Dispatches from the Culture Wars

The US has always had a 'difficult' relationship with religion because of the traumatic origins of the nation. The original British settlers, especially in what became the liberal northern establishment, were wealthy dissenters (including Catholics and Jews) who were prohibited from political participation in their homeland. Henceforth, all attempts to impose a religious orthodoxy would be prohibited - in the name of protecting religious freedom, of course.

Absolutely baffling. The original British settlers, especially in the north, were theocrats who were bothered that someone else had beaten them to the punch of establishing an official religion in England that wasn't theirs. England at the time was an Anglican theocracy and they wanted a Calvinist one, which is exactly what they set up when they got here, and Catholics and Jews were persona non grata. Religious freedom did not come until well over a century later.

Thus, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the trial in which I testified, is classed as a civil rights case.

Only in the broadest sense of the word, in the sense that all cases involving a provision of the Bill of Rights are called civil rights cases. But Kitzmiller was an establishment clause case specifically, which means it does not require that someone's civil rights have been violated, only that the government, in this case the school board, has acted outside its constitutional authority.

It is not the first time a moral panic has broken out over the prospect that some religiously inspired views might make their way into state-supported schools. The legal response has been characteristically thuggish. Thus, the American Civil Liberties Union bulldozed its way into Dover, Pennsylvania, just as it did eighty years ago in Dayton, Tennessee to turn the Scopes 'Monkey' Trial into an international sensation.

Notice there is no argument here, only an ugly insult. He doesn't say that the ACLU was wrong, only that it was "thuggish" and it "bulldozed" its way in. Typical rhetoric, but hardly reasonable. And when he does try to supply such arguments, he has only straw men to offer:

The intellectual content of the ACLU's case against ID is largely based on fears about a right-wing religious takeover of the US school system. I don't doubt that many of ID's supporters harbour such desires, but the decentralised nature of the school system - which accounts for the seemingly endless court cases involving the teaching of evolution -- makes any such takeover unlikely.

This is utter nonsense. The plaintiff's case in Kitzmiller did not require any such argument, nor was one made. All it required was that this particular policy be found unconstitutional, regardless of whether any other school anywhere followed their example. There were lots of arguments made in the trial against ID, none of which had anything to do with a "right wing religious takeover" of the school system. The "intellectual content" of the case against ID is to be found in the volumes of testimony about the complete lack of scientific content offered by the ID movement.

Nevertheless, the ACLU's eagerness to pursue cases like Kitzmiller, especially given all the other civil rights violations in the US, reflects a profound lack of faith in the wisdom of elected local school boards to resolve these matters.

And pray tell, why should anyone have any such faith in the wisdom of elected local school boards? The board in Dover was not exceptional, they were about average for most local school boards, which tend to be populated primarily by people like Bill Buckingham. That is, by people who would have little hope of passing an exam in virtually any of the classes offered at the school and thus hopelessly unqualified to be passing judgment on how anything ought to be taught.

Since schools are funded entirely through local taxes, if taxpayers dislike what is taught, they can always vote against the school board's members in the next election. (And they do!)

But legal issues are not decided on what taxpayers like or dislike, nor should they be. If you put up for a vote what should be taught in public schools, the results would be frightening. And why should such a thing be put to a vote? Why would we give credence to someone to make a judgment on what ought to be taught in a science classroom if they know little or nothing about science? We don't put medical diagnoses up for a vote of the public, nor do we take straw polls to decide what is wrong when our car doesn't work, we defer to the judgment of those trained in medicine or auto mechanics because they have a far better chance of actually knowing what they're talking about.

The same is true in matters of science or history or mathematics, which just like auto mechanics or medicine require a good deal of study and expertise in order to be understood. Asking the general public to decide what ought to be taught in a class in which the vast majority of them would have a vanishingly small chance of passing a mid-term exam is as absurd as asking the janitors at the hospital the best course of treatment for a herniated disk; they simply do not have the knowledge required to make an informed choice.

In this respect, the US provides a wonderful experimental environment for educational alternatives. Yet, this has not prevented an ingrained paranoid reaction to the slightest whiff of religion in the schools that serves, unwittingly, to stultify the spirit of free inquiry.

More nonsense. Those who advocate intelligent design are entirely free to do what scientists have always done when their ideas conflict with the consensus and are rejected by mainstream scientific opinion; they are free to do the hard work necessary to prove that consensus wrong. That they choose not to do that work and engage instead in dishonest public relations campaigns and political lobbying efforts is a key fact that lends credence to the argument that they are not engaged in science at all.

I was asked by the defence counsel to serve as a 'rebuttal witness' to the experts amassed by the ACLU. I agreed after having read the expert witness statements, which contain some of the most egregiously ignorant abuses of scientific and philosophical authority imaginable. I tried to address the most important of these in my own expert statement, but they continued to proliferate - more egregiously and ignorantly - in the ACLU expert witness transcripts. I don't know if ID's hardcore supporters are simply scared or polite, but it would not take much to deflate the significance of the ACLU experts' claims. I tried to do this in my own court testimony, but in the end I was mainly trying to shore up ID's scientific credentials, not deconstruct those of the ACLU's experts. Nevertheless, I have plenty of notes about this and hope to be invited to publish them to a wide audience.

