Source: https://www.equip.org/article/intelligent-design-in-the-schools/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 16:29:51+00:00

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Intelligent design (ID) theory — which seeks to explain the cause of the specified complexity in the universe — is a new factor in the debate over origins. The U.S. Supreme Court has specifically dealt with state laws concerning creation and evolution in public school science curricula, but it has never addressed ID. If the Supreme Court were to assess a law permitting or requiring the teaching of ID in public schools it would likely employ the standard set down in its most famous creation/evolution case, Edwards v. Aguillard. It is possible, however, to construct a statute that would pass constitutional muster: First, ID has no historical connection to the creation/ evolution debate in the Scopes trial; therefore, it should not suffer from guilt by association. Second, ID literature and curricula are not transparently derived from the book of Genesis, as is creationist literature. The arguments for ID are not grounded in any particular religion’s interpretation of its special revelation. They are, rather, the result of empirical facts, well-grounded conceptual notions, and critical reflection. The conclusions of ID are consistent with creationism, it is true, but ID is essentially different. Finally, an ID statute could be justified using two secular lines of reasoning: by challenging the state endorsement and biased promotion of evolution, and by arguing that an ID statute would promote students’ exposure to important scholarship and protect the academic freedom of ID adherents.
What if a government body required or permitted its public schools to include criticisms of evolution and presentations of intelligent design (ID) theory in their science curricula? The U.S. Supreme Court has specifically dealt with state laws that either forbade evolution (Epperson v. Arkansas)1 or required balanced treatment between evolution and creation (Edwards v. Aguillard),2 but it has never addressed this particular question. To require or permit the teaching of ID in public schools, nevertheless, is constitutional. To make this case, we must first define creation, evolution, and intelligent design.
Creation. Creation, as understood by the courts, is synonymous with young-earth creationism. This view, according to Phillip E. Johnson, U.C. Berkeley law professor, is associated with the “term ‘creation-science,’ as used in the Louisiana law [in the Edwards case], [and] is commonly understood to refer to a movement of Christian fundamentalists.” “Creation-scientists,” continues Johnson, “do not merely insist that life was created; they insist that the job was completed in six days no more than ten thousand years ago.…[Young-earth creationism] attributes the existence of fossils to Noah’s flood” (emphasis in original).3 The statutes struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Epperson and Edwards, and by a federal district court in McLean v. Arkansas,4 had this type of creationism in mind.
Not even hard-line creationists deny that biological species adapt to changing environments over time and genetically pass those adaptations to their offspring. This is microevolution, which is distinguished from macroevolution — the view that through small, incremental, and beneficial mutations over eons of time, all living things in our world originated from one bacterial cell.
Naturalistic evolution says the entire universe can be accounted for by strictly material processes without resorting to any designer, creator, or nonmaterial entity. To say such a view of evolution is true, therefore, is to say naturalism (or materialism) as a worldview is true, for such a strictly material and random version of evolution necessarily entails naturalism. This means a threat is posed to materialism when evolution is challenged, for naturalistic evolution seeks to answer the very same question as ID: What is the origin of the apparent design in biological organisms and/or the rest of the natural universe and/or the universe as a whole? Evolution answers this question by appealing to the forces of unguided matter (and/or energy) whereas ID appeals to an intelligent agency.
Intelligent Design. Intelligent design is a research program. A small, though growing, platoon of academics embraces this program and maintains that, rather than the blind forces of unguided matter, an intelligent agency better explains the specified, and sometimes irreducible, complexity of some physical systems. These systems include biological entities as well as the existence of the universe as a whole.
Two aspects of ID are relevant to the constitutionality of an ID statute: (1) the case against methodological naturalism, and (2) the case for intelligent design. The literature supporting ID is sophisticated, vast, and growing; therefore, the presentation of its case will be cursory.
