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Unintelligent Designs
The famous “monkey trial” took place in Dayton, Tennessee over 80 years ago. In July 1925 high school biology teacher John Scopes was on trial for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution in the public schools. (The Tennessee law, enacted just a few months earlier, made it unlawful for any teacher – including university professors – in state-funded schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”) The trial was billed as the “monkey trial” in the popular press, reflecting the circus atmosphere that prevailed in Dayton during those hot summer days. But Scopes’ trial was also called “the trial of the century,” for among other things, it pitted famed criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow (hired by the ACLU to defend Scopes) against special prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a national leader in the fundamentalist Christian anti-evolution crusade. As dramatized in the classic play Inherit the Wind, Darrow’s essential strategy for the defense was to turn the tables on the prosecution: to put on trial not Mr. Scopes but the law he allegedly violated, a law that used the coercive power of government to mandate the teaching of religious belief (a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible) in the public schools. After the trial judge barred the expert testimony Darrow sought to introduce (prominent scientists who would have explained Darwin’s theory to the jury), Darrow took the extraordinary, dramatic step of calling Bryan to take the stand as an expert on the Bible. Bryan, confident in his faith, willingly fell into Darrow’s trap, exposing his fundamentalist beliefs to ridicule. At one point, when Bryan responded to Darrow’s question by saying, “I do not think about things that . .. I do not think about,” Darrow immediately followed up by asking, “Do you ever think about things that you do think about?” Although Scopes was convicted (and sentenced to pay a $100 fine), the state supreme court reversed the conviction (holding that the fine was excessive!) while upholding the constitutionality of the law. Not until 1967 was the Tennessee law repealed. Particularly after the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 awakened Americans to the inadequacy of science teaching in U.S. public schools, Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution, refined by modern scientists, at last became part of the standard science curriculum in American public schools. Nevertheless, Christian fundamentalists continued their crusade against the teaching of evolution. The debate in recent decades has been essentially a replay of the Scopes trial debate and its fundamental disagreements: faith versus reason, religion versus science. The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the issue in 1968, when in Epperson v. Arkansas it decided that an Arkansas law prohibiting the teaching of evolution was an unconstitutional government “establishment” of religion. (The Court reasoned that the law was an official attempt to aid a specific religious view by censoring ideas that would challenge that view – an open breach of the principle of neutrality which is the core of the First Amendment freedom of religion clause.) Since the Epperson decision, anti-evolution fundamentalists have used various tactics (more fully discussed below) to continue their attempt to establish the Biblical version of the creation of man. One of those tactics, disguising religion as “creation science,” was similarly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1987. In recent years, fundamentalists have changed their tactics yet again, inventing the successor to “creation science,” which they call “intelligent design,” as an alternative to evolution. Their campaign to get school boards and state boards of education to require the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools received a major set-back last December, when a federal judge held that the Dover, Pennsylvania school board’s mandate was unconstitutional. (The school board won’t appeal the decision because the town’s voters in November 2005 swept out of office eight of the nine board members who had supported the intelligent design mandate.) The battle continues, however: although Ohio’s state Board of Education wisely has rejected curriculum standards that supported intelligent design (voting 11-4 in February to eliminate portions of its curriculum guidelines for 10th-grade biology and an accompanying lesson plan that called for a critical analysis of evolution), the Kansas State Board of Education has voted to mandate the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum. The advocates of intelligent design (I’ll call them “IDers,” or “IDiots” – short for “Intelligent Design zealots”) are dishonest. Like the enemies of evolution in Tennessee in the 1920s, they are religious zealots who feel threatened in their beliefs by modern biological science, including the scientific theories of natural selection and evolution. They have coined the term intelligent design to distinguish their theory from creationism, and they disguise their religious motives by using the terminology of science. But behind the rhetoric, the reality of today’s intelligent design movement is that it is essentially no different from its predecessor, the creationist movement, and other anti-evolution movements that came before it. As Charles Krauthammer noted in an insightful op-ed, the current fight over evolution “is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment” (“Phony Theory, False Conflict: `Intelligent Design Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith,” Washington Post, Nov. 18, 2005). Smart judges – like the federal judge in the Dover, Pennsylvania case – who will not be deceived by the rhetoric and who understand the essence of “intelligent design” theory will, properly, decide that government mandates requiring its teaching in public school science classes indeed do violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on government establishment of religion.
