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denial) is that a small but vocal minority of religious fundamentalists misread the theory of evolution as a challenge to their deeply held religious convictions. Make no mistake about it. Creationists do not want equal time. They want all the time. Theirs is a war on evolution in particular and science in general, and they are as fanatical in their zeal as any religious movement of the past millennia. Listen to the voice of Phillip Johnson, the fountainhead of the modern ID movement, at a February 6, 2000, meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in Anaheim, California: “Christians in the twentieth century have been playing defense. They’ve been fighting a defensive war to defend what they have, to defend as much of it as they can. It never turns the tide. What we’re trying to do is something entirely different. We’re trying to go into enemy territory, their very center, and blow up the ammunition dump. What is their ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation.”

Johnson uses another metaphor: a wedge. In his 2000 book The Wedge of Truth, he writes: “The Wedge of my title is an informal movement of like-minded thinkers in which I have taken a leading role. Our strategy is to drive the thin end of our Wedge into the cracks in the log of naturalism by bringing long-neglected questions to the surface and introducing them to public debate.” This is not just an attack on naturalism, it is a religious war against all of science. “It is time to set out more fully how the Wedge program fits into the specific Christian gospel (as distinguished from generic theism), and how and where questions of biblical authority enter the picture. As Christians develop a more thorough understanding of these questions, they will begin to see more clearly how ordinary people—specifically people who are not scientists or professional scholars—can more effectively engage the secular world on behalf of the gospel.”

Finally, in a sermon to the Unification Church Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution, revealed his true motives for studying evolutionary theory: “Father’s [the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.”

Let me be blunt (as if I could be even more). It is not coincidental that ID supporters are almost all Christians. It is inevitable. ID arguments are reasons to believe if you already believe. If you do not, the ID arguments are untenable. But I would go further. If you believe in God, you believe for personal and emotional reasons, not out of logical deductions. IDers, like the creationists of old, are not only Christians, they are mostly male and educated. In an extensive study on why people believe in God, Frank Sulloway and I discovered that the number one reason people give for their belief is the good design of the world. When asked why they think other people believe in God, however, the number one reason offered was emotional need and comfort, with the good design of the world dropping to sixth place. Furthermore, we found that educated men who already believed in God were far more likely to give rational reasons for their belief than were women and uneducated believers. One explanation for these results is that although, in general, education leads to a decrease in religious faith, for those people who are educated and still believe in God there appears to be a need to justify their beliefs with rational arguments.

What is really going on in the ID movement is that highly educated religious men are justifying their faith with sophisticated scientistic arguments. This is old-time religion dressed up in newfangled language. The words change but the arguments remain the same. As Karl Marx once noted: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical