Casey Luskin, a staff member of the Discovery Institute and their Intelligent Design focused Center for Science and Culture, took another backhanded swipe at creationists yesterday morning. It seems that in a rather sad attempt to distance themselves from his roots (yes, ID’ers came out of the creationist movement) Luskin resorts to a bit of historical revision. He quotes from Alister McGrath’s book, Darwinism and the Divine:
Writers linked with the creationist and ‘Intelligent Design’ movements in North America vigorously oppose the teaching of evolution in schools, arguing that ‘Darwinism’ is intrinsically atheistic. (pp. 33-34)
Luskin then goes on to say:
That statement is seriously inaccurate. It might be true of “creationists” in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the ID movement has been very clear in on-the-record statements, including many public policy recommendations, that it does NOT in the least oppose teaching evolution. Discovery Institute is by far the most active ID group that gets involved with evolution-education policy, and we not only oppose mandating ID in public schools, but we think evolution should be taught and that more evolution should be taught.
Should we presume Luskin placed quotes around “creationists” because many of the early ID proponents were part of the creationist movement in the 70s and 80s? For instance, Access Research Network came out of the creationist community. ARN began as the Creation Society of Santa Barbara. It later changed it’s name to Students for Origins Research which eventually became Access Research Network.
Although it would take some time to locate in our VHS collection of old ID videos, there is a talk by Phillip Johnson in which he mentions his “…friends at ICR (Institute for Creation Research)…” We could dig further and find other strong and undeniable connections between the early ID movement and creationist movement of the 70s and 80s. But then again, Casey would continue to deny the historical record.
By the way, we suspect Casey would be hard put to find but a few creationists from that 20 year time period that actually opposed teaching evolution in public schools. The Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, the Bible-Science Association (now Creation Moments), the Creation Science Foundation (now Answers in Genesis), the Creation Science Movement, and many other groups have never advocated banning evolution. These were all organizations (and many more) that were in existence during the period Casey claims creationists wanted to ban evolution in public schools.
Please do some research before you blather on about creationists. Doesn’t the Discovery Institute use fact checkers for their blog postings???
Hint: Casey, you’ve confused the 70s & 80s with the 20s & 30s and the difference between opposing evolution versus banning evolution!
cp
P.S. We can conclude that Alister McGrath also doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
