Discovery Institute: Difference between revisions

Discovery Institute (DI) is a think tank in Seattle, Washington. It focuses on both local and global issues, including the Cascadia Project, which is the development of a balanced, seamless, and expanded transportation system between Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. It is also active in some social conservative issues. Its Center for Science and Culture is a proponent of Intelligent Design. It was founded in 1990 by Bruce Chapman, who had formerly been a fellow of the Hudson Institute, with George Gilder.

Programs

The DI has five main programs which it entitles:

• Technology and Democracy Project
• Center for Science and Culture
• Cascadia Project
• Bioethics Program
• Economics Program

and a further four minor programs:

• Environment
• Religion, Liberty and Public Life
• C.S. Lewis and Public Life
• Education and Community

Position

The Discovery Institute is supportive of the concept of Intelligent Design. However, contrary to accusations by some proponents of evolution, it does not support requiring the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools. Rather, it supports an educational policy on evolution that it calls "Teach the Controversy" that entails presenting to students the scientific evidence for and against evolution. It does take the position that teaching the scientific evidence that supports Intelligent Design does not violate the Constitution, and should therefore be permitted.

Opponents argue that there is no scientific evidence for ID nor is there any against evolution by natural selection. Proponents contend that such a position shows an ignorance of the relevant literature, including Darwin's own works, and suggests an educational policy of censorship.

The Discovery Institute’s “wedge strategy” document [1], which identifies the governing goals of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture as 1). To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies and 2). To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God, was widely circulated via the Internet in 1999. In March 2004 the Institute published a more comprehensive description of its agenda in a document entitled The “Wedge Document”: “So What”? This document details the Center’s plan to oppose the idea that “all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone” and to challenge “false scientific theories” that support scientific materialism. Amongst the theories and ideas targeted are Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, chemical evolutionary theory, “many worlds” cosmologies, behaviourism, strong artificial intelligence and “other physicalist conceptions of mind”, Marxism, and Freudian psychology [2].

One of its programs argues for the relevance of the views of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis to society. The Technology and Democracy Project envisages the need for technology in a modern economy. The Cascadia Project relates to transport in the Seattle area in a Cascadia around the American states of Washington, Oregon and the Canadian province of British Columbia

The Bioethics Program opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human genetic manipulation, human cloning, and the animal rights movement. The Institute uses the language of the religious right.

The Economics Program advocates low taxation and regulation of businesses and individuals as the best way of building a strong economy.

The law and justice program focuses on the American tort legal system, which it believes is creating a strain on the American economy and needs to be reformed.

Center for Science and Culture

The Center for Science and Culture (formerly the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture)[3] is a body of the Discovery Institute which is a leading advocate of intelligent design, the teleological argument for the existence of god based on evidence of design in nature, and asserts that currently accepted explanations for the origin of the universe and of life (eg. the theory of evolution) or inadequate or incorrect. It must be noted that intelligent design is not widely recognised by the scientific community, as it is considered to be a pseudoscientific form of creationism.

The Centre's so-called Wedge strategy came to wide public attention with the distribution of an internal position paper or fund-raising document which outlined the strategy. In essence the strategy appeared to be a plan of action for replacing the naturalistic methodology of science with Intelligent Design. The paper stated in part that:

The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

External links

• Discovery Institute website
• Infidels.org article with further discussion and analysis on the Wedge strategy