Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Is ID dying out or is it just warming up?
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott, and today I get to welcome Dr. Casey Luskin to ID the Future. We're gonna have a discussion today about a book called Designer Science, and that purports to be a comprehensive history of the intelligent design movement. And we're going to talk about whether that is achieved or not with this book. Casey, welcome.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: Great to be with you, Andrew, and so exciting to be in your new studio.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. It's awesome to be in person. You know, zoom things are one way to do it, but I love just kind of sitting and chatting in real time, nothing better.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: We're definitely evolving to new levels here.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Well, Casey, you're associate director of the Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture, and rather than me mouth off about all the work you've done, I just want you to tell our listeners and viewers briefly what you do day in and day out at Discovery Institute.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Yeah, basically I send emails, I do zooms, and I don't sleep. I mean, that's the short version, but the long version is that I manage our research program. We are funding over 40 research projects around the world, actually. I mean, in the US and also internationally of scientists that are looking at the evidence for intelligent design. And basically I oversee that.
And so we are trying to make sure that the scientists whose research we fund have the resources that they need to be able to do their research.
Also, I do a lot of speaking and teaching and writing. I teach at our summer seminar on intelligent design. I'm basically the host for our natural sciences track every year.
Also do a lot of student mentoring. We have a very large. We have over 1100 graduates of our ID summer seminar student seminar programs that started back in 2007. We'll get into that, I think a little bit in these podcasts, but we have a large mentoring program trying to mentor these students. Many of them have already gotten their PhDs and they're now actually doing ID research, but a lot of them are still in the process of getting their PhDs. In fact, just yesterday I had a zoom with a. A student who's about to finish her PhD, is looking at postdocs, and we're trying to connect her with potential ID friendly labs where she could go and do a postdoc. So we do this kind of stuff all the time, trying to mentor students who want to get involved with ID research or are already involved at some level in Helping them to get involved at higher and higher levels. So. And then of course, you know, I do blogging and podcasting and traveling and speaking and all that kind of stuff, writing books and papers and articles and. And so, I mean, but I really do have a real job. Like, most of my days are spent doing admin work, databases, emailing people, setting up zooms, coordinating research projects, and making sure that our scientists are able to do what they want to do.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's so much. And you've just been a workhorse for Discovery Institute. And I remember my earliest memories of the Idea the Future podcast, even before I joined, was hearing Casey's voice and it was enthusiastic and it was engaged and he just drew us in with all the things was talking about. And here I am running the podcast, but you know, his voice and, you
[00:03:17] Speaker A: know, now you're drawing me in, Andrew.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, you know, you have been working on a series. It's done now and it's available and we'll tell people how to find it. But it's a series at Science and Culture Today, that's our flagship news and commentary website, covering the debate over evolution and intelligent design.
And you've been working on a critical review of a book that came out last year and called Designer A History of Intelligent Design in America. Now, first, what can you tell us about the book and who wrote it?
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Yeah, so the book is by C.W. howell, who got his PhD from Duke University a few years ago on basically the history of intelligent design. So the book is actually based upon the PhD thesis of C.W. howell, looking at a history of Intelligent design in America. And, and so the book is supposed to be a history of id. In fact, I think on one of its earliest pages, it promises to give a quote, full length history of ID, much like the PhD thesis, which in the abstract promised to give, quote, the first full length historical overview of the intelligence eye movement. So pretty ambitious and bold claims here to really give the first full length history of ID and historical overview of id. And so the book was published by New York University Press and it came out in, I think around about a year ago, I would say September ish of 2025, somewhere around there. And again, it's based upon this PhD thesis from Duke University in 2021.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Okay. And the way we're going to structure our conversation is we're going to zoom into the most egregious of errors, the Mike Behe fabricated quote on this episode. And then in a subsequent episode, we're going to unpack further mistakes and omissions and with designer science. But before we do that, I just want you to help us be clear. What is the moral? What is the lesson we should take from this whole episode with designer science and the fabrication and the misrepresentation and the sloppiness? What should the takeaway be? Just want to put that up there, you know, to begin with.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Andrew, we're going to tell this story in just a second here, but here's the real moral of the story.
The ultimate source of misinformation that led to this misquote, this fake quote of Michael Behe was the Kitzmuller versus Dover ruling. And so the moral of the story is to reaffirm something that we've known for a long time, and that is that the Kitzmuller vs Dover ruling is full of errors about intelligent design and is really not a reliable source of information about id. And if you're going to trust Judge Jones, trust the Dover ruling as a reliable source of, of information, you need to fact check Judge Jones. And if you don't do that, you can actually get yourself in a serious sort of academic hot water situation and you get really burned by Judge Jones. And sadly, I think that in this case, as we'll talk about, C.W. howell, he relied on Judge Jones's Kitzmuller vs. Dover ruling. I don't think he fact checked it. And because of that, he incorporated false information, this fake quote from Michael Behe into his book and it really, really came back to, to hurt his scholarship. So the moral of the story is to affirm something we always knew or we've known for a long time, that the Dover case, the Dover ruling, is full of misinformation about id. And you gotta fact check it before you just quote it and blindly trust it.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: It's not just harming him or the publisher or his book. It's harming the people that wanna read a comprehensive history of intelligent design. So, yeah, good advice indeed. Now give us a little kind of overview or flyby of just what you found as you unpack this book.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Sure, sure. So I have to ask you, do you know what TLDR means? Andrew? Have you heard that, that acronym?
