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  Noah and the Dinosaurs: On the Trail of Intelligent Design

Noah and the Dinosaurs On the Trail of Intelligent Design

By Michael Scott Moore

Part 2: Part II: Intelligent Design or Intelligent Creationism?

A year or so earlier IDEA had pamphleted Woodruff's final Evolution lecture with a list of sharp questions about Darwinism. Woodruff took the list home and dismissed each question in a brief, brusque paragraph in a flyer of his own, which he handed out after an exam and also gave (later) to me. It was Woodruff's only encounter with IDEA. He didn't care who wrote the questions, although he knew who'd founded the club. Still, Casey was skittish about connecting his name to an exchange of ideological cannon fire with a distinguished professor. So he clammed up in the Jeep. IDEA's free-debate ethic had its limits.

Casey parked in front of the Institute for Creation Research. We found Dembski chatting in a lecture room to a handful of Creationist professors, mostly potbellied men with glasses and large watches who could have been small-town sheriffs or aerospace engineers. They looked weary but genial, sitting in cramped chairs while Dembski stood next to a podium in his clean suit and fielded questions about Design. A man I later identified as Duane Gish, a Creationist who's assaulted Darwinism in public for decades, said he was impressed and pleased with Dembski's work, though he did wish the young man would come around to a young-earth position. Dembski was noncommittal. The only ground he gave to such blandishments was, "I think we're all committed to Design." They shared stories about the bigotry of mainstream Darwinists; they chuckled over Phillip Johnson's poison pen. (Johnson is a lawyer, not a scientist. His debating skills are considerable.) Dembski answered a few questions about his falling-out with Baylor University, and then the meeting broke up.

Finding ID at a museum for creationism

The Institute for Creation Research was a weird place for Dembski to be. Later it would surprise experts (like Woodruff) that I had seen him there. On the whitewashed office walls hung faded kitschy paintings of the Seven Days of Creation. The Museum dramatized each Day in a series of rooms that were like shabby theater sets. The idea was to make Genesis feel present, palpable. You started in a black chamber -- "Day One: God Creates Heaven and Earth" -- with murals of swirling stardust and a familiar planet. You moved on to other chambers showing the invention of light, the birth of plants and animals, and so on. The text for each Day questioned evidence for the Big Bang (among other modern ideas). Day Seven was a warm room with lush jungle murals where aquariums of fish and beetles and lizards surrounded you like cages in a pet store. This was Eden. The resident Serpent -- a three-foot ball python with a branch to climb -- lived in a corner tank, and hidden speakers piped in birdsong.

The next room showed the Fall. Under glowering red light and soft, discordant music a glass case gave a sample of all the junk and waste of the modern world: a broken test tube, syringes, a cracked rock 'n' roll record. Darwinism, in this world-view, had severed modern people from true Christian faith. We lived in an errant world created by God, and the universe, despite appearances, was ordered and complete; our lives, if we turned to Christ (and rejected everything from modern science and to the United Nations) had meaning.

Maybe the least scientific room at ICR had a painting of Noah's Ark, with not just all the mammals in wooden stalls but also, just visible over a wooden rail, the back of a stegosaurus. Why? Creation Scientists believe Noah must have tried to save at least a few dinosaurs, because giant lizards had no time to evolve, under a young-Earth scheme, before humans.

I saw most of this the following day, when I drove to Santee alone. In the hours before Dembski's speech I was still confused. I'd never heard of Creation Research. I didn't know the Institute was the base for a re-education project in America, with a network of Christian radio stations and lobby groups to promote Creationism and oppose Darwinism in public schools. "I don't want to say they're all Okies, or descended from Okies who came here during the Depression and brought their religion with them," Professor Woodruff told me later in his office. "But that's what happened."

Caught in the act

So I still wanted to meet Dembski. I still took him seriously as a scholar. Casey introduced us on the Institute's porch, and there was a tension I didn't understand. Dembski was tightlipped. Casey apologized: "I just thought he'd like to see the Institute. And you said you could talk to him before the speech --"

"You should have told me he was coming," Dembski said.

The trouble had to do with his remarks about Baylor. I was asked not to print any of them. But his Baylor controversy was old news. It was less interesting, in the end, than the simple fact of a man devoted in public to non-fundamentalist "Intelligent Design" spending quality time in Santee. William Dembski turns out to be the mild face of a movement that wants to change American schools for scriptural reasons; and I had caught him in flagrante with Creationists.

Casey was nervous as hell. On our way back to campus he said, "You're not gonna print anything you heard in there, are you?"

So IDEA's openness had hit a brick wall. But I still wanted to join Dembski for dinner. But after swapping cars in a campus lot, and riding in a van full of Intelligent Designers to the place where I'd parked my car, I sensed that I wasn't barred from dinner, but not exactly invited, either.

Dembski brought up the school's architecture. To show I meant no harm, I mentioned my impression of UCSD as a kind of La Défense-in-San-Diego. It seemed like a simple remark on a topic far removed from politics, Darwin, science, or God.

"One of the engineering buildings over on the other end of campus," I said, "even looks like that big square arch."

Morbid silence.

Okay, fine -- maybe they've never been to Paris. These things happen. We reached my car and I heard Casey whisper to his friend Nate, in the back seat. Nate was an Urban Studies major who belonged to IDEA out of sheer enthusiasm, an earnest-looking goateed fellow with a shaved head and large, cowlike brown eyes. He needed a ride to his dorm. I'd offered to drive him, although it meant being excluded from dinner. Maybe Nate and I could talk?

But when we climbed out of the van, Nate said he didn't really live that far away; thanks anyhow, he'd just as soon walk. Everyone waved goodbye. The van drove off, and I found myself alone in the lot with nothing to do for two hours. I had -- by careful design -- been dumped.