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But this time, reality did not follow the script. To be sure, initial resistance came from young-earth creationists. (This movement has been much maligned, even by fellow Christians; yet it has helped preserve a large pocket of resistance to naturalistic evolution.) Followup, however, came largely from proponents of intelligent design (ID) a newer movement that is making surprisingly deep inroads into mainstream culture.The unofficial spokesman for ID is Phillip E. Johnson, a Berkeley law professor who converted to Christianity in his late 30s, then turned his sharp lawyer's eyes on the theory of evolution. Spotting what he saw as logical errors in the case for Darwinism, Johnson penned several influential books, including Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance. (His latest book, The Wedge of Truth, is due out in July.) Johnson's penetrating critiques were the first to win a respectful hearing in academia, and he now advises a group of scientists who are developing the case for design, many of them at the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) in Seattle. After the Kansas decision, CRSC scholars appeared widely in mainstream media: Johnson in The Wall Street Journal; director Steve Meyer on NPR; program director Jay Richards in The Washington Post; and fellows Michael Behe in The New York Times and Jonathan Wells on PBS.Indeed, the growing success of the intelligent-design movement is almost certainly what provoked the over-the-top reactions to Kansas in the first place. Top university presses are publishing books on ID, notably William Dembski's The Design Inference by Cambridge University Press (1998) and Paul Nelson's forthcoming On Common Descent through the University of Chicago Press. Baylor University's Michael Polanyi Center, founded by Dembski, held a conference last month on naturalism in science that attracted nationally known scientists such as Alan Guth, John Searle, and Nobel Prize-winner Steven Weinberg. These scientists' willingness even to address such questions, alongside design proponents such as Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, gives enormous credibility to the ID movement.Why is ID so successful? The answer is partly that ID functions as an umbrella uniting various strategies for relating faith and science. In the past, Christians tended to splinter into small, often antagonistic groups, such as theistic evolutionists, progressive creationists, old-earth creationists, young-earth creationists, and flood geologists. "On this issue the Christian world was playing defense," Johnson explains. "We were saying, 'What can we defend? How much do we have to give up?' "The drawback in playing defense is that you have to protect each outpost to ensure that the enemy doesn't get past a single one. Hence Christians argued vociferously about the details of fossils, mutations, radiometric dating, and the early chapters of Genesis.By contrast, Johnson says, ID is about playing offense: "We're leaving the fortress and heading behind the lines to blow up the other side's headquarters, its ammunition store." As the dust settles, even the questions Christians are trying to answer may take on entirely new forms.What is the other side's "ammunition store"? It's the definition of science itself, Johnson says. Science is typically defined as objective investigation (discovering and testing facts)& amp;mdash;the means for making faster airplanes and better medicines.But there's another definition held implicitly in the scientific establishment, and it is tantamount to the philosophy of materialism or naturalism. This is the idea that science may legitimately employ only natural causes in explaining everything we observe.The way this definition of science operates is to outlaw any questioning of naturalistic evolution. Darwinists don't ask whether life evolved from a sea of chemicals; they only ask how it evolved. They don't ask whether complex life forms evolved from simpler forms; they only ask how it happened. The presupposition is that natural forces alone must (and therefore can) account for the development of all life on earth; the only task left is to work out the details.Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin gave the game away in a revealing article in The New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997). While expressing skepticism about the "unsubstantiated just-so stories" often labeled science, Lewontin nevertheless accepts the standard story of evolution. Why? Because, he writes, "we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism." This commitment is not itself based on science, Lewontin admits. Indeed, just the opposite: Scientists accept materialism first, and then are "forced" to define science in such a way that it cranks out strictly materialistic theories. (In his words, "we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations.") Finally, Lewontin insists that this "materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door." As Nelson comments, "Design is ruled out not because it has been shown to be false but because science itself has been defined as applied materialistic philosophy."One goal of the ID movement is to drive a wedge between the two operative definitions of science. The Kansas board made its own contribution to the "wedge strategy" when it changed the standards' definition of science from an activity that seeks "natural explanations" to one that seeks "logical explanations." The idea is that science should be open to any rational, testable theory, and not be limited to naturalistic theories. Design theorists hope to press the case against Darwinism until scientists are forced to decide which is the real definition of science: Will they follow the evidence wherever it leads, or will they insist on naturalistic theories regardless of the evidence?

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May 22 2000, Vol. 44, No. 6