| The authors explain why they wrote the book this way. Religious interference in American science and science education is an old story. But intelligent design proponents’ cultivation of support for efforts to eliminate evolution from public school science, or to disparage it, and to secure recognition of creationists’ claims of scientific legitimacy, are today enjoying unprecedented, nationwide success.
For the first time, such claims seem to many lay observers to have become respectable. In fact, however, they are no more respectable as scholarly inquiry, or specifically as biological science, than were their discredited "creation science" predecessors. Unfortunately, this is not widely understood.
Nor is the seamless continuity of "Intelligent Design Theory" with other recognized forms of creationism.
Having examined in detail claims made by members of the "Wedge" we saw it as our professional and civic obligation to scholarship and science to prepare a fully documented account of their anti-evolution agenda. We came to understand that, for the well-being of science and science education, the seamless continuity of intelligent design and traditional creationism must be demonstrated for our colleagues and the knowledgeable public.
The narrowness of Wedge strategists’ religious aims, which do not reflect the values of the broader, more tolerant religious community, must be exposed, as must Intelligent Design’s pervasively sham methods of inquiry.
People who value science and the benefits of life in an enlightened society must be alerted to the Wedge’s political, cultural, and religious ambitions. |
