Free Republic

CBN.com – SEATTLE, Washington - The Dover, Pennsylvania school board is on trial in the state capitol. Their crime? They wanted to tell high school students once a year that evolution is only a theory. They also wanted to mention an alternate theory: Intelligent Design, or ID. That was too much for some parents. They sued, claiming ID is religious and therefore illegal in school. The judge will decide the case in the next few weeks.So is ID really just religion in disguise? Do both biology and astronomy support ID? And who are these people promoting ID?To answer those questions,...

On October 21, the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a forum titled "Science Wars" that focused on the intelligent design/evolution controversy. Among the participants in the forum were the Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, Richard Thompson, and Mark Ryland, Director of the Discovery Institute's Washington office. During the course of the discussion, Ryland claimed that the Discovery Institute had "never set out to have school boards" teach intelligent design. He was swiftly corrected by Thompson, who held up a copy of the Discovery Institute's "Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curriculum: A Guidebook" by Steven Meyer and David...

Discovery Institute's “Wedge Document”: How Darwinist Paranoia Fueled an Urban Legend In 1999 someone posted on the internet an early fundraising proposal for Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Dubbed the “Wedge Document,” this proposal soon took on a life of its own, popping up in all sorts of places and eventually spawning what can only be called a giant urban legend. Among true-believers on the Darwinist fringe the document came to be viewed as evidence for a secret conspiracy to fuse religion with science and impose a theocracy. These claims were so outlandish that for...

In his Call to Conversation, President David Leebron made the case for increasing Rice’s size. Students are quick to attack any increase in size, because our small size and tight-knit community make Rice great. Unfortunately, size is also one of our weaknesses, as was made obvious to me over the summer when the Discovery Institute — a conservative organization leading the war against evolution, with no relationship to the television network — released a list of 400 scientists who question Darwinism. The “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” stated: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural...

Bob Davidson is a scientist — a doctor, and for 28 years a nephrology professor at the University of Washington medical school. He's also a devout Christian who believes we're here because of God. It was these twin devotions to science and religion that first attracted him to Seattle's Discovery Institute. That's the think tank that this summer has pushed "intelligent design" — a replacement theory for evolution — all the way to the lips of President Bush and into the national conversation. Davidson says he was seeking a place where people "believe in a Creator and also believe in...

Discovery Institute [of Seattle] has filed a public records request with the Ohio State University (OSU) seeking all documents related to Darwinist attacks on OSU doctoral candidate Bryan Leonard. The request was submitted under the Ohio Public Records Act. In June, Leonard's dissertation defense in the area of science education was suddenly postponed after three Darwinist professors [O the horror!] at OSU attacked Leonard's dissertation research because it analyzed how teaching students evidence for and against macroevolution impacted student beliefs. According to a news report in The Columbus Dispatch, the professors admitted at the time that they had not read...

Three years ago, the Ohio Board of Education invited a small but influential Seattle think tank to debate the way evolution is taught in Ohio schools. It was an opportunity for the Discovery Institute to promote its notion of intelligent design, the controversial idea that parts of life are so complex, they must have been designed by some intelligent agent. Instead, leaders of the institute's Center for Science and Culture decided on what they consider a compromise. Forget intelligent design, they argued, with its theological implications. Just require teachers to discuss evidence that refutes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as...

Is Darwin winning the battle, but losing the war? As soon as one challenge to the teaching of evolution is beaten in the courts, another emerges to take its place. The current contender is “intelligent design,” a theory that according to advocates at the Discovery Institute “makes no religious claims, but says that the best natural evidence for life’s origins points to design rather than a process of random mutation and natural selection.”

A pro-Darwin lobbying group is being accused of trying to censor a published and peer-reviewed scientific article that deals favorably with the theory of intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) claims the article by Dr. Stephen Meyer is "substandard science" and should not have been published by the peer-reviewed biology journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. But Dr. John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), says the NCSE has flip-flopped just like a politician. "The refrain of Darwinists up till this point has been intelligent design isn't science...

Premiere evolves into protestFilm argues for expanded scope of science education    By Haley Clark, News Editor    Published: 5/15/2002 Saul Renderfrance The "Icons of Evolution" documentary, which highlights what some scholars regard as problems with a number of pieces of evidence commonly used to support Darwinian evolution, premiered in Third Gwinn Friday night. Friday evening’s premiere of the film "Icons of Evolution" met with dissension from people within and without the bounds of SPU. These dissenters include members of the SPU biology department and a group called Burlington-Edison Committee for Science Education (BECSE). Prior to the event, in the...