Elsberry Nails the Discovery Institute's Spin

My friend Wesley Elsberry has written an absolutely devestating critique of the ways that the Discovery Institute has engaged in deceit to spin the media coverage of intelligent design in their favor. He absolutely nails the big lie at the middle of the ID strategy, the false pretense that they are not engaged in religious apologetics. We know how this strategy works because they've told us how it works. When speaking to predominately Christian audiences, they tell the truth both about their motivations and about the fact that they intentionally try to hide them as part of their PR strategy. As their primary strategist Phil Johnson admitted on American Family Radio two years ago:

Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.

Likewise, William Dembski, another DI fellow and the most important theorist in the ID camp, talks openly about what intelligent design is really about when he is speaking to audiences that are receptive to it. To wit:

The world is a mirror representing the divine life. The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

There are dozens of such statements made. One of their former fellows, Bruce Gordon, has written that ID has been "hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement" and has become "an exercise in Christian 'cultural renewal'." But when a reporter sees statements like this from DI fellows and writes that ID is religiously motivated, the DI howls in feigned outrage at media bias. Indeed, they sent a file of complaints to Accuracy in Media complaining that the evil media keeps reporting that ID is religious in nature. And predictably AIM swallowed it hook, line and sinker:

The Discovery Institute focuses on the issue of whether there is any evidence of design in nature, rather than whether there is a designer. Still, its representatives tend to be portrayed in religious terms by the media.

Such a tactic is common operating procedure by the ACLU, which is determined to portray any alternative to evolution as religious and therefore not allowed to be taught or even discussed in the public schools.

Isn't that terrible? The media and the ACLU actually report what they say ID is really about instead of the prepackaged deceitful version that they want them to report. How biased of them, reporting the truth instead of the preferred fiction that their PR machinery has produced for public consumption.