Intelligent design discussion moves to university campuses

Posted: 2/17/06

Intelligent design discussion moves to university campuses

By Sarah Price Brown

Religion News Service

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (RNS)—When Hannah Maxson started an intelligent design club at Cornell University last fall, a handful of science majors showed up for the first meeting. Today, the high-profile club boasts more than 80 members.

Until recently, the nationwide debate over whether intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution was centered primarily in public elementary and high school science classes.
Now the discussion is spilling over onto university campuses. At nearly 30 public and private universities across the country, students have started clubs aimed at promoting intelligent design. The clubs, sponsored by the Intel-ligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center—IDEA—a small, nonprofit organization based in San Diego, have been gaining members and visibility.
Proponents of intelligent design insist the theory, which says the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher being, is scientific. Opponents—including most of the nation’s scientific establishment—put their weight behind Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and dismiss intelligent design as a religious idea based on the biblical creation story in Genesis.
When Cornell’s interim president, Hunter R. Rawlings III, denounced intelligent design as “a religious belief masquerading as a secular idea” in a speech last October, Maxson, a 21-year-old junior and president of the Ithaca, N.Y., school’s IDEA club, responded with a press release. Rawlings’ comments were a “gross misstatement,” she said, and “an insult to people of faith throughout America.”
Suddenly, Maxson, a self-described “bookish” chemistry and math major, found herself and her club in the spotlight.
“Before, we were just basically a science club,” she said. “Now, we have to defend our ideas everywhere.”
During one recent week, she was scheduled to speak about intelligent design at a campus discussion, make a presentation to a biology class and give an interview on local radio.
Intelligent design clubs at other universities also have been gaining momentum and attention. The first IDEA club meeting at George Mason University, a public school in Fairfax, Va., drew 20 people.
At a recent meeting, where a scientist guest speaker offered his criticisms of intelligent de-sign, 90 people attended.
Josh Norton, a 22-year-old math major who is president of the University of California at San Diego’s club, said his group was meeting every week in order to plan an all-day conference on intelligent design for the spring.
Casey Luskin, 27, founded the first IDEA club in 1999, at the University of California at San Diego. Luskin, then a college junior, had become interested in intelligent design after taking a biology seminar that taught about the theory. When Luskin graduated with a master’s degree in earth sciences in 2001, he founded the IDEA Center to help other students start their own clubs.
If a high school or university student contacts the IDEA Center about starting an intelligent design club, the center will provide a curriculum with suggested discussion topics, books, videos and a bibliography of sources.
Recently the center helped start clubs at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. A few high schools, including one as far away as Kenya, also have started IDEA chapters.
The organization is “very grassroots,” Luskin said. Its seven staff members volunteer part-time. They operate on a budget of a few thousand dollars, which comes from individual donations, he said.
The group’s advisory board includes Michael Behe and William Dembski, fellows at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, a think tank that is the driving force behind the intelligent design movement.
Dembski became the Carl F.H. Henry Professor of Theology and Science at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary last June.
Luskin recently started working at the Discovery Institute as a program officer concerned with public policy and legal affairs. Still, he stressed that the IDEA Center remains independent and receives no funding from the institute.
But Victor Hutchison, professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, who attended some IDEA club meetings on his campus, said he could not separate the clubs from the broader intelligent design movement, spearheaded by the Discovery Institute.
“I find that they are espousing exactly the talking points of the creationist Discovery Institute,” said Hutchison, who described himself both as “an evolutionist” and “a person of faith.”
The way Hutchison sees it, the clubs fit into what he calls Discovery’s larger plan to attack evolution and replace it with the religious viewpoint of biblical creationism and eventually “establish a theocracy.”
The IDEA Center says intelligent design is a scientific concept, not a religious one. But students came to the meetings with their Bibles, Hutchison said. The IDEA Center also requires its club presidents to be Christian.
Luskin explained that as a Christian group, “we wanted to be totally open about who we thought the designer was.” But, he added, “this belief about the identity of the designer is our religious belief; it’s not a part of ID theory.”
Hutchison nevertheless sees the requirement as a contradiction. “It just proves they are lying when they say it’s not religious-based,” he said.