By Barbara Forrest

Summer is two-thirds over, and nothing much is going on. (Exception: we can be sure that creationists are busy plotting — they never slack off. This is a significant factor in their success at causing trouble and catching pro-science advocates off guard. There’s a lesson here.) So it’s a good time to review some little-noted developments that occurred after the 2008 passage of the creationist Louisiana Science Education Act. As it turns out, the Discovery Institute (DI), national headquarters of the intelligent design creationist movement, despite its declaration of victory when Gov. Jindal signed the LSEA, continues to stay abreast of what goes on down here. They even monitor our small town newspapers.

First, a little background: For the details of Louisiana’s adoption of this legislation, see this analysis of the bill’s creationist history and content. See direct evidence of the DI’s influence on the content of the bill here. Listen to DI creationist David DeWolf discuss his role in crafting the LSEA here. To hear DI staffer Casey Luskin’s podcasts concerning Louisiana, go here and here. Luskin accompanied creationist Caroline Crocker to Baton Rouge on May 21, 2008, where she testified (ram video) in favor of the LSEA. Crocker discusses her role in the LSEA here. She has a history of teaching creationism as a college instructor; slides that she used in her classes can be seen here. Her interview with Coral Ridge Ministries about that episode is here. (CRM also produced a truly vile piece of anti-evolution propaganda, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy. Watch it here.)

Now let’s return to the review of developments so far this year. In January 2009, John West, the associate director of DI’s creationist Center for Science and Culture, divulged that DI has been giving legal advice to the Louisiana Family Forum, with whom it partnered to help write and promote the LSEA. DI also was involved in the LFF’s successful effort to persuade the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to guts its policy for implementing the LSEA.

A Discovery Institute representative is trying to travel to Baton Rouge for today’s hearing, West said. He also confirmed that his group has continued advising the Louisiana Family Forum on the law. The Baton Rouge-based organization often pushes for more religious expressions in the public sphere.

(Bill Barrow, “Science Lesson Content Debate Expected Today,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 13, 2009)

DI continues to monitor Louisiana, right down to our small-town newspapers. On January 25, 2009, Dr. Holly Wilson, a philosophy professor at the *University of Louisiana-Monroe (*identification only), had a very good letter in the Monroe News Star in which she pointed out, as a Catholic, that intelligent design creationism is not consistent with Catholic theology. (She’s right. The Catholic Church endorses the scientific theory of evolution. Read Pope John Paul II’s comment on evolution here. See the roster of speakers at the Vatican’s Pontifical Gregorian University “International Conference on Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories,” March 3-7, 2009. Note that only distinguished scientists — and no creationists — were invited.) Here is her letter (keep reading below for more of today’s post and analysis).

January 25, 2009
 It’s not a Catholic theory of creation

[By Dr. Holly Wilson]

The newest strategy of the Discovery Institute to promote its agenda of creationism and intelligent design is to work for and promote “Academic Freedom” legislation for science education in K-12 schools.

If you go to the Discovery Institute Web site you will find them reporting on and praising state-level efforts to change laws. Not only are they committed to promoting their religion of Christianity, they are promoting only their Protestant version.

As a Catholic, I would be worried about my children or my students having to be exposed to their vision of a Creationist God in the public school system rather than the Catholic vision of the Creationist God who has been creating in and through evolution. I would not want my children or students to think that God only created once back about 10,000 years ago and created the species as they are now or just slightly evolved to this point. If creationism and intelligent design are going to be taught in science classrooms, I would want the Catholic version taught.

I don’t want my children or my students being exposed to the Protestant idea that the Bible has to be interpreted literally. I want my children and my students exposed to Catholic interpretation of the Bible, namely that the Bible needs to be interpreted in its own historical context and hence the words used then don’t mean the same things they mean now in the 20th century.

I would want my children and students to have a historical consciousness and know our understanding of how God created and is still creating can be known through modern science as modern scientists understand it. I don’t want my children or students exposed to the Protestant belief that science and religion are in conflict.

Further, I don’t want my children and students being taught to believe that science and metaphysics are the same thing. I want my children and students to be able to think critically about the distinction between metaphysics and science.

Medieval fathers of the Church like St. Thomas Aquinas taught the difference between metaphysics and science, and I would want my children and students exposed to that distinction and not have them exposed to ideas that gloss over this essential distinction.

Frankly, I don’t want my children or students exposed to the Protestant version of creationism. Intelligent design is nothing by the Protestant version of creationism. All the talk of irreducible complexity is just their way of arguing that species had to be created by God as they are because they could not have evolved from other species the way evolution tells us they did. And that metaphysical argument is precisely against my beliefs as a Catholic about how God created the species.

If the BESE board is going to let metaphysics be taught in a science curriculum, I want them to include the Catholic version of creationism, too. Thirty percent of Louisianians are Catholic. So at least 30 percent of the metaphysics education in science classrooms should be Catholic.

If my children and students have to be exposed to Protestant metaphysics, then they should also equally hear, and this is on account of academic freedom, Catholic metaphysics.

The Rev. George Coyne, the directory of the Vatican Observatory, in a 2006 talk said, “Intelligent design reduces and belittles God’s power and might.” He went on to say that science should be seen as a “completely neutral” endeavor and that science and religion should be totally separate pursuits.

