Science Club
Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design
by Thomas Woodward
Baker Books, 2006
(224 pages, $14.99, paperback)
reviewed by Louis Markos
The intelligent design (ID) movement has come a long way since Phillip E. Johnson’s crusading book, Darwin on Trial (1991), challenged its readers to question not only the science behind Darwinian (macro) evolution but also the academic-political-media establishment that dismisses as “unscientific” any discussion of origins that does not adhere religiously to the dogma of scientific naturalism.
Johnson’s call was heard by Michael Behe, who, in Darwin’s Black Box (1996), argued that Darwinian (naturalistic) evolution was incapable of assembling complex chemical structures, and by William Dembski, who, in The Design Inference (1998), proposed a method by which researchers could test whether a phenomenon was the result of necessity, chance, or design.
Critical Shift
Still, the movement lacked a historian. Enter Thomas Woodward, who teaches systematic theology and the history of science at Trinity College of Florida, whose 2003 book Doubts About Darwin provided a clear and comprehensive history of the major figures, books, and breakthroughs that have marked the growing success of ID.
In Darwin Strikes Back, he explores the animosity that ID has provoked from the academy and the media. He carefully documents how its critics have changed their tactics since 2000, shifting from ridicule andcondescension to outright attack and accusation, attempting to undercut ID’s strong scientific foundation while associating ID with theocracy, witch trials, and the end of progress. No longer willing (or able) to ignore the arguments of ID, they have grown increasingly dishonest and uncivil.
The charge that ID is religion disguised as science was, of course, raised against Johnson, but the “religion, not science” label, used sporadically in the 1990’s, became [after 2000] a vehement first volley in almost every rhetorical encounter between the two sides. Often it was closely tied to the charge that many adherents of ID theory were known to be “religious” or, even more rhetorically poisonous, “fundamentalists.”
In God, the Devil, and Darwin (2004), for example, an Oxford University Press book praised by Science as a “cogent and well-argued alarum” that “deftly skewers the scientific pretensions of intelligent design creationists,” historian of science Niall Shanks declared that “a culture war is currently being waged in the United States by religiousextremists who hope to turn the clock of science back to medieval times.” This war is an important fragment of a much larger rejection of the secular, rational, democratic ideals of the Enlightenment upon which the United States was founded. The chief weapon in this war is a version of creation science known as Intelligent Design Theory. . . . At the fat end [of ID’s wedge strategy] lurks the specter of fundamentalist Christian theocracy.
According to Woodward, one of the key players in the fight against ID’s “fundamentalist takeover” is Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), whose “goal is not only to warn the pro--evolution constituency of these threats but to seek to block and thwart them at every turn.” As a typical example of the extent of her efforts, he documents how, along with the ACLU, she pressured a Washington state high-school superintendent into prohibiting a biology teacher from bringing into his classroom information critical of Darwinism, even though that information had appeared in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals.
ID Strikes Back
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on evolution from the online archives
23.6—November/December 2010
Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas
The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage
22.6—July/August 2009
on a Noble Defense Doomed by Darwinian Materialism by John G. West
22.8—November/December 2009
Looking for Beauty & Justice 150 Years After Darwin’s Classic by Charles Taliaferro
more from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
on Properly Rendering Things to Caesar & to God by Peter J. Leithart
29.5—Sept/Oct 2016
on the Loss of True Community & Rising Political Desperation by Karl D. Stephan
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
