[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.]
Timing of the Centre for Intelligent Design
The launch of a “new” Intelligent Design organisation in 2010 has the touch of absurdity about it. Intelligent Design is basically dead and the leading proponents cut and ran five years or so back. The only journalists in the UK that take it seriously are Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens and Christopher Booker, none of whom is even remotely science graduates.
Phillips is a populist and now very right wing journalist who writes for the middlebrow Daily Mail. Her handling of the MMR “controversy” means nobody in science can take her seriously. Her only degree is in English. Booker is some what of an oddball that's drifted around journalism for years – mostly with middle brow publications. His degree is in history. Hitchens writes for the middlebrow Sunday Mail. He's an ex-Trotskyite, who still appears to be an ideologue, and has a third class honours degree in politics.
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Even a cursory knowledge of Intelligent Design would show that it is a scam concocted to get round two US legal cases (McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education 1982; Edwards v. Aguillard 1987; the latter reached the Supreme Court) which confirmed that creationism could not be taught in school science lessons. The accidental leak of the Discovery Institute's top secret Wedge document decade later confirmed the obvious, that the real objectives of the movement was social re-engineering along deeply conservative fundamentalist religious lines. The 2005 Dover bench trial in the USA confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that Intelligent Design is not a scientific position at all.
However, even before the Dover trial, the Intelligent Designers had lost the public relations battle with the media. The seminal event was the 2005 “Kansas Kangaroo Court” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_evolution_hearings) a Discovery Institute-backed mock trial of evolution by the Kansas State Board of Education (then controlled by religious fundamentalists). The media saw through the entire scam. They did that without even listening to the scientists (who boycotted the hearings).
Intelligent Design is religious. All the people behind it are religious fundamentalists. Anyone in the UK should be deeply disturbed that the people behind Truth in Science pushing Intelligent Design are hard line Biblical literalists who think the world is 6,000 years old and the Noah's Ark tale is true. All of the people we have identified as involved in C4ID are, likewise, Calvinistic Protestants.
The objective of the people behind Intelligent Design is to get it into schools as part of the objective of re-engineering society along fundamentalist (and deeply conservative) religious lines. A theocracy, in effect, with them in charge. It is no coincidence that one of the people involve in C4ID is also aiming to get Christians elected into office and another is a past politician.
Their backgrounds in science are irrelevant and they have no support amongst British scientists. In the key fields of evolutionary biology and geology, there are no practising scientists in the UK that support Intelligent Design. Not one. Messrs Longlois and Loose are not scientists at all. Messrs Galloway and Nevin are medical scientists where evolutionary biology is largely irrelevant and Noble is a former civil service administrator and school teacher (albeit with a largely irrelevant PhD in chemistry).
Navigate Your Way Around This Report
First Page: Centre for Intelligent Design Executive Summary
Introduction to the Centre for Intelligent Design
Previous page: How Many People are Behind the Centre for Intelligent Design?
This page: Timing of the Centre for Intelligent Design
Next Page: 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
Centre for Intelligent Design's Headquarters
Supporting the Show – Messrs Michael Behe, Steve Fuller and Geoff Barnard
Miscellaneous Intelligence
