I recently had the pleasure of dealing with a very polite young woman who wanted to give me a flyer about a presentation by Eric Hovind, son of the more (in)famous Kent Hovind. A snippet of our conversation went something like this:
Me: Has this been experimentally demonstrated?
Her: Oh, yes.
Me: Can you give me the publication history where I can find this information?
Her: Actually, the atheist organizations don’t want us to publish it.
As may be divined through careful astrology, the conversation went downhill from there. It did give me some ideas, though, that struck me as interesting enough to research further. Presuming she meant that the atheist organizations were preventing them from publishing their information in an academic journal, a resource disparity between creation scientists and atheist organizations should be pretty apparent and easy to identify, and it should favor the atheist organizations. Specifically in the case of non-profit agencies, GuideStar.org should be able to easily find the 990 forms and give us the revenues of the more significant players (revenue in this case being used as a measure of public support and/or interest).
In many ways the Discovery Institute’s often-found publicity of intelligent design has secured it as the foremost organization interested in doing so. Their GuideStar page can be found here, though a free registration is required to view the 990 form. For expediency’s sake, the 2007 990 form (line 12) says that the Discovery Institute took in a total of $4,256,588. (We’re using 2007 because GuideStar as of yet does not have their 2008 form.)
According to GuideStar, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science took in $308,546 for the 2007 fiscal year.
A clear difference is at work here, but it is precisely the opposite of the lady’s claims. On a purely financial level, intelligent design has Dawkins outfinanced by an astounding $3,948,042. However this comparison isn’t quite fair – one would hypothetically donate to the Discovery Institute if they liked intelligent design as a concept, while the RDFRS would receive funds from those who specifically support Richard Dawkins’s drive to promote, well, reason and science through this foundation. Is there some other, more general, evolutionary foundation that might be better able to match the Discovery Institute’s general mandate?
In fact there is. The Evolution Society, chaired by Charles Fenster, a biologist at the University of Maryland, seems to have a general enough mandate — the “STUDY AND PROMOTION OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES.” According to GuideStar, in 2007 it took in $416,980. The Discovery Institute thus has them out-financed by $3,839,608.
The financial situation really can’t get much clearer. Atheists are being outspent quite well, or at least those groups are. It’s also worth noting that the Discovery Institute spent over $3 million on “program services” in 2007, more than either of the two atheist organizations made during that same period.
It strikes me, though, that this comment about atheist organizations blocking intelligent design publishing attempts is actually sort of a reverse compliment. If the Pew Foundation’s breakdown of American religious affiliations is correct, 1.6% of Americans self-identify as atheists while 78.4% identify as Christian. The Census Bureau estimates that the 2009 US population was 307,006,550 people.
Presuming the Pew Foundation’s percentages hold true for 2009, there were roughly 240,693,135.2 people who would identify themselves as Christian in 2009 in the United States, and 4,912,104.8 people identifying themselves as atheist. Presuming this woman’s logic to be correct, one atheist is therefore capable of stopping 49 Christians from publishing things about intelligent design.