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Ohio's intelligent design crusader
John Mangels and Scott Stephens
Plain Dealer reporters

The most dangerous man in science is waiting patiently, as he often does, for a meeting to start. He sits alone at the front of a conference room decorated with heavy brass chandeliers and plastic ficus trees and smelling faintly of fresh paint. Occasionally he lifts the cuff of his white dress shirt to check his watch, a calculator model. Almost time.

Nearby, his laptop beams an image onto a projection screen. It is the Earth as seen from deep space, a calm and perfect orb of indigo oceans and cottony clouds, the kind of view enjoyed by only a few lunar astronauts and the God this man fervently believes in.

Tonight, for a change, his audience is friendly. There will be no rolling eyes, no patronizing questions or interruptions, no sotto voce mutters of "Who is this guy?" Not that any of that bothers Bob Lattimer, for his convictions provide a certain serenity. He is the kind of man who smiles harder the more he disagrees with you.

Tonight, though, he is literally preaching to the converted; his listeners are 80 or so of his 2,000 fellow congregants at Hudson Community Chapel, a sprawling year-old evangelical church that has sprouted among the contemporary colonials of northern Summit County. If they know him at all, it is as a tenor in the choir. But if they have come expecting some kind of sermon, a biblical-based rationale for the startling guerrilla war he is waging, they will be disappointed.

"This talk is going to be about science - not much about religion at all," he declares.

His audience trickles in, in twos and threes, on this raw, rainy weeknight, a few toting Bibles, others trailing kids. At precisely 7:30 - for Lattimer, an analytical chemist by trade, is a man of precision - he stands.

He makes an awkward joke about how it's better to be here than at an Indians game, then tucks his hands in his back pockets and begins to chip away at one of the most revered scientific theories of the modern age.

Bob Lattimer is a heretic with a Ph.D. and a bully pulpit. He is taking on Charles Darwin and evolution from inside the education and science bureaucracies, and that is what makes him such a threat to the scientists and educators who are trying to keep Ohio's science curriculum free of unorthodox - they would say absurd - ideas.

Lattimer, 57, has tunneled deep into the education system he disdains, emerging on the group rewriting Ohio's science teaching guidelines. As a scientist, he is using his credentials, his reputation, to bolster the credibility of his attack on evolution's scientific underpinnings and to push for a change in the very definition of science.

Lattimer is the self-anointed statewide point man for intelligent design, evolution's latest and most sophisticated foe. He is a circuit-rider for ID, speaking wherever he's asked, lighting brush fires, stoking the coals of what he apocalyptically calls the "Ohio firestorm" to obliterate evolution's monopoly in public schools.

He goes to all the meetings. He tracks and reports ID developments on his Web site. He uses his vacation time, 20 days so far in the last 11 months, to serve on the science writing team. Without raising his reedy voice - for he is disarmingly, self-effacingly polite - he keeps talking, keeps prodding, keeps asking, keeps objecting, keeps showing up, a quiet but relentless battering ram for intelligent design.

And in a state that may well dictate the course of anti-evolution strategy for the rest of the country, at this point, Bob Lattimer is winning.

Darwin under fire

The battle to cleanse the public schools of America of Darwin's ungodly idea has been a long and losing effort.

A Tennessee judge fined high school biology instructor John Scopes $100 in 1925 for violating a state law against teaching "that man is descended from a lower order of animals." But it was a brief, hollow victory for the Protestant fundamentalists who had bullied the law onto the books. Defense lawyer Clarence Darrow's withering cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan, who had billed himself as an expert witness on the Bible, exposed flaws in Bryan's religious and scientific knowledge and swung popular opinion to Darwin's theory.

A higher court reversed Scopes' conviction, and most other states shunned anti-evolution attempts. In the sporadic challenges that followed, federal judges consistently ruled in favor of teaching only evolution in public classrooms, and against God-centered counterproposals for human origin. Creationism can't pass the Constitution's ban on state-endorsed religion.

Major faiths have managed to make their peace with evolution by reserving a place for God as the creator of the process Darwin described. Plenty of scientists are able to accommodate their personal religious beliefs with what DNA and fossils tell them about evolution's basic soundness.

But within those fundamentalist sects that believe the Bible is the literal word of God, resentment of evolution's hold on education has festered like a sore. They cannot escape it even in their own Christian schools, since their students still have to take the state's evolution-oriented achievement test to graduate.

And make no mistake, they say, Darwin's idea has religious implications, negative ones, as surely as creationism has positive ones. For if children learn that life is nothing more than a chance outcome - a cosmic accident, really - isn't that a state-sponsored shove down the slippery slope toward atheism? Doesn't teaching the seemingly random brutality of natural selection convey that life is cheap and God is callous, even cruel? Without the fear of eternal consequences, won't we find the siren call of immorality too tempting to resist?

