Chapter I

The Ohio affair represented antievolutionist action at the standards level, trying to steer young minds in the desired direction by carefully worded rudders and supplementary bibliographies. Another venue for activism involved affecting what information students might be exposed to at the source, through the textbooks chosen for use in a state or district’s schools.

School textbook adoption has always been a potentially contentious minefield, given the many interest groups itching to politicize things, from the multicultural Left angling for politically correct purity (example: populace and diverse California) to Kulturkampf warriors on the Right (example: the burbling cauldron of populist Texas), surveyed by Fordham Institute (2004). The Fordham Institute report spotted several soft spots in the methodology, from the dumbing down of content for vacuous “readability” to something physicist Richard Feynman criticized way back in the 1960s when he participated in reviewing the procedures: lazy evaluators farming out their homework to external readers, instead of diving into the content for themselves. But even a reformed system relying less on centralized committee decisions and getting closer to working teachers in the community will still hit the snag that genuinely fair history books and insightful fiction and poetry will inevitably affront the sensibilities of some ideologues Left or Right, while rigorous science texts are never going to be uncontroversial so long as they insist on unapologetically using the dreaded E-word of Evolution or specifying too many zeroes in the age of rocks when they address living biology and its geological and paleontological underpinnings.

For many years in Texas, grassroots activists Mel Gabler (1915-2004) and Norma Gabler (1923-2007) wielded an enormous influence on textbooks, ferreting out what they perceived as liberal anti-American bias and scientific inaccuracies (particularly evolution), a tradition that has not abated, Valerie Strauss (2014). Because textbook publishers couldn’t afford to produce a special edition just for the Texas market, what was taught (or not) in Texas became a de facto standard for schoolbooks nationally, Scott (2009) and Gail Collins (2012). Although the Texas legislature reined in some of the Board of Education’s power over textbook selection in 1995 (with only marginal impact), the highly politicized TBOE membership remained favorably disposed to the Gablers’ work, passing a resolution in 1999 honoring their decades of textbook scrutiny, Matsumura (1999a)—more on the Gablers and their creationist proclivities in Chapter 2

In 2003 antievolutionists in the legislative tried to restore the Board’s former authority via House Bill 1172, Madden et al. (2003), and House Bill 1447, Howard et al. (2003)—both failed. But by then local Texas creationist Mark Ramsay had entered the fray to lobby for textbook revision with Texans for Better Science Education (already encountered in section 1.3 above regarding P-E potshots), a spin-off from his Greater Houston Creation Association. Schafersman (2005) noted where Ramsay was coming from by quoting from the GHCA’s 1996 credo:

God’s world must always agree with God’s Word, because the Creator of the one is the Author of the other. Thus, where physical evidences from the creation may be used to confirm the Bible, these evidences must never be used to correct or interpret the Bible. The written Word must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict.

While the parent group continued to channel the ICR/AiG biblically literal Flood Geology worldview, such as Greater Houston Creation Association (2009), the targeted Texans for Better Science Education dusted off the Edwards v. Aguillard-era academic freedom approach to discrediting evolution by instructional jujitsu: present those strengths and weaknesses (though in practice it was hard to detect where advocates of this tactic ever allowed for evolution to have any “strengths”). And there were more than enough creationist players on the TBOE to carry that sanitized ball: David Bradley, Terri Leo, Gail Lowe and Don McLeroy.

Add one more player: the Discovery Institute was also ready to flex its lobbying muscle regarding its own oh-so-carefully selected portfolio of “teach the controversy” evidence against evolution. Discovery Institute (2003a) submitted a textbook analysis to the TBOE that was just another gloss on the unavoidable Wells (2000a), critiqued by Gishlick (2003) and Schafersman (2003). They also fielded two witnesses, Baylor University professor Francis Beckwith and DI Fellow Ray Bohlin, to repeat the Icons of Evolution talking points yet again, as recounted in Bohlin (2003). Skip Evans (2003) offered a less flattering assessment for the NCSE, while general press coverage avoided details in favor of brief quotes from the contending camps, such as Frazier (2003), Chavez (2003), Houston Chronicle (2003) and Maguire (2003).