ID proponents, such as mathematician William A. Dembski, maintain that most scholars who hold to evolutionary theory do so because of a prior commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), “the view that science must be restricted solely to undirected natural processes.”11 According to Johnson, “a methodological naturalist defines science as the search for the best naturalistic theories. A theory would not be naturalistic if it left something out (such as the existence of genetic information or consciousness) to be explained by a supernatural cause.”12 If one defines science as a discipline that allows only naturalistic explanations, and if one maintains that science is the only field that provides truth on the question of origins, then evolution (not necessarily Darwinism) must be true even if it leaves many unanswered questions. The real question, according to design theorists, is not whether ID conflicts with MN but whether their arguments for ID work. If ID arguments work, then MN is not a necessary precondition of natural science and cannot be employed to exclude positions contrary to it.
Detecting Specified Complexity. At the core of the ID research program are criteria that proponents claim can be used to detect or falsify design. Dembski offers one such criterion. He posits an explanatory filter in order to detect specified complexity (SC), something we recognize as evidence of intelligent agency in many fields, such as “forensic science, intellectual property law, insurance claims investigation, cryptography, and random number generation.”13 Dembski proposes that we extend these insights, which have proved fruitful in other fields, to the natural sciences.
“Complexity,” writes Dembski, “ensures that the object in question is not so simple that it can readily be explained by chance.”16 For Dembski, “complexity…is a form of probability.”17 For example, because the improbability of opening a combination lock by chance depends on the complexity of the mechanism, “the greater the complexity, the smaller the probability. Thus to determine whether something is sufficiently complex to warrant a design inference is to determine whether it has sufficiently small probability.”18 Complexity alone, however, does not necessarily indicate design. The result of 1,000 coin flips is complex but can be explained by randomness. This is why specification is also essential.
Dembski distinguishes between specification and fabrication. The latter occurs when one infers a pattern ad hoc (that fits only one instance) after the fact. For example, suppose a hurricane moved through my neighborhood, destroying four out of the seven homes on my street, and the three homes not destroyed are owned by my two brothers and me.21 We own the second, fourth, and sixth homes on the block, which means that the hurricane destroyed only the odd-numbered homes. Suppose I were to infer from this pattern either that the hurricane intentionally spared the homes of the Beckwith brothers and/or that the hurricane did not like odd-numbered homes on my block. This design inference would not be warranted since the “pattern” may be adequately accounted for by chance and necessity and thus is ad hoc. The pattern detected by the SETI researchers in Contact, however, is not a fabrication. It is an instance of SC because it is not only highly complex and improbable, but it also has specification, a pattern that is independent of, or detachable from, the event it explains. In other words, the pattern is not derived exclusively from the event, but one we could construct even if we did not know which one of the possible events would occur.
There are several ways in which design theorists employ Dembski’s filter in order to detect design in nature. We will look at two.
Reviewers of Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box “admit[ted] the current lack of Darwinian explanations,” even though most “expressed confidence that in the future such explanations will be found.”31 Behe does not share this optimism. He rather argues that the data are more consistent with an ID explanation. He maintains that we do have legitimate criteria by which to detect design (e.g., SC) and that an IC system exhibits the characteristics these criteria are meant to detect: it is contingent, complex, and specified.
ID advocates have applied Dembski’s explanatory filter to this phenomenon.38 According to some design theorists, the fine-tuning of the universe for the possibility of human life exhibits the characteristics of specified complexity; and thus, it can be attributed to an intelligent agent, for it is contingent (i.e., it is one of many possibilities), complex (i.e., it is a highly improbable arrangement of independent variables), and specified (i.e., it is a cosmological pattern a capable intelligence could have constructed if it intended to make the universe conducive to human life).
Having defined creation, evolution, and intelligent design, we now turn to the possibility of constructing a constitutional ID statute. If the Supreme Court were to assess a law (statute) that permitted or required the teaching of ID, it would likely employ the test it set down in Edwards, the case that set the standard by which public school curricula on origins should be evaluated.
The Louisiana statute assessed in Edwards was struck down for four reasons: (1) its historical continuity with the Scopes trial and the creation/evolution debate, (2) its textual connection to the Genesis-inspired statutes struck down in Epperson and McLean, (3) the religious motivation of its supporters, and (4) its illegitimate means (i.e., advancing religion, limiting what teachers may teach) to achieve appropriate state ends — that is, academic freedom — though the Court concluded that the statute’s purported purpose (or end) was “a sham,”39 and thus the statute had no real secular purpose.