[00:07:03] Speaker B: I've heard it, but remind you. Okay.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: No, it's funny because I, I thought everybody knew this. It's like definitely like one of those, you know, not. I am, I'm almost a millennial. Like a Gen Z acronym. TLDR means the too long didn't read version. Okay, got it. So if you didn't have time to read my. I don't know what it was like, 13,000 word review of the book. I definitely gave the book more attention than it probably needed, but we wanted to document what's really going on with id. And frankly, as I was writing the review of this book, I just kept finding more and more problems. And so it got to the point where I was like, I just have to put the pen down and get this out there. I would be reading it and be like, oh my gosh, another problem. This is going to take me three more hours of writing and three more pages to document why this is all wrong. I. I just had to stop eventually. So the TLDR version, and this is still going to be a little bit long, but this is sort of just a summary or overview of what I would say is the weaknesses, but also the strengths. The book is not entirely bad. In fact, we could even start with that. It is far from the worst history of ID ever written. Okay. And the book has some positive qualities in that he acknowledges some things about ID that I would say are accurate, such as the Discovery Institute, for example. He. He very much is clear that we did not support the policy that the Dover School District implemented back in 2005 in the Dover case. So this was good. He got that right. He also talks about how idea is different from creationism. And although I think he probably spends too much time obsessing over the question of whether or not ID is dead, he doesn't officially declare ID dead. Now he tries to pan as stale and nothing new coming out for 20 years. This flickering flame is what one reviewer wrote in Christianity Today. And that's probably the vibe that the book gives off, but at least he doesn't say that we're dead. And he also acknowledges, though, that we're different from creationism, et cetera, et cetera. So the book is far from the worst history of ID ever written. Now, that being said, it's a pretty low bar to not be the worst history of ID when we're talking about books like Creationism's Trojan Horse or I think It Was Monkey Girl. I mean, these are books that really came at it with extremely polemical agendas that really just like we're not even trying to be the least bit objective. How he actually even talks about some of this in his book, like some of these other histories were very polemical. He's right about that too. I agreed with that.
So it's not that hard to not be the worst history of ID ever written. However, given I would say both the errors and even the omissions in this book are huge. To the point where it's really impossible to call this a full length history of id. I mean, that falls far, far short of that goal. So we're going to get into this more today. But just to give a taste of where we're going, the big problem that I think we're going to start off with is that there's this linchpin quote that Hal uses in the book which he claimed was a quote damning admission, which Michael Behe quote, confessed on the witness stand during the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial. And he claims that in this book Behe said that there was something, well, this is the way he described it, something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of id. Okay, that's not the quote from Behe, but we'll get into that quote later. But he said that Behe basically admitted something that showed that there is, quote, something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of id. Okay, the problem is that when you look at the quote that Behe supposedly said during the Dover trial, Behe never said those words, nor did he ever say anything remotely like that either during the Dover trial or anywhere else. He's never written it, he's never said it. And in fact these words completely contradict Behe's actual stated position both at the Dover trial and in his own personal writing. So we'll get into this more in this episode. But for now I just want to say a core part of this book's thesis that ID basically isn't science and his religion is based upon a totally fake and invented quote, a fabricated quote from Michael B. So that is not a good look for starting off here. Now again, the biggest, another really big problem is the omissions from the book. Not just the errors, but the things that it leaves out. And you remember the subtitle of this book is A History of Intelligent Design in America. And again, it claims to provide a full length history of id. So you would expect that if it's going to actually do that, it would do a pretty good job of say documenting the ID research program, which is a big part of the history of ID over the last 20 years post Dover or maybe talking about a lot of the books that have come out post Dover. A lot of really interesting ID scholarship has been written stuff by Steve Meyer. We got some of these books here. You know, Darwin's Doubt, Signature in the Cell, Return of the God Hypothesis, all post over books. You've got Darwin Devals by Michael Behe up there. We could talk about a lot of, you know, you don't have all the books here, but a lot of good books by ID theorists. Science and Human Origins, Mining the Brain, the Immortal Mind, A lot of books that have broken new ground for intelligent design over the last five, 10, 15, even 20 years.