Bob Lattimer believes this, devoutly so, but his activism now has a decidedly less Christian overtone than before. That is the beauty and the power of intelligent design: Its intentional vagueness on who the designer is means that those who believe life's architect is the Christian God and those who are certain it is an extra-terrestrial can comfortably co-exist in ID's big tent.

Or as Lattimer says, "We like to think of it as an umbrella under which various ideas of creation can fit."

Becoming conservative

The conservatism that is the bedrock of Bob Lattimer's world and the launching pad for his intelligent-design exploits was not a birthright. His parents' suburban Kansas City, Mo., household in the 1950s was a Democratic one; his father, a tool-and-die maker for a steel company, was a union man.

Young Bob, brainy, shy and terrible at sports, played violin in the school orchestra and sang in the choir. He graduated second in his high school class of 550, a few Bs in gym class costing him the valedictory title. He earned advanced degrees in chemistry, then took a job with what was B.F. Goodrich in Cleveland. He met his wife there, has stayed with the same company for 28 years, his neat, spartan cubicle a testament to an orderly mind and a desire to stay put.

As a young adult, he was a "nominal Democrat," but grew more conservative as his children entered school and he began to take more interest in education and political affairs.

In the 1990s in his hometown of Hudson, Lattimer peddled the Christian Right's traditional remedies for societal rot: school prayer; local curriculum control; the elimination of sex education and outcome-based learning (meaning government-dictated values); support for vouchers so that fed-up parents can rescue their kids from public schools like he has.

His two sons aren't in public schools. One of his boys, Paul, the 11-year-old, has attended a private Christian academy since kindergarten. Scott, 14, who has Down syndrome, is home-schooled. "I often get asked that," Lattimer says, with a ready, almost eager response to why he spends so much trying to change a system in which his children don't participate.

"I'm a taxpayer. My taxes go to support public schools. My kids interact with [public school students]. It's important they get the values I feel comfortable with. I also vote, so I have a right."

Lattimer's unlined, Missouri-plain face became a familiar sight at Hudson school board meetings. He organized a local chapter of the national Citizens for Excellence in Education, an arch-conservative, Christian-oriented, education-reform group. He partnered with his friend and fellow church member Kenneth Claypoole, publicly backing the Hudson school board member's controversial stands on various issues, including teaching creationism.

The duo's notoriety peaked in 1996, when they drew national attention for lobbying against the board's selection of "The American People," a best-selling social history text. Lattimer and Claypoole said the book over-emphasized women and minorities and downplayed the accomplishments of "mainstream" historical figures. It was too depressing, they said, too unpatriotic.

"Revisionist history doesn't focus on the patriotic aspects, it focuses on the negative aspects," says Lattimer now, unapologetically. "Kids need heroes. They need to know there's much good in our history. Some cultures are better than others."

The culture in Hudson had just about had enough. By the time Lattimer and Claypoole had reached their zenith, not one but two groups had begun to counterattack: the local Parent Teacher Association and the newly formed Hudson Citizens for Intellectual Freedom. Lattimer's wife, Mary Beth, who in 1995 sought to join Claypoole on the school board and in 1997 hoped to fill his seat when he declined to run again, was soundly defeated each time. And the board eventually voted to accept the book Claypoole and Bob Lattimer had fought against.

Hudson was mirroring what was going on in the rest of the country. By 1998, the Christian Right's nearly two-decade reign over American politics was in decline. The public mood had changed; the moral absolutes that had once been embraced as refreshingly frank and courageously uncompromising now seemed harsh, hypocritical.

The movement's more savvy operatives saw what was coming and knew what it meant. One of the most effective grass-roots organizations, the 170-chapter national Citizens for Excellence in Education to which Lattimer's chapter belonged, abruptly abandoned its 15-year quest to wrest control of local public school districts from "anti-Christian" education reformers.

"The system of public education has refused to bend," CEE founder and president the Rev. Bob Simonds acknowledged to his 350,000 disciples in an ominously worded letter that year. Rather than continue to try to arrange "safe passage" for Christian children through the public schools, where they were victims of "spiritual rape and slaughter" and their souls were at risk, Simonds called for parents to withdraw in favor of private or home teaching.

Lattimer, a school voucher man himself, didn't necessarily agree with Simonds' separatist solution - "He's pretty dogmatic about it," is as critical as Lattimer will get - but he sensed the same insurmountable opposition locally to traditional Christian-based education reforms as Simonds was finding nationally. The efforts of Lattimer's group became "marginalized" in Hudson, he says. Facing a brick wall, the local CEE chapter, which was loosely organized to begin with, disbanded.

Claypoole says his friend's ascension from local to statewide stage is a logical progression.

