Marketing Intelligent Design: Law and the Creationist Agenda

by Frank S. Ravitch

Overview

Recently a new battle has emerged between science and religion. The battle has focused on intelligent design (ID) and the numerous legal, philosophical, and educational concerns surrounding it. Resolution of these concerns centers on two questions: Is ID science? And is ID religion? Despite the fact that ID does not meet the standards of scientific rigor, ID proponents have been able to create a remarkably well-designed marketing plan aimed at imposing a theistic naturalism in schools and scientific discourse. Both the ID movement and some of its most vociferous opponents have a vested interest in suggesting that science, especially evolutionary biology, and religion are incompatible. This book presents a philosophical and legal counterpoint by demonstrating the compatibility between religion and evolutionary biology and the incompatibility between ID and mainstream science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521139267
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/11/2010
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Professor Frank S. Ravitch is the Walter H. Stowers Chair in Law and Religion at the Michigan State University College of Law. He is most recently the author of Masters of Illusion: The Supreme Court and the Religion Clauses (2007) and Law and Religion, A Reader: Cases, Concepts, and Theory, 2nd Edition (2008). He has also published numerous law review articles dealing with law and religion, civil rights law and disability discrimination. Ravitch regularly serves as an expert for print and broadcast media and speaks on topics related to church-state and civil rights law to a wide range of national and local organizations.

Table of Contents

1. Designing design; 2. Big d and manufactured paradigm shifts; 3. The law and intelligent design; 4. Theistic evolution; 5. Dawkins' dilemma; 6. No intelligence allowed or no intelligible science?; 7. The Madison Avenue approach to law and science.

Editorial Reviews

"Law, religion, and science—they all swirl together in debates over the teaching of intelligent design (ID) and evolution. ID advocates insist that public school teachers should be required to teach ID whenever they teach evolution. Frank Ravitch brings his vast knowledge of these debates to bear in Marketing Intelligent Design and leaves the ID argument in tatters. With incisive arguments and historical understanding, Professor Ravitch demonstrates that the ID position is no more than an imaginative marketing campaign that repackages previous attacks on the teaching of evolution. But the substance of the attack is the same, and Ravitch shows why it must fail."
- Stephen M. Feldman
Jerry W. Housel/Carl F. Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law and Adjunct
Professor of Political Science, University of Wyoming



"Marketing Intelligent Design is an interdisciplinary feast. Frank Ravitch adroitly marches through issues of law, evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, biblical interpretation, and the tactics associated with the Intelligent Design Movement. The result is an articulate and stinging indictment of Intelligent Design on all fronts. This is an important book."
- Steven H. Shiffrin
Author of The Religious Left and Church-State Relations
Charles Frank Reavis, Sr., Professor of Law Cornell University

From the Publisher