Evolution Diary

Found this interesting article by Barbara Forrest, recounting her participation as a expert witness during the Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District Trial.

She was called as a witness because of her co-authorship with Paul R. Gross of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press, 2004) and other publications about ID.

I had two tasks: to demonstrate to Judge Jones that ID is creationism, thus a religious belief, and that Of Pandas and People is a creationist textbook. As part of the evidence for my first task I included the words of two leading ID proponents, Phillip E. Johnson and William Dembski. Under direct examination by Eric Rothschild, I related Johnson’s definition of ID as “theistic realism” or “mere creation,” by which he means “that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology.” To that I added Dembski’s definition: “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” If the judge had heard nothing except these two quotes, he would have had all the evidence he needed that ID’s own leaders regard it as not only creationism but also as a sectarian Christian belief. But I had much more, such as CSC fellow Mark Hartwig’s 1995 Moody Magazine article in which he referred to a 1992 ID conference at Southern Methodist University as a meeting of “creationists and evolutionists,” calling Dembski and Stephen Meyer “evangelical scholars.” [29] During these early years, when they needed money and supporters, ID proponents openly advertised both their religiosity and their creationism.

Read the whole article at Skeptical Inquirer

Related stories

Ken Miller’s Evolution lecture videos after the Trial 

BBC Documentary about the Dover Trial