Intelligent Design: Not Science, But Religion
In a superb article, “The Case Against Intelligent Design,” which was published in The New Republic last August, Jerry Coyne (a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago) has exposed ID for exactly what it is: “the latest pseudoscientific incarnation of religious creationism, cleverly crafted by a new group of enthusiasts to circumvent current legal restrictions.” Intelligent design is “simply the third attempt of creationists to proselytize our children at the expense of good science and clear thinking,” Professor Coyne observes: “Having failed to ban evolution from schools, and later to get equal classroom time for scientific creationism, they have made a few adjustments designed to sneak Christian cosmogony past the First Amendment. And these adjustments have given ID a popularity never enjoyed by earlier forms of creationism. . . .
“Why have the new image and the new approach been more successful? For a start, IDers have duped many people by further removing God from the picture, or at least hiding him behind the frame. No longer do creationists mention a deity, or even a creator, but simply a neutral-sounding `intelligent designer,’ as if it were not the same thing. This designer could in principle be Brahma, or the Taoist P’an Ku, or even a space alien; but ID creationists, as will be evident to anybody who attends to all that they say, mean only one entity: the biblical God. Their problem is that invoking this deity in science classes in public schools is unconstitutional. So IDers never refer openly to God, and people unfamiliar with the history of their creationist doctrine might believe that there is a real scientific theory afoot. They use imposing new terms such as `irreducible complexity,’ which make their arguments seem more sophisticated than those of earlier creationists.
“In addition, many IDers have more impressive academic credentials than did earlier scientific creationists, whose talks and antics always bore a whiff of the revival meeting. Unlike scientific creationists, many IDers work at secular institutions rather than at Bible schools. IDers work, speak, and write like trained academics: they do not come off as barely repressed evangelists. Their ranks include Phillip Johnson, the most prominent spokesperson for ID, and a retired professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at LeHigh University; William Dembski, a mathematician-philosopher and the director of the Center for Theology and Science at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Jonathan Wells, who has a doctorate in biology from Berkeley.”
(Jerry Coyne, “The Case Against Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name” [reviewing the ID textbook Of Pandas and People, by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon], The New Republic, Aug. 22, 2005.) Professor Coyne adds that all these proponents of ID are affiliated with the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), a division of the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. (Johnson is the “program advisor” to the CSC, the other above-named IDers are senior fellows at CSC.) He aptly identifies the CSC as the “nerve center of the intelligent design movement” and finds its origins to be “demonstrably religious”: the Discovery Institute itself identifies the Center as being designed explicitly “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” These “Governing Goals” of the Discovery Institute were also identified by Judge Jones, in his opinion in the Dover, Pennsylvania case (discussed below) as part of a large body of evidence – including documents furnished by the defense’s own expert witnesses – showing that ID is not science but religion. The Center’s own “Wedge Document” states in its “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary” that its goal is to replace science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science” – in the words of Judge Jones, the ID movement “seeks nothing less than a complete scientific revolution in which ID will supplant evolutionary theory.” (Katzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp.2d 707, 737 (2005).) Judge Jones found that a rigorous attachment to natural explanations is “an essential attribute to science,” both by definition and by convention. In contrast, ID “is predicated on supernatural causation”: “ID takes a natural phenomenon and, instead of accepting or seeking a natural explanation, argues that the explanation is supernatural.” Indeed, one of the most influential ID works – Of Pandas and People, the textbook Professor Coyne reviews in his New Republic article and also the text recommended by the Dover school district as a “reference book” for 9th-grade biology students – states, in pertinent part: “Darwinists object to the view of intelligent design because it does not give a natural cause explanation of how the various forms of life started in the first place. Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly, through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.”