Following a well-trod path that the defenders of creationism had worn fifteen years before in Edwards v. Aguillard, where their arguments must be seen as fully scientific and not even a smidge religious because they had edited out any allusions to religious personages or doctrines, the Discovery Institute (2003b) put their shovels in to deepen the trench further: their “effort to empirically detect” the Intelligent Design interventions of the (purposefully unidentified) intelligent designer were utterly separate from the Genesis-driven creationists that they certainly were not, given how they weren’t quoting scripture, at least while wearing their ID nametag for public photo sessions.

Discovery Institute (2003c) particularly singled out a CNN report for, as the DI’s John West put it, “depicting the textbook controversy as a battle between extremist Bible-thumpers and the defenders of evolution and even claiming that critics of the textbooks believe that ‘the Bible takes precedence over science’.” (Hear that, Mark Ramsay?) As for the Discovery Institute contribution to the Texas textbook debate:

There was testimony from three people who urged the Board to improve textbook coverage of evolution. But none of them talked about the Bible, and none of them advocated the inclusion of creationism in textbooks. Instead, they focused on increasing the coverage of evolutionary theory to include scientific criticisms that appear in peer-reviewed journals.

Two of the witnesses talked about the following:

Dr. Francis Beckwith, a professor at Baylor University, presented the Board with a letter from 22 faculty members at Texas universities who urged Board members to make sure the biology textbooks they adopt cover both the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory.

Discovery Institute Fellow Ray Bohlin, from Richmond, Texas, discussed some scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory not covered in most textbooks and presented the Board with a statement from 100 scientists challenging the neo-Darwinian claim that natural selection acting on random mutations is sufficient for explaining the complexity of life. Dr. Bohlin holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology, and MS in Population Genetics, and a BS in Zoology.

And thus did Texas get yet one more rerun of the Icons of Evolution show, this time with an even more developed popularity contest attached as trailer: we found “22 faculty members” and “100 scientists” who agree with us, and that can stand in for the nonexistent technical literature establishing Intelligent Design’s case among the much tougher audience of the scientific community at large. Signaling some expedient styling skills when it came to authority quoting, the Schaeffer et al. (2002) list of 100 was apparently trimmed to some “40 Texas Scientists Skeptical of Darwin” offered by Discovery Institute (2003d).

When the Discovery Institute had fielded their list of 52 Ohio scientists favoring “Academic Freedom,” Patricia Princehouse (a philosophy professor at Case Western Reserve University who had organized the competing Ohio Citizens for Science petition) had “suggested some of the scientists signing the Intelligent Design petition may have been misled” by its carefully worded appeal, Amanda Onion (2002). But the Kansas II collection went beyond that, to direct hijacking: Martin Poenie—and the hijackee was not amused. As Hillis & Poenie (2003) explained in a joint letter to the TBOE:

The other of us (Poenie) was listed by the Discovery Institute as one of the Texas scientists on their “40 Texas Scientists Skeptical of Darwin” list (although he did not authorize the DI to include him on the list). Poenie did write a letter to the state board arguing that Darwinian (hyperdarwinian) mechanisms are not the only ones molding the evolutionary history of life and that we should be free to consider alternative non-darwinian mechanisms of change. However, that letter was not intended to oppose basic evolutionary biology or to support poor teaching or coverage of that topic.

This will not be the only time that scientists who express legitimate caveats about this or that aspect of evolution will find themselves dragooned into the antievolution campaign (waylaid both by creationists and Intelligent Design advocates). Poenie happened to be alerted to the maneuver, though, and was able to promptly call the miscreants to account. In the way of things among lazy secondary “scholarship,” the Schaeffer et al. (2002) list continues to make the Internet rounds with Poenie’s name still erroneously attached, such as at the National Association for Objectivity in Science website (mentioned above in the Ohio case).

