Spintelligent Design

The spin by creationists and fundamentalists in response to the recent Kitzmiller v. Dover decision in Dover, PA is simply amazing. Aren't Christians instructed not to lie???

Initially, a couple of key things to read. Here is Judge Jones's court decision. The decision by itself should more than adequately reveal the misrepresentations occurring in the articles I cite below.

Next, in the interest of fairness, Stephen C. Meyer's much-cited definitive essay on Intelligent Design. The essay validly points out alleged flaws in the theory of evolution, but engages in speculative thinking (albeit lucidly written) about form and function in order to do little more than establish the feasibility, the possibility, of design as an alternative to random chance. There is a world of difference between this article and what the Dover school board tried to do. The Dover board explicitly and unapologetically mandated the introduction of Intelligent Design in biology classes for religious reasons. One board member said, after the meeting in which the decision was made: "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such." At another point, he said "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?" And, of course, the book the board mandated science teachers suggest to their students, Of Pandas and People, is an openly religious book that, according to its critics, misrepresents everything from its own orientation to the fossil record and extinction evidence.

So now for the spin:

Lee J. Strang writes in the National Review Online that the ruling is an example of the broad, oppressive reach of the Establishment Clause, and that it's yet another case of attempting to "purge religion from the public square." Hogwash. The ruling purges religion from a science class. Strang admits (he has to in order to retain any intellectual integrity) that the Dover school board (most of whom were booted out of office over this fiasco) overreached, and made the mistake of wearing their religious purposes on their sleeves. But Strang insists that an Originalist perspective would allow religious explanations to be taught alongside scientific ones. Of course, what Strang doesn't say is that this needn't be done in science classes, and in fact creationism and all religious accounts of the universe can be, and are, taught in elective comparative religion and philosophy classes in public schools all over the country. Strang really has to stretch the arguments and implications of Kitzmiller to prove some kind of overall, categorical hostility toward religion. In this particular case, such hostility is only to religion in a science class. Strang also insists that Intelligent Design theorists have good arguments, but that's beside the point. Intelligent Design is indistinguishable from ancient and classical teleological arguments for the existence of God. Those arguments, once again, belong in philosophy and religion classes, not science classes. By its very nature, a Design thesis is an argument about the philosophy of science, the metaphysics of science; an argument ABOUT science, not an expression of the scientific method. Read Meyer's essay and judge for yourself.

Family News in Focus, the website of Focus on the Family, reveals an even greater degree of buffoonary in its editorial by Steve Jordahl. Jordahl simply lies in this piece, saying that Judge Jones ruled that it is unconstitutional to teach ANY alternatives to evolution. ANY. That's a flat-out untruth, of course (Jones only ruled that ID was unconstitutional, because it was religious in both intent and content), but it gets better. "Under the school board’s plan," Jordahl writes, "religion would not have been brought into the classroom." Not true. The school board's plan required teachers to alert students to the existence of a creationist book in the school's library, and encourage students to read that book. You really should read Jordahl's editorial for yourself. It's laughable, poorly edited and full of errors, reactionary, and looks to have been written by a 5 year-old child. Oh, and it quotes an ID advocate as saying there's plenty of empirical support for ID, but of course, no such support is specifically identified.

A house editorial in the Wheeling News-Register contends, without a shred of warrant, that ID possesses "at least as much validity as ... evolution." Wow. You'd think they'd mention some of that validity. Nope.

Ah, Chuck Colson chimes in as well. If you're too young to remember him, he helped to organize the illegal wiretapping of Democrats by the Nixon people. Subsequently he founded a Christian prison ministry outfit. Anyway, as we know from observing the careers of Ollie North and Mark Fuhrman, corrupt public officials can always schlep for conservative news organizations, and Colson is no exception. His Townhall.com editorial doesn't really make any arguments at all. He just says he "strongly disagrees" with the ruling. He reluctantly admits that the school board overplayed its hand. But the real purpose of the editorial is to push the reader towards "informative" links at the bottom of the page--from a book available through Amazon making the case for intelligent design (although the book in question does so from an evangelical perspective, doesn't present both sides of the issue, and doesn't use the scientific method at all), to links to a "research and information page" that is full of editorials against evolution rather than any actual research and information.

I am much more sympathetic to the viewpoint of William Grassie of the Metanexus Institute, which advocates meaningful, critical dialogue between religion, philosophy, and science. Grassie says the real problem here is that students don't sufficiently understand the underlying philosophy of science, and that such an understanding is a prerequisite to understanding how to discuss the shortcomings of evolutionary theory, the politics of the scientific and religious communities, and why evolution still has the preponderance of evidence on its side even if it's not "perfect."

But this is worlds away from what creationists want. Implicit in their arguments, further illustrated by the dishonest and warrant-free spin of the articles cited above, is a desire to eliminate critical thinking altogether, in favor of appeals to authority, tradition, and doctrine. A citizenry that is taught to believe that all things exist merely because of the will of a divine creator will easily take the next step: That a few authorities are appointed to speak for that creator. The next step: Those authorities have a monopoly not only on theological and scientific truth, but also on moral and, of course, political truth. There is a free, open and short road running from creationism to religious authoritarianism. Judge Jones has closed that road--for now. Thank God!!!