Stated another way, “ID posits that animals did not evolve naturally through evolutionary means but were created abruptly by a non-natural, or supernatural, designer.” (400 F. Supp.2d at 736, emphasis added.) There is one major claim made by IDers, which they tout as truly novel: as summarized by Professor Coyne, that is the idea “that organisms show some adaptations that could not be built by natural selection, thus implying the need for a supernatural creative force such as an intelligent designer.” These adaptations share a property called “irreducible complexity,” a characteristic discussed in Pandas and elaborated by Michael Behe in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, where he defines it as “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” Many man-made objects show this property; Behe cites the mousetrap, which would not work if even one part were removed, such as the catch, the spring, the base, and so on. An example of an “irreducibly complex” system in the biological realm frequently cited by IDers is the “camera” eye of humans and other vertebrates, which also consists of many parts – the lens, retina, optic nerve, etc. – whose individual removal would render the organ useless. The “fatal flaw” in this argument for ID is that it misunderstands, or misrepresents, the theory of natural selection. As Professor Coyne explains, “We have realized for decades that natural selection can indeed produce systems that, over time, become integrated to the point where they appear to be irreducibly complex. But these features do not evolve by the sequential addition of parts to a feature that becomes functional only at the end. They evolve by adding, via natural selection, more and more parts into an originally rudimentary but functional system, with these parts sometimes co-opted from other structures. Every step of this process improves the organism’s survival, and so is evolutionarily possible via natural selection.”
Darwin himself used the eye as an example of something which, with all its complexity, appears to have been formed by some process other than natural selection; but then Darwin “ingeniously answer[ed] his own objection” (quoting from Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origins of Species): “Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.”
Thus, as Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection explains, “our eyes did not suddenly appear as full-fledged camera eyes, but evolved from simpler eyes, having fewer components, in ancestral species.” Nearly 150 years ago Darwin himself brilliantly addressed the basic ID argument by surveying existing specifies, “to see if one could find functional but less complex eyes that not only were useful, but also could be strung together into a hypothetical sequence showing how a camera eye might evolve. If this could be done – and it can – then the argument for irreducible complexity vanishes. . . . [E]ach step of the process is exemplified by the eye of a different living species. At the end of the sequence we have the camera eye, which seems irreducibly complex,” but “the complexity is reducible to a series of small, adaptive steps” (Coyne, “The Case Against Intelligent Design”). The “irreducible complexity” argument is not, in fact, novel; it is a modern retelling of the classic “argument from design” advanced (in an effort to prove the existence of God) by British theologian William Paley (1743-1805), in his 1802 book, Natural Theology. Paley popularized the argument from design with his famous example of a watch. Suppose, he argued, that we were to find a watch on the ground. When we inspect it, we find “its several parts are formed and put together for a purpose,” indeed, “they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day”; moreover, we find that “if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed,” the watch would not function. Thus, Paley argued, “the inference . . . is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker . . . an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.” Paley then extended this argument to the natural universe; just as finding a watch on the ground implies a conscious designer (the watchmaker), he maintained, so finding an equally complex organism imples a cosmic designer (God). As George Smith observes, Paley’s design argument has been open to a number of philosophical objections. One fundamental problem is the argument’s circularity. As Smith explains, “the inferential process represented in the design argument is the reverse of what actually occurs. We conclude that a watch is the result of design, not because we see `that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose,’ but because we know by direct experience that watches are made by men.” In other words, “we do not, as Paley insists, infer that a watch is man-made because we perceive design in it; rather, we infer that a watch is designed because we know it is man-made.” When an archaeologist, for example, wishes to determine whether an unknown object is a primitive ax or merely a rock, he looks for evidence that it was manufactured, or man-made. “Nature . . . provides the basis of comparison by which we distinguish between designed objects and natural objects. We are able to infer the presence of design only to the extent that the characteristic of an object differ from natural characteristics.” To claim that nature as a whole was designed “is to destroy the basis by which we differentiate between artifacts and natural objects.” The only way to produce evidence of design within the context of nature itself is first to posit the existence of a supernatural designer: “One must first know that a god exists before one can say that nature exhibits design,” and “this renders the design argument useless for proving the existence of a god.” (Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God (Prometheus Books, 1979), pp. 262-68, emphasis in original.) Moreover, as Professor Coyne adds, “the eye is not a watch.” The human eye, though quite functional is imperfect – “certainly not the sort of eye an engineer would create from scratch”: “Its imperfection arises precisely because our eye evolved using whatever components were at hand, or produced by mutation. Since our retina evolved from an everted part of the brain, for example, the nerves and blood vessels that attach to our photoreceptor cells are on the inside rather than the outside of the eye, running over the surface of the retina. Leakage of these blood vessels can occlude vision, a problem that would not occur if the vessels fed the retina from behind. Likewise, to get the nerve impulses from the photocells to the brain, the different nerves must join together and dive back through the eye, forming the optic nerve. This hole in the retina creates a blind spot in the eye, a flaw that again could be avoidable with a priori design. . . . Evolution differs from a priori design because it is constrained to operate by modifying whatever features have evolved previously. Thus evolution yields fitter types that often have flaws. Those flaws violate reasonable principles of intelligent design.”