Another problem arises with the DI’s “statement from 100 scientists.” Spurred on by the attention PBS’ Evolution series got in 2001, the Discovery Institute set about gathering as many names on it as they could, growing over the years until it runs to over a thousand signatories, Mark Edwards (2001f), Discovery Institute (2007; 2010a; 2011g), and which critics of evolution love to point to as signs of the crumbling edifice of Darwinism. But just how representative are its signatories of informed scientific dissent? The ever-ballooning “Dissent from Darwinism” compendium represents less a genuine groundswell of doubt about the scientific merits of Darwinism from the people doing the work (paleontologists, geneticists and so on) than an artful corralling of the choir, drawing on a population of credentialed academics all too often marvelously far from the fray (engineers, physicians, veterinarians, philosophers and such) who appear to have been disinclined to evolutionary thinking on religious or ideological grounds long before ever appending their names to the DI list.

That would include Ray Bohlin, along with full YEC creationists like biologists Joseph Francis, L. James Gibson and Timothy Standish, physicist John Baumgardner, neuroscientist David DeWitt, and Matti Leisola at the “Laboratory of Bioprocess Engineering” in Finland, which highlights how being a Darwin dissenter is no guarantee that the scientist in question doesn’t have some peculiar baggage in tow that may call into question their suitability for the disinterested witness list. The core drivers of the campaign also involved a fairly small body of activists—Behe, Dembski, and Walter Bradley were among the nine signatories to Schaeffer et al. (2002) who were carryovers from Bocarsly et al. (1993), the “Ad Hoc Origins Committee: Scientists Who Question Darwinism.” Actually, as the Institute for Creation Research has many thousands of names to draw on from their PhD mailing list, in the “science by plebiscite competition” Creation Science can claim a wide lead.

For what it’s worth, over 550 Texas scientists, teachers and business tech types (including three Nobel laureates: Michael Brown for medicine, chemist Johann Deisenhofer and physicist Steven Weinberg) sent a letter of their own favoring the evolutionary standards, Weinberg et al. (2003), stressing that, “Evolution is not a belief, a hunch, or an untested hypothesis; it has been extensively tested and repeatedly verified. Any dilution in textbooks of the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution should sound an alarm to every parent and teacher.”

Alas, no list of supporters for some proposition (no matter how short or long) means much unless it is backed up by solid research. Which returns us to that perpetually ringing methodological doorbell: who exactly decides what constitutes relevant and sufficient evidence in a scientific discipline? Antievolutionists aren’t picking their ammunition out of a hat, randomly plucking papers from Science or Nature and assigning them to the “strengths” or “weaknesses” evolution bins purely to stimulate the imaginations of science students. To the contrary, pieces from the “peer-reviewed journals” are offered solely because they had acquired an apologetic patina among antievolutionists as hot stuff to use, never mind what the authors intended or whether subsequent research rendered their relevance moot—exactly what creationists had been doing for thirty years, and often with the same material. So in what respect was Intelligent Design doing anything different from that, waving “evidence” without context or follow-through?

More specifically, who among the three witnesses in Texas were up to that task of winnowing out the obsolete or apologetically motivated drivel? The invisible first witness was not mentioned in any coverage of the TBOE hearings, and unfortunately their institutional website archive tails out at 2009, so that phantom has disappeared from the scope. But the DI pair is another matter.

Beckwith had just been appointed an Associate Professor of Church-State Studies, Evans (2003), part of Baylor President Robert Sloan’s effort to ramp the university up into a national example of religiously invigorated education. But however effective Beckwith may have been at teaching or publishing works on religion and the law, nothing in his practical background gave him special insight into evaluating the technical literature on the origin of Cambrian taxa or any of the other issues their oracle Jonathan Wells had expounded on. He certainly showed no inclination to dive into that area in his advocacy of the legal propriety of teaching Intelligent Design, such as Beckwith (2002; 2003; 2007; 2010), including his glancing intersection with the Rod LeVake case covered below.

Nor would the finer points of the scholarly evaluation of technical literature be a major element of Beckwith’s stint at Baylor. As Bill Dembski had already learned, the climate at the Christian university could be both political and chilly. After a change of administration removed his mentor Robert Sloan, his path to tenure was temporarily challenged, eliciting Kulturkampf outrage that the university was trading its very theological soul for the mammon of academic success.

