Here is how Wells ends his book:
So a growing number of bright young men and women have the courage to question Darwinism, study intelligent design, and follow the evidence where it leads. They know they are in the middle of a major scientific revolution. And the future belongs to them. (p. 207)
This is wildly overstated. There is no paradigm shift going on. This isn't plate-tectonics. Kuhn doesn't apply. Nevertheless, I actually agree with something that Wells says in his last chapter as he builds up to this, namely the following: "Anyone who studies American history knows that telling people they are not allowed to talk about something is the tactic least likely to succeed in the land of the free and the home of the brave." There's something to this. Evolution defenders have been forced into the position of trying to shut down the teaching of ID; that in turn allows the ID people to have the enviable rhetorical stance of invoking free speech and the freedom of ideas. Wells is wrong that a scientific revolution is happening, but right that our strategy needs a lot of work. In fact, there's something else about the strategy inherent in Wells' book that bears noting. Last year, you will recall, ID suffered its greatest defeat ever. A federal judge unmasked it, threw it out of court, called it not science, an updated form of creationism, and so on. And yet here Wells is claiming victory. This, again, is a cunning strategy: Don't linger on your losses. Project strength. Still, the IDistas do have some bile to direct towards the man who did them the most damage, Judge Jones. Not only does Wells attack "judicial megalomaniacs" at one point. There's this, which I found troubling:
Judge John E. Jones III was so impressed by the testimony and materials presented by the Darwinists that he apparently didn't bother to read much of the material presented by their critics, and he came down squarely on the side of the ACLU. (p. 155)
Using words like "apparently" doesn't legitimize this kind of speculation. Wells can't possibly know what material Judge Jones did or didn't read in preparing his decision. By the way, Wells also has this to say:
...defining science as the search for natural explanations leads to serious problems. Miracles might really happen. Laboratory experiments generally focus on phenomena that obey natural regularities, for which appeals to miracle would be inappropriate. But if God does work miracles, whether in the present or in the past, we would be seriously mistaken to insist that they can be explained by natural regularities. Acts of God that take place in the real world would have objective effects, and if methodological naturalism prevents us from even considering an essential element in their causation, but claims to lead to the truth, then it is the same as metaphysical naturalism. (p. 133-134)
You see where this train of logic leads, of course. I can just badly assert that a miracle happened to me today. I can't provide any evidence that you would accept, of course. But believe me, it happened.
