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same National Religious Broadcasters meeting at which Dembski spoke: “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.”4 In 1996, Johnson did not pull his punches: “This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science. . . . It’s about religion and philosophy.”5

Enter the Wedge. It was Johnson who introduced the metaphor in his book The Wedge of Truth. “The Wedge of my title is an informal movement of like-minded thinkers in which I have taken a leading role,” he writes. “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.” After naturalism falls, materialism is the next target in their gun sights. “Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings. . . . The attention, publicity, and influence of design theory should draw scientific materialists into open debate with design theorists, and we will be ready.”6 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.”7

The principal exception to my earlier generalization that Intelligent Design creationists are Christians is the author of the Top Ten list of evolutionary “icons,” Jonathan Wells. Wells is a Moonie—a member of the Unification Church and a follower of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who assigned Wells the task of destroying evolution. “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,” Wells confesses. “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.” Wells went out and earned his doctorate and penned The Icons of Evolution.

Beyond the legal and religious angling, a motivation for Intelligent Design theorists to distance themselves from the creationists of old is that no one took the creationists seriously. Dembski, who has no qualms about contesting creationist beliefs of other stripes to further his cause, explained the problem in a 2005 debate with the Young Earth creationist Henry Morris. The first step, he says, involves “dismantling materialism. . . . Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology, which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I’ve found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ. Indeed, once materialism is no longer an option, Christianity again becomes an option.” The objective then is to find a foothold for ridding the world of materialism. In Dembski’s view, “intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.”8

The new creationism may differ in the details from the old creationism, but their ultimate goals run parallel. The veneer of science in Intelligent