Whenever the academic freedom of a professor is at stake the social and political context of the players is as relevant as their religion or philosophy, and the legal aspects of this can become complicated in a hurry, as noted by Ravitch (2008a) with special attention paid to the precedent set with Bishop v. Aronov in 1991 (where a university was held to be in its rights when they restricted a professor’s interjection of his Christian perspective in his physiology course). The Bishop example figured as legal precedent in a more blatant case of classroom evangelism, Edwards v. CA UNIV PA (1998), along with other church-state battles over the years, such as Stern (1997) offering the American Jewish Congress’ Amici Curiae concerns over an Alabama judge’s courtroom posting of the Ten Commandments, and Waxman & Christensen (1998) defending the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding rules. Groups across a wide spectrum of interests took note of the case in terms of evaluating education guidelines, from Maricopa Community Colleges (1998) and University of North Carolina (2001), to Anti-Defamation League (2001) and Thomas Wheeler (2001) at The Federalist Society. More on the Kulturkampf side were proponents of legislative religious freedom statutes invoking Bishop, such as Gregory Baylor (1996) testifying before Congress regarding HJR 184 and Ron Paul (2000) proposing HR 5078. Meanwhile, Phillip Johnson (1992a; 1995b) alluded to the Bishop case only as kindling for his customary bonfire of materialist vanities.

The extent to which anti-religious prejudice figured in the reaction to Beckwith’s dalliance with ID was murky, however. His conservative politics and pro-life views may have been the main factors, salient enough to be noted by Erin Roach (2006) for the Baptist Press and by a cautiously anonymous graduate student at American Spectator (2006). Joseph Bottum (2006) at First Things saw things in equally broad Kulturkampf terms.

Not surprisingly, the Evolution News & Views coverage was more ID-centric. John West (2006a-b) explicitly suggested Beckwith was under fire for his defense of the constitutionally of teaching ID (even though Beckwith didn’t recommend schools actually do that), and Bruce Chapman (2006) chalked Beckwith’s treatment down to a Darwinian campaign to “shut down damaging evidence as early as possible,” while Robert Crowther (2007b) decried the “trampling of academic freedom at Baylor” and the university’s disapproval of computer engineer Robert Marks’ posting his ID research on the institutional website, further commented on by Luskin (2007l).

Incidentally, Baylor has another ID booster in organic chemist Charles Garner (2008), later signing a pro-ID letter to the Louisiana legislature supporting their antievolution efforts, Warren et al. (2011). By the time Denyse O’Leary (2006; 2008a) entered the picture Beckwith had been granted tenure, limiting her to high fiving Beckwith for bucking “the materialist establishment” and wagging thumbs down for Baylor’s pusillanimous decline.

That political cliques at Baylor may have been overshadowing Beckwith’s ID views was hinted at by Steven Plaut (2006) at David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, contrasting Beckwith’s treatment by the “PC Inquisition” at Baylor with their toleration of Marc Ellis, a liberation theology advocate critical of Israeli defense policy. Along the way Plaut sported a truly sublime credulity as he specified that ID “is certainly regarded as a legitimate view worthy of consideration by a considerable number of scientists, including quite a few who are not religiously observant people at all.” His web-linked evidence for this consisted of three sources: on the religious observance issue he nicked David Berlinski (1996b) secondarily from Doug Sharp’s unabashedly YEC Revolution Against Evolution website (was Plaut a regular reader, or just an undiscerning ammo trawler?) and reminded us of his very narrow Kulturkampf focus by trotting out two WorldNet Daily articles to supply “those considerable number of scientists.”

WorldNetDaily (2005) offered nothing more than a reprise of the Discovery Institute interpretation of the controversy over the publication of Stephen Meyer (2004b) in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Even more tenuous was former stockbroker turned homeschooling Oregon mother Lynn Barton (2006) on “Why intelligent design will change everything” because Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box was supplying “the scientifically credible alternate theory” needed to make good on “the devastating critique” she had read back in 1989 in Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.

