Discovery Institute, Intelligent Design, and Neo-Darwinism
Post #4 – A profile of Discovery Institute, which is involved in the legal skirmish over the screening of “Darwin’s Dilemma.”
On October 9, 2009 Discovery Institute joined the dispute between the California Science Center and the American Freedom Alliance by filing a public document request with the Science Center; on December 2, the Institute announced that it had filed suit against the Science Center because it had failed to disclose all relevant documents as required by California’s Public Records Act.
Discovery Institute – through its Center for Science and Culture – is the most prominent opponent of the theory (and teaching) of evolution in the country. Based in Seattle (with an office in Washington, DC), Discovery Institute engages in public policy research and advocacy in many areas, including regional transportation, defense policy, legal reform, the environment and the economy, entitlement spending, and religion and public life.
“Discovery Institute’s mission is to make a positive vision of the future practical. The Institute discovers and promotes ideas in the common sense tradition of representative government, the free market and individual liberty.”
A distinct perspective shapes the Discovery Institute’s research program:
“The point of view Discovery brings to its work includes a belief in God-given reason and the permanency of human nature; the principles of representative democracy and public service expounded by the American Founders; free market economics domestically and internationally; the social requirement to balance personal liberty with responsibility; the spirit of voluntarism crucial to civil society; the continuing validity of American international leadership; and the potential of science and technology to promote an improved future for individuals, families and communities.”
Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (CSC) opposes the theory of evolution (“neo-Darwinian theory”), while promoting the theory of intelligent design. This attention on evolutionary biology stems from CSC’s focus on “scientific discoveries and theories that raise larger philosophical, world-view or cultural issues.” Discovery Institute’s concern is not with all scientific discoveries and theories, but only those that lend support for “scientific materialism – the simplistic philosophy or world-view that claims that all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone.” [The link is to a pdf of Discovery Institute's: The "Wedge Document": "So What?"]
The Center for Science and Culture’s opposition to scientific materialism is at the heart of Discovery Institute’s interest in presentation of “Darwin’s Dilemma.” It is a religious objection. In this view, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition created the world and human beings within this world, and thus the theory of evolution and natural selection – which leaves an intelligent agent / creator out of the picture – cannot be true.
Discovery Institute takes pains to distinguish between creationism, which begins with reference to religious belief, and intelligent design, which presents itself as scientific. “Creationism typically starts with a religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. Intelligent design starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what inferences can be drawn from that evidence.”
In my next post, we will look more closely at the Center for Science and Culture’s strategy and approach in opposing evolution and advancing intelligent design.
(Photograph of Charles Darwin, age 51, via Wikimedia Commons.)
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