And Hal basically omits and explicitly denies the vast majority of the scholarly innovations of ID over the second half of its history, namely the last 20 years of ID since 2005, since the Dover trial. And this is what he actually states as an exact quote. He says since 2005, ID has hardened into a more inflexible ideology and its leading thinkers and writers have doubled down on on the same arguments they had made in the 90s. Yet the book barely even talks about the growth of ID's research program since 2005. And yes, there are a couple places where he briefly mentions ID research, but here's a telling statistic. We'll get into this more, I think in the next podcast. But this is really all you need to know here to get a sense of where the book goes and what it leaves off. There's about 500 bibliographic entries in the book. Only two of them are to peer reviewed pro ID scientific papers. That's less than zero point. About 0.4% of his total bibliographic citations are to ID scientific research papers. And none of those, by the way, are to the approximately 200 or so peer reviewed, ID peer reviewed scientific research papers that have come out since the dover trial in 2005. Okay, and when this book came out a year ago, they released, I don't know, it was certainly far more than 150. All right, he doesn't mention a single peer reviewed pro ID scientific paper that came out since Dover, although he tries to claim this is actually another quote. He says nearly all of the material produced by ID's Leading Lights after 2005. So nearly all the material produced by Leading Lights ID's Leading Lights after 2005 were recapitulations, replications and restatements of prior arguments. But he ignores all these innovations of our research books published over the last 20 years, talking about things like Darwin, Duvall, Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, Return of the God Hypothesis, New ID forays into human origins and the origin of the human mind. He just ignores every single bit of this. He does mention books like Darwin's Doubt, but he frames them as if there's nothing new and then leaves off all the new material that they're talking about. So we'll talk about that too in, I think, the second podcast.
Danny has sort of an interesting angle. You know, Andrew, you've published a lot of op eds. You were just in the New York Post. I've done a few. I just had one in the New York Post as well. We both published a bit. Okay. You know, when you're trying to get something published, you want to come up with what's called a news hook. Right? Something that's going to be catchy, that, you know, the editors are going to think, okay, this is a hot angle. A hot way to look at a topic that's gonna get people's attention that I'm gonna wanna publish. Okay. So you can see that Hal is looking for this angle on intelligent design to get publishers to wanna publish his thesis as a book. So what was his angle? His angle is basically that ID is the root of all science skepticism. Okay. The root of all evil in their views is science skepticism. Why do I say this? Well, if you've been following the scientific community over the last five, six years, since COVID you know that one of the biggest things that they talk about is the public's loss of trust in the scientific community. There you can see polls have showed this. The public has lost a huge amount of trust in the scientific community. It's a huge thing that the scientific community is very, very worried about. Whether rightly or wrongly this has happened. The public has lost trust in the scientific community. Okay, and so what Howell's angle is that basically a lot of this is all ID's fault. Okay. And even though, like, we're not the ones who were telling people to wear masks then not wear masks and blah, blah, we didn't do any of that. We had nothing to do with this Covid stuff that made people lose trust in science. But he wants to blame a lot of this on id.
But really, when you look at his evidence for this, I mean, it's really weak. Andrew. It comes really down to cherry picking a few examples here and there where he occasionally finds IP proponents challenging the consensus in other scientific fields. The way he puts it is that we commit the thought crime of, quote, doubting the science consensus outside of evolution. Okay? So you shouldn't be doubting the science consensus in evolution or even outside evolution according to hell.
But again, it's just very, very thin evidence. Yes, occasionally some ID person will write a stray article here, even once in a while, write a book. Somebody wrote a book challenging some of the COVID Lockdown policies. Nevermind that the current head of the NIH basically agrees with a lot of what was in that book. But this is like you're now becoming a science skeptic and this is really bad. Okay, but again this, this is like minor stuff that is not what most ID people are spending most of their time doing. It's very occasional stuff. So again, why is he doing this? Is because he knows that really, I would say the defenders and the guardians of the scientific community today are very worried about the public's loss of trust in science. So if he can pin a lot of that on ID now he's got an angle to really garner the interest of people who published books from New York University press to blame ID, ID's done so many things bad in their eyes. Let's just pile on now. It's our fault that people are losing trust in the scientific community. Okay, so anyway, we'll get to that maybe a little bit as well. But then he couples this with this kind of strange argument where he says that ID proponents, when we are arguing that ID is science, that somehow this shows that ID has a quote, scientistic tone and we're actually agreeing with our atheistic opponents that quote, all reality must be scientifically documentable. What is he saying here? Well, scientism of course, not science we're talking about scientism is the view that science is the only true, valid pathway to real, objective, reliable knowledge. Okay, and so scientism of course is what sort of is the fundamental philosophical premise of atheism? That science is the only real pathway to have knowledge. This criticism of idea of course is absurd. We're huge critics of scientism. We've been saying for years that yeah, you can have valid knowledge, that you know, science is not bad. I mean, I'm not anti scientific knowledge. I think science has given us all kinds of great knowledge. But you can also have knowledge outside of science. It's also valid forms of knowledge. You can have non scientific methodologies that can give you valid knowledge. Idaho has been saying this like forever. So to call us, you know, proponents of scientism is really, I think quite, quite surprising.