The conceit that Barton could genuinely feel the pulse of a scientific revolution based on those two books was bad enough (like Robert Bork, she pegged biochemist Behe as a “microbiologist”)—then again, Behe (2006b, 40) tagged Michael Denton as a “geneticist”—but Plaut presumably had no inkling that Berlinski (and Denton if you wished to lump him in too) effectively exhausted the supply of non-religious ID advocates, or that the handful of named design luminaries in his three secondary sources (Barton alluded to the Discovery Institute “Dissent from Darwinism” list but name dropped no one) comprised “a considerable number of scientists” only if you didn’t take into account how many scientists there were working in the relevant fields (try tens of thousands on for size).

Kulturkampf conceptual baggage was similarly not far from the other DI witness in Texas, Ray Bohlin. While he may not have mentioned the Bible or creationist resources in his presentation to the TBOE, he has not been so shy in other venues. Bohlin’s activities at Probe Ministries were focused on creationist apologetics, and through Probe Ministries the connections with the seminal players was close: Probe Ministries was founded in 1973 by Campus Crusade for Christ alumni John Buell and Jim Williams, and Charles Thaxton worked there in 1980, Matzke (2009c, 389-391). Bohlin (1993b) has defended the viability of YEC positions on the ae of the Earth, while partnering later as Bohlin & Milne (1998) he has been more equivocal:

Biblically, we find the young earth approach of six consecutive 24-hour days and a catastrophic universal flood to make the most sense. However we find the evidence from science for a great age for the universe and the earth to be nearly overwhelming. We just do not know how to resolve the conflict yet. Earlier, we emphasized that the age question, while certainly important, is not the primary question in the origins debate. The question of chance versus design is the foremost issue. The time frame over which God accomplished His creation is not central.

In other words, a plain reading of scripture would appear to be contradicted by the weight of physical evidence, but none of that is to be permitted to raise doubts about whether the Bible version of events was true to begin with (and risk stomping onto the biblical inerrancy minefield). So however much the Bible is not mentioned explicitly in creationist or Intelligent Design public presentations, hovering behind every issue (as seen in section 1.6 above regarding Bill Dembski and John West apropos Theistic Evolution) is a worldview that does not permit such contradictions in principle any more than would the YEC hermeneutics of Mark Ramsay (or Danny Phillips). Intelligent Design can proceed without impediment among creationists because nothing it ever proposes will be allowed to conflict with the unspoken dogmatic backdrop. Which is precisely how creationists had been operating, before Edwards v. Aguillard, and since.

This head-scratching bemusement allows apologists like Bohlin to dodge the question in a manner that brings into doubt how willingly they will do this on any topic that challenges the religious underpinnings of their convictions. It is an evasive tactic found in Hank Hanegraaff’s Bible Answer Man radio apologetics and is functionally pervasive throughout the Intelligent Design movement: let’s not divide over side issues like how many zeroes there are in the age of things, but instead embrace a chronology free framework where we can slip design arguments in through the wide cracks of our own contrivance.

Philadelphia preacher Brian Jones (2000; 2013b) reflects this progression, weaned on YEC at the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary and thus skeptical of Darwin’s Black Box’s insufficiently explicit affirmation of Jesus Christ (further tainted by Behe’s troubling willingness to accept too much geology and evolution), but by 2013 Jones was not so willing to push believers over the age of the Earth cliff. Norman Geisler (2014) has wrapped himself in a similar hermeneutical cocoon to make his fence-straddling a bit more comfortable from the OEC side: contending that the Young Earth interpretation of Genesis is not directly justified by scripture (though not disallowed either), but that believers shouldn’t concern themselves with such trifles as the chronology of creation anyway, thereby rendering the scientific data conveniently irrelevant.

Such ecumenical vagueness cannot help but spill over into the evolution issue, where creationists and ID can cross-fertilize with remarkable ease. Thus Ray Bohlin (1999) breezily included the 1974 edition of Henry Morris’s Scientific Creationism and Duane Gish’s Evolution: The Fossils Say No! from 1972 among the “pioneering works” in the antievolutionary parlor game of “finding the crack and exposing its weaknesses” along with the ID parade of Behe, Dembski, Denton, Johnson et al. Which, in a way, is all too true: there is no fundamental difference as to how ID antievolutionists approach data compared to their YEC brethren. The only distinction is that Morris and Gish do occasionally take a stand on those zeroes and thereby trip over a larger body of information than the hunkered down ID subset.

