As fallout continues over NYU Press’s retraction of C. W. Howell’s Designer Science, it’s worth looking more closely at the media outlets and scholars who promoted the book so uncritically. Christianity Today (CT) and historian Edward Larson are prime examples.
In September 2025, CT published a review that coincided with the book’s release. Titled “The Flickering Flame of Intelligent Design,” the article depicted intelligent design as a flame that flickered out because it lacked “a robust scientific component.” The essay was penned by Larson, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods.
Full disclosure: I have known Ed since he was a Fellow of Discovery Institute in its earliest years, before it started the Center for Science and Culture (CSC). Ed was never a part of the CSC, and sometime after the CSC was launched, he ended his association with the Institute (I don’t recall the year). However, Ed was still a Fellow while he was writing Summer for the Gods, and I was fortunate to read and comment on his manuscript before it was published. I thought the book was an important one (I still do!), although I differed with how Ed framed the philosophical dispute between William Jennings Bryan and the ACLU. I had not been in contact with Ed for years until I contacted him this week about his article. I invited him to comment on his review in light of the retraction of Howell’s book. He politely declined.
Based on my past experience, I would describe Ed as a Christian proponent of evolution who is not favorable to intelligent design. In other words, he is pretty much like Howell.
Unlike Howell, however, Ed has earned a reputation as a judicious and careful scholar. Alas, his review shows how even reputable scholars can be careless and inaccurate — especially if they are writing about a position they don’t share and that goes against what they perceive as the established view all right-thinking-people should embrace.
No Position to Judge
As my colleague Casey Luskin has shown in meticulous detail, Howell’s shallow dismissal of ID’s scientific research program revealed more about himself than about ID. In particular, it showed his breathtaking ignorance of what ID scientists and scholars have actually produced since Dover. How would he know if intelligent design has a “robust scientific component” or not? He is in no position to judge.
Neither, sadly, is Ed Larson — or he might have been more careful in his review. He might even have been skeptical when he read Howell’s supposed “damning admission” from Michael Behe, given that the fabricated words contradicted both Behe’s publicly stated views and what common sense suggests Behe would ever say about ID.
Instead, Ed not only praised Howell’s shoddy scholarship, he added his own doozy error, writing: “Discovery Institute officials pushed the Dover school board to adopt ID-friendly policies in 2004.”
False.
Discovery attempted to get the Dover board to repeal its policy because we were not trying to mandate ID in classrooms. Instead, we proposed something a lot more limited: Make sure both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory are covered, a position favored by the vast majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum. Our actual science education policy should be well known to anyone who followed what we said. And our opposition to the Dover policy from the start is part of the public record. Ed should have known that. In fact, he should have known it from reading Howell’s book. As Casey Luskin noted here, citing pp. 12, 119, and 121 of Designer Science, the book “accurately recounts that Discovery Institute opposed what the Dover School District did.”
To Christianity Today’s credit, when I brought this error to their attention, they quickly removed the false statement from their article and appended an appropriate editor’s note.
Not so commendable has been CT’s unwillingness (thus far) to accurately inform their readers about the controversy over Howell’s book. Since CT uncritically boosted the book as good scholarship, you might think they would feel obligated to inform their readers of the controversy over the book’s fabricated material. I suggested to CT that they cover the book’s retraction as a news story. But they have expressed no interest in doing so.
Worse, when CT finally appended a second editor’s note to Larson’s review, it was the most anodyne statement possible: “This review was based on the first edition of Designer Science. The book’s publisher, NYU Press, told CT in August 2026 that the book would be re-issued to correct a misattributed quote.”
“A misattributed quote”? That’s all?
Covering for Shoddy Scholarship
Imagine that a book accused you of making a “damning admission” on the witness stand in an infamous trial. The book then uses quote marks to provide the supposed actual words of your “damning admission.” Then imagine that you never said those words — on the witness stand or anywhere else! Instead, the words actually came from one of your chief opponents and contradict your known views. If that happened to you, would you regard CT’s editorial note as an adequate — or accurate — description of what happened? Note that it’s not only the quote that was fabricated; it’s also the situation. The book invented the claim that you issued the false words on the witness stand in a trial.
Earlier this week, I pushed back against CT’s inaccurate editor’s note. I finally heard back today that the editor involved is on vacation and they may — or may not — choose to reply.
If CT wants to repair the harm it did by uncritically promoting Howell’s shoddy history, it needs to be a lot more forthright. An accurate editor’s note would read: “The book’s publisher, NYU Press, has withdrawn the original edition of Designer Science after scientist Casey Luskin discovered that a quote attributed by the book to intelligent design proponent Michael Behe as a ‘damning admission’ on the witness stand was a fabrication. Behe never said the words on the witness stand or anywhere else, and the false quote contradicted Behe’s known views.”
But CT’s staff seems more interested in providing cover for Howell’s shoddy scholarship than in correcting the record.
Stockholm Syndrome Christianity?
As you might have noticed, the critics of intelligent design I’m discussing here aren’t atheists or materialists. Howell and Larson are both Christians, and CT is a Christian magazine. Nevertheless, they all seem willing to traffic in stereotypes about ID proponents propagated by secular critics.
Sadly, I’m not surprised. In my book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, I discussed how many Christians in the leadership class end up identifying more with secularists than with the beliefs of some of their fellow Christians. As a result, they become far more skeptical of their fellow believers than they do of their secular peers.
For many Christian intellectuals, the place the transformation begins is college.
In the current case, there is a fascinating academic tie that connects Howell and Larson. Both were mentored by the same secular historian of science: Ron Numbers (1942-2023). Larson says Numbers’s “academic rigor… and intellectual integrity became my guiding principles,” while Howell attributes his own decision to write a dissertation (and ultimately a book) on intelligent design to Numbers’s encouragement. “My book would not exist without him.”
Numbers was an agnostic who abandoned his belief in Christianity because of Darwinian evolution. As Numbers explained, evolution “makes the whole plan of salvation silly because there never was a fall.”
Although praised by fellow academics for being even-handed, Numbers spent the waning years of his career attacking and spreading misinformation about intelligent design. He co-authored “a call to action” against intelligent design that was riddled with inaccuracies. And at a private event I attended where he spoke, Numbers equated intelligent design proponents with Holocaust deniers. So much for being a fair-minded scholar!
Numbers served on Howell’s dissertation committee. No wonder Howell’s dissertation didn’t get a very careful vetting. No wonder his dissertation (and book) got so many things wrong.
CT, Howell, and Larson likely consider themselves as too thoughtful and well-informed to be taken in by the arguments of intelligent design proponents, their country cousins. So they reflexively dismiss intelligent design; and when they misrepresent it, they are not inclined to investigate further in a way that might challenge their preconceptions.
I find that tragic. What they don’t recognize is their skepticism is one-sided. Their original thoughts are not so original after all. And they are living in a shrinking echo chamber as secular thinkers abandon the old talking points.
“Neo-Darwinism is dead,” declares Oxford University biologist Denis Noble. “Intelligent design is valid science,” proclaims Nobel laureate physicist Brian Josephson.
Maybe when the chorus of secular voices grows loud enough, the Christians wedded to the old paradigm will finally open their minds.