John Paul II in his “Message to the Vatican Observatory Conference on Evolutionary and Molecular Biology” declared that today evolutionary theory is no longer a hypothesis. He also went on to say that evolutionary theory is increasingly accepted by scientists and supported by a convergence of research from many different fields.

The pope referred to “the need for a correct interpretation of the inspired word, of a rigorous hermeneutics. It is fitting to set forth well the limits of the meaning proper to Scripture, rejecting undue interpretations which make it say what it does not have the intention of saying.”

He also acknowledges that natural philosophy plays a legitimate role in the explanation and mechanism of evolution, but it does not necessitate a reductionist metaphysics. Intelligent design proponents, like Philip Johnson, believe that evolutionary theory is necessarily materialist and reductionist, but the pope understands that science and religion are separate entities with separate magisteria and thus it is not necessary to hold that the spirit of a human being arose out of matter. Human nature is still in the image of God even if human beings evolved from other animal species.

It is clear that the Catholic Church’s position is inconsistent with intelligent design. Catholics are not opposed to academic freedom, but we would like to have our perspectives included in that if there is going to be a violation of the separation of church and state in the science classrooms of Louisiana.

Of course, better yet, would be that there be no violation of the separation of church and state in the science classrooms of Louisiana and that our children and students be exposed only to the neutral theories of science. Let our children also learn that science is a methodology, not a dogma. And I will be happy.

Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute, quickly posted an online comment at the News Star taking issue with Dr. Wilson. Soon afterwards, an op-ed from Discovery Institute fellow David DeWolf, who had helped craft the LSEA, appeared in the newspaper. Here is a relevant excerpt from that op-ed (with creationist code talk in red and LCFS commentary in blue):

What is at stake in Louisiana is not a divide between Catholic and Protestant — or even a divide between religious and non-religious — but a question of whether Louisiana students can question the materialist dogma that is frequently peddled in the guise of science instruction. [emphasis added]

Students should be free to question whether materialist explanations for the origin of biological complexity [more code talk] are plausible; and they should be free to study both the evidence that supports a materialist explanation (such as random mutation and natural selection) as well as the evidence that leads to skepticism. [Yet more code talk that attempts to create the impression that there is scientific evidence against evolution. There isn't.] . . .

. . . Wilson badly mischaracterizes the Discovery Institute, which is blamed for foisting a ‘Protestant version’ of science on Louisiana. [See Pope John Paul II's comment on evolution linked above.]

For openers, the Discovery Institute *has never advocated mandating the teaching of intelligent design*, but rather has promoted science education policies that encourage students to learn about the strengths and weaknesses in mainstream evolutionary theory (Darwinism) [more code talk for undermining evolution].

[*Note: From the foreword of Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook, co-authored by DeWolf:

Happily, the law is not on the side of an enforced Darwinian orthodoxy. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction." As this guidebook will show, teachers and school boards who choose to tell students about the evidence and arguments for intelligent design actually fulfill this Supreme Court mandate. [emphasis added]

Referring to the Supreme Court case that originated in Louisiana, the foreword interprets the Court’s recognition of the constitutionality of teaching genuine scientific theories to school children as a mandate to teach intelligent design (which is creationism and therefore unconstitutional under Edwards). While the foreword was written by fellow creationist Jon Buell, co-authors DeWolf and Stephen C. Meyer are long-time fellows of the Discovery Institute’s creationist Center for Science and Culture. Meyer is the director of the CSC. They obviously did not object to Buell’s reference to the teaching of ID as the fulfillment of a Supreme Court mandate.]

Second, the Discovery Institute is headed by a Roman Catholic, Bruce Chapman.

[Actually, Chapman established the creationist wing of the Discovery Institute long before his conversion to Catholicism in 2002, prior to which he was an Episcopalian, thus a Protestant.]

The man responsible for the argument from ‘irreducible complexity,’ [another creationist term] which Wilson attributes to this same Protestant narrowmindedness, is Michael Behe, a distinguished Catholic scholar from Lehigh University.

[Being Catholic, which is an entirely personal matter to be respected under the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom, means nothing with respect to intelligent design creationism except that its Catholic proponents are out of step with their own Church. But as for Prof. Behe, not only is he out of step with his Church in being an ID proponent, he is also out of step with his own Lehigh University Department of Biology, which has posted a disclaimer of his creationism on the departmental website, which reads in part, "While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific."]

As it happens, in addition to being a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, I am also a Roman Catholic.

[Again, see above. If this is not convincing, please see Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God, July 2004, a report by the Vatican's International Theological Commission, approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger/aka/Pope Benedict XVI, when he was President of the Commission and also head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition:

Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution. While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage.]

Based on an analysis of nothing more than this short excerpt from DeWolf’s Monroe News Star op-ed, it is clear that the facts are on Dr. Wilson’s side. (The next post will feature Barbara Forrest’s response to DeWolf’s op-ed, which the News Star was very kind to print.)

Finally, the fact that DeWolf and Chapman saw and responded to Wilson’s letter in the newspaper of a small Louisiana town like Monroe indicates how closely they continue to monitor events down here. Their continued monitoring of Louisiana shows how deeply invested they are in manipulating the only state that has so far been foolish enough to buy what they were selling last year.