Timeline of Intelligent Design - Teach The Controversy

Teach The Controversy

• 1999 strategies: argue that individual teachers have a constitutional right to present creationist material, and that "evidence against evolution" should be taught in the science classroom as a way to improve teaching and learning. Attempts to teach IC and introduce Pandas. Resources for teachers... abundantly available from both "creation science ministries" and conservative religious groups.
• 1999 David DeWolf, Stephen C. Meyer and Mark DeForrest coauthored a 40-page booklet, Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook, published by the FTE. It claims Edwards v. Aguillard mandated "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind" subject to a "clear secular intent of enhancing.. science instruction."
• 1999 Skagit County's Burlington-Edison School District finds that for almost 10 years the high-school science teacher Roger DeHart had been omitting state-approved biology textbook teaching on evolution, and using Pandas.
• Aug. 17, 1999, Philip Kitcher, professor of the philosophy of science at Columbia University, in online debate in Slate magazine with Johnson, coins neo-creo: "Enter the neo-creos, scavenging the scientific literature, they take claims out of context and pretend that everything about evolution is controversial. . . . But it's all a big con."
• May 10, 2000, DI briefing of Congress, "Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design and its Implications for Public Policy and Education," also addressed the social, moral, and political consequences of Darwinism. Creation-evolution debate had primarily been active at the state and local level, a new effort to involve Congress, took place as the Senate entered its second week of debate on overhauling federal K-12 education programs. Nancy Pearcey "For Darwinists, religion must give way to a new science-based cosmic myth with the power to bind humans together in a new world order. She then asked what this means for morality and argued that people were right to be concerned that all the above would undercut morality."
• July 2000 Dean Kenyon and David DeWolf of CRSC: Kenyon states "Scientific creationism... is actually one of the intellectual antecedents of the Intelligent Design movement.
• June 2001 Rick Santorum introduces The Santorum Amendment to "Teach the Controversy" partially written by Johnson (and based on a law journal article written by DI activist David DeWolf) inviting, left out of bill but kept in conference report.
• December 2002 DI lobbying to get ID into Ohio science standards Ohio House Bill 481. Bills all failed, ID excluded by name in the approved standard but it included the phrase "critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory" used as excuse for the new "teach the controversy" strategy.
• Jan 2004 Dembski The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design ISBN 0-8308-2375-1 page 22 "Theism, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, holds that God by wisdom created the world. The origin of the world and its subsequent ordering thus result from the designing activity of an intelligent agent, God.
  Naturalism, on the other hand, allows no place for intelligent agency, except at the end of a blind, purposeless, material process."
• 2004 ©. FTE, draft for new version of Pandas, mentions 10th anniversary, authors listed as Michael J. Behe, Percival Davis, William A. Dembski, Dean H. Kenyon, Jonathan Wells. Contents list, preface, notes to teachers, notes to students, epilogue, but no main content.
• March 10, 2004, Ohio State Board of Education approved model lesson Critical Analysis of Evolution – Grade 10.
• 2004 Paul Nelson interviewed by a magazine called Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity – "Easily, the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don't have such a theory right now, and that's a real problem. Without a theory, it's very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we've got a bag of powerful intuitions and a handful of notions such as irreducible complexity and specified complexity, but as yet, no general theory of biological design."
• 2004 the school board of Grantsburg, Wisconsin, voted to have ID taught as an alternative to evolution. By late summer 2005 letters urging reversal had been organised by a department of University of Wisconsin–Madison and clergy nationwide, the Clergy Letter Project, resulting in the board largely reversing their decision.
• April 8, 2004 first of the Academic Freedom bills promoting intelligent design passed unanimously by the Alabama Senate. On May 17, 2004, the Alabama House adjourned the 2004 legislative session without voting on the bill, allowing it to lapse. On February 8, 2005, a pair of virtually identical bills were simultaneously introduced in the Alabama Senate and House, again under the description of "The Academic Freedom Act."