1) Definition of Science from the Kansas Science Standards

“Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.”

2) The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture’s Mission Statement

Design Theory: A New Science for a New Century:

Materialistic thinking dominated Western culture during the 20th century in large part because of the authority of science. The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks, therefore, to challenge materialism on specifically scientific grounds. Yet Center Fellows do more than critique theories that have materialistic implications. They have also pioneered alternative scientific theories and research methods that recognize the reality of design and the need for intelligent agency to explain it. This new research program-called "design theory"-is based upon recent developments in the information sciences and many new evidences of design. Design theory promises to revitalize many long-stagnant disciplines by recognizing mind, as well as matter, as a causal influence in the world. It also promises, by implication, to promote a more holistic view of reality and humanity, thus helping to reverse some of materialism's destructive cultural consequences.

3) The Wedge Strategy: Introduction

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. ....

…Thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces .... This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards... Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology….

Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. …The Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature.


4) The Wedge Strategy: Five Year Strategic Plan Summary

… We are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the “thin edge of the wedge,” was Phillip Johnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, …

We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

5) William Dembski: “Science and Design”

An object that is designed functions within certain constraints. Transgress those constraints and the object functions poorly or breaks. Moreover, we can discover those constraints empirically by seeing what does and doesn’t work. ... Transgress those constraints, and we as well as our society will suffer.

There is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that many of the attitudes and behaviors our society promotes undermine human flourishing. Design promises to reinvigorate that ethical stream running from Aristotle through Aquinas known as natural law.

6) KCFS Response to Dembski

The chilling idea here is that science can, and should, investigate what constitutes "natural" ethics and morals, and that science can discover which behaviors transgress the intended purposes of human design. Many people would agree that our society would benefit from a reinvigoration of ethics, but few would feel comfortable with science being the vehicle by which, somehow, "correct" ethical and moral behavior were established.

7) Phillip Johnson April 8, 2000, Lawrence, KS

When asked if one could accept the theory of evolution and also be a Christian, Johnson called such people “liberal Christians” and said that they“are worse than atheists because they hide their naturalism behind a veneer of religion.”

8) Keith Miller: KSU Geology professor, KCFS Board member, and evangelical Christian

Creation was not a past accomplished act, but rather is a present continuing reality. God's creative power is continually at work, even now.

God is intimately and actively involved in what we perceive as "natural" or "law-governed" processes. This view, which I believe is thoroughly orthodox, makes a completely seamless evolutionary history of life entirely acceptable theologically. Such a scientific description does not violate one's understanding of the nature and character of God.

9) Phillip Johnson: April 19, 2001, Northshore Church

“We will discover that "in the beginning was the Word" is fact not fantasy. It's as true scientifically as it is spiritually or Biblically…

[Evolution is] is the latest fashion in idolatry.

This spiritual understanding is, I think, the right entry into the whole Biblical system of thinking.”

10) William Dembski: National Religious Broadcasters meeting, February 2000

"Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God.…The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ.,…And if there's anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ as the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view.”

11) William Dembski: Touchstone Magazine, July/August 1999

“The world is a mirror representing the divine life…Intelligent design readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”