The Wedge Document, the conspiracy errs

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external imagereationism is first and foremost a political-social movement, not a scientific movement at all. Over the decades, the movement has suffered trememdous set backs, mainly loosing court battles and the like. So, instead of focusing on the courts, where they've already lost, some creationists, mainly from the "Intelligent Design" sector, have taken a different tack.

The method is to use intelligent design as a front for creationism in general, creating a pseudo-scientific facade that's used to get people (especially people on school boards) to start discussing creationism.

What they do is (and this was detailed by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education at a special session of last year's meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology) get invovled with the local school boards and start talking about scientific critisisms of evolutionary theory and promoting consideration of alternative scientific explanations, which any sensible person can accept. Then when things start to get rolling on this and there is community interest they start talking about how Intelligent Design is just such an alternative explanation, one that seeks to, and has been successful in, detecting intelligent agency in the design of living things. So now the public is really interested and the school boards have pressure to start having meetings about their scientific standards and revisions and all that.

Once that stage is reached, scientific criticism of evolution is dropped, consideration of scientific alternatives is dropped, and even promotion of intelligent design is dropped, and the discussion does full swing into teaching outright creationism in science classes at public expense and literally doing away with methodological naturalism (ie science and rational thinking) in schools.

Obviously not in every case does it follow that sequence, but that is the pattern that people like Scott and others involved in the issue have picked up on.

And if anyone thinks its not beleivable, the creationist movement itself made the mistake of allowing an internal document ominously titled "The Wedge Document" to get into public circulation. This document details.....a conspiracy to use intelligent design literally as a wedge with which to destroy scientific thinking and replace it with pure theology.

Below is a link to the text of the document as maintained by the esteemed and well researched Lenny Flank, (done with the aid of a very powerful pizza deliveryman )

The Wedge Document

A PDf version.

Also feel free to read "The Wedge at Work". And also check out the Discovery Institute's response, "So What" (in pdf format), along with this webpage that contain's Lenny Flank's response to that.