But then his reason for this is simply because we will often defend the scientific status of intelligent design. Well, okay, here's what I want to say about that. Walk a day in our shoes when you have all these people telling us you're not doing science, you're doing religion. I mean, how is one of the people trying to say this about us that, you know, Michael Behe, this Fake quote that he used to. He's using that to say that there's something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of id. What he's saying is that ID really isn't science. It's more religion than science. Walk a day in our shoes when you've got all these critics claiming that what we're not doing is science. And what they really mean by that is there's nothing objective here. There's no valid knowledge here. And you'll understand why sometimes we feel the need to show that actually our arguments are empirically based. We're citing evidence, we're using methods of science. There's nothing wrong with that. This doesn't mean that we're proponents of scientism any more than any other time somebody makes a scientific argument that therefore they're suddenly a proponent of scientism. When you get wrongly attacked of doing non science as much as we do, then I think that we should get a little bit of slack and understanding and appreciation. Why? Sometimes we need to show people, hey, no, what we're doing is science. We're not saying science is the only valid form of knowledge. We. What we are saying, though, is that while we're doing ID is science, and that needs to be reckoned with. You need to meet us on scientific grounds, deal with our scientific arguments rather than just dismissing us by claiming we're not science. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people do that. Okay, but this is where it also gets kind of interesting. So remember Hal's previous argument that we talked about is that idea is the root of all science skepticism. Okay? So Hal kind of is posturing himself. And as another one of these, there's kind of a cottage industry out there. I think of Naomi Oreski. She was at UC San Diego. There's a whole bunch of folks out there who posture themselves as sort of the guardians of big science to go out and take on the science skeptics and show why what they're doing isn't really very credible, et cetera, et cetera. So he postures himself in this book as sort of a defender of big science. Remember, he's accusing us of doubting the science consensus outside of evolution. That's a thought crime, if you read this book. So isn't that interesting that he is posturing himself as sort of a guardian of science, and yet he's critiquing us for supposedly promoting scientism? All right, if there's anybody here who is, I think, promoting scientism, it's somebody who is out there attacking those who challenge the consensus simply because they're doing that. So treating big science as sort of sacrosanct science with a capital S, maligning those who dare to question big science makes for a far stronger alignment with scientism than anything you could legitimately hang around our neck in the ID community. Okay, so I think that there's some little bit of hypocrisy going on here. But lastly, we want to talk about Howell's basic sort of thesis about the arc of ID's history. Okay. He is writing a history book. His thesis is that ID faced, in his words, a quote, staggering defeat at the Dover trial. He even calls it a disastrous defeat and then underwent a sharp decline in the years post over. And although he frequently will officially deny that ID is dead, and again, I think he spends too much time obsessing over that question of whether or not idi's dead. It's always weird when you try to play coroner too much with intelligent design.
And he even does often use past tense verbs to describe id, calling it defunct or talking about our supposed demise, et cetera, et cetera, of all this, that ID underwent this supposed decline. It's only plausible when you ignore a huge amount of what ID is actually doing. And we'll get into that, I think, in the next podcast. We already touched on this a little bit, but a huge. Well, how can you say a huge portion of this book? Because it doesn't actually exist.
This book ignores and omits a huge portion of the second half of. Of ID's history, basically since 2005 to the present, when this book was published about a year ago. And so what he really does is he's confusing the media frenzy that happened over ID during the Dover years. Yes, there was absolutely a media frenzy during the Dover years because there was this big court case and everybody was debating whether or not to teach id.
