Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross. Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 1951 5742 7. Hardcover, $40.00

Earth scientists will soon be wishing for the old days when creationists held such distinctive positions as believing Earth is only a few thousand years old, a worldwide flood produced all sedimentary rocks, and that people and dinosaurs knew each other. Many dramatic battles were fought against this pseudoscience, and we learned much about the politics of science, education and religion in a constitutional democracy, but we did not have to do much deep thinking. “Young Earth Creationism,” as we now call it, is so fractured with contradictions, misconceptions and delusions that it sometimes seems a self-parody. We learned how to defend science against such nonsense in the courts and public schools, and we won every case.

These legal and political victories against creationism, though, may have misled us. Despite all the resources devoted to public education, nearly half of all Americans still believe evolution never happened. The political energy in this population, along with new leadership tested in the conflict, has produced a reformed creationism far more sophisticated than the old.

Under the euphemism “intelligent design” (ID), creationism is once again rattling state legislatures and alarming those who care about the integrity of science education. Creationism’s Trojan Horse is a thorough documentation of the political rise and strategic goals of the ID movement. It is critical intelligence we need now.

“The wedge” is the name that proponents of ID gave to the movement, which started in 1992 under the leadership of Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor who had recently written a book called Darwin on Trial. As philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross recount in Creationism’s Trojan Horse, a key event in the origin of the wedge was the thorough dismantling of Johnson’s arguments by Stephen Jay Gould in an issue of Scientific American. Thirty-nine academics (none of them geologists) circulated a letter defending Johnson’s work; many later became charter members of the ID movement. From the beginning, this movement had a religious purpose, even as it worked to obscure it by avoiding references to the supernatural or scripture.

The key to success was going to be a deceptively secular strategy in which scholars would sow doubts about evolutionary theory throughout the public square, “wedging” themselves into school curricula by appealing to issues of fairness and claiming the mantle of persecuted thinkers. Promoting an agenda beyond anti-evolution and a nod to the possibility of an “intelligent designer” would split the movement along ideological and religious lines, a mistake the traditional creationists made often.

Forrest and Gross show in detail how the wedge of ID has grown in the past decade through careful politics and the patient marshaling of resources. The movement’s first success was the shocking 1999 decision of the Kansas Board of Education to nearly remove evolution from the state’s science standards. Although this decision was overturned by the electorate the next year after receiving national attention (and embarrassment), the wedge barely slowed. It moved on to Ohio where it again lost a statewide decision but gained traction with its associated rhetoric. We see this year that it has reemerged with strength to again contest the Kansas science standards (with hearings held in May), and it is active in dozens of other states.

The amount and sources of money funding the ID movement are among the surprising revelations in Creationism’s Trojan Horse. The Center for Science and Culture (CSC) is a division of the Discovery Institute devoted to promoting ID “research” and “teaching students more fully about the theory of evolution” (you can guess what that means). CSC is generously funded by foundations with explicit religious missions, one of them so far to the right that it is virtually theocratic. Millions of dollars are available for continuing campaigns against evolution and historical geology at every political level from school boards through Congress.

The most valuable lesson we learn from Forrest and Gross is that the defense of science against creationism is no longer a matter of marching a series of transitional fossils before the public. Phillip Johnson made it clear when he said in 1996: “This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science … It’s about religion and philosophy.” The thin edge of the wedge is ideological. It claims only that the weaknesses of evolutionary theory should be taught along with its strengths, and that “alternatives” should be considered when teaching “origins.” It is the scientific method, after all, and common sense. It is also just plain fair, the argument goes.

The only way to fight against this argument is by understanding what those “weaknesses” are purported to be, and how ID creationists define the scientific method by removing “naturalism” and replacing it with the alternative of a ghostly designer beyond scientific analysis. Creationism’s Trojan Horse is a superb resource for our own necessary education about the new creationists.