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When it comes to explaining why ID should be such an intellectual embarrassment in the first place, Shulevitz is again unreliable. She rests her case on Kenneth Miller's 1999 book, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, which she refers to as "a definitive refutation" of creationism and ID. "It would be hard to overstate the value of Miller's book to anyone attempting a serious consideration of new Christian thought," Shulevitz writes.

Well, it can't be that hard to overstate the value of Miller's book, because that is exactly what Shulevitz does with no apparent strain. Miller is an impressive scientist, and he may prove to be right, for example, in his critique of Michael Behe's argument for "irreducible complexity." But he hasn't yet reduced Behe to quivering jelly—has Shulevitz seen Behe's response to Miller at the Discovery Institute's Web site?—and it is wishful thinking or simply more bad reporting to suggest that the case is closed. Indeed, with the appearance of books such as Dembski's The Design Inference from Cambridge University Press (which prompted a rejoinder from the philosopher of science Elliott Sober), the Intelligent Design debate appears to be more lively than ever.

Critics such as Shulevitz have set the tone in the past for public discourse about evangelicalism, but they don't deserve all the blame. There are all too many voices from within the evangelical world that play right into the reigning stereotypes. A case in point is Gene Edward Veith's tub-thumping response to Wolfe in World magazine, "Whose Mind Needs Opening?" Citing Wolfe's criticism of faith statements at evangelical colleges, Veith asserts that "what progress evangelical colleges have made [in the direction of intellectual vitality] is due directly to their having statements of faith. Their lapses come from trying to get around them."

With that astonishing claim, Veith rewrites the history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism. Know-nothing fundamentalism? Never heard of it. The scandal of the evangelical mind? What scandal?

Now it is certainly true that non-negotiable faith commitments are essential to preserve the identity of evangelical colleges—else what makes them "evangelical"? On that point Veith and I are completely in agreement. But faith statements constructed by this or that body do not have the status of the historic creeds, let alone Scripture itself, and all too often such statements have reflected homespun hermeneutics and local pressures. Many evangelical professors who sign such statements do so in assent to the spirit of what is being affirmed, not the letter.

It is bad enough to deny that there is any tension between such institutional faith statements and intellectual freedom—Christian freedom—but it is truly and wildly perverse to claim that insofar as evangelical colleges have failed in the direction of intellectual vitality, their failure can be attributed to "trying to get around" their statements of faith! Rather than deny the very existence of this tension, I believe it is the calling of evangelical scholars and intellectuals to embrace it, recognizing that we will never resolve it in this earthly life.

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October (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44