Observing that IDers tend to concentrate more on biochemistry than on organs such as the eye – citing “irreducibly complex” molecular systems such as the mechanism for blood-clotting and the immune system – Coyne notes that there is no doubt that many biochemical systems are “dauntingly complex,” but can still be explained – as science progresses – in terms of biochemical evolutions. “It is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance `God’” (Coyne, “The Case Against Intelligent Design”). Faith in supernatural creation, regardless what form it takes, is incompatible with science because religion and science are based on mutually incompatible assumptions. As George Smith notes, “Science represents man’s attempt to systematize given aspects of reality into a coherent framework of knowledge. Since science is dedicated to understanding reality, it rests on the premise that reality can be understood. Theology, on the other hand, is dedicated to the proposition that an important segment of reality (in fact, its ultimate form) is forever unknowable. There are cross-purposes at work here. Science seeks to make reality coherent; theology seeks to convince us that some aspects of reality are incoherent.”
(Smith, Atheism, p. 89.) Significantly, even the Vatican – whose hostility to science when it appears to conflict with religious dogma is well-known in Western history (consider, for example, the prosecution of Galileo by the Inquisition, for his “heresies”) – has recently recognized that intelligent design is not a science. The Vatican’s chief astronomer, the Rev. George Coyne (the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory), said at a conference in Florence, Italy, that placing ID theory alongside that of evolution in school programs is wrong: “Intelligent design isn’t science, even though it pretends to be,” he said. “If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.”
Evolution: A Sound Scientific Theory
A frequent tactic used by IDers is to claim that Darwinism is “only a theory” and that it has many flaws, particularly with regard to alleged “gaps” in the fossil record. It is upon such criticisms of evolution that IDers base their case for teaching ID as an alternative theory. The problem with this critique, however, is that it misrepresents both evolution and the nature of science, generally. As Professor Coyne explains, quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary, the term theory as used in science means “a scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts.” In common parlance, people may speak of something as “only a theory,” but in science, “a theory is a convincing explanation for a diversity of data from nature.” Thus scientists speak of “gravitational theory,” for example, as an explanation for the mutual attraction of physical bodies. “It makes as little sense to doubt the factuality of evolution as to doubt the factuality of gravity,” he observes (Coyne, “The Case Against Intelligent Design”). Evolution, or neo-Darwinian theory, is not one proposition but several, as Professor Coyne explains:
Professor Coyne adds that these three propositions were first articulated by Charles Darwin in his 1850 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, “and they have not changed substantially, although they have been refined and supplemented by modern work.” As he emphasizes, Darwin “did not propose these ideas as pure `theory’; he also provided voluminous and convincing evidence for them.” Indeed, the weight of evidence was “so overwhelming” that it crushed creationism: “Within fifteen years, nearly all biologists, previously adherents of `natural theology,’ abandoned that view and accepted Darwin’s first two propositions. Broad acceptance of natural selection came much later, around 1930.” In Darwin’s time the fossil record was sparse – Darwin himself called the absence of transitional series in the fossil record “the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against the theory” – but in the 19th century, there were already findings that suggested evolution. Since then, however, paleontologists have turned up Darwin’s missing evidence: “fossils in profusion, with many sequences showing evolutionary change. . . . Moreover, we now have transitional forms connecting major groups of organisms, including fish with tetrapods, dinosaurs with birds, reptiles with mammals, and land mammals with whales. Darwin predicted that such forms would be found, and their discovery vindicated him fully.” Professor Coyne further observes that in the past 150 years, “immense amounts of new evidence have been collected about biogeography, embryology, and, especially, the fossil record. All of it supports evolution.” Moreover, the theory of natural selection – which Darwin, lacking direct supporting evidence, proved with logical and analogical arguments – has been supported with much scientific evidence. “Biologists have now observed hundreds of cases of natural selection, beginning with the well-known examples of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, insect resistance to DDT, and HIV resistance to antiviral drugs. Natural selection accounts for the resistance of fish and mice to predators by making them more camouflaged, and for the adaptation of plants to toxic materials in the soil,” for example. (I recall that my 9th-grade science fair project helped confirm Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to two different species of the one-celled organisms, paramecia.) “Since 1850,” Professor Coyne concludes, “Darwin’s theories have been expanded, and we now know that some evolutionary change can be caused by forces other than natural selection. . . . Yet selection is still the only known evolutionary force that can produce the fit between organism and environment (or between organism and organism) that makes nature seem `designed.’ As the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky remarked, `Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Evolution, therefore, “has graduated from theory to fact. We know that species on earth today descended from earlier, different species, and that every pair of species had a common ancestor that existed in the past. Most evolutionary change in the feature of organisms, moreover, is almost certainly the result of natural selection. But we must also remember that, like all scientific truths, the truth of evolution is provisional: it could conceivably be overturned by future investigations” – for example, the possible (but unlikely) discovery of human fossils co-existing with dinosaurs. Coyne also notes why tactics advocated by IDers – such as mandating disclaimers, stickers to be placed in biology textbooks saying something like “Evolution is a theory, not a fact” – are not just pernicious but “doubly pernicious.” First, when applied to scientific theories, the distinction between theory and fact is erroneous. Second, if it is applied to evolution theory, it ought to be applied to other scientific theories as well. “Why haven’t school boards put similar warnings in physics textbooks, noting that gravity and electrons are only theories, not facts, and should be critically considered? After all, nobody has ever seen gravity or an electron. The reason that evolution stands alone is clear: other scientific theories do not offend religious sensibilities” (Coyne, “The Case Against Intelligent Design”). The great English philosopher Herbert Spencer could have been describing ID when he declared that “those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.”
Religion in Public Schools: The Constitutional Background
As noted above, the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1968 Epperson decision struck down the Arkansas law that, like the 1925 Tennessee law involved in the Scopes case, had prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. The Court held that the statute violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government “establishment” of religion (applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment) because it had a religious purpose: the state impermissibly breached the principle of government neutrality by prohibiting the teaching of particular information in schools merely because it conflicted with some religious beliefs. Following Epperson, anti-evolution fundamentalists championed “balanced treatment” statutes that required public-school teachers who taught evolution to devote equal time to teaching the Biblical view of creation. Courts realized this tactic was another attempt to establish religion and accordingly struck down these statutes as unconstitutional. (See, e.g., Daniel v. Waters, 515 F.2d 485 (6th Cir. 1975).) Fundamentalist opponents of evolution then adopted the tactic of using scientific-sounding language to describe religious beliefs and then to require that schools teach the resulting “creation science” or “scientific creationism” as an alternative to religion. In Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of one of these newer anti-evolution statutes, a Louisiana law that required “balanced treatment for creation-science and evolution-science in public school instruction.” The majority of the Court (by a 7-2 decision) held that this requirement violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment because the statute, in both its explicit language and in its legislative history, was designed to promote religion. (The Court thus saw through the oxymoronic term creation science and saw creationism for what it was: religious belief in the guise of “science.”) By the time the Court decided Edwards v. Aguillard, the majority of the justices had adopted the so-called Lemon test for determining whether a given governmental action violated the First Amendment prohibition of government “establishment” of religion. The test, derived from Chief Justice Warren Burger’s opinion for the Court in the 1971 case, Lemon v. Kurtzman, requires a challenged statute to satisfy three tests in order to be found constitutional: first, it must have a secular purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be neutral – that is, it must neither advance nor inhibit religion; and third, it must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.” Although the test was formulated by Chief Justice Burger as a more “accommodating” approach to government actions that seem to favor religion – such as various forms of government aid, direct or indirect, to parochial schools – its chief critics on the Court itself have been the more conservative justices, led by Burger’s successor, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who view it as too mechanical – and too hostile to religion. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has offered an alternative standard – the so-called “endorsement test” – but, so far, a majority of the justices continue to apply the Lemon test in cases involving alleged government establishment of religion.
The Dover, Pennsylvania Case
In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a U.S. district court judge for the Middle District of Pennsylvania considered the constitutionality of the Dover school board’s mandate that students be “made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design.” The school board followed up this resolution with the requirement that the teacher in the 9th-grade biology class at Dover High School read the following statement to students in the class: “The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
“Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
“Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.
“With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency in Standards-based assessments.”
