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Noah and the Dinosaurs

On the Trail of Intelligent Design

By Michael Scott Moore

Intelligent Design presents itself as a middle way between Creationism and Darwinism. But is it? Turns out, the road to ID, while it may profess to be open to all, is riddled with Biblical detours.

One rule of fundamentalists is that they hate to be interviewed. William Dembksi doesn't. He has a long face and glasses, wears knife-edged slacks and sober ties; he mixes fashion sense with a relaxed wonkishness that announces dedication to reason rather than the Bible-thumping fanaticism he's been accused of at Baylor University, in Texas, where he once led an anti-Darwinist think tank called the Polanyi Center. He talks to radio and newspapers and seems wholly uncontroversial. But Dembski is also a leading name in Intelligent Design, a young movement of scientists who want to question Darwinism and prove, if they can, that the universe shows evidence of creation by some transcendent mind.

Whose mind? They won't say. Dembski gives whole lectures without using the "G-word." His field is math and logic; all he wants to do (he says) is distinguish design from randomness in nature. His book "The Design Inference" offers a test for telling a random system, like weather, from systems that couldn't logically develop without a master plan. The basic idea is to prove that a bird's wing, or even a bacterial flagellum -- never mind a human being -- is too complex to evolve at random, the way Darwin proposed. Dembski and "Design" scholars in other fields, like the biochemist Michael Behe, accept that the universe is millions of years old; they're Christians but not fundamentalists; they don't think the earth was formed in a week. But they do believe Darwinism is a kind of liberal-humanist religion, with its share of orthodoxies, shibboleths, and myths.

I saw Dembski speak in 2001 at my alma mater, UC San Diego. UCSD in that year had the only student club in America devoted to intelligent design. It was called the IDEA Club -- "Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness" -- and its website invited atheists and believers, evolutionist professors and young-Earth creationists, Phys.-Ed. majors and Hindus -- absolutely anyone -- to come in and wrangle over Darwin. Their openness impressed me. Disagreement and debate were part of the fun, at least in their online manifesto. They just wanted to talk. Sites like "The San Diego Humanist," by contrast, published mean-minded, antireligious sarcasm. "We atheists and humanists and freethinkers have all been made to feel pretty much apart from the rest of the world around us, haven't we?" a woman called Lucia K. B. Hall had said in a speech posted on the Humanist site in late 2000. Religious people see humanists as, "Aliens," she declared. "Sci-fi horrors. Bug-eyed monsters. Multi-tentacled nightmares dripping green slime that want to rape their wives and husbands and eat their children."

In search of open mindedness

This kind of whining made me wonder if college in America had somehow changed. Fundamentalist Christians had gone quiet since the days of Reagan and the first George Bush. Maybe it was now humanists like this Hall woman who were hateful and intolerant. Dembski claimed to be the victim of narrow-minded, materialistic thinkers who lacked the mental equipment to see his revolutionary theories in full color. Well, I thought, suppose he's onto something? I'd read about a theory in physics -- unrelated to Design -- which said the universe obeyed laws from a simpler, lower dimension, like a credit-card hologram throwing a 3-D image from information coded on a flat surface. The universe, in this model, is a projection, which we can fully untangle only with information that (like God) lies off our empirical map. Maybe Dembski had something to contribute in this direction. I was charged with curiosity. So on the morning of his speech, I boarded a plane for San Diego.

UCSD is built on the cliffs above Blacks Beach in La Jolla. It's known for a world-class biology department as well as its collection of hyper-modern buildings. To me the campus works as a survey of bad ideas in concrete and glass from the last thirty years. It reminds me of La Défense, Paris' modern-architecture ghetto. UCSD's new engineering building even had a square glass arch that resembled the famous arch at La Défense. A neon installation called the Seven Deadly Sins, flashing names of virtues and sins in multicolored neon, was commissioned for the roof of the university theater -- where virtue and vice were dramatized -- but homeowners near the La Jolla Playhouse had complained, so now the words LUST and AVARICE and CHARITY flashed nightly over the heads of engineering students from the top of an earthquake-research building. The whole campus has this futuristic, thrown-together quality. It's not intelligently designed.

A few miles east, in the near-desert town of Santee, a long, white, stucco building called the Institute for Creation Research squats along a barren frontage road. This is the North American headquarters of fundamentalist Creationism. Its faculty of Ph.D.-laden scientists and mathematicians all believe literally and cheerfully in Genesis and every other book of the Bible. They teach and promote Creation Science, which is not really science but an odd project to chop and reassemble scientific evidence until it agrees with the Bible. Job lived during the Ice Age, in the Institute's view. Noah's flood wiped out the dinosaurs. The scholars at ICR give weak support for these claims in a series of little fliers. They publish new research in non-peer-reviewed journals and invite school groups to tour their Creation Museum.

"I am not a fundamentalist"

Dembski and his Intelligent-Design friends reject young-earth Creationism. So many critics have accused the I.D. movement of being Creationism in disguise (including the late Stephen Jay Gould) that Dembski and Behe and members of the IDEA Club have to repeat, over and over, that they're not fundamentalists. "I do not regard Genesis as a scientific text," writes Dembski, in what amounts to a position paper. "I have no vested theological interest in the age of the earth or the universe." He agrees the earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe about 14 billion. "Even so, I refuse to be dogmatic here. I'm willing to listen to arguments to the contrary." Again, that open mind.

I'd arranged to meet both Dembski and the IDEA Club's president at a campus café before the speech. The club president was an enthusiastic earth-sciences student named Casey Luskin, with short dark hair, heavy eyebrows, and a nervous beaming smile. He seemed pleased to meet me but a little put out. Dembski couldn't make the interview. He'd been sidetracked to Santee for a casual talk with a group that was curious about his ideas. Did I have any extra time? Could I drive out there with him? Sure I could. We climbed into Casey's clean white Jeep and headed east, toward the Institute for Creation Research.

Casey talked, and drove, in energetic bursts. I wanted to know why my alma mater had the distinction of being the only school in the nation to host an I.D. club, and Casey gave me the story. He and two friends had founded IDEA in May 1999 after Phillip Johnson, a father of the movement, came to speak on campus. The fierce emotion Casey saw in other students after the speech and during a parallel seminar called "Creation and Evolution" had convinced him the school needed a club. He said IDEA had already tangled, awkwardly, with a prominent UCSD evolutionist named David Woodruff.

"Really?" I said. Woodruff had been a professor of mine. "What happened?"

Sore question. He hesitated.

"I need to think if I want this to be out in the open. It's nothing like -- I feel like we did nothing wrong, in that whole situation, at all ... But if this could turn into something against my professor, I don't want that."

I promised not to turn it into a new scandal. I was just curious. Woodruff was a formidable man. "I'll probably talk to him," I said.

"About this situation?"

"No, just about Intelligent Design." I still had no idea what situation he meant. "What happened, though?"

He started to breathe heavily.

"Could you turn off the recorder for a sec?"