Steve Fuller, Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism, Cambridge: Icon Books, 2008, ISBN 978 1840468 04 5
Dissent over Descent is that rare book which will aggravate any reader with strong ideas about its subject. Intelligent Design inhabits the shell-pocked no-man's land between science and religion. Steve Fuller argues that it should be taught as an option because science depends on religion. But his version of religion will set pious teeth on edge.
Fuller does to science what scientific critics often do to religion. He studies it as a cultural construct. He looks down on it from the heights of the history, philosophy and sociology of science. He does not confine himself to what scientists think they are doing, but asks how scientific theories arose and what are the strands of contemporary understanding of science.
He also shows that the conflict between science and religion has largely been manufactured as propaganda in the struggle, first to control the educational curriculum, and more recently for funding.
Fuller is knowledgeable both about scientific and religious debates. He moves allusively but persuasively through a complex intellectual and cultural history.
The heart of his argument is that Darwinian evolution, although accepted as orthodoxy, is a shaky theory, and that power, not reason, lies behind the exclusion of intelligent design from the science curriculum.
He claims that scientific enterprises grew out of religious belief. Many fathers of modern science, like Linnaeus and Mendel and Newton, wanted in their science to define the relationship between God and the natural world. In particular, they wanted to explore the design of the universe. They assumed that reality is intelligible and coherent, and that in understanding it through science we also know something of God's design.
Because Darwin's principle of natural selection seemed to undermine the claims of scientific reason, it was criticised as strongly by philosophers like John Stuart Mill and by Darwin's fellow scientists as it was by bishops. If the human world was explained by chance phenomena, the mind and its capacity to reason, and presumably its belief in the intelligibility of nature, were also simply chance developments.
In fact, Fuller argues, proponents of evolution follow Darwin by importing into their theories the ghost of design. They assume that the world today is the culmination of evolutionary development, and so measure natural history by reference to this future stage.
The logical difficulties of evolutionary