Privileged Planet and Intelligent Design

1. Privileged Planet and Intelligent Design Ray Bohlin, Ph.D. Probe Ministries www.probe.org

2. Privileged Planet Premiered • June 23, 2005 at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. • Discovery Institute seeks a Washington venue to premiere the film • The Smithsonian asks to see the film

3. Privileged Planet Premiered • Smithsonian approves the premiere and instructs Discovery on how the invitation should look and read. • Smithsonian asks for a $16,000 “donation” and requires invitation to say Smithsonian is the co-host. • Discovery Institute complies and the Smithsonian approves the invitation. • Invitations go out June 1st. • Evolutionary community is mortified!

4. The Invitation

5. The Reaction • “Is one of Washington’s most prestigious museums promoting intelligent design…?” • “It looked as though the Smithsonian was supporting intelligent design.” • “The Smithsonian was duped.” • “We urge you to preserve the Smithsonian Institution’s prestigious scientific reputation by not allowing the film to be shown.” • The film “blurs the distinction between well-accepted, peer-reviewed, testable science and ideologically based, untestable assertions.”

6. The Museum’s Response • “After dozens of calls and emails from researchers and the public, the museum decided last week to return the donation and issue a statement disavowing the event.” Nature June 8, 2005 • Upon reviewing the film again “we immediately recognized the difficulty . . . the science is sound . . . but it leads to conclusions that are philosophical, not scientific.” Physics Today August 2005

7. Officially • “Upon further review we have determined that the content of the film is not consistent with the mission of the Smithsonian Institution’s scientific research. Neither the Smithsonian Institution nor the National Museum of Natural History supports or endorses the views of the Discovery Institute or the film.”

8. Officially • The Smithsonian publicly announced they would return the $16,000 but later said privately that it needed to keep $5,000 for expenses. • Hopefully this did not include the cost of valet parking which mysteriously set up on the wrong side of the museum.

9. Host Committee • Mr. Ken Ferguson, COO, National Geographic Television • George Gilder • Hon. And Mrs. Edwin Meese • Dr. Bijan Nemati, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory • Hon. Rep. Thomas E. Petri • Hon. Sen. Rick Santorum • Dr. Philip Skell, National Academy of Sciences

10. Film and Reception

11. Reviews • “In a book of magnificent sweep and daring, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards drive home the arguments that the old cliché of no place like home is eerily true of Earth. Not only that, but if the scientific method were to emerge anywhere, the Earth is about as suitable as you can get. Gonzalez and Richards have flung down the gauntlet. Let the debate begin; it is a question that involves us all.” Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology, University of Cambridge

12. Reviews • “This thoughtful, delightfully contrarian book will rile up those who believe the ‘Copernican principle’ is an essential philosophical component of modern science. Is our universe designedly congenial to intelligent, observing life? Passionate advocates of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) will find much to ponder in this carefully documented analysis.” Owen Gingerich, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

13. Additional Useful Quote "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that

14. Additional Useful Quote we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. “Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons," New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 28. Lewontin is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University