Jonathan Wells (intelligent design advocate)

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Jonathan Wells (intelligent design advocate) bigraphy, stories - American intelligent design advocate

Jonathan Wells (intelligent design advocate) : biography

1942 –

John Corrigan "Jonathan" Wells (born 1942) is an American author and advocate of intelligent design. Wells joined the Unification Church in 1974, and subsequently wrote that the teachings of church founder Sun Myung Moon, his own studies at the Unification Theological Seminary and his prayers convinced him to devote his life to "destroying Darwinism." The term Darwinism is often used by intelligent design proponents to refer to the scientific consensus on evolution. Jonathan Wells. The Words of the Wells Family"As I stated earlier, Johnson, Dembski, and their associates have assumed the task of destroying ‘Darwinism,’ ‘evolutionary naturalism,’ ‘scientific materialism,’ ‘methodological naturalism,’ ‘philosophical naturalism,’ and other ‘isms’ they use as synonyms for evolution." Barbara Forrest. March 2000. Quoted in William A. Dembski. May 14, 2005 He gained a PhD in religious studies at Yale University in 1986, then became Director of the Unification Church’s inter-religious outreach organization in New York City. In 1989 he went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in molecular and cell biology in 1994. He became a member of several scientific associations and was published in academic journals.

In his book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?, Wells said that a number of examples used to illustrate biology textbooks were grossly exaggerated, distorted the truth, or were patently false; he said that this shows that evolution conflicts with the evidence, and so argued against its teaching in public education."Several of them grossly exaggerate or distort the truth, while others are patently false. Yet they are found year after year in almost all textbooks dealing with evolutionary theory, and they invariably accompany other material promoting that theory. When someone points out that the textbook examples misrepresent the facts, Darwinists don’t rush to correct them. Instead, they rush to defend them." , Jonathan Wells, June 12, 2002, posted at Discovery Institute website. Retrieved August 13, 2007. Some reviewers of Icons of Evolution have said the Wells misquoted experts cited as sources and took minor issues out of context, basing his argument on a flawed syllogism. Wells’s views on evolution have been rejected by the scientific community."Biological evolution is the theory that all living things are modified descendants of a common ancestor that lived in the distant past. It claims that you and I are descendants of ape-like ancestors, and that they in turn came from still more primitive animals…much of what we teach about evolution is wrong. This fact raises troubling questions about the status of Darwinian evolution. If the icons of evolution are supposed to be our best evidence for Darwin’s theory, and all of them are false or misleading, what does that tell us about the theory? Is it science, or myth?" –Jonathan Wells, "In order to advance his thesis, Wells has to convey the idea that "Darwinism" pits itself against traditional Christianity: to allow pupils to learn it is to give them up to atheism, decadence, liberalism and to lose the culture war. Note that Wells does not wage war against evolution. In fact, he is at pains to make it (somewhat) clear that he wages war against "Darwinism", which in context might sound like the sort of thing any sensible Christian would want to guard against. Unfortunately, Wells isn’t exactly clear what he means by Darwinism as opposed to evolution. Easily, one of the prominent faults of Wells’s screed is a pervasive confusion between terms. Words, like "Darwinism" and "Traditional Christianity", seem to mean whatever Wells wants them to mean for that specific sentence. In many cases words are used without regard for his own stated definitions and usually without regard to usage elsewhere in his book. There are several possible reasons for this confusion in terms. First, Wells confusion may be by design. I have argued elsewhere that creationists intend to confuse their audiences when they argue. Second, if you review the acknowledgements page, you’ll read how Wells used many authors to help him prepare this text. It is possible that Wells’s editorship was so insufficient that he allowed a term that makes up part of the book’s very title to have a flexible meaning. My suspicion is that there was both disparity between the understanding of key terms by different authors as well as an intention to confuse."