History

2018 Censor of the Year

February 12, 2018

Every year Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture recognizes a Censor of the Year, an outstanding example of a person or institution that contributed to the pro-Darwin “consensus” through intimidation, agitation, or professional retaliation. The 2018 Winner is…

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

April 19, 2008

History

This documentary brought the issue of academic freedom to the limelight, showcasing examples of campus censorship of professors and students guilty of being interested in an alternative explanation of life called Intelligent Design. Read More ›

Shedding the Galileo Complex

January 14, 2008

History

Correcting this historical picture — the Galileo story in particular — is one of the great virtues of John Lennox’s God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? The very notion of a science-religion conflict is largely the invention of a few prominent (though now discredited) 19th-century historians. Galileo’s persecution is the linchpin of this tale. Read More ›

Kitzmiller v. Dover: A Pyrrhic Victory?

John G. West

December 22, 2005

History

In 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania forbid the Dover school district from mentioning the theory of intelligent design in science classes. Read More ›

Science and Religion Twenty Years After McLean V. Arkansas

Francis J. Beckwith

April 1, 2003

Education, History, Policy

The conventional wisdom in constitutional law is that the debate that began with the famous Scopes trial in 1925¹ over the teaching of origins in public school science classrooms officially ended in 1987. In that year the U.S. Supreme Court, in Edwards v. Aguillard,² struck down a Louisiana statute, the Balanced Treatment Act, that required its public schools to teach creationism if they taught evolution and vice versa. The Court held that the statute violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. A small group of academics, however, with university appointments, impressive publications, and better credentials than their creationist predecessors, have raised questions about evolution and have offered alternative arguments that have changed the texture, tenor, and quality of a debate once thought long dead. Read More ›

Fact, Myth, and the Scopes Monkey Trial

Phillip Johnson

July 1, 1997

Education, History

As Phillip Johnson recounts, some myths are too good to be true. The popular narrative of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" is just such a myth: tired, misleading, and still distorting dialogue about evolution. Read More ›