President Bush even made a comment saying he thought at one point, he made this passing comment in response to a question and answer session. He thought, sure, teach id. So when that kind of stuff is happening, yeah, the phone is going to ring off the hook. Okay. We had lots and lots of media. We still talked to media, but, you know, it was. It was a really a huge media frenzy that was going on during the Dover era. And after the Dover era was over, yeah, that media frenzy calmed down quite a bit. But he's confusing this media frenzy with an actual understanding of what idea is doing and whether it's growing and whether it's actually growing in its prominence academically and scientifically. And the answer is that the real story of ID is not being measured by a media frenzy that happened when there was some lawsuit back in 2005. Yeah, that's really not the real world. The real story of ID is what I would call snowball, like slow and steady growth. I love to compare ID to a snowball started off very small. I would say ID started back in the 80s. But over time the snowball has grown more and more and more and more and more to the point where now, like we have this very, very active, vibrant, fairly large research community of hundreds of scientists who are contributing to ID research and we're very, very busy. I mean, I can tell you we're growing because it's. We're having to grow our staff and take on more people, more and more responsibilities, more and more projects all the time. So the real story of ID's history is not, you know, spike during the Dober years and then decline. That's a very superficial sort of media perceptions approach to understanding id. You really want to understand, if you're a historian and you really want to dig into your subject, don't do this superficial thing. Look at the real history of what's going on. IDs slow and steady snowball, like growth over time where we've grown more and more and more over time, more and more people have joined our community. High level conversions from, you know, the evolutionary view to us, our research program growing, our science community growing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the real story of ID's history. So in closing, this book is far from the worst history of ID of written, as I said, but it does have, and it does have some positive qualities, but it's kind of got this strange bimodal quality. What is bimodal? Bimodal is when you have sort of two peaks. Okay, you think of the bell curve. Well, a bimodal modal bell curve has a peak here, then it goes down, then a peak there. So the book has this weird bimodal quality where it kind of like does some things really well, like sometimes quoting ID proponents correctly and getting some factual retellings of certain parts of ID's history, especially in the early years, it does a lot of that. Very, very Right. But then in other areas where I think it's even more important, like say, you know, your main critique of ideas being more religion than science, or your fundamental claim that ideas have this decline and it hasn't done anything new since Dover and then that is based upon just ignoring so much of what Adi has done. I think that there's sort of this strange quality where the book does some things really well, so then it can get away with doing other things really poorly. And the other things that it does really poorly, I would say, are the more important things that are really relevant to us today. I'm not sure if that was planned. I don't know if that Hal did this on purpose, but it was certainly the result. You, you have this strange book where it does some things really well as far as like, you know, telling certain parts of ID's history just fine. But then in other areas there's just, you know, gargantuan galaxy sized omissions of what's really going on in ID and really missing the big story of what's been happening in ID over the last 20 years. So I think those areas where he gets things wrong are precisely where he's trying to make ID look really bad. And it's also where the book is by far the weakest, objectively speaking.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Yeah, Casey, that's a great summary or flyover of just some of the general problems with designer science. And some of them we'll get into a little bit more, including this fabricated quote. And I also love the advice you gave about walking a mile in one's shoes before you write their history. You know, I think that's a great approach and something we need to remember, you know, the pressures involved in that subject's history, you know, and in the life that's being lived there. You've got to really fill those shoes to understand where they're coming from and where the problems lie. So that's awesome advice. Well, as we said in this episode, we're going to get a little bit more into the Michael Behe fabricated quote. Now, this is bombshell, you know, this is huge. And so tell me, where did the quote come from? How did it end up in Howell's book and what's happened since you raised the arm?
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Sure, sure. So this is kind of a long story.
The quote that Howell attributed to Michael Behe originally actually came from the ACLU from a brief that the ACLU filed with Judge Jones during the Dover trial. And what the ACLU was doing was it was not actually claiming to be quoting Behe. The ACLU was claiming to be just providing basically a summary of a scholarly article that Behe had written in the journal Biology and Philosophy way back in 2001. Okay. And they were summarizing this article now. They were badly Misrepresenting what Behe said in the article. We'll get into that as well.
But basically the ACLU was just purporting to summarize this paper B he had written. They were misrepresenting it nonetheless. And then what happened was Judge Jones something that a lot of people don't know about the Dover ruling, and I don't even know if Christopher Howell appreciated this, but over 90% of the celebrated section where Judge Jones claimed in the DOVER Ruling that ID is not science, over 90% of that section was either copied verbatim or near verbatim from an ACLU brief that was submitted during the Dover trial. And we wrote a report that documented this way back in, like, 2006. Okay, so this is like ancient history as far as we're concerned. But we showed in case after case after case that Judge Jones copied, just simply copied and pasted from the ACLU with very, very minor changes. Okay? Now, this is not necessarily plagiarism. Courts are allowed to sort of copy from a brief that is submitted by a party during a case. But this practice of copying from a party's brief is highly discouraged and frowned on by courts. Okay, so the Supreme Court, for example, one time, and this is sort of a paraphrase here, but they said basically that you never want to just sign whatever an attorney puts in front of you because that tends to incorporate sort of the overzealous advocacy over those attorneys directly into your ruling. And of course, the judge's rule is to kind of split the baby right into. You know, you have to come down on one side, but you want to be very careful to make sure you're not incorporating the overzealous advocacy. Or at least, you know, when you do copy straight from a party, it sort of removes that look of judicial independence, you