Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design by Barbara Carroll Forrest, Paul R. Gross ISBN: 0-19-515742-7 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (20 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Courageous, intellectual, and thorough
Comment: "Intelligent design" (ID) is a religious and political movement that claims that only a designing intelligence (the Christian deity) could be responsible for the order we see in the natural world. It seeks to overthrow "scientific materialism" (what everyone else just calls "science") and replace it with Christian doctrine.
Although its proponents claim ID is science, there are essentially no papers describing the "theory", testing it, or making predictions from it in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Instead, its proponents publish popular books with religious or political presses.
ID books are full of self-praise and hype, but very little actual science. What little science there is is full of flaws (one crucial calculation in Dembski's _No Free Lunch_ is off by 65 orders of magnitude, a fact he has never publicly admitted).
This book is the first to document, in exhaustive detail, the religious and political motivations behind ID. Forrest and Gross show how the movement was conceived after a religious conversion by a law professor; how it is bankrolled by a Christian reconstructionist millionaire; how it is based on nonexistent science; and how it seeks to replace science at all levels, from grade school to the National Science Foundation, with Christian dogma.
Contrary to the claim by one reviewer (who did not dare give his name), there is essentially no name-calling in this book. Instead, the analysis is scholarly, impeccable, and sober; the endnotes alone run for 65 pages.
If you are concerned about how the Religious Right is hijacking science education in the United States, this book is essential reading. Be sure to take your blood pressure medication before starting, because the unrelenting duplicity that Forrest and Gross chronicle in the ID movement is sure to make you burst a blood vessel.
Will the scientific community heed this wake-up call? I certainly hope so.
Rating: 4
Summary: They get it right, but they may underestimate their opponent
Comment: Is this a book where you get a definitive history and understanding of the intelligent design movement? Is it a fair and balanced treatment? No, not at all. This is a debunking treatment.
This book correctly places the intelligent design movement in its political and cultural context as an unfortunately successful attempt to discredit central elements of modern science ... in principle replacing the legitimate scientific tradition with a reformist theistic science as far as it succeeds.
Forrest and Gross do a superb job of showing why ID is not legitimate science according to the history and values that have driven science since its inception.
Yet in taking a scientific debunking approach and equating ID with "creationism" in general (and the "Scientific Creationism" of Henry Morris and Adventist literalism in particular) the authors also seem to miss some of the _non-scientific_ subtleties in their opponents' reasoning which make it as compelling and successful as it has been, even to many who aren't congenial to "Young Earth Creationism" and Seventh Day Adventism.
Forrest and Gross often discount rather than listening to their opponents, and in the process they often appear miss the internal logic and completely different way of thinking of the ID proponents. This results in arguments that must genuinely sound ad hominem and question-begging to ID enthusiasts, accusing the ID authors of deliberate fraud and deception of various kinds.
The ID movement has deceptive aspects to it, but then so does the marketing of evolutionary theory in the popular press. What Forrest and Gross do not consider, and should, is the extremely radical nature of the ID claims. They treat ID as bad alternative science, seemingly because the IDers present it as an alternative scientific paradigm to evolutionary biology and natural selection. They observe that it is neither conventional science nor speculative science ... concluding that it is therefore a fraud.
This doesn't quite seem to capture it. Leaders of the ID movement often claim that science has been mistaken *from its inception* about rejecting a Creator of some sort. In other words, they do not pretend to be doing naturalistic science and then sneak in a Creator, so much as they are claiming that science should have been theistic all along.
A Creator might possibly work through evolution, but with highly visible opponents like Richard Dawkins who often use natural selection as a reason to deny the existence of a Creator, IDers have little reason to split hairs between theistic and naturalistic evolution. Their (often hidden) point is the designer, not the design.
An early hero of the ID revolution, Michael Denton ("Evolution: A Theory In Crisis"), has no argument at all with natural selection, only with its use as an all-encompassing explanation of form and function throughout living things. His popularity among IDers reveals something important about the movement: their focus on making nature consistent with the presumed designer rather than worrying about the specific mechanisms used in design.
