A Long Turning Point

The Origin of Salvo & True Progress

Harvard-educated lawyer Norman Macbeth spent ten years researching Darwinism. “If I had to oppose [Darwin] in court, I could get his case thrown out,” he concluded. In 1971, he wrote Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason, arguing that Darwinism was full of errors in reasoning; with intractable gaps in its evidence, it should be abandoned. His book hardly made a ripple.

Twenty years later, another Harvard-educated lawyer, Phillip E. Johnson, cross-examined Darwinin Darwin on Trial. He, like Macbeth, pointed out the circular reasoning and faulty leaps of logic that should have invalidated Darwin’s theory in the eyes of any reasonable juror judging the case.

This time, there was more than a ripple. Johnson soon collaborated with a group of young scientists and scholars to launch what became known as the Intelligent Design movement (ID), critical of both Darwinism and its offspring, neo-Darwinism. Through the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, this vanguard of ID proponents championed the case for Intelligent Design, but progress required time and hard work.

ID & Salvo

In 1998, I was the editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. While attending a conference on C. S. Lewis at Cambridge University, I met one of the speakers, William Dembski. He was a Discovery Institute Fellow and author of the ground-breaking The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press). After several conversations over meals, I agreed to dedicate an issue of Touchstone to Intelligent Design if he would supply the authors and edit the articles.

So in July–August 1999, Touchstone published a 108-page issue on ID, which sold out quickly, as did a second printing. In 2001, Brazos Press published the issue as a book: Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design, which sold more than 22,000 copies over the next two decades. Seeds were being planted widely (the book was even translated into Korean).

Because of growing interest in ID, we at Touchstone decided to create a new magazine anchored in ID—and in 2006, Salvo was born. We at Salvo are grateful to have the Discovery Institute as a partner organization and to have played a small part in the ID movement.

The ID Turning Point

Promoted through the work of the Discovery Institute, ID has gone from strength to strength with over 300 peer-reviewed articles published and now an “ID 3.0” research program of its own. Finally, we can see there has been a slow and arduous—but clear—turning point in the debate about origins.

Discovery’s approach has been to “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” and Discovery Fellows have welcomed open discussion and debate of the empirical evidence for or against Darwinism. This issue includes Discovery Fellow Casey Luskin’s inspiring personal example of this approach (p. 54). Casey has always sought truthfulness on both sides of a question. This reminds me very much of another young man who sought honest debate and discussion about contested issues: Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. Kirk chose that name for his campus organization with the hope of changing minds and turning our society back to sanity.

Those who seek truth, wherever it leads, are the true progressives, as C. S. Lewis would have it:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake.… Going back is the quickest way on.

We trust that this 75th and penultimate issue of Salvo will continue to inspire all who love and seek the truth.