[Links to the main sections of this long report on the Centre for Intelligent Design are given at the bottom of this page. If you want to disagree, discuss, add to or comment on the research, feel free to do so on our community forum. That's what it's there for.]
by Roger Stanyard © 2010
In this section we look at some other individuals and organisations involved in the launch of the Centre for Intelligent Design. This is not an exhaustive list; there are a couple of people not detailed here who appear to have had a role in launching the Centre. We also have no idea where the money is coming from to pay Noble.
As we long ago established, there is an interlocking network of creationist activists in Britain that come together when common interests call. We suspect that some of the people in this network are also involved in C4ID.
The Centre for Intelligent Design launched through a lecture tour of the UK by Discovery Institute senior fellow Professor Michael Behe with Professor Steve Fuller also involved in the last of the venues. The tour took place in November 2010 (see http://www.darwinordesign.org.uk for details). It's an odd combination; Fuller isn't even remotely a scientist and Behe's views on Intelligent Design are somewhat odd even by the standards of the movement. The creationist and Truth in Science activist Dr Geoff Barnard was also involved in the tour. Our report on the Leamington Spa event (see Michael Behe in Britain) suggests that the young earth creationism of Genesis Agendum was being pushed during the tour.
We at the BCSE attended two of the events and our associates a third (Leamington Spa, Bournemouth and Glasgow) and the full reports can be found in our report Michael Behe in Britain and Michael Behe in Britain Part 2
The venues were in Oxford (not Oxford University but Oxford Brookes University, the former Oxford Polytechnic), Cambridge University (presumably not at the request of the university), Glasgow Caledonian University (a former polytechnic), North Leamington High School (a secondary school), Bournemouth (at what looks to be a college of further education), Kensington Temple (a fundamentalist Elim Pentecostal church), Westminster Chapel (a very fundamentalist and creationist church) and Nevin's Brethren Church in Belfast.
The Westminster Chapel event was hosted by the evangelical Premier Christian Radio. The latter also interviewed Michael Behe. However it is not a fundamentalist radio channel in the mode, say, of many American Christian radio and TV channels. For starters, it's up market. If its popular community forum is anything to go by, a large proportion of its audience is strongly opposed to creationism and Intelligent Design.
Westminster Chapel, always a strong hold of ultra-evangelicalism, is strongly creationist and it has repeatedly been used as a venue by leading young earth creationists such as Andy McIntosh of Truth in Science. In April 2010 he recently gave the Michael Faraday Creation Lecture, the name clearly being a ploy to give McIntosh's bogus science an air of credibility to the gullible.
Such ploys are a standard creationist trick. There isn't any evidence to show that Faraday, if he were alive today, would agree with anything McIntosh says about creationism. Faraday simply did not know about what we know about science today - not by a very long margin. The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, supports and agrees with evolutionary biology and mainstream geology. It was its director, Denis Alexander that McIntosh, Norman Nevin, Greg Haslam, Geoff Barnard and pals aggressively attacked in Should Christians Embrace Evolution?: Biblical and Scientific Responses after Alexander said they could in Creation and Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?.
Of course McIntosh's Truth in Science is on public record as claiming it intends to expose as "charlatans" those it disagrees with about science - presumably this accounts for the attack by Nevin, McIntosh and pals and the use of Faraday's name in McIntosh's creationist lecture. It would all be very sordid if it didn't sound like something out of Monty Python's Life of Brian with McIntosh, Nevin, Barnard, Haslam, Reg and pals spitting "splitter!" at Alexander.
Westminster Chapel's pastor is Should Christians Embrace Evolution? contributor Greg Haslam who is, needless to say, a young earth creationist - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7613403.stm
Then there is the issue of Kensington Temple in London as a venue for Behe's tour. This church isn't new to Intelligent Design and creationism either. On the section of this report on Peter Loose, we detail his involvement in both the Elim Pentecostal movement in Britain and his organisation of a 2004 tour of Britain by Discovery Institute head and AIDs denier Phillip Johnson and notorious Institute for Creation Research sometimes young earth creationist Andrew Snelling
The Johnson and Snelling tour of the UK, which involved 26 venues, was backed by the Elim Pentecostal movement in Britain. You can find some details here. Of course, in bringing along the (sometimes) young earth creationist Snelling, Johnson shot himself in the head by showing that intelligent Design is religious but that didn't see to sink in to the more gullible.