The rejection of Aristotelian purposes for all things was pretty clearly a positive step in the development of physical science, and this is a big part of what originally drove the rejection of teleology. The ID folks are not entirely wrong in claiming that the rejection of a Creator itself was the somewhat arbitrary result of opposing the medieval Church's tradition in general along with Aristotle's pervasive teleology. It was not a logical, empirical, or epistemic neccessity, but a cultural value associated with the Enlightenment faith in the autonomy of reason. The core reasoning of the IDers is consistent and reasonable, given their assumptions, so the tone of Forrest and Gross will likely come off as shrill to their IDer opponents.
In the end, Forrest and Gross are surely right to be alarmed at this movement, even though it is probably more sincere than they credit it. The problem with ID is not with its rather trivial observation of design in nature, but in the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) reinterpretation of scientific data in light of scripture and an unspoken but shared vision of the Creator as an alternate way of reasoning in competition with the scientific tradition.
IDers do end up confusing the issue by claiming to be doing science (or "real science,") when in fact they are proposing "a new kind of science" rooted in theistic belief completely outside of the tradition to which we give that name.
Even if many scientists and philosophers were wrong to deny possibility of a Creator and the role of the Creator in natural events (something half of Americans seem to defend) Forrest and Gross are *still* right to be suspicious of a movement that borrows the name of the scientific tradition while seeking to reform it completely to reshape biology in completely non-evolutionary terms against the epistemic values and evidentiary basis of the field.
Forrest and Gross are not fooled by the superficial similarity and pretended association of ID with scientific reformers and fine-tuners of evolutionary theory. They are at their best making it clear that scientific reform of biology and the non-science of intelligent design are two very different things.
This book is a splash of cold water to those who still may think of creationism in any form as something that belongs as a "theory" alongside biological science in a classroom. ID is not alternative science, but an alternative *to* science, a part of a "culture war" to redefine the public symbols of truth and meaning. Forrest and Gross provide the evidence of this, although in avoiding the internal logic of the opposing arguments and considering their opposition to be based mostly on fraud and ignorance, they don't seem to fully realize just how powerful their opposition's reasoning can be to many people.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Must-read Book for Teachers & Parents of School Children
Comment: This well-researched and documented book lays bare the plot by modern-day scientific creationists posing as qualified scientists to subvert biological education in the public schools and colleges by means of "the wedge of intelligent design." The absence of any scientific evidence for the concept of "intelligent design" is firmly established by the authors who then go on to document the strategy being used by its advocates to persuade parents, educators and politicians that the concept is not only scientifically valid, but that it calls into question, or even refutes, the theory of organic evolution-a theory actually as firmly established as the theory of gravity and the theory of atomic structure.
The authors contend, and support their contention with fact, that the absence of scientific evidence to support the concept of intelligent design is not all that important to its advocates, for the goal of these individuals is simply to use this concept as a wedge to convince the general public and its political leaders that intelligent design is a scientific theory sufficiently plausible to warrant inclusion in the scientific curriculum as a logical alternative to the theory of evolution. This goal achieved, pseudo-science will have a firm place in biological instruction, students will receive a wrongful education, and science itself will be maimed.
This book should be studied carefully by all who would preserve the integrity of science education in our schools. It will serve as an excellent manual for those called upon to defend the integrity of state courses of study in science against expected assaults by intelligent design advocates in the upcoming, cyclic reviews by state departments of education.
 |
Title: Unintelligent Design by Mark Perakh ISBN: 1591020840 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
 |
Title: God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory by Niall Shanks ISBN: 0195161998 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
 |
Title: Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series) by John Angus Campbell, Stephen C. Meyer ISBN: 0870136755 Publisher: Michigan State University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
 |
Title: The Impossibility of God by Michael Martin, Ricki Monnier ISBN: 1591021200 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
 |
Title: Life's Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris ISBN: 0521827043 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 04 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
