Though young-earth creationists have lost serious influence in King County, a new and much more powerful creationist threat has arisen in Seattle in the form of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CSRC). The CSRC operates under the auspices of the Discovery Institute.
No noteworthy public school incidents have been reported yet.
The Creation Association of Puget Sound (previously known as the Seattle Bible-Science Association) has lost serious support in recent years. The association has stopped running their shows on cable's public access channel, and there has been no recent news of any planned lectures at Westminster Chapel. The association has been totally unable to muster any support beyond its small core base and there have been no reports of any public school incidents that can be credited to them. Walter Lang, founder of the national Bible-Science Association runs the Genesis Institute in the basement of Atonement Lutheran Church and is a strong influence on the Creation Association of Puget Sound.
Unlike the Creation Association of Puget Sound, the Discovery Institute in Seattle has demonstrated a profound ability to shape the current direction of the modern creationist movement. Forming a new organization called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CSRC), the Discovery Institute is now regarded as the most profound threat to evolutionary biology yet.
In 1996, Phillip Johnson, a law professor at Berkeley took it upon himself to cleanse American education and culture of "naturalistic evolution," and initiated a conference at Biola University called the "Mere Creation" Conference. Johnson recruited William Dembski and a host of others to help him do this, and they have worked assiduously and systematically ever since. Dembski was one of the most active organizers of this conference, a closed affair attended by a couple of hundred like-minded people, which constituted the beginning of the organized movement against what intelligent design adherents believe is the imminent downfall of American culture and morality because of the dominance of naturalism in science and culture. A 1996 article about the conference at http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/11-30-96/national_2.asp. The web site for the Mere Creation conference is located at http://www.origins.org/mc/menus/index.html.
The CSRC is also extremely well financed and recently received $1.5 million from wealthy businessman Howard Ahmanson. See Walter Olson's article at http://www.reason.com/9901/co.wo.darkbedfellows.html. For over twenty years, Ahmanson has served on the board of Chalcedon, Inc., an extremist Christian organization run by R.J. Rushdoony. See Jerry Sloan's article, "The Man Behind Knight" at http://www.frontiersweb.com/sfv18iss21/Pages/feat_1.html. CRSC's willingness to take the money of a man who would completely undermine secular society speaks volumes.
The CSRC is currently causing problems in a host of communities (too numerous to describe in detail here), including Baylor University as well as Skagit County, where school teacher Roger DeHart's success is critical to their long term plans.
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