Teach the Controversy

[12][13] The overall goals of the movement are "to defeat scientific materialism" and "to replace [it] with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God".

[7][8][11] A federal court has agreed with evaluation of the majority of scientific organizations (including the American Association for the Advancement of Science) that the institute has manufactured the controversy they want to have taught by promoting the false perception that evolution is "a theory in crisis" by falsely claiming the theory is the subject of wide controversy and debate within the scientific community.

[7][8][9][19] In fact, intelligent design has been rejected by essentially all of the members of the scientific community,[20][21] including the numerical estimate of 99.9 percent of scientists.

To the chagrin of Graff, who describes himself as a liberal secularist,[25] the idea was later appropriated by Phillip E. Johnson, Discovery Institute program advisor and father of the ID movement.

[26] The phrase was picked up by the Discovery Institute affiliates Stephen C. Meyer, David K. DeWolf, and Mark E. DeForrest in their 1999 article "Teaching the Controversy: Darwinism, Design and the Public School Science Curriculum"[27] published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.

[28] The campaign was devised by Stephen C. Meyer and Discovery Institute founder and President Bruce Chapman as a compromise strategy in March 2002.

They had come to the realisation that the dispute over intelligent design's (lack of) scientific standing was complicating their efforts to have evolution challenged in the science classroom.

[30] The Discovery Institute's strategy has been for the institute itself or groups acting on its behalf to lobby state and local boards of education, and local, state and federal policymakers to enact policies and/or laws, often in the form of textbook disclaimers and the language of state science standards, that undermine or remove evolutionary theory from the public school science classroom by portraying it as "controversial" and "in crisis;" a portrayal that stands in contrast to the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community that there is no controversy, that evolution is one of the best-supported theories in all of science, and that whatever controversy does exist is political and religious, not scientific.

DI's goal is to move from battles over standards to curriculum writing and textbook adoption while undermining the central positions of evolution in biology and methodological naturalism in science.

[40]Afterward, Lawrence Krauss, a Case Western Reserve University physicist and astronomer, in a New York Times essay said: A key concern should not be whether Dr. Abrams's religious views have a place in the classroom, but rather how someone whose religious views require a denial of essentially all modern scientific knowledge can be chairman of a state school board.

Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education says this comment shows that the teach the controversy strategy was "pioneered in the wake of Edwards v.

Members of the scientific community have responded to this tactic by pointing out that like evolution whatever controversy may exist over cloning and stem cell research has been largely social and political, while dissident viewpoints over global warming are often viewed as pseudoscience.

As with intelligent design creationism, science-deniers' so-called evidence takes the form of claims for the insufficiency of current scientific explanations rather than concrete, testable alternative hypotheses.

As in the evolution debate, religious extremists use the clever strategy of denigrating the scientific consensus on causality (global warming is human-caused via pollution) by pretending it contrasts sharply with an alternative scientific theory that, properly-understood, is really just a more nuanced view that's not really in opposition (current global warming is part of the earth’s natural cycle but is being exacerbated by pollution).

[52][53][54][55][56][57] The campaigns run by intelligent design groups place teachers in the difficult position of arguing against their employers while the legal challenges to local school districts are costly, diverting funding away from education and into court battles.

While the educators stonewall, our job is to continue building the community of people who understand the difference between a science that tests its theories against the evidence, and a pseudoscience that protects its key doctrines by imposing philosophical rules and erecting legal barriers to freedom of thought.

[64] The institute spends more than $1 million a year for research, polls, lobbying and media pieces that support intelligent design and their Teach the Controversy campaign[65] and is employing the same Washington, D.C. public relations firm that promoted the Contract with America.

Its efforts were largely aimed at conservative Christian policymakers, to whom it was cast as a counterbalance to the liberal influences of "atheistic scientists" and "Dogmatic Darwinists."

As a measure of their success in this effort, on 1 August 2005, during a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, President Bush said that he believes schools should discuss intelligent design alongside evolution when teaching students about the origin of life.

In some state battles, the ties of Teach the Controversy and intelligent design proponents to the Discovery Institute's political and social activities were made public, resulting in their efforts being temporarily thwarted.

The Institute showed a willingness to back off, even to not advocate for the inclusion of ID, to ensure that all science teachers were required to portray evolution as a "theory in crisis."

The institute's strategy is to move from standards battles, to curriculum writing, to textbook adoption, and back again, doing whatever it took to undermine the central position of evolution in biology.

Critics of this strategy and the movement contended that the intelligent design controversy diverts much time, effort and tax money away from the actual education of children.

Over 70 scientific societies, institutions, and other professional groups representing tens of thousands of individual scientists have issued policy statements supporting evolution education and opposing intelligent design.

According to Thomas Dixon, "The 'controversy' in question has not arisen from any substantial scientific disagreement but is the product of a concerted public relations exercise aimed at the Christian parents of America.

"[70] Prominent evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have proposed various "controversies" that are worth teaching, instead of intelligent design.

Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, described the approach of the movement's proponents as "a disarming subterfuge designed to undermine solid evidence that all living things share a common ancestry."

Critics also allege that the Discovery Institute has a long-standing record of misrepresenting research, law and its own policy and agenda and that of others: Johnson's statements validate the criticisms leveled by those who allege that the Discovery Institute and its allied organizations are merely stripping the obvious religious content from their anti-evolution assertions as a means of avoiding the legal restriction on establishment.

He concluded that "teaching the controversy" would undermine creationists’ criticisms, and that the scientific community's resistance to this approach was bad public relations.