know, and it looks like you're really just, you know, buying everything lock, stock, and barrel from these guys and not really being an independent thinker. So Judge Jones, sadly did exactly what the Supreme Court said not to do in that he copied the vast majority of his section on weather, ideas science from the aclu, either for literally verbatim or nearly verbatim. Like the kind of changes that would make a cheating high schooler blush. Okay? Like, just minor little changes. So Judge Jones takes the ACLU's brief, copies it, and when they wrote this summary of Behe's article, Judge Jones copied that whole section. What was interesting, though, is he put the words emphasis added around or basically at the end of this section where he. Italicized words from the aclu. It was very strange. The ACLU did not claim to be quoting Behe directly. They just claimed to be quoting from his paper. Judge Jones put these words in italics and then put emphasis added. Now, whenever you put emphasis added, you only do that if you're quoting somebody. Okay, so if you're reading the Dover ruling and you see these italics and then the words emphasis added, you might naturally conclude that now Judge Jones is claiming to be quoting somebody. It's kind of a weird way to do it. Usually when you quote somebody, you use quotation marks, you know. But in any case, the words Emma says added made people think that this was an actual quote from Behe. However, Judge Jones still after these words, he then cited to Behe's original paper. Okay, now finally, along comes Christopher Howell. He reads this passage from the Dover ruling. Judge Jones italicizes these words, uses the phrase emphasis added, assumes Judge Jones is quoting and now quoting from Behe. And then now Christopher Howell adds a new dimension of error and that he actually claims that Judge Jones is quoting from Behe not from some paper, but from Behe's actual testimony during the Kitzmuller vs Dover trial. So here's what Christopher Howell writes on page 132 of his book. He says, quote, ultimately the most damning admission may have come from Behe's mouth himself when he confessed on the stand that the quote plausibility of the argument for ID depends on the extent to which one believes in the existence of God, unquote. And then Howell goes on to say, this is now Howell writing at root, BE's admission show that there was something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of id, that it was based upon philosophical assumptions on metaphysics and on first principles. It therefore depended upon a prior commitment. So by putting those words in quotation marks, Hal claimed that Behe literally said that quote, the plausibility of the argument for ID depends on the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. Those were the words he put in Behe's in quotes. And then he says that Behe quote confessed these words on the witness stand during the Dover trial, even calls this a quote damning admission. Okay, so he's really building this up. And then he even comes back to the same quote later at the end of the book to kind of just sink home his point. That idea is basically more religion than science. There's something fundamentally non empirical about it. It's metaphysics, et cetera, et cetera. So I basically drill down into this and Try to find out what really happened during the Dover trial. Before we want to get in this, I want to make a point. All right, so Hal is saying that there's something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of id. Well, I'm not a philosopher of science, but I can tell you that any philosopher of science will actually say that there's something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of all science. That science depends on sort of like certain fundamental philosophical assumptions. Such as that, you know, we can trust our logic, we can trust our senses, or that there's an orderly basis to the universe, that things are repeatable. I mean, there are certain sort of unprovable or at least scientifically unprovable philosophical assumptions that are at the heart of any scientific theory. So to attack ID for saying that there's something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of it, well, I mean, you got to realize something like most good philosophers of science would acknowledge, yes, all science depends on something fundamentally non empirical. So this is not like a specific criticism of id. But of course, what Howell is trying to say is something different. That ID really is a religious view, a metaphysical view, not a scientific view. And he's really trying to again make the standard old critique we've heard a billion times that idea is not science, but religion. So the point here being Behe never said those words during the Dover trial. Okay, I went through the Dover transcripts. I searched them high and low. Those phrases don't exist. Number two, Behe has never written those words in any of his scholarly writings. I went back, I searched everything I could search.
I went back to the original paper that Beheved published in Biology and Philosophy, which led to the ACLU's original misrepresentation of what he had written. Although at least the ACLU didn't claim to be quoting Behe. You know, I went back to that paper. There's nothing. That quote does not exist in that paper. Moreover, it's not even like there's some very similar quote. And it's just a slight misquote. There's nothing similar to what this supposed quote from Behe. Nothing similar to it whatsoever. In Behe's Dover testimony in, in that article he wrote in Biology and Philosophy or anywhere else, as far as I can tell, it is a totally fabricated, fake quote. And so this is sort of the most, also very importantly is that the words that they're attributing to Behe actually directly contradicts what Behe actually said during the Dober trial and what he said in this 2001 article in Biology and philosophy. And so really you've got this, like, really sort of warped, bad scholarship game of telephone, where what started off as the ACLU's misrepresentation of what Behe wrote in an article, just summarizing it, though, suddenly somehow, you know, one person to the next to the next and next. Now those words are being directly attributed to Behe as if it was a damning admission that he made at the Dober trial. So, I mean, you know, yeah, wow is actually exactly what I said. It's like, you know, the. The stuff we have to deal with sometimes. It's just kind of like, wow, you know, like, how did this happen? And again, this is not a slight misquote. There's nothing even remotely close to this in anything that BE has ever written.
And so we kind of dwell the story here of where all this came from. But I want you to see how badly this misrepresented Behe's actual position in his paper that he originally wrote. Okay, here's an actual quote from the paper that Behe wrote in biology and philosophy. He said, quote, so this is Behe's actual views, right? You want to represent people accurately. This is what Behe actually said.
He said, quote, the conclusion of intelligent design in biochemistry rests exclusively on empirical evidence. The structures and functions of the biochemical systems, plus principles of logic. No particular tenet of faith is involved. Therefore, I consider design to be a scientific explanation, whether ultimately correct or not.