Kensington Temple is a huge Elim Pentecostal church, especially when its associated churches across London are taken into account. It dwarfs Westminster Chapel in terms of its congregation numbers (they total, perhaps 20 times more).
[Ed. comment: Kensington Temple's [[web site -> http://www.kt.org/media/] on 30th November 2010 listed Behe's "presentation" Darwin or Design as a sermon given at 2.30 pm on 21st November 2010. However the link to its audio recording was broken. So we don't know if Behe was preaching Intelligent Design as religion or giving a "scientific" presentation. The difference is very, very important as the Discovery Institute, of which Behe is a senior fellow, says that it is science and not religion.]
Perhaps one of the most disturbing venues for Behe's tour was the Crescent Church (http://www.crescentchurch.org/churchlife/sermons/index.php) in Belfast's University district, one of the few parts of Belfast that isn't segregated. Northern Ireland is Europe's creationist capital. See our huge reports on the Caleb Foundation and Update on Northern Ireland for example. Creationism is deeply politicised there and the university (Queen's) is the only one in Europe that we are aware of which has a creationist society.
Those "dreary steeples" of Down and Armagh. Norman Nevin's Crescent Church - a centre of attack on science in Belfast's unsegregated University district.
The Brethren Crescent Church is, of course, Norman Nevin's church; he's a lay preacher there. It's popular as well, even amongst students. Nowadays it is understood to attract congregations measured in the low hundreds mark but the building is believed to have a capacity of around 1,000 or more.
Northern Ireland is a province where alleged Christians have been hating and killing other alleged Christians for centuries. It's very much the sort of place where people edit dreary books called Should Christians Embrace Evolution?: Biblical and Scientific Responses attacking other Christians for being charlatans or splitters. As CS Lewis once commented, he never met a Christian until he left Ulster.
One wonders what Lewis would have thought had he met Nevin's young earth creation pal, serial libeller and obsessive Pastor David Anderson, dismissed by Richard Dawkins as a twerp. But then, Stormin' Norman tells us that Intelligent Design has nothing to do with religion, no siree Bob. Nice people! See this and this and this unfunny, autistic invective.
The Crescent Church is the main Brethren church in Northern Ireland and has attracted creationist speakers in the past, such as Monty White of Answers in Genesis. It is very fundamentalist, describing itself as "Bible-based" - usually a euphemism for Biblical literalism.
However one looks at the list of venues for Behe's tour, they are basically not those of high status organisations and institutions in the scientific or intellectual arenas. That three of them are fundamentalist religious churches mocks the Centre for Intelligent Design's bogus claim that Intelligent Design is not about religion.
Five years after the Dover trial, both C4ID and Michael Behe have desperately being trying to play down the Intelligent Design movement losing spectacularly there. This was one of Behe's consistent themes throughout his tour but Alastair Noble was playing it down beforehand. It's as if Noble was preparing the ground for Behe:
“Well it’s a very peculiar thing when scientific judgements are subcontracted to courts, and you will know that in Britain and in Northern Ireland courts get things wrong. These are not decisions that are settle by courts, you have decide on the basis of the evidence that you have. I suppose that what courts can do is rule on the consensus, but that is not the same thing as ruling on the evidence.” Alastair Noble talking to Everyday Ethics BBC Radio Ulster 10th October 2010
It's idiotic bullshit of course. The courts have centuries of experience and expertise in dealing with evidence. That's way creationists keep losing, time and time again, in the courts. A judge is not expected to be an expert witness in his own court but is expected to rule on the evidence of those that are.
The Dover trial court (and prior courts including the Supreme Court) was not asked to undertake a scientific judgement. They were asked to make a legal judgement and the Discovery Institute and its allies, the deeply conservative, religious Thomas Moore Law Center, had been pushing for years for such a legal judgement on Intelligent Design to go before the courts. See
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/04/science/sciencespecial2/04design.html That's how it got there. The Center offered its legal services free of charge to the defence if the latter went ahead with pushing Intelligent Design.
