Design in America. By C.W. Howell. New
York University Press, 2025.
Twenty years after the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, in which a federal court found that intelligent design is neither scientifically credible nor detachable from its creationist antecedents, C.W. Howell offers a history of the intelligent design movement that is neither a hostile polemic nor a partisan apologetic. In the introduction, Howell explains that he was reared as a young-earth creationist and then was interested in intelligent design while in high school and college, but he now regards himself as a theistic evolutionist. In any case, he disclaims any “interest in promoting a particular viewpoint on creation, design, or theism” and declares instead that he seeks to present intelligent design “in a critical but fair light … simply to understand it and its supporters” (p. 15). There certainly is a need for a compendious history of the intelligent design movement. To what extent is Designer Science successful in meeting that need?
Three limitations of the book deserve comment. First, while it is understandable that Howell refrains from adjudicating between the proponents and the opponents of intelligent design, it is disconcerting not to see any reference to position statements decrying intelligent design from organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science or major critical works such as Why Intelligent Design Fails (2004). Second, Howell apparently relies exclusively on public sources; there is no indication that he conducted interviews with any of the relevant figures or consulted any of the relevant archives. Third, the book focuses on the leaders of the intelligent design movement with little consideration of the rank and file through either interviews, as in Jason Rosenhouse’s Among the Creationists (2012), or through survey research. Yet on the whole, Designer Science is a well-written, well-researched, and well-argued contribution to the literature on intelligent design.
In chapter one, Howell considers the “complicated and at times murky” (p. 47) relationship between intelligent design and creationism, fully cognizant of the motives that help drive opinions here: the implications of the abundant case law thwarting the ambitions of creationists to affect public science education was never far from the thoughts of the proponents or the opponents of intelligent design. In the course of doing so, Howell provides a capsule history of anti-evolutionism in the United States, with a particularly insightful discussion that traces relevant lines of thought from their origin in old-school creationism (including such comparatively obscure figures as A.E. Wilder-Smith, Gary Parker, Norman Geisler, and Wendell Bird) to their inclusion in the newfangled view of intelligent design, as promoted in The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984) and the textbook that would later star in the Kitzmiller trial, Of Pandas and People (1989/1993).
The intelligent design movement emerged to the public eye in the 1990s, popularized by Phillip Johnson, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and bolstered by the work of Michael Behe, the biochemist author of Darwin’s Black Box (1996), and William Dembski, the philosopher author of The Design Inference (1998). Their arguments and the objections of their critics are sketched, albeit not in a tremendous amount of detail and with no attempt to adjudicate these disputes. Howell astutely discusses the reluctance of the proponents of intelligent design to derive any theological or philosophical consequences from their scientific claims, which, while alienating established creationist organizations such as the young-earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, enabled the movement to maintain a big tent. Not all were welcome to its shelter, though: the intelligent design movement studiously ignored the 2002 endorsement by the Raëlian UFO cult.
In chapter three, Howell turns to politics. For Johnson especially, intelligent design was a wedge issue to deploy in the service of broadly conservative ideas in a culture war. These were not quite the same conservative ideas that appealed to young-earth creationists: intelligent design’s conservatism was not so populist. Still, as Howell observes, “Whether conservatives were traditionalists, neoconservatives, or theoconservatives, anti-evolution was a thread that ran through each movement” (p. 107). It would have been relevant for him also to consider how, by the same token, anti-communism is a constant theme throughout creationism, as Carl Weinberg’s Red Dynamite (2021) thoroughly documented. The chapter ends by describing, under the heading “Politics Outruns Science,” a string of successes—fortunately, only temporary successes—attained by the intelligent design movement in the first few years of the millennium in Ohio, Georgia, and Kansas.
Then, in Pennsylvania, the Dover Area School Board decided to promote intelligent design to public school students who were supposed to be learning about evolution. Howell briefly but adeptly sketches the background, the conduct, and the outcome of the Kitzmiller trial in chapter four. “The decision was a rout,” he summarizes. “The ‘big tent,’ which had granted [intelligent design] strength, was its legal undoing” (p. 145). The remainder of the chapter is devoted to discussing subsequent attacks on intelligent design from, on the one hand, the so-called New Atheists and, on the other hand, theistic evolutionists, especially those at the BioLogos Foundation, established by the evangelical Francis Collins, and Catholic thinkers influenced by Thomas Aquinas. Here Howell might have usefully also discussed the attempts of the Discovery Institute, the main intelligent design think tank, to recruit conservative Catholics to intelligent design.
In chapter five, Howell considers the state of intelligent design after Kitzmiller. He observes that the proponents of intelligent design have “reiterated and reprised the same general arguments” but with added “cultural aggrievement and a sense of persecution” (p. 158), which were on conspicuous display in the Ben Stein–fronted propaganda film Expelled (2008). But he fails to register that they have also largely abandoned the pretense of secularity—witness the title of Stephen C. Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis (2021), for example—perhaps because they have lost any realistic hope of reforming public science education. Later, in the conclusion, Howell adds that intelligent design seems unable to compete with young-earth creationism, especially as presented in the vivid and lowbrow style of Answers in Genesis’s tourist attractions. “Of what use is specified complexity,” he asks, “against a zip line, petting zoo, food court, and planetarium?” (p. 205).
In the introduction, Howell offers the sweeping claim that “intelligent design both planted the seeds and nurtured the growth of extreme skepticism in the world of US conservatism” (p. 7). By the time he reaches the conclusion, the claim is not so implausibly rendered: intelligent design’s “lasting contribution … looks not to be its challenge to Darwin but its post-[Kitzmiller] challenge to the reliability of scientific practice and its both tacit and explicit support for a host of suspicious movements,” including vaccine hesitancy, AIDS denialism, and climate change denial (p. 208). But his tight focus on intelligent design seems to have induced him not to consider rival hypotheses, such as the political polarization of specific issues in science and of trust in the scientific enterprise generally, in light of which it is likely that intelligent design reflected, rather than propelled, the increase of science denial among political conservatives in the United States.
