Recently Jonathan Wells has been brought up as some sort of authority to trust regarding the impossibility of the Cambrian “explosion” without the help hand of his God of Greed. So though I don’t have the time, I couldn’t resist a quick search or two. Verrry interesting, but stupid.
Jonathan Wells: Who is He, What is He Doing, and Why?
By Burt Humburg, March 31, 2007
https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/03/jonathan-wells-1.html
In 1999-2000, the Kansas State Board of Education was running their PR machine full-bore, trying to convince the public that the central organizing theory of modern biology and biotechnology was a dead idea. Creationist speaker after creationist speaker was flown into town to put on a dog and pony show. If you were a Young-Earth Creationist, you might have seen Duane Gish/Fred Whitehead nondebate. If you liked ID creationism, you might have seen Johnson or Wells. Back then, it was a very big tent.
Well, KCFS wasn’t going to take things lying down, so we thought we’d prepare a few flyers to inform the audience to help them be ready for the creationists when they arrived. One of those flyers, “Jonathan Wells: Who is He, What is He Doing, and Why?” turned out to be pretty important.
Fast forward to Spring 2005, …
Jonathan Wells, who during his testimony claimed that he was not influenced by religion.Within the span of an hour, KCFS was able to print several copies of our Wells flyer to distribute to interested members of the press. The result was that in the following day’s newspapers, Jonathan Wells testimony and his quotations were seen in juxtaposition to each other, making of his credibility to journalists what those in the know had deemed of it for years.
Find the flyer on the flipside. It’s also available in RTF format. Please note that the DI has since changed their name from the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture to simply the Center for Science and Culture. So clearly it’s no longer religious.
<blockquote>CRSC and the Wedge Jonathan Wells is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC), a branch of the Discovery Institute, a privately-funded, conservative think-tank in Seattle. The CRSC believes that science in general, and the theory of evolution in particular, are responsible for a materialistic, atheistic philosophy whose “destructive cultural consequences” in our society must be reversed.
Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Wells became convinced that evolution was false because it conflicted with his church’s belief that humankind was specifically designed by God. On the urging of Moon, Wells went to Yale to pursue a divinity degree, focusing his work on arguments against evolution. Later, in the early ’90s, he went back to school at Berkeley to get a biology degree to bolster his credentials in fighting evolution. (See “In His Own Words” below). Soon after getting his degree, he began work at the Discovery Institute.
Wells’ new book, “Icons of Evolution,” is characteristic of the “debunking evolution” style common to anti-evolutionists. Like the young-earth creationists who claim scientific evidence for the flood or an eight-thousand year-old earth, Wells selectively looks at inconsistencies, disagreements, or errors in the scientific data. He ignores the vast body of knowledge that supports the topic he is attacking and fails to acknowledge that the scientific community itself has addressed the problems Wells is describing.
The CRSC has a strategy called the Wedge for replacing science as it is currently practiced with “intelligent design”, a theistic science which would allow supernatural causes.</blockquote>
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In his own words,
<blockquote>The Words of the Wells Family
Marriage and the Family: the Unification Blessing
by Jonathan Wells - <a href="https://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/MARRGE3.htm">https://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/MARRGE3.htm</a>
"This is the third and final excerpt from a paper presented in the "Marriage and Family" seminar sponsored by the International Religious Foundation in Seoul, August 1991."
In 1960, after his first wife had turned against him and divorced him, Moon married Hak Ja Han, the present Mrs. Moon. As a spiritual teacher in the Asian context, he was respectfully called Master; but when he came to the West in the mid-1960s, his American followers bestowed on him the title of Reverend. Although there may be members of the Unification Church who do not believe Reverend Moon to be the second coming of Christ, I think it is fair to say that such people must be a small minority; indeed, it is difficult to imagine anyone persevering in the rigorous life of a Unificationist without believing that Sun Myung Moon is to our generation what Jesus was to his.
Although Divine Principle laid the theological groundwork for Unificationism ...</blockquote>
Also see:
<a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wells">https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wells</a>