The word creationism, coined in 1868 in opposition to what was then called Darwinism or evolutionism, had fallen on hard times. The proponents of a theory faithfully attributing the origin of matter to God, "the creator," were seemingly overwhelmed by the theory put forward by Charles Darwin and bolstered with much evidence by 20th century scientists. As a result, the noun creationism (like its predecessor, teleology, the study of purposeful design in nature) gained a musty connotation while evolutionism modishly lost its -ism.
Then along came the phrase intelligent design, and evolution had fresh linguistic competition. Though the phrase can be found in an 1847 issue of Scientific American and in an 1868 book, it was probably coined in its present sense in Humanism, a 1903 book by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller: "It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design."
The phrase lay relatively dormant for nearly a century. "The term intelligent design came up in 1988 at a conference in Tacoma, Wash., called Sources of Information Content in DNA," recalls Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, who was present at the phrase's re-creation. "Charles Thaxton referred to a theory that the presence of DNA in a living cell is evidence of a designing intelligence. We weren't political; we were thinking about molecular biology and information theory. This wasn't stealth creationism. The phrase became the banner that we rallied around throughout the early 1990s. We wanted to separate ourselves from the strict Darwinists and the creationists."
At about that time, the traditional creationists took up the phrase. "We are a Christian organization and use the term to refer to the Christian God," says John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, California "The modern intelligent design movement looks at Dr. Phillip E. Johnson as its founder.... His book, Darwin on Trial, kind of started it all in the early '90s. We were using intelligent design as an intuitive term: a watch implies a watchmaker." (That mechanical analogy was first used by the philosopher William Paley in his 1802 book, Natural Theology, a pre-Darwinian work holding that the complexity of nature implies an intelligent creator -- namely, God.)
The marketing genius within the phrase -- and the reason it now drives many scientists and educators up the walls of academe -- is in its use of the adjective intelligent, which intrinsically refutes the longstanding accusation of anti-intellectualism. Although the intelligent agent referred to is Divine with a capital D, the word's meaning also rubs off on the proponent or believer. That's why intelligent design appeals to not only the DNA-driven Discovery Institute complexity theorists but also the traditional God's-handiwork faithful.
This banner floating over two disparate armies challenging evolutionary theory has the Darwinist scientific establishment going ape. Leonard Krishtalka, a professor at the University of Kansas, lumped the armies together last month in a widely quoted definition of the ID movement as "nothing more than creationism in a cheap tuxedo." Reached by my researcher, Aaron Britt, Krishtalka added: "It's a sophisticated camouflage of Genesis-driven creationism. Intelligent design sounds scientific, and they couch it as science instead of religion. It's frighteningly Orwellian." Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says: "Whether or not there is or was an intelligent designer is not a scientific question. It's not an alternative to evolution. What they are trying to do is get religion in the science classroom."
RSS