ID’s Historical Connection to the Creation/Evolution Debate. ID has no historical connection to the creation/evolution debate in the Scopes trial. Boston University law professor Jay Wexler, however, argues that because ID has some historical connection to the creation/evolution controversy, it would not pass the Edwards standard,40 but that would make the genetic fallacy a principle of constitutional jurisprudence.41 After all, if historical connection of any sort, no matter how distant or loose, is sufficient to prohibit the teaching of a subject, then astronomy and chemistry ought to be prohibited since they have their origin in the religiously oriented practices of astrology and alchemy.
1. If an apparently designed entity exhibits specified complexity (SC), the inference is warranted that the entity is the result of an intelligent agent.
2. SC can be reliably detected by an explanatory filter.
3. The irreducible complexity of some biological systems, and the fine-tuning of the universe for the existence of life, are instances of specified complexity.
4. Presupposing methodological naturalism (MN) and relying exclusively on its resources (i.e., chance and necessity) cannot account for SC in the instances listed in (3).
5. ID cannot be excluded from serious consideration simply because it is inconsistent with an a priori commitment to MN.
6. Given points one through five, ID best accounts for the irreducible complexity of some biological systems and the fine-tuning of the universe for life.
No doubt ID has implications for the veracity of evolution: If its arguments are sound, then ID defeats evolution. ID’s premises and propositions, unlike the ones from creationism, are neither derived from, nor grounded in, any particular religion’s interpretation of its special revelation. They are, rather, the result of empirical facts (e.g., the structure of the cell), well-grounded conceptual notions (e.g., SC, IC), and critical reflection. These subsequently serve as the basis from which one may infer that an intelligent agent is likely responsible for the existence of certain apparently natural phenomena. Granted, the conclusions inferred by these premises may be consistent with, and lend support to, one or more tenets of creationism, but that fact alone does not make ID creationism or even constitutionally suspect. Even though the big bang theory, the most widely accepted theory of the universe’s origin, is consistent with theism, it is not the same as theism;42 neither is ID the same as creationism.
ID’s Motivation and Purpose. In order to address the concerns of reasons (3) and (4) of the Edwards standard, any government body requiring or permitting ID to be taught in its public schools would have to justify it by appealing to secular reasons. The following four secular reasons can be employed.
The Endorsement Test. In Lynch v. Donnelly, Justice O’Connor proposed an “endorsement test” by which the Court may assess alleged trangressions of the Establishment Clause. No government action is to create a perception that it is either endorsing or disfavoring a religion. The concern of this test is whether the disputed activity suggests “a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.”43 If a particular curriculum gives the impression that a certain disputed, irreligious point of view is favored, a state could argue that in order to erase that perception, a statute requiring or permitting the teaching of ID is necessary.
ID proponents have had their works published by prestigious presses and in academic journals,50 have aired their views in major universities and other institutions,51 and have been recognized by leading periodicals.52 Students, therefore, should be exposed to these works.
Furthering and Protecting Academic Freedom. A state could make the argument that an ID statute protects the academic freedom of teachers and students. They may suffer marginalization, hostility, and public ridicule because of their support of ID and doubts about the veracity of the evolutionary paradigm.
The Supreme Court has affirmed that teachers engage in protected speech under the rubric of academic freedom (and the First Amendment) when they bring into the classroom relevant material that is supplementary to the curriculum (and not a violation of any other legal duties) and they have adequately fulfilled all of their curricular obligations.56 It follows, then, that any legislation passed to protect the academic freedom of teachers and students to discuss scientific alternatives to evolution would simply be affirming what is already a fixed point in constitutional law.
In a society of contradictory religious and philosophical points of view, the law must address how public schools ought to deal with the question of origins with fairness while violating neither the presentations of science nor the rights of the nation’s citizens.
The infusion of intelligent design into this debate has changed the legal landscape. Unlike the creationism repudiated by the Supreme Court in Epperson and Edwards, ID cannot be dismissed as an attempt on the part of religious people to introduce their views into the public schools.
1. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968).
2. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).
3. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1991), 4.
4. McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255 (1982).
5. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, A Facsimile of the 1st ed. (1859) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 61.
