I was just perusing the Discovery Institute’s main blog to see their response to potential veep Bobby Jindal signing the newest stealth creationist legislation in Louisiana. Lots of crowing, of course. I particularly enjoyed the mention of Discovery Institute fellow John G. West’s article on National Review Online, as it gives me opportunity to mention today’s Discovery Institute slapdown on NRO’s The Corner, care of John Derbyshire.

But here’s what really set my blood boiling. Check out this pathetic attempt to harness Thomas Jefferson as an intelligent design proponent:

Next time someone tells you intelligent design is “based on religion,” you might point him to American Founder Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. As I explain in a special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion.

Ironically, the critics of intelligent design often think they are defending the principles of Jefferson. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, claims that intelligent design is religion and then cites Jefferson’s famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists calling for a “wall of separation” between church and state. The clear implication is that Thomas Jefferson would agree with them that intelligent design is religion. A writer for Irregular Times goes even further, insisting that “the case of Thomas Jefferson makes it quite clear that there was not a consensus of support among the authors of the Constitution to allow for the mixing of religion and government to support theological doctrines such as intelligent design.”

In reality, Jefferson did not believe that intelligent design was a religious doctrine. In a letter to John Adams on April 11, 1823, he declared:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.

(emphasis added)

By insisting that his defense of intelligent design was made “without appeal to revelation,” Jefferson clearly was arguing that the idea had a basis other than religion. What was that basis? He went on to explain:

The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.

In sum, Jefferson believed that empirical data from nature itself proved intelligent design by showing the natural world’s intricate organization from the level of plants and insects all the way up to the revolution of the planets.

Wow. As a graduate of the University of Virginia (so frequently referred to as Thomas Jefferson’s University that the radio station call letters are WTJU), I am well acquainted with the deployment of quotations from Mr. Jefferson to support nearly any point of view. However, this goes too far. Jefferson died in 1826, 33 years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Intelligent design borrows heavily from dusty old natural theologian William Paley, but it is in essence a repudiation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Jefferson was not a critic of evolution because he had no knowledge of evolution.

In fact, he thought extinction did not exist and that there were likely still mastodons roaming the Pacific Northwest. But he shouldn’t be blamed for not knowing or discovering a scientific theory on his own. After all, he also said this, as he petitioned Congress for the repeal of a duty on imported books:

That the value of science to a republican people; the security it gives to liberty, by enlightening the minds of its citizens; the protection it affords against foreign power; the virtues it inculcates; the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order, and happiness, (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes,) are topics, which your petitioners do not permit themselves to urge on the wisdom of Congress, before whose minds these considerations are always present, and bearing with their just weight.