The upshot for Bohlin’s credibility is this: the material in the more recent versions of their works, Morris (1985) and Gish (1995), are very bad science, explored at length in Downard (2004). Morris’ claims on biology and the fossil record are superficial and inept, while Gish is arguably the most manipulative and evasive “scholar” in the entire creationist literature. Which means, whatever analytical standards Bohlin may have, clearly he regards their shoddy work as acceptable in a way he does not the mountains of evolutionary technical literature that he has seldom even approached, let alone persuasively refuted. And given his opinion of Morris and Gish, how likely is it that his critical gears might for once mesh and he examine Icons of Evolution with anything like a truly critical assessment of its “strengths and weaknesses”?

Another measure of how disconnected the Discovery Institute was with the facts on the ground concerns how the antievolutionists in the Texas legislature fitted into the picture. Wayne Christian went on to support creationist Carlos Garza on the State Board of Education, Gómez Licón (2010) and Texas Freedom Network (2010; 2012b), and when Todd Staples ran for lieutenant governor in 2013 (having moved on to become Agriculture Commissioner) he joined the other three Republican candidates in supporting teaching “creationism” in schools, decrying the evolution only approach as a brand of “political correctness.” Competing candidate Jerry Patterson (Land Commissioner) subsequently backed off a mite, clarifying that he thought creationism should be taught in social studies classes concerning comparative religion, not in science class, Garrett (2013a-b). In these cases the term “Intelligent Design” was showing no particular currency.

Beyond evolutionary theory, the decidedly Kulturkampf milieu of the Texas antievolutionists has not been hard to spot either. 40% of the sponsors of House Bill 1287 in 2007 (establishing elective courses to study the Bible in public schools) had also backed the HB 1447 Board of Education revision in 2003, Chisum et al. (2007) and Howard et al. (2003). HB 1287 was so vaguely worded that it opened the door for more than just an academic discussion of the cultural import of Bible stories, with some courses diving off the eschatological board into instruction on End Times prophecy and unconstitutional affirmations of Biblical truth, Kamisar (2013) and Huffington Post (2013b) reacting to the study by Chancey (2013a)—more on that in later chapters.

Opposition to liberal abortion laws was salient in the group, and has continued unabated. Rep. Dwayne Bohac’s campaign earned a Truth-O-Meter slot at PolitiFact (2010) for falsely accusing Annie’s List (a liberal Texas group devoted to electing pro-choice Democratic women) of supporting “third-trimester abortion on demand,” while Rep. Jodie Laubenberg’s role in a “surge” of successful Pro-Life abortion restrictions nationwide was highlighted in Pitts (2014) for World Magazine.

Rep. Dan Flynn has repeatedly raised the alarm about banning any use of Islamic Sharia Law in Texas (another of those solutions in search of a problem), Texas Freedom Network (2013a), and Rep. Debbie Riddle gained notoriety when she claimed without a drop of evidence in a CNN interview that some of the children of undocumented immigrants were “little terrorists, who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm,” Sanchez (2010). Riddle later thought teachers could circumvent the ban on sectarian prayers in public schools by having students “read from the book of Proverbs from the Bible” instead, Sherman (2012). “As for other religions,” Riddle insisted with insouciant indifference to the devotional toes of people outside her pew, “the wisdom won’t do them any harm.”

Many of the HB 1172/1447 backers filtered onto Texas Tea Party terrain, such as Ken Paxton and Robert Talton attending a candidate event in 2014 noted by Pastor Greg Young, a Young Earth Creationist who also offered to educate the flock in a course on topics from “A Biblical View of History, Law and Government” to “The Crisis of the Constitution from Biblical Absolutes to Evolutionary Humanism.” When not fuming on the iniquities of the Obama administration, Young’s podcast shows reflect such Answers in Genesis authority as “Dr Georgia Purdom a leading Macro biologist,” Greg Young (2014a-b). We’ll be examining Georgia Purdom’s expertise in due course.