I've written before about Casey Luskin and his IDEA club, which exists to promote Intelligent Design on college campuses. I've criticized it for having purely religious motivations (which Luskin tries desperately to conceal), and for their very poor understanding of the science they claim to criticize. Jack Krebs and Wesley Elsberry at the Panda's Thumb have also ripped into Luskin over both of these issues.

Luskin, as you might guess, is indignant. In particular, he is irate that he was caught with a current listing at a conference that describes the IDEA club as a "ministry". It wasn't his fault, he protests. At length. At extravagant length.

At http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000246.html, there are some comments being made about the description of the IDEA Center. Namely, at "http://www.idconference.org/html/youth_conference.html", my bio was given as: "Co-president of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center, a ministry focused on equipping students to promote Intelligent Design." I never gave them a bio for me nor did I ever instruct them to say anything about me. Quite frankly, I agreed to speak at this conference a long time ago and my name wasn't even up on the site until very recently, much less this description of the IDEA Center.

Obviously the word "ministry" implies we are a religious organization. Let me say that I was very shocked to see this wording, and as soon as I just read over the PandasThumb thread and found out about all this, I e-mailed Sondra Lantzer, a staff member at the church hosting the conference, and I asked her to change it to: "Co-president of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center, a non-profit organization focused on helping students to understand and debate intelligent design theory." The latter is an accurate description of what we are. I don't think it is fair to call us a "ministry" because quite frankly, we spend the vast majority of our time talking about scientific issues and a very small minority of our time talking about religious matters. When IDEA Clubs form, we encourage them to register as educational organizations because that is what they are: they host debate forums where people can have friendly, informed, and informal discussion about ID and evolution with individuals of various viewpoints.

He was shocked. Shocked, I tell you, that anyone would assign a religious intent to his organization.

Well, thanks to a tip from Nick Matzke who pointed out that several examples of the IDEA club web page can be found using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, we can see what the IDEA center has said about itself in the past. Here are several versions of the IDEA mission statement, and we can see how it has (dare I say it) evolved over the years.

It all reminds me of the evolving banners at the Discovery Institute.

Note how it moves from explicitly "Christian-affiliated" to "under the auspices of Faith Seminary" to "autonomous". This is odd, since you can also look at who is on the Board of Directors, which "makes all official decisions about the direction and status of the Center", from the 2001 board to the current leadership. Several new people have been added, but the original core group is still running things: Michaeel Adams, dean of Faith Seminary, Eddie Colanter, Assistant Professor of Apologetics and Ethics at Faith Seminary, H. Wayne House, Distinguished Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Faith Seminary, Casey Luskin, Steve Renner, and Scott Uminsky. As Luskin has no doubt noticed, pretending to be a source of scientific information while nestled under the wing of a seminary is not a great idea.

Note also that one rather significant clause in the 2002 document, "Hold, through other arguments, that the identity of the Designer is consistent with the God of the Bible", has been deleted. It's also politically unwise to expose your narrow sectarian religious beliefs while pretending to be scientific, so that had to be jettisoned.

So, yes, I can see why Casey Luskin was shocked that the organizers at a conference sponsored by the Community Bible Church of Highlands, NC would call his organization a "ministry". They were blowing his cover.

Luskin, in his outraged defense against the indignity of being called a "ministry", implores people to call the conference organizer and check that his excuse was valid. I did. She replied with nearly the same words Luskin used, taking all the blame for the mistake, although she didn't say how she came up with the idea that the IDEA club was a ministry.

While I had her on the phone, though, I did ask her one other question. This conference, which has also been mentioned by John Lynch, is titled "Two World Views: what's the difference". Here is its purpose:

Conference Purpose:   To introduce Jr. and Sr. High Youth to two worldviews.
1.   The secular worldview which is humanistic in nature placing man at the center of all philosophy.
2.   The Biblical worldview which looks to the Bible as the ultimate authority of all truth.

It lists 5 speakers, Mark Eckel, Kenneth Boa, Michael Behe, Chuck Colson, and Casey Luskin. The first two are ministers, Behe is the anti-evolutionist author of Darwin's Black Box, Colson is the crook who found Jesus, and Luskin is...whatever. The obvious question, and the one I asked the organizer, is given the intent of the conference to present two worldviews, and with that list of speakers, who is presenting the secular worldview?

To my surprise, she was very quick with the answer, and even gave me a brief summary of what he'll be talking about. It wasn't Behe, and it certainly wasn't Luskin: it's Eckel. Yes, that's right, the Associate Professor of Educational Ministries at the Moody Bible Institute is going to give an overview of secular humanism to the kids, warning them of what they can expect when they go off to college. That's their idea of presenting the secular worldview.

A question that only Luskin can answer is what the heck he's doing, inviting himself to a bible camp meeting^*, if he's so embarrassed by the religious foundation of his IDEA club.

^*The exact wording of the conference organizer was that they came up with the bio after Luskin "asked to be a part of the conference." So much for the implication that he was invited to participate.