Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds

This is a book in favor of intelligent design – of the idea of creationism – which I’ve historically been very skeptical of. The promise is right there in the title: Darwinism, or naturalistic evolution, is at odds with Christianity and must be “defeated.”

The author is a law professor at at UC Berkeley (or was – he died a couple years ago). He was very active in the Intelligent Design movement.

In particular, he pioneered with became to be known as The Wedge Strategy, which was a plan to “drive a wedge” into Darwinism and get Intelligent Design taught in school. This movement was responsible for the “Teach the Controversy” campaign, which postulated that there was a “controversy” about evolution vs Creationism and schools were obligated to explain both sides.

The book is extremely well-written. Very clear, very concise.

But…he never really gets to the point he promised. I feel like he danced around the topic by discussing the politics of it and his frustration at media bias against creationism (for example, he spends an entire chapter talking about the movie Inherit the Wind). There’s a lot of complaining about the state of the world and the media. He very rarely drifts into actual counterarguments.

It’s the like the entire book is a “meta-argument,” not the argument itself. It’s about “defeating Darwinism,” but doesn’t actually try to do it. (It’s like Tenacious D writing a Tribute to the greatest song in the world, or One Direction singing about the Best Song Ever without ever naming the subject of the song.)

Also, he’s pretty selective about how he defines “evolution.” He uses the terms “Darwinism” and “naturalism” to pigeonhole evolution as something devoid of God – a pure natural process that created us from nothing and is responsible for the complexity of the world of today. (To be fair: this is the literal definition of naturalism.)

The other side of that coin is the idea that evolution was initiated and guided by a higher power. He says this:

A God-guided process is not what modern science educators mean by “evolution,” however. They are absolutely insistent that evolution is an unguided and mindless process, and that our existence is therefore a fluke rather than a planned outcome.

That feels a little “strawman-ish” to me? I think there are a lot of people (like me) who feel like evolution is the how but God is the why. This argument, he feels, is actually just Creationism by a different name.

It’s a short book, and I’m glad I read it. It makes me want to read the other books he’s written on the topic.