It is easy even now, four years gone, to find people in Hudson who equate Bob Lattimer with the devil himself for what he tried to do in their community. It also is easy to find those who dismiss him as an aberration. Both views are too simplistic and miss the larger point.

Hudson was a learning experience for Lattimer, a crucible for shaping and refining his activism. He learned from his mistakes there, just as he studied and learned from Kansas' brush with anti-evolutionism in 1999.

He took maximum advantage of the opportunities Hudson gave him - that democracy gives anyone, for good or ill - to mold civic policy, just as he is doing now on a bigger stage with intelligent design. Should he be faulted for outworking his opponents? Should he feel bad for figuring out how to manipulate the machine?

"I don't like what he stands for, but I have an almost grudging admiration for him," says a longtime Hudson adversary who asked not to be named. "He's dedicated and single-minded. You stomp on that balloon and it pops up somewhere else. People still like to use Bob as the bogeyman. I'm upset that we're lazy in our civic duty and let people like him move in. There's a power in Bob counting on animosity and disengagement to move forward. It's not an accident he's moved on to the state level."

Along the way, he has made his blandness work for him. A quirk of personality has become an asset. It simplifies things. It negates distractions. The fewer the priorities, the clearer the mission. Family. Church. Work. Intelligent design.

"Bob is very calm," says his pastor, Joe Coffey. "He doesn't approach people with any real passion. He's very logical, very reasonable, very rational. He'd be like the Dragnet guy - just the facts."

Ask Lattimer what his hobbies are, and he hesitates, ponders for a good number of seconds, stammers a bit and comes up with . . . nothing. He follows the Indians, goes to a few games a year. He was a Boy Scout leader for a time. But stumping for his cause is an all-consuming effort now. It is a cause his wife, a chemist like Bob and now a homemaker, understands.

Advocating for a creator

Bob Lattimer came late to intelligent design. For years, he brokered an uneasy and ultimately unsuccessful peace between his religious convictions and his scientific nature.

"I was a reluctant creationist because that's all there was," he says.

Clearly, scientific evidence cast doubt on the "young-earth" creationists' belief that God formed our planet less than 10,000 years ago. To accept the Genesis creation timeline literally, one would have to dismiss all kinds of basic science, from the speed of light shining from distant stars to the carbon dating used to pinpoint the age of million-year-old rocks on Earth.

On the other hand, science dictated that God be excluded from any creation theory, and evolution left no active role for a deity, anyway. That couldn't be right.

Intelligent design solved that conundrum, but at a price: Lattimer, a well-respected chemist, a 30-year man of science, had to renounce science's basic definition. He had to forswear science's required limitation that it only concern itself with the natural world, and with offering only natural explanations for its processes, since one can only examine and test those things that physically exist.

Intelligent design may attempt to use scientific methods in its search for clues to intentional creation, but its conclusion - that a supernatural force is behind everything - is one that traditional science would never, could never, make.

It was science that led Lattimer to intelligent design. Once there, he realized the impracticality of science as it exists now, and he willingly began to point out the short-sightedness of his profession and his peers. Science shouldn't limit itself to natural explanations, he says; it should search for the best explanations, whether they are natural or supernatural. Lattimer doesn't see that as a betrayal of science. On the contrary, he thinks it strengthens it.

"Naturalism is the belief that nature is all there is. I've been a scientist for 30 years and I never heard that science had to be limited to a naturalistic explanation until I got into this [ID]," he says. "If you only allow a naturalistic explanation, how will you discover anything else?"

That kind of argument threatens to cause mainstream scientists' heads to explode. Many of them are religious, but accept that science is unable to consider God. Otherwise, it would be too easy just to give up trying to understand things and say God was responsible. Mainstream scientists see ID as a black hole, a dead end. It starts with a foregone conclusion - there's a designer and I'm going to find it - but wimps out when it comes to the biggest and most obvious question of all - who the designer is.

ID's advocates are skittish about that line of inquiry because it could divide their careful coalition of members, and because it tends to spotlight the movement's strong fundamentalist Christian foundation.

"If you want to say something about the designer, that's religion and not science," Lattimer says. "It's God, sure," he answers when pressed for his own belief. "But everyone doesn't have to say that. I suppose it goes back to the status of the legal situation, that if they can pin down [who ID proponents think the designer is], it might affect" whether the courts view ID as an attempt to endorse a religious belief.

"We don't like to discuss it in public," Lattimer says. But he insists that ID, having no clergy or sacred text or code of moral conduct, fails the religion test.

Realistically, Lattimer and his fellow ID proponents don't expect to persuade most mainstream scientists to come on board. The opposition is too entrenched, has too much at stake to change its mind. But if you are trying to transform the culture, why waste time with scientists anyway? Why not focus on where you can have the most impact - on schools, where children are taught what to believe, and on parents, who want to control that process.

