Samuel Chen to the White Courtesy Phone

Samuel Chen is a Baylor undergrad poli sci major who posted the DI's objections to being called a "conservative Christian think tank" on his blog. As the conversation there in the comments has developed, it's become fairly amusing to watch. Someone from here posted a quote from Barbara Forrest that cited the Wedge Document, as I did, to support the argument that the DI is, in fact, a conservative Christian thinktank. First, the quote from Barbara:

Launched by Phillip E. Johnson's book Darwin on Trial (1991), the intelligent-design movement crystallized in 1996 as the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC), sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Seattle think tank. Johnson, a law professor whose religious conversion catalyzed his antievolution efforts, assembled a group of supporters who promote design theory through their writings, financed by CRSC fellowships. According to an early mission statement, the CRSC seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies."

And here is Chen's response:

Dr. Barbara Forest is the former president of the Louisiana ACLU and a leader in the evolution movement. "Plunge" hinted in another post that we shouldn't accept what Dr. Forrest Mims says because he is a proponent of intelligent design and his view are tainted. However, it appears that evolutionists are quick to accept what Dr. Barbara Forest says, because it's somehow untainted.
Bascially, evolutionists have this policy: if it's from an intelligent design proponent, it must be wrong. If it's from an evolutionist: it must be 100% correct.
To say what Barbara Forest says about intelligent design is 100% correct without further observation is to say that everything the Republicans say about the Democrats is 100% correct, or vice versa.
Think people or haven't your brains evolved that much yet?

Amusing little snark at the end, but as the full quote suggests, the one having the problem with logical thinking here is Chen. He, in fact, is the one who is dismissing someone's statements not because they're false but because the person is on the other side. He didn't dispute anything in the quote from Barbara Forrest. How could he? Every word of it is true. In their own words, the mission of the Center for Science and Culture was "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

Their own document, used to raise funds in their early days, declares that the goal of "design theory" (a misnomer, since there is as yet no such theory) is to "reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." I know it's inconvenient that this document was made public, but that doesn't make it go away.

Chen offers no actual argument here as to why that description is not accurate. He offers only an ad hominem argument ("why should I listen to her, she used to be with the ACLU?") and a gratuitous insult. The closest he comes to an actual argument is to ask how it can be a conservative Christian thinktank "when there are so many people of other faiths in the organization." But remember, we're talking about the CSC specifically, not the DI as a whole, since the only department of the DI involved in the evolution/ID debate is the CSC.

Now look at a list of the CSC fellows and tell me which ones are not Christian. This is where they drag out a cardboard cutout of David Berlinski, the token Jewish guy. But Berlinski is first and foremost a self-declared iconoclast who abhors evolutionary theory and seeks more than anything else to tweak the noses of evolutionary biologists because he thinks the entire field is a pseudo-science. He personally couldn't care less about religion one way or the other, but he joined up for his own ego-driven reasons. The fact that he joined does not change the fact that the CSC's clearly expressed mission is primarily religious in nature.

So please, Mr. Chen, come here and explain how in the world an organization whose own stated goal is to establish a "theistic science" and to replace the "materialistic conception of reality" with a conception that is "consonant with Christian and theistic convictions" can reasonably be described as "secular", or why it is unreasonable to describe that organization as "conservative Christian" in nature.