They lost not because the courts were somehow incapable, out of depth or incompetent but because the defence team (which included Behe and Fuller as well as the Thomas Moore Law Center) was incompetent and seriously out of its depth. Two prime expert witnesses for the defence, the Discovery Institute's Bill Dembski and Stephen Meyer, cut and ran without ever giving evidence. The defendants, the Dover School Board, were so stupid it appears that they didn't even understand what Intelligent Design was. They also lied repeatedly under oath.
All this, of course, is very well documented. The Dover trial was one of the landmark court cases of the last 100 years. Books have been written about and films and TV programmes produced about it. In the USA it made the tiny rural town of Dover a household name although the court case was held the Pennsylvania state capital Harrisburg.
But Alastair Noble would make these claims, wouldn't he, because his star launch pal, Michael Behe, spectacularly failed at Dover.
“Consensus” doesn't enter into it. There was no “consensus” in the Dover trial. It was a bench trial (no jury amongst which to have a consensus). There was no “subcontracting” of science decisions to courts. Dover was a civil case initiated by private citizens (intelligent and informed parents who don't want the sort of crapola promoted by Alastair Noble taught to their children). This was not about scientific research in academia or discussions between intellectuals about the forefront of knowledge. It was a dispute between a school board pushing creationism (and underwritten by the Thomas Moore Law Center) and parents whose children were affected.
Indeed, there is strong evidence that the Discovery Institute wanted the whole thing to go to the Supreme Court.
Alastair Noble's pals deliberately used the courts to pick a fight with parents and lost through their own incompetence and stupidity.
There isn't the slightest evidence that the judge (John Jones) was either “biased” or incompetent. The creationists and Intelligent Designers have been trying to smear him (and the judicial process) ever since they lost (indeed, Jones received death threats after his landmark ruling). Alastair Noble is just another on a long list of libellers and smearers desperately trying to hide that Intelligent Design is a religious position.
If, of course, the issue was one of a biased or incompetent judge, the Intelligent Designers/creationists could either have gone to appeal (they didn't) or forced a similar trial elsewhere (they didn't do that either). Instead they have since avoided going to the courts like it were a dose of syphilis; coming up instead with a new scam called “teach the controversy”. That hasn't worked either as there is no controversy.
Of course, Messrs Behe and Fuller know all about the Dover fiasco as they were expert witnesses for the side that spectacularly lost. Strange, isn't it, that Noble has picked himself two of the losers to launch his scientific freak show.
Indeed, Behe's credibility was so shot to pieces by Professor Ken Miller, a fellow Catholic acting for the plaintiffs (winning side), that his university (Lehigh) has publicly disowned him. It should not come as a surprise then that Behe has not written any books or papers on Intelligent Design for the last three years. There's no longer any money in it.
But then, when one is desperate to justify one's cause, Professor Behe has some advantages. He's not a foaming at the mouth Calvinist; he is a deeply conservative Catholic representing an obscure wing of conservative Catholicism that has a creationist bent. Behe does accept evolutionary biology (to a degree) and the old age of the earth, which provide a suitable smokescreen to hide the real beliefs of many a person in his movement. Still, by Norman Nevin's definition, he is probably, like Denis Alexander, not a real Christian. Heck, he's not even a Prod.
Professor Steve Fuller provides another smokescreen for the real beliefs of the Intelligent Design movement. He's a full tenured professor of sociology at Warwick University in the UK (although he's American by origin). Fuller claims to be a religious agnostic. He was educated by Jesuits in his childhood.
However, Fuller's credibility was also shot to pieces as a result of the Dover trial. Because he is a sociologist/philosopher with no background in science and (possibly wrongly) is seen as a post-modernist, no scientist takes a blind bit of notice of his opinions on Intelligent Design. His position isn't helped by his justification of his testimony to the Dover trial.
His book "Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism" was utterly panned in the Guardian where Steven Poole wrote: "The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name."
The book is unreadable. I've tried to read it twice and it's all over the place. It jumps about dramatically so there is no consistency in thought or argument. It's impossible to follow what Fuller is saying. It is a rant.