The public education system is society's steering wheel. With the right driver, the schools aim the culture in the proper direction. The Constitution and the courts kept blatantly religious creationism out of the driver's seat. ID, however, might have a shot.

Kansas in 1999 was the first opportunity to break evolution's hold on school science classes, but it turned into a setback. The arguments against evolution were too shrill, the entry of ID too late to really capture public support. Once again, evolution's advocates were able to cast the confrontation as one between science and religion, another needless bout between evolution and the same old has-been challenger, creationism.

The outcome was predictable. Creation-minded state school board members briefly dumped evolution from the curriculum, but voters soon ousted them and restored order. Evolution triumphed. Intelligent design never made it into the ring.

Lattimer knew that Ohio, in 2001, was to begin an 18-month effort to revamp its science curriculum. So he did what a good chemist does: examine the forces that link or break things apart, what cause generates what effect.

Lattimer studied Kansas and learned from it. He became friends with retired Kansas City lawyer John Calvert, co-founder of the Intelligent Design Network and a main player in the Kansas ID effort. He attended IDNet's national conference last summer to hear the movement's leaders.

He talks often with Calvert, and occasionally with others in the loose coalition of national ID organizations. While the larger groups set the national agenda, they need grass-roots people where the action is taking place, like Ohio. Who better than Lattimer, an accomplished scientist with an interest in education and a history of conservative activism?

By the time he visited Kansas, Lattimer already had secured a spot on the team of volunteers - most of them educators - who were to write Ohio's new science teaching standards. He did it with the help and encouragement of Deborah Owens Fink, a member of the State Board of Education.

Articulate and persuasive, the University of Akron marketing professor has known Lattimer since the mid-1990s, when she served on the Summit County school board and he often attended to lobby for vouchers and other issues of parental choice. Last spring, she began pressing education officials to get him on the science writing team.

"I am very hopeful that Bob Lattimer and at least one other intelligent-design person can be included," she e-mailed Bob Bowers, an associate superintendent of the Ohio Department of Education. "It is especially important that conservatives feel they have . . . been included in the process."

She wrote to Bowers that Lattimer shared her own position that evolution should be taught, but "additional competing theories [should] be included as well - e.g. intelligent design."

While some evolution supporters say Owens Fink's efforts to get an intelligent-design activist on the writing team are inappropriate, she says that she only wanted to ensure that the group reflects Ohio's multiple points of view. "I'm real careful who I recommend for anything," she says. "People may disagree with Bob's viewpoints on different issues, which is healthy. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone to say he's anything but professional and a person they would respect."

Lattimer got a seat at the table, but he soon found he wasn't making an impact. Despite his vocal presence on the group charged with writing the development-of-life part of the science standards, the first two drafts have had a decidedly evolution-only approach.

"There are other people, I think, who are really struggling" with how to teach human origin, writing team member Michael Beeth says. "Bob is fully convinced, and he's not afraid to state his position. He doesn't dominate conversations. He doesn't interrupt other people. Bob's vote counts as one, and the rest of us vote a different way."

"The writing team has been a lost cause, up until now," Lattimer concedes. So he has shifted strategy, concentrating on politics and public opinion.

Late last year, he formed Science Excellence for all Ohioans, whose 30 members include representatives of conservative and Christian groups such as Ohio Eagle Forum, the American Family Association, and Christian Home Educators of Ohio. Kenneth Claypoole, the former Hudson school board member, helps run the group's Web site.

Through SEAO, Lattimer is putting public pressure on the state school board to overrule the writing team on which he serves. and to include intelligent design in the science standards the board must approve by year's end. State education officials have been swamped with thousands of e-mails from around the country, many of them arguing for intelligent design's place in science classes.

Several sympathetic State Board of Education members invited an ID expert to personally address their committee, and the board arranged a public debate between evolutionists and ID advocates. At least seven of the 19 board members appear to favor standards that would allow the teaching of alternatives to evolution, including intelligent design.

SEAO also is backing two bills that would give the Ohio legislature the final say on the science curriculum.

"It's clear this will eventually be decided in the courts," Lattimer says. "Come December, if they don't change it, we'll probably pursue a legal challenge."

Until then, though, he will work from the inside. When he wraps up his speech at Hudson Community Chapel, he has collected the names of more than 30 people who will help in the push for intelligent design. It may not sound like much, but there is time, and Bob Lattimer is a patient, persistent man.

"You have to realize that sometimes you have to take small steps," he says. "I feel very good about where we're at right now. This is not a short-term battle." Opponents of intelligent design "don't understand how important this is to us. They think we're going to go away. We won't."

Contact John Mangels at:

jmangels@plaind.com, 216-999-4842

Contact Scott Stephens at:

sstephens@plaind.com, 216-999-4827