So it would be harder to imagine B offering a stronger confirmation of his position that ID is a scientific explanation based exclusively on empirical evidence that does not require any tenet of faith. Okay, yet this is the source that somehow led to this fake quote where he's saying, supposedly the exact opposite. You know that the plausibility of ID depends on whether or not you believe in God, but that all directly contradicts what Behe actually said. Even Behe's Dover testimony.
Well, listen to this.
Towards the end of the book, Howe again talks about this supposed damning admission from Behe during the Dover trial. Here's what Hal writes. He says, towards the end of his testimony at Dover, Michael Behe testified that one's preconceptions and metaphysical stance may be the primary driver in one's scientific conclusions. And in his case, he was referring to his own reading of design in nature. Okay? Behe never testified that one's preconceptions or metaphysical stance may be the primary driver of one's scientific conclusions. What did Behe actually say during the Dover trial? He was actually asked by the plaintiff's attorney about this paper in biology and philosophy during the Dover trial. And you know, you can read this whole exchange that I posted on my review of the book on science and culture today. But basically at the end of explaining all this the plaintiff's attorney asked Behe. He says it's a God friendly theory, isn't it Professor Behe? So this is what Behe says. In response he says let me respond to that in a couple of ways. First let me clarify for context that this is a journal called Biology and Philosophy. So I'm not only speaking about scientific matters here, I'm also talking about non scientific matters here. In an academic forum, academics embrace much more than just science. This is an academic forum which embraces philosophy. So I addressed philosophical issues as well. Then Behe says and again my statement as written is certainly correct and it's happened time many times in science. And I'll just refer to John Maddox's article Down with the Big Bang. He didn't like the Big Bang theory and it wasn't because the data were inconsistent with it, it's because it was philosophically unacceptable.
Walter Nernst hated the idea of a beginning to the universe. He it was unscientific so and other people have said similar things. So it's clearly true that people make decisions even about a scientific theory not based not only on the science itself but on what they perceive as other ramifications of their theory. But as I've argued a number of places, it's the proper role of a scientist to leave aside those other considerations as much as possible and focus simply on the scientific data.
So as you can see from that little exchange, in no way did be he confess that there is something fundamentally non empirical at the heart of id, that it was based upon philosophical assumptions, on metaphysics, on first principles, on something that requires a prior commitment. Instead, B clearly says even if it's Dover or testimony, that idea is a scientific theory. But he also says that sometimes for psychological reasons people will reject scientific theories based not only on the science itself but but what they perceive as other ramifications of the theory, unquote. And he gives examples of the Big Bang and others. But B makes it clear that he's applying this statement about sociology and psychology to all of science, not just specifically to intelligent design. So he's certainly not saying that oh his own supportive ID depends on him believing in God or you know, very much exactly against the way Hal tries to characterize this. And in fact Behe then goes on to say that scientists should avoid this psychological tendency as much as possible, he says, and focus simply on the scientific data.
So nowhere does he remotely concede that ID is not science or that ID is religion, or that you have to believe in God to accept id.
And in fact, if Hal had gone back to the original source at this linchpin moment in the Dover trial, he would have never found any indication that Behe confessed anything like this on the stand.
So I would say this is really the big reason why this is not good scholarship. So, Andrew. So Behe never testified that quotes one's preconceptions and metaphysical stance may be the driver in one's scientific conclusions. In fact, he certainly never said that his own preconceptions of metaphysical stance are what led him to conclude Intelligent Design. I actually went back, Andrew, and looked at some old interviews he had given to kind of show what his position was. I way back in 1996, Behe told EWTN, one of the largest Catholic news networks. It's, you know, Behe is a practicing Catholic. That's very well known. He said, quote, I never gave evolution a second thought and certainly saw no conflict with church teaching. Of course, the Catholic Church teaching that it is possible to accept evolution and be a very good practicing Catholic or another good example is he did an interview with a National Catholic reporter in 2005, not long before the Dover trial, and this article quoted Behe, quoted Behe, and it said, behe is a Catholic, yet Behe told me he believes a Catholic in good faith can accept these scientific mechanisms posited by evolutionary theory. I'm a biochemist, not a theologian, he said, and this is quoting Bee, but it says to me that belief in mutation and natural selection is compatible with Catholicism as long as the underlying premise is that God set it up that way. That seems to be an orthodox Catholic position. And then the article goes on to quote Bee. He's saying I'm critical of evolutionary theory not because it's unorthodox, he said, but because it can't do what it purports to do. So Bee has been very clear on the record for a long time that his conclusions about ID and evolution are driven by what he believes is the scientific evidence, not his theological preconceptions and certainly not his own reading of design onto nature, coming from his own metaphysical stance, as Hal would have us believe.
