressed either.
While intelligent design has hit obstacles among scientists, it has also failed to find a warm embrace at many evangelical Christian colleges. Even at conservative schools, scholars and theologians who were initially excited about intelligent design say they have come to find its arguments unconvincing. They, too, have been greatly swayed by the scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere who have examined intelligent design and found it insufficiently substantiated in comparison to evolution.
“It can function as one of those ambiguous signs in the world that point to an intelligent creator and help support the faith of the faithful, but it just doesn’t have the compelling or explanatory power to have much of an impact on the academy,” said Frank D. Macchia, a professor of Christian theology at Vanguard University, in Costa Mesa, Calif., which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, the nation’s largest Pentecostal denomination.
“Young-earth” creationists don’t like the unpersuasive arguments that have nothing to do with Scripture. “Old-earth” creationists don’t like the unpersuasive arguments that were debunked along with Paley over a century ago. Lawyers don’t like the unpersuasive arguments because they quickly run into church-state problems. And anyone who takes science seriously doesn’t like the unpersuasive arguments because they don’t make any sense.
But other than these groups, intelligent-design creationism has a bright future.