6. Antony Flew, Darwinian Evolution, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997), 42.
7. Douglas J. Futuyama, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 95.
8. See Monroe W. Strickberger, Evolution, 3d ed. (Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 2000), 76.
9. See ibid., chaps. 1–25.
10. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 279.
11. William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 119.
12. Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 208.
13. William A. Dembski, “Reinstating Design within Science,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1, 4 (1998): 506.
14. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, The Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute, vol. 9 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 25.
19. Dembski, “Reinstating Design,” 508.
21. This is my example, not Dembski’s.
22. See Dembski, Science and Evidence for Design, 47–51 n. 17.
23. Quoted in Dembski, “Reinstating Design,” 509.
24. Dembski, “Reinstating Design,” 510. Citing William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 5.
25. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (1872), 154, quoted in Michael Behe, “Intelligent Design as an Alternative Explanation for the Existence of Biomolecular Machines,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1, 4 (1998): 566.
26. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 39.
28. Behe, “Intelligent Design,” 567. Controversy surrounds Behe’s mousetrap example. For a response to criticisms, see William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 256–67, 279–89.
29. Behe also includes the bacterial flagellum, blood clotting, vesicular transport, and immune systems as examples of irreducibly complex biological systems.
30. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 64–65.
31. Behe, “Intelligent Design,” 569.
32. K. Giberson, “The Anthropic Principle,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 9 (1997).
33. See John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); John Leslie, Universes (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
34. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design, 56–57.
35. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Refined by Fire,” Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design, ed. William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 372.
37. Quoted in Walter L. Bradley, “Designed or Designoid,” in Mere Creation, 40, quoting from D. L. Brock, Our Universe: Accident or Design? (Wits, South Africa: Star Watch, 1992), n.p.
38. See Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design, 56–66.
39. Edwards, 482 U.S., 587.
40. Jay D. Wexler, “Of Pandas, People, and the First Amendment: The Constitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in the Public Schools,” Stanford Law Review (1997): 465.
41. The genetic fallacy occurs when the origin of a viewpoint or argument, rather than its merits, is used to dismiss the view.
42. See William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
43. Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 688 (1984) (O’Connor, J., concurring).
44. Epperson, 393 U.S., 103–4.
45. United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 176 (1965).
46. Epperson, 393 U.S., 113 (Black, J., concurring).
48. Edwards, 482 U.S., 593–94.
50. See Dembski, The Design Inference; Paul A. Nelson, On Common Descent, Evolutionary Monograph Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); Del Ratzsch, Nature, Science, and Design: The Status of Design in Natural Science, Philosophy and Biology Series (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology; John A. Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer, eds., Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003); William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004); and William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2000).
51. In 2000, both Baylor University (“The Nature of Nature: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of Naturalism in Science,” Baylor University, 12–15 April 2000) and Yale University (“Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe,” Yale University, 2–4 November 2000) hosted major conferences on ID science and the evidence for design in the universe. The American Museum of Natural History (New York City) presented a public discussion entitled, “Evolution or Intelligent Design? Examining the Intelligent Design Issue” in April 2002 (http://www.amnh.org/programs/ lectures/index.html?src=p_h#).
52. See James Glanz, “Biologists Face a New Theory of Life’s Origins,” New York Times, 8 April 2001, sec. 1, 18; Teresa Watanabe, “Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator,” Los Angeles Times, 25 March 2001(http://www.arn.org/docs/news/fingerprints 032501.htm); Beth McMurtrie, “Darwinism under Attack,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 December 2001 (http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i17/17a00801. htm); Brian Fitelson, Christopher Stephens, and Elliot Sober, “How Not to Detect Design,” Philosophy of Science 66, 3 (1999); Neil W. Blackstone, “Argumentum Ad Ignorantam,” Quarterly Review of Biology 72 (1997); J. A. Coyne, “God in the Details,” Nature 383 (1996); and Robert Dorit, review of Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, American Scientist 85, 5 (1997) (http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/bookshelf/leads97/dawin97%2D09.html).
56. See David K. DeWolf, “Academic Freedom after Edwards,” Regent University Law Review 13, 2 (2000–2001): 480–81.

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