So again, Behe's actual statement on the witness stand was thus the proper role of a scientist is to leave aside those other considerations as much as possible. And simply focus on the scientific data. He affirmed that idea is science and even writes in the paper from which the fake quote ultimately was taken that quote, the conclusion of intelligent design and biochemistry rests exclusively on empirical evidence. No particular tenet of faith is involved. Therefore, I consider ID to be a scientific explanation. So again, what started off as the ACLU's misrepresentation of Behe somehow ends up being Behe's direct quoted words during the Dover trial. And it shows somehow that there's something quote, fundamentally non empirical at the heart of id. But it never happened. It's totally fake. It's all a fabricated story. And this was not a minor error. Again, all of this formed a linchpin quote that Hal used in his book and referred back to even multiple times to show that ID is not science or something like religion, but it really directly contradicted Behe's views, not just a
[00:43:46] Speaker B: little footnote at the bottom of, of the chapter.
Well, it sounds like Behe could not have been clearer in the, the different communications he was making about these points.
And you can certainly see the role of sloppy scholarship here. Well, Casey, let me, let me ask you, you approached New York University Press, you wrote to them, you explained this, you, and you asked for them to do something, tell us what happened next.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean, I wrote a letter to New York University Press, I think it was at the end of July, early August of this year. And I said, look, this book is damaging the reputation of Michael Behe and Discovery Institute, and Behe is one of our senior fellows. And this book is putting out false information about him. It's claiming he said something that he never actually said and that really misrepresents his actual stated views.
And I asked him to basically correct future editions of the book. And I have good news. This story actually has a positive ending, Andrew, at least to this point, as we record this podcast today. The publisher and the author, C.W. howell, responded very positively. They agreed that this was an error and they agreed to recall all the current stock and destroy it. I actually wasn't even asking for that. I just said, hey, will you please acknowledge this mistake and will you please correct any future editions? They actually said that they're going to pull the current edition of the book from the market and destroy all existing inventory. And they said that they're going to update the manuscript to fix the attribution, the false attribution and the, you know, the false quote, which is great. And they said they'll recreate a reissued version of the book, you know, that does not have this fake quote.
And going forward, only the corrected editions would be available for sale. So I want to say that, you know, I really appreciated their response. My letter, again, simply asked them to correct future versions of the book. I didn't ask them to pull it from the market and destroy all existing inventory.
So they really deserve credit, I think, for trying to do the right thing here. I think it does show that at some very important level, both New York University Press and the author, C.W. howells, do care about the truth. So despite the poor scholarship, they did the right thing here. Now, this doesn't change the fact that this book has very serious problems. I think it has done a lot of damage to ID and to Michael Behe. But at the end of the day, you know, they did the right thing and I really respect and want to honor that. Yeah.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Wow, that is a happy ending of sorts. We wish it hadn't happened, you know, to begin with, but that's a really positive development, Casey. And thanks in large part to your efforts and your work uncut, I sacrificed
[00:46:29] Speaker A: a good chunk of my vacation with my wife Stanley in Mexico, riding all this last week of July. So. But, you know, that's all right. Great place to go, you know, do riding next to the beach and then go boogie boarding in the ocean with my nieces and nephews. So it was. It was okay.
[00:46:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, tell me just as we wrap up this portion of our conversation today, you know, looking at all this, what lessons can the everyday person teach? Take from this, from this whole chapter of misrepresentation and fabrication in a book that purports to be a comprehensive history of id.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, the obvious lesson here is, of course, to not use an invented fake quote and then make it a lynchpick argument of your academic book. That's never a good thing to do. But I think everybody already knew that. So I think there is. This reaffirms for us at Discovery and the ID community. Some of you already knew, but I hope this helps other people to appreciate this other lesson that is that this situation really emphasizes why you should not trust Judge Jones's Kitzmuller vs Dover ruling as a reliable source of information about intelligence. If you're going to go back and borrow any of Judge Jones's arguments, you need to fact check him first. Okay. Apparently, C.W. howe did not fact check the airfield Kitzmidler v. Dover ruling. And the result was he incorporated false claims into his book and he really got burned by Judge Jones. And so I think that this really? That is the moral of the story is you need to make sure that if you're going to cite the Dover ruling, go back and fact check it. Make sure that it's not putting out fake news about intelligent design. And again, to be clear, this fabricated quote is only one of multiple major problems with the book Designer Science.
Hal makes his case against ID not only by error, but also in huge part by omission. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later.
[00:48:21] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. This sets us up perfectly for more discussion about those things. Casey, I appreciate your time. I know you're really busy, but you've done excellent work here and it's been great to unpack that today. So thank you for joining us today.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Great conversation.
[00:48:38] Speaker B: And just to remind readers and viewers that we can make that available.
The whole series that Casey has written, is it all available now?
[00:48:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's all on scienceandculture.com and that's the website where we put out the full review of the book. Okay.
[00:48:54] Speaker B: And it's long, but it's worth it if you want to dig into this and see kind of what happened at length. And of course, for more on Casey's work, you can always go to his website, Casey Luskin.com we'll be back with more on this conversation about Designer science. Until then, I'm Andrew McDermott for ID the Future. Thanks for joining us.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
