Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [54]
Money talks. At the time of this writing there are no fewer than seventy-eight pending legal clashes between Intelligent Design and evolution in thirty-one different states. Most of these have been fueled by the Discovery Institute’s funding program. Fifty books, countless opinion editorials, essays, reviews, and commentaries, even slick documentaries—two broadcast on public television and one shown at the Smithsonian Institution—have also come down the pipeline.13 As a poignant example of what money can buy, at the urging of the Discovery Institute’s public relations firm—the same firm that promoted conservative congressman Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America—in July 2005, Catholic cardinal Christof Schönborn wrote an opinion editorial in The New York Times in which he contradicted Pope John Paul II’s 1996 statement that the theory of evolution is no threat to religion. Schönborn told Catholics that the Church does not accept evolution, a stunning reversal countered by the Vatican itself when Cardinal Paul Poupard held a press conference to declare that Genesis and evolution are “perfectly compatible.”14
The Discovery Institute is about politics, not science. According to its president, Bruce Chapman, described by the Times as “a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative” who draws a hefty salary of $141,000 a year, “we are not going through this exercise just for the fun of it. We think some of these ideas are destined to change the intellectual—and in time the political—world.” He is careful to add that “Fieldstead & Company and the Stewardship Foundation agree, or they would not have given us such substantial funding.”15 The Discovery Institute has become so political, in fact, that the Templeton Foundation—the provider of the largest cash prize available (over $1 million) for “progress in religion”—has withdrawn its support. After giving the Discovery Institute $75,000 for a 1999 conference on Intelligent Design, they have since rejected the institute’s grant proposals. Why? “They’re political—that for us is problematic,” explained the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, Charles L. Harper, Jr., who added that although Discovery has “always claimed to be focused on the science, what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth.”16
The Greater Glory
Although the motives of the proponents of Intelligent Design are secondary to their arguments, these motives are misplaced.
Let us reconsider the motto of the Christian AMDG Foundation—Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam—“To the greater glory of God.” These are stirring words, even emblazoned on the stationery of Pope John Paul II, the same Pope who granted one billion Catholics permission to accept evolution as a reality of nature that poses no threat to religion.
If you are a theist, what could possibly proclaim the greater glory of God’s creation more than science, the instrument that has illuminated more than any other tool of human knowledge the grandeur in this evolutionary view of life? There are questions that remain to be answered, to be sure, and controversies still to be resolved, but they are questions and controversies open to all of us—theists and atheists, conservatives and liberals—because science knows no religious or political boundaries. Science, more than any other tradition, follows the motto erected at the Panama Canal: Aperire Terram Gentibus, “To Open the World to All People.”
WHY SCIENCE CANNOT CONTRADICT RELIGION
The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.
—Pope John Paul II,