Thus, the school board did not mandate the actual teaching of ID, but it did mandate the teaching of this disclaimer (referred to as the “ID policy” in the court’s decision), which was challenged as an unconstitutional government establishment of religion. (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp.2d 707, 708-709 (M. D. Pa. Dec. 20, 2005).) In his opinion finding the school board’s actions to be unconstitutional, Judge Jones analyzed the ID policy in terms of both the Lemon test and Justice O’Connor’s alternative “endorsement” test. Discussing the history of the anti-evolution movement and of ID’s place in it, Judge Jones concluded that, first, “an objective observer would know that ID and teaching about `gaps’ and ‘problems’ in evolutionary theory are creationist, religious strategies that evolved from earlier forms of creationism”; second, that “an objective student would view the disclaimer as an official endorsement of religion”; and third, that “an objective Dover citizen would perceive” the disclaimer to be “an endorsement of religion.” Thus, it transgresses the endorsement test by showing religious favoritism or sponsorship: the school board, in effect, gave its imprimatur to ID. As noted above, Judge Jones’ opinion includes a thorough discussion of the question whether ID is a science; and based upon all the evidence in the record – which included the defendants’ own expert witnesses – he concluded, correctly, that ID was not a science but a religion, “predicated on supernatural causation.” (400 F. Supp.2d at 714-45.) Applying the three-part Lemon test, Judge Jones similarly found that the Dover policy violated the First Amendment prohibition on establishment. After discussing a detailed time line showing the school board’s actions, the judge concluded that the policy had no secular purpose; rather, the board “consciously chose to change Dover’s biology curriculum to advance religion.” With regard to the second Lemon prong, the “effect” test, he then found that “since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the ID policy is the advancement of religion.” Thus, he found, “[t]he effect of Defendants’ actions in adopting the curriculum change was to impose a religious view of biological origins into the biology course, in violation of the Establishment Clause.” He did not need to consider the question of government entanglement with religion; clear violations of both the purpose and effect prongs of the Lemon test were sufficient to invalidate the ID policy under the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, Judge Jones found that the Dover policy also violated the religious-freedom provision of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which protect both aspects of religious freedom (both free exercise of religion and prohibition of government establishment of religion) protected by the First Amendment. (400 F. Supp.2d at 746-65.)
The Future Constitutionality of IDiotic Mandates
Judge Jones’ opinion in the Dover, Pennsylvania case is a model that ought to be followed by other federal courts when considering similar attempts by ID proponents to mandate its teaching – or even to officially recognize its critique of Darwinian evolution theory – in the public schools. It is a thorough, well-reasoned opinion amply supported by findings of fact that reveal ID for exactly what it is: religion, not science. Applying the Supreme Court precedents – and particularly Edwards v. Aguillard, federal courts ought to conclude, as Judge Jones did, that ID mandates are unconstitutional. Some Court-watchers, taking note of the recent changes in personnel of the Supreme Court (Chief Justice Rehnquist’s death and his replacement by the new Chief, John Roberts, and Justice O’Connor’s retirement and her replacement by the Court’s newest member, Justice Samuel Alito) have questioned whether the Court’s First Amendment “establishment of religion” jurisprudence will take a more decidedly conservative direction, with perhaps a different (and more favorable) result regarding the constitutionality of ID mandates. It’s still far too early to tell, but I have some doubts whether Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Alito will change the Court’s jurisprudence significantly in this area. Roberts strikes me as more “moderate,” in many respects, than his predecessor, Chief Justice Rehnquist; it remains to be seen, for example, whether he will be as openly hostile to the Lemon test as Rehnquist was. And Alito, for all the criticism of him coming from left-liberals, who viewed him as a clone of Justice Anton Scalia (leading to the nickname, “Scalito”), is probably truly a jurisprudential conservative, which means, among other things, that he has due regard for the principle of stare decisis – which means adhering to the precedent set by cases like Epperson v. Arkansas or Edwards v. Aguillard, even when he personally might disagree with the Court’s prior decisions. Justice O’Connor’s “endorsement” test is likely to disappear – unless it is embraced by a new majority of the Court, comprised of the four “liberal” justices (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy (the moderate conservative who is now the critical “swing” vote between the left-liberal and conservative blocks on the Court – but I believe the Lemon test is still here to stay, for some time. That means that, for the foreseeable future, efforts by today’s William Jennings Bryans – anti-evolution religious crusaders, masquerading their religion in the guise of pseudo-scientific “intelligent design” (the IDiots, in other words) – to use the coercive power of government to substitute their theories for true science are doomed to fail, as they should, because of the U.S. Constitution and its prohibition of government establishment of religion.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Monday, May 1, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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