Intelligent Design, Rev. Moon, and Deception

Monday July 12, 2004

It is a characteristic of Intelligent Design that proponents will say one thing in one place but something radically different elsewhere - all in an apparent attempt to mislead people into thinking that Intelligent Design is a genuine scientific endeavor.

Ed Brayton writes about one case of this happening in a most blatant way:

One of the most prominent advocates of Intelligent Design Creationism is Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution. He has a PhD in molecular biology from Berkeley. Let me give you a textbook example of saying one thing to the public and another to one's fellow travelers. In the introduction to Icons of Evolution, Wells wrote: “During my years as a physical science undergraduate and biology graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I believed almost everything I read in my textbooks. I knew that the books contained a few misprints and minor factual errors, and I was skeptical of philosophical claims that went beyond the evidence, but I thought that most of what I was being taught was substantially true.“

He claims this quite often, that he was an evolutionist all through grad school, but eventually he was convinced solely by the biological evidence that evolution was false. Now, what does he say to his fellow travelers? Quite the contrary: “Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.“

It really does seem that either Wells has been misleading people in one context or the other because both statements can’t be true. And who is “Father” in the second quote above? Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. Curious, isn’t it? You don’t suppose that this little “error” is in any way related to Moon’s ministry and efforts to push a far-right religious agenda in America, do you?

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