Today’s New York Times has a couple of interesting articles on the so-called “evolution debate” (there is no debate among mainstream scientists).
First, in his “On Language” column in the NYT Magazine William Safire scrutinizes “creationism,” “evolutionism,” “neo-creos,” and the PR firm for ID, The Discovery Institute, which just happens to be the subject of the page one story “Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive” of the newspaper.
As part of on ongoing series called “The Evolution Debate”, the article by Jodi Wilgoren examines the Discovery Institute, which is the propaganda machine behind the idea of “intellegent design.” The Seattle-based Discovery Institute (founded in 1990 as a branch of the right-wing Hudson Institute) is funded, not surprisingly, by the same right wing Christians who backed Bush in recent elections, which explains why W. is mouthing their stance on the evolution v. ID “debate.” But the Discovery Institute also gets mainstream backing, including $1 million a year from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
The Times reports that “since the presidential election last fall, the [intelligent design] movement has made inroads and evolution has emerged as one of the country’s fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.”
The Discovery Institute also pushed the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a “teach the controversy” approach and helped design a curriculum to support it, according The Times. Institute talking points almost made it into the No Child Left Behind Act, too. “A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute’s talking points. “Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy,” was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.”
According to The Times “these successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” in favor of a “broadly theistic understanding of nature.”
A couple of sidebars…
One of the “Ads by Google” posted on The New Times on the Web version of the Discovery Institute article was:
“Believe in Jesus?
We’ll pay you $75 right now to complete a simple survey!
PaidSurveysOnline.com”
And, as Signe Wilkinson illustrates in this cartoon for the Philadelphia Daily News, it’s too bad W. hasn’t come up with an intelligent design for Iraq.
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If there is no creator, then what is ones purpose in life? What advantage would you evolutionists have in persuading the world that evolution is true? In your piont of view, everyone is eventually going to die and then that’s that. So there is no benefit to ones “beliefs”. How do you explain miracles? If you want, I could give you hundreds of scenarios where no scientific explanation was found. Maybe you are fighting against us “neo-creons” because we have something that you don’t have and you just can’t seem to place what what that something is. We have a connection with each other that you evolutionists seem to lack. I have thoroughly studied evolution and my conclusion is than there is no possibility that life could ever come from non-life. This planet and everything that is on it had to have been the work of a divine creator. Even Darwin stated so in his last book. Believe what you want to believe. I know for a fact that I was created the image and likeness of God.