Mr_Christopher
Posts: 1238
Joined: Jan. 2006
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I'll only copy and paste a few paragraphs or so. This one is well worth reading, the author is on target.
| Quote | Discovery's Creation
By Roger Downey
A Seattle think tank launched the modern intelligent-design movement with a simple memo. The idea has evolved into a media sensation. And the cause has mutated beyond rational control.
By Roger Downey
Birth of a Theory
A brief history of intellligent design.
The Wedge
The treatise that launched the Discovery Institute's campaign for intelligent design.
In 1998, members of a Seattle nonprofit think tank drafted a secret five-year plan with an ambitious goal: to "defeat scientific materialism" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
By the end of the stated five-year period, the benevolent conspirators had seen much of their goal accomplished. There was widespread public debate with materialist Darwinists. Dozens of books had been published presenting a non-Darwinian alternative theory of life. There was widespread respectful press coverage of their cause, with innumerable supportive op-ed columns in mainstream media, cover stories in the national newsweeklies, and even a widely broadcast PBS documentary. School authorities in 10 states were looking into adopting some or all of the recommendations for high-school science curricula. So well was the campaign going that in 2004, some of the original antimaterialism advocates were confident enough of eventual triumph to predict in detail a complete meltdown of Darwinian science by 2025—the 100th anniversary of the notorious "Monkey Trial" of 1925.
However unlikely their optimism at the time, it looks a great deal more unlikely today. In December, a federal judge presiding over another case of Darwin versus faith in a public-school system handed the antimaterialists a defeat so sweeping—in the form of a judicial decision so detailed and so trenchant—that even the most passionate advocates of faith-based science seem stunned and confused about the future of their cause. They'll be back. But in this time of their momentary disarray, it seems appropriate to look back over the short but rocketlike rise to media celebrity of the idea called "intelligent design" and the small, dedicated band of true believers who sold the concept to the wider world.
The story begins, so far as the world at large is concerned, on a late January day seven years ago, in a mail room in a downtown Seattle office of an international human-resources firm. The mail room was also the copy center, and a part-time employee named Matt Duss was handed a document to copy. It was not at all the kind of desperately dull personnel-processing document Duss was used to feeding through the machine. For one thing, it bore the rubber-stamped warnings "TOP SECRET" and "NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION." Its cover bore an ominous pyramidal diagram superimposed on a fuzzy reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel rendition of God the Father zapping life into Adam, all under a mysterious title: The Wedge...
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An analysis of this article probably belongs on PT...Lots of ID history too. This is a very good one!
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Uncommon Descent is a moral cesspool, a festering intellectual ghetto that intoxicates and degrades its inhabitants - Stephen Matheson
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