Steve Fuller (sociologist) - Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design

Fuller has made many statements relating to his support for intelligent design (ID), including two books, and in 2005, he testified for Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and the decision, which ruled against intelligent design, cited Fuller's testimony. Fuller has stated his position in an article he wrote in The Times Higher Education Supplement. Fuller has been criticised for his allegedly postmodernist views on science (Fuller's views can more accurately be characterised as the related viewpoint of social constructionism), as well as his support for intelligent design. Where this criticism has come from pro-Science blogs, it has largely centred on his testimony, for the defense, at the Kitzmiller trial. This testimony was frequently quoted by Judge Jones, though not in a way helpful to the defense, as noted by critics of intelligent design. Some critics within the Science and Technology Studies community have described Fuller's participation at this trial as "naive" and have suggested that the field needs further development before it can constructively engage the legal community on the nature of science. He has claimed that he doesn't support intelligent design "but feels that it should have a 'fair run for its money'", and that he is a secular humanist. In his book "Dissent over Descent", he identifies himself as a secular humanist and though he does not believe in a divine personal creator, he sees religion, in general, as a motivating influence in scientific pursuits and believes that the difference between science and religion is more institutional than intellectual.

On 21 February 2007, Fuller debated with Lewis Wolpert at Royal Holloway, University of London on whether evolution and intelligent design should be accorded equal status as scientific theories. Fuller supported the proposition. Fuller has written a complimentary endorsement of the pro-Intelligent Design Discovery Institute's textbook Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism (published in 2007), which is featured on this book's website.

Fuller appeared in the 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein:

If you take seriously that evolution has to do with the transition of life forms, and that life and death are just natural processes, then one gets to be liberal about abortion and euthanasia. All of those kinds of ideas seem to me follow very naturally from a Darwinian perspective-- a deprivileging of human beings, basically. And I think people who want to endorse Darwinism have to take this kind of viewpoint very seriously.