Darwinism and intelligent design: Darwin's public relations squad

My friend, AngelWeb at Free Mark Steyn alerts me to this story by Melanie Phillips, "Creating an insult to intelligence" (29th April 2009):

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was

nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

One thing I would contest with Phillips is that it was "muddled." It was a sophisticated attempt to keep a dying idea - Darwinism - alive, using the legal system.

If you can get a judge to say something is true, the fact that most reasonable persons do not believe it does not count for much.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: