John's Reviews > Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond

An Important Collection of Papers Discussing the History and Analyzing the Veracity of Creationism

"Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond" is an important updated edition of an earlier volume focusing on the history and claims made by "scientific creationists" back in the 1980s. This recently expanded edition, edited by Andrew J. Petto, editor of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and Laurie R. Godfrey, the editor of the original edition, takes a long, hard look at the history, scientific claims and educational implications of creationism, especially in its latest, most virulent, flavor, Intelligent Design. This superb tome is subdivided into three parts; the first is a historical and philosophical survey of creationism. The second part explores its most important scientific claims in ample detail. The third section examines creationism from the perspective of trying to understand science, discussing how and why it fails to meet the rigorous self-imposed centuries-old standards of peer-reviewed scientific research. The sixteen contributors include a diverse group of scientists, philosophers, and other educators, including such luminaries as philosopher of science Robert Pennock, geochronologist G. Brent Dalrymple, vertebrate paleobiologist Kevin Padian and historian Ronald Numbers. This is truly an important, exceptional book which deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone seeking to understand the history and aims of American creationist movements, especially that of Intelligent Design.

The opening section on the history and philosophy of creationism features superlative essays written by Ronald Numbers and National Center for Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott. Numbers' essay starts this section with a terse, but vivid, account of the history of American creationism. Scott follows with an in-depth examination of the Intelligent Design movement itself, emphasizing its recent legal debacle, the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District trial. Anthropologist John Cole's concluding essay focuses on the significance of the Discovery Institute's notorious "Wedge Document" as a "blueprint" for inserting Intelligent Design creationism into almost every important facet of American educational and cultural life.

In the book's second section, there are several essays that I found especially useful. Physicist Victor J. Stenger explains creationism's fascination with cosmology, along with a lucid mathematical rebuttal of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow William Dembski's concept of Complex Specified Information. Geochronologist G. Brent Dalrymple's extensive essay on the ages of the universe and the Earth is the most succinct examination of this issue that I've come across, and one I recommend highly to all. Kevin Padian and Kenneth D. Angielczyk's "'Transitional Forms' versus Transitional Features" is an extensive overview of "missing links" in paleontology and their significance in constructing testable hypotheses about degrees of relationship between different species (or higher taxonomic units) as depicted in cladograms. Marine biologist Wesley Elsberry's extensive refutation of Dembski's Explanatory Filter/Design Inference demonstrates how and why this peculiar abuse of flow-chart diagrams and mathematical logic is quite nonsensical; here Elsberrry has demolished effectively the elaborate - if poorly "designed" - "mathematical" argument that Dembski has offered as "proof" of Intelligent Design.

Ending on a powerful note, the final section of "Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism" contains exceptional essays from philosopher Robert Pennock and evolutionary geneticist Norm Johnson. Pennock - whose superb "Tower of Babel" Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism ranks foremost on my required reading list of books on creationism - tears apart the creationist canard of arguing from ignorance - the so-called "God of the Gaps", by asserting that absence of evidence does not automatically imply support of creationism, especially its Intelligent Design variety. Johnson follows with an insightful overview from his perspective of Drosophila genetics research, demonstrating how pioneering work, early in the last century, showed that evolution was indeed a valid scientific theory. The book's editors offer an intriguing, persuasive, closing essay explaining why it is necessary to explain the "controversial" aspects of contemporary evolutionary theory as part of the standard curricula of biology science classrooms.