Reed Cartwright at PT offers the following assessment of the Biologic Institute as described by Celeste Biever in her recent NEW SCIENTIST article (go here for Biever, here for Cartwright).
Clearly, the Discovery Institute has established the Biologic Institute a few decades too late. The Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society have been doing research to challenge naturalism for a long time. They are so prestigious in the field that they have even created their own research journals for publishing their papers. This does not bode well for the Discovery and Biologic Institutes because they will have a hard time breaking the stranglehold that those two research centers have on the industry. For decades now, the ICR and CRS have been telling us that their research is going to revolutionize science in five years time. How can the Biologic and Discovery Institutes compete with such success? We here at the Thumb wish the Biologic and Discovery Institutes all the luck in turning the ID public relations campaign into a working scientific program. They’ll need it.
It’s interesting to contrast Cartwright’s sneering remarks to those of UCDavis biologist Arthur Shapiro a decade ago**:
“The Creation Hypothesis (InterVarsity Press, 1994) … received a remarkably respectful review in Creation/Evolution, a strongly anticreationist journal. Reviewer Arthur Shapiro, professor of zoology at the Davis campus of the University of California, concluded with this paragraph: `I can see Science in the year 2000 running a major feature article on the spread of theistic science as a parallel scientific culture. I can see interviews with the leading figures in history and philosophy of science about how and why this happened. For the moment, the authors of The Creation Hypothesis are realistically defensive. They know their way of looking at the world will not be generally accepted and that they will be restricted for a while to their own journals. … If they are successful, the day will come when the editorial board of Science will convene in emergency session to decide what to do about a paper which is of the highest quality and utterly unexceptionable, of great and broad interest, and which proceeds from the prior assumption of intelligent design. For a preview of that crisis, you should read this book. Of course, if you are smug enough to think `theistic science’ is an oxymoron, you won’t.'” (Shapiro A.N., Review of Moreland J.P., ed., “The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer,” InterVarsity Press, 1994, Creation/Evolution, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994, pp.36-37, in Johnson P.E., “Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education,” InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1995, p.239)
2000 was a bit optimistic, but 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of Darwin’s ORIGIN seems now entirely realistic.
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**Note that Shapiro and Johnson offered their remarks in relation to “theistic science.” This term was proposed in the mid-90s. As ID broadened to include non-theists and narrowed to focus on design in biology, “theistic science” fell by the wayside.