In 1998, members of a Seattle nonprofit think tank drafted a secret five-year plan with an ambitious goal: to “defeat scientific materialism” and “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”
By the end of the stated five-year period, the benevolent conspirators had seen much of their goal accomplished. There was widespread public debate with materialist Darwinists. Dozens of books had been published presenting a non-Darwinian alternative theory of life. There was widespread respectful press coverage of their cause, with innumerable supportive op-ed columns in mainstream media, cover stories in the national newsweeklies, and even a widely broadcast PBS documentary. School authorities in 10 states were looking into adopting some or all of the recommendations for high-school science curricula. So well was the campaign going that in 2004, some of the original antimaterialism advocates were confident enough of eventual triumph to predict in detail a complete meltdown of Darwinian science by 2025—the 100th anniversary of the notorious “Monkey Trial” of 1925.
However unlikely their optimism at the time, it looks a great deal more unlikely today. In December, a federal judge presiding over another case of Darwin versus faith in a public-school system handed the antimaterialists a defeat so sweeping—in the form of a judicial decision so detailed and so trenchant—that even the most passionate advocates of faith-based science seem stunned and confused about the future of their cause. They’ll be back. But in this time of their momentary disarray, it seems appropriate to look back over the short but rocketlike rise to media celebrity of the idea called “intelligent design” and the small, dedicated band of true believers who sold the concept to the wider world.
The story begins, so far as the world at large is concerned, on a late January day seven years ago, in a mail room in a downtown Seattle office of an international human-resources firm. The mail room was also the copy center, and a part-time employee named Matt Duss was handed a document to copy. It was not at all the kind of desperately dull personnel-processing document Duss was used to feeding through the machine. For one thing, it bore the rubber-stamped warnings “TOP SECRET” and “NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION.” Its cover bore an ominous pyramidal diagram superimposed on a fuzzy reproduction of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel rendition of God the Father zapping life into Adam, all under a mysterious title: The Wedge.
Curious, Duss rifled through the 10 or so pages, eyebrows rising ever higher, then proceeded to execute his commission while reserving a copy of the treatise for himself. Within a week, he had shared his find with a friend who shared his interest in questions of evolution, ideology, and the propagation of ideas. Unlike Duss, the friend, Tim Rhodes, was technically savvy, and it took him little time to scan the document and post it to the World Wide Web, where it first appeared on Feb. 5, 1999.
The unnamed author of the document wasted no time getting down to his subject. “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Yet little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science.” Such thinkers as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and, above all, Charles Darwin promulgated a “materialistic conception of reality” that “eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and music.”
Not content with bewailing the intelligentsia’s falling away from faith, the author proposed to do something about it. “Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies,” he wrote. He went on to detail a 20-year plan to replace “materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God,” and to replace materialist science with a new scientific paradigm “consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