Translation: those who disagree with me are a bunch of mean poopyheads and someday I might attempt to support that claim.

Finally, what do I think of ID's own prospects? ID is currently stuck in the Neo-Darwinists' image of them. Its proponents lean too heavily on the evidence against evolution. They too quickly reach for God and don't make enough of the idea that 'design' is a concept indifferent to the life/non-life distinction.

Well at least he recognizes the obvious about the ID movement. However, he seems to give no thought to the possibility that the ID movement lean heavily on arguments against evolution (all of them taken directly from creationist material) because that's all they have to offer, or that they "too quickly reach for God" because the entire artifice of ID is little more than a less substantive version of good old fashioned creationism.

During the trial, Fuller made many more statements that were simply counter to all historical evidence. For example, he actually argued that ID should be put into public schools as a sort of "affirmative action strategy with regard to disadvantaged theories", as though all ideas were equally plausible and deserved an equal number of followers to develop them. I'm quite serious, he actually said that:

Q. Well, does that concern you have for encouraging scientific progress explain in part why you're supporting Dover's small step in this case?

A. Yes. Well, in fact, that is, in a sense, the main reason, because if you think about this sociologically, how do you expect any kind of minority view with any promise to get a toe hold in science? Okay. And you basically need new recruits.

This has been the secret of any kind of scientific revolution or any kind of science that has been able to maintain itself. You need enough people on the ground, a critical mass to develop it. You just can't count on three or four people and somehow expect them to spontaneously generate followers, especially when they're being constantly criticized by the establishment.

You have to provide openings and opportunities where in principle new recruits to the theory could be brought about. And, of course, the way to do it, the most straight forward way is by making people aware of it early on, and to show promise, not to mandate it, but to show that it's there. Take it or leave it.

And some will take it. And they may go on and develop it further. And then you'll see the full fruits of the theory down the line. But unless you put it into the school system, it's not going to happen spontaneously from the way in which science has been developing at this point.

There are a couple of obvious reasons why this argument is absurd. First, because history strongly argues the contrary. There have been many revolutions in science where a dominant theory was replaced by a "radical, innovative" new theory that was initially rejected by mainstream scientists; in not a single one of those situations was it required that they be taught in schools prior to their acceptance as an "affirmative action strategy" to provide recruits to help develop the theory.

Alfred Wegener did not demand that his views on continental drift be put into public school curricula in order to overcome the hidebound orthodoxy of his fellow scientists; he merely got to work, continually working with like minded people to develop and refine his theory and document the evidence for it. His views, once the upstart new kid on the block being told to stay off the old theory's lawn, is now the dominant view. Fuller does not provide a single example of a revolution in science requiring such an affirmative action strategy, nor could he possibly find one if he tried. They simply don't exist.

Indeed, the fact that no such affirmative action program has ever been provided for any idea that was rejected by scientists and yet many such ideas have been initially rejected and then ended up being dominant ideas before long, proves that his logic is false. And one might add that ID has an enormous advantage over every other previously rejected idea in that it is already taught to millions of kids in private Christian schools and home schools around the country.

Big bang cosmology, as Behe reminded the court about 14 million times during his testimony, was initially rejected by mainstream scientists. But big bang cosmology, within a couple of decades, became the dominant view among scientists. By Fuller's reasoning, it must be seen as a miracle that it managed to do so without being taught in schools so that new students could be recruited that might push the idea forward and make it compelling and scientific.

Yet it did so with none of the advantages that ID has already; there was no PR campaign to push big bang cosmology in churches, school boards and legislatures, no well-funded institutes publishing reams of books and pamphlets to a huge target audience eager to read their material. There were no churches sponsoring seminars to convince people that the big bang was real, or blogs to promote it all over the world.

And yet it managed to succeed simply because the scientists who promoted it did the work necessary to establish the big bang theory as valid. And because it was an actual theory, one which allowed the derivation of testable hypotheses and thus spurred actual research. Fuller admitted during his testimony that ID required "much more development" before it could spur actual scientific research. The obvious answer, of course, is that until it does so, and until those research results actually support the idea, it simply has no business even being discussed as part of a high school science curriculum.

Secondly, think of the implications of his argument. He does not attempt to argue that ID, among the vast sea of fringe ideas in science, is uniquely plausible and therefore deserves this kind of affirmative action before other fringe ideas. Indeed, his argument logically requires the same be done for each and every fringe idea in science, from the geocentrists to the flat earthers to the hollow earthers to the Raelians to Van Daniken's pyramidiocy to UFO cults and who knows what else.

By Fuller's reasoning, each and every one one of these positions, and countless more, must be taught in public schools lest we disadvantage such "radical, innovative views." By his reasoning, all of these ideas must be taught fairly and equally along with all of the well established scientific explanations for every natural phenomena in the world in order to provide them with new recruits on the off chance that they might be proven right someday. To call this idea lunacy is to be too kind; it is sheer idiocy.