However, there is one telling comment in it which suggests that Fuller realised how badly wrong he had got it at Dover. He openly accuses the judge (John Jones) of being incapable of running a fair trial, stating that the trial was doomed from the start because Jones is a Lutheran who doesn't go to church every Sunday. Fuller, though, simply avoided justifying this libellous smear on the judge's competence.
I must admit I found that cowardly but I'm not an American who can't stand loss of face.
As part of the Behe tour, those attending were offered a copy of the DVD "Unlocking the Mystery of Life” produced by Illustra Media. This was the same DVD used in the launch campaign of Truth in Science and, of course, makes no mention of young earth creationist despite all the people in Truth in Science being YECers.
One wonders just who C4ID thinks it is trying to fool. One also wonders whether C4ID is clearing surplus TiS stock. The video is hardly an objective look at the issues. Virtually all of the “scientists” and other people that appear in it are fellows of the Discovery Institute. Despite the DVDs slick presentation, none of the participants has since gone on to produce one iota of “Intelligent Design” science. Not a single, peer reviewed, paper.
Dr Geoff Barnard, a biochemist, is openly a young earth creationist. He's been publicly pushing young earth creationism for years through an organisation called Genesis Agendum (http://www.genesisagendum.org.uk) and, more recently, as an activist in Truth in Science. If anyone had any doubts that Intelligent Design is the same as creationism, Barnard's participation in the Behe tour should immediately dispel them. Barnard is a biochemist who has now, it appears, retired and lives in Israel. As far as the BCSE is aware, Barnard has never publicly said that he accepts Intelligent Design (as in “creation in a cheap tuxedo”). He's an out and out young earth creationist (see http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/bios/g_barnard.asp).
If anyone is in any doubts about Geoff Barnard's ambitions about undermining mainstream science for religious reasons, the Genesis Agendum web site makes matters very, very clear: It intends to provide a “Virtual Museum as a resource for science teachers and students. Know as The World Around Us, its objective is to encourage discussion of evolutionary theory in the light of recent [totally unspecified] discoveries. The museum presents evidence from science and history, suggesting that there is a paradigm crisis [only in the imagination of creationists] in an evolutionary world-view [worldview is a hard right wing American term such that either one is a fundamentalist or one has the wrong worldview]. This is the first phase of the museum...”
See our report on Behe's presentation at Leamington Spa Michael Behe in Britain where we were told that this young earth creationist web site was been pushed by the Intelligent Designers to school children.
Barnard is, of course, one of the contributing authors to Norman Nevin's book Should Christians Embrace Evolution? However, it isn't clear to us what sect or denomination Barnard belongs to. He has a master's degree in theology. It is believed that he now lives in Israel. His involvement in Biblical Creation Ministries, an offshoot of the Biblical Creation Society, almost certain means he's not a practising Jew. Barnard is also involved in Truth in Science.
111 David and Jonathan
Our report Michael Behe in Britain on Michael Behe's November 2010 tour of Britain promoting Intelligent Design identifies two other individuals that appear to be involved with the Centre for Intelligent Design. One goes by the name of "Jonathan M". He appears to have been at several if not all of the presentations by Behe and posted reports on blogs associated with the Discovery Institute. From his grammar, he may be American.
The other was Michael Behe's minder during to tour, someone in his thirties or early forties called David who described himself as a lawyer. He is English (we spoke with him) and he appears to be an activist for the cause.
If anyone has any further details of these two, the BCSE would be very interested to hear from you - contacts us at committee@bcseweb.org.uk
Navigate your way round this report using the following links:
First Page: Centre for Intelligent Design Executive Summary
Introduction to the Centre for Intelligent Design
How Many People are Behind the Centre for Intelligent Design?
Timing of the Centre for Intelligent Design
Who Runs and Organises the Centre for Intelligent Design?
Professor Norman Nevin OBE
Dr Alastair Noble
Dr David Galloway
John Langlois OBE, Centre for ID Guernsey
Peter Loose
Centre for Intelligent Design Strategy
The Channel Islands Connection
Previous Page:Centre for Intelligent Design's Headquarters
Current Page: Supporting the Show – Messrs Michael Behe, Steve Fuller and Geoff Barnard
Next Page: Miscellaneous Intelligence
