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Where do you see yourself right now as a movement in those stages?

I like to characterize this in terms of an alliteration that begins with P, the letter P, for preposterous, pernicious, possible, and plausible. I think that maybe about ten years ago we were at the preposterous stage.

Now we're at the pernicious stage. There are lots of people saying this is really dangerous, this threatens to overthrow science, these people have to be stopped. The real challenge is to move it from this to getting a fair hearing.

What are you trying to do in The Design Revolution?

I speak in a lot of different venues, mainly colleges and universities, and I find that often the most productive time there is not during my actual talk but afterwards when people ask questions. I thought it would be helpful in trying to move intelligent design from the pernicious to the possible stage, to write a book where I'd address these questions. And so what I did was I collected these questions together and then tried in some short, snappy chapters to answer them.

What is one of the most common questions that needs clarification?

One of the biggest is the difference between intelligent design and creation. Creation is always a doctrine of being, where did the world come from? Intelligent design is not concerned with ultimate origins, it's concerned with how do you explain the arrangement of certain material substances? How do you do that without saying where that stuff came from in the first place?

In what sense are the critics of intelligent design correct in saying that the ultimate conclusion and driving force behind intelligent design is a theistic drive?

Motivations are things held by people, not by theories. Intelligent design, as a scientific project, is trying to come to grips with effective intelligence, if such there be, in biological systems. The practitioners of intelligent design, the creationists, the fundamentalists, or the evangelicals, are they religious people? It seems to me that the question is irrelevant, and if you're going to pose it then I think you also need to pose it for the Darwinists, many of whom are militant atheists.

If you're going to put people on the couch and analyze their motivations, you look at Stephen Jay Gould, at Richard Dawkins, look at these people. Their evolution is serving their ideological end every bit as much as intelligent design may be serving someone else. I'm not sure I see it as a red herring.

Is it hurting the intelligent design movement within the scientific community that it is being embraced and promoted by leading evangelicals and by fundamentalists who want to see changes in school curriculum?

I don't think you've really nailed it down accurately. I'm finding that intelligent design is being accepted well outside any sort of evangelical or Christian mold. I was recently speaking at Oxford University. My sponsors were the Oxford Center for Hindu Studies. They were very much impressed with intelligent design. I'm finding that just about anybody with religious sensibilities who holds to, has some sort of spiritual longing, thinks that there's some sort of meaning or purposiveness behind the world, they're going to be favorably impressed with intelligent design. And they are going to be put off by this materialist bullying which says there's nothing behind the world.

Is intelligent design testable right now within science?

I would say intelligent design is testable, and Darwinian evolution is not testable. Darwin said that for a complex organ to form it would have to form according to a series by a numerous successive slight modifications. And then he said I can't think of anything that couldn't have formed that way. Well of course, if you don't specify a process any more specifically than numerous successive slight modification, then anything might be the result of such a process. The Darwinists assume no burden of evidence of proof as a consequence. And that holds to this day.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48