Pennsylvania: Evolution lawsuit

http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/07/id

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002522889_evolution27.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-na-dover26sep26,1,4383005.story?coll=la-news-learning

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/pp/05275/581245.stm

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/12797106.htm

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/12793013.htm
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051001/INTELLIGENT01/TPEducation/

Does God wear a lab coat?
The latest round in the culture wars pits Christians advocating ‘intelligent design’ against secular parents who want kids taught evolution only. Is there a middle ground? SHAWN McCARTHY surveys the view from Harrisburg, Pa.
By SHAWN MCCARTHY
Saturday, October 1, 2005 Page F3

Brown University professor Kenneth Miller proclaimed from the witness stand this week that he is a Christian Darwinist — a position that would be considered oxymoronic by more extreme partisans in the acrimonious debate over the teaching of biology in the United States.

Mr. Miller was the first witness in the case of Kitzmiller v. the Dover District School Board in Pennsylvania, the latest U.S. legal battle pitting Christian opponents of evolutionary theory against advocates of separation of church and state.

Eleven parents are suing the Dover school board for introducing the concept of “intelligent design” — which holds that the world was created by an “intelligent designer” who set evolution in motion — into biology class. The parents argue that intelligent design is a thinly disguised version of creationist theology and, as such, does not belong in a public-school science class.

But the Kitzmiller case is not just a scene from the current culture wars, sparked by the rising aggressiveness of U.S. fundamentalist Christians. It is a 21st-century instalment of the centuries-old contest between religion and science, a conflict that most famously led to the trial of Galileo Galilei by the 17th-century Inquisition.

Prominent scientists have often dismissed traditional religion as mere mythology and superstition, just as Christian leaders have denounced evolutionary biology as godless and evil.

On the stand this week, Mr. Miller sought to bridge those two solitudes, arguing that society should render unto science that which is scientific — and leave matters of faith to religion.

A Roman Catholic who co-wrote the leading biology textbook in the United States, Mr. Miller insisted there was no conflict between faith and science. “I believe not only are they compatible, but they are complementary,” he said.

He is a fervent opponent of the intelligent-design movement, the latest salvo in Christianity’s 146-year-old war on Charles Darwin’s theory that all species evolved from a single life form over billions of years through a process of natural selection.

He testified that the movement’s reliance on a supernatural designer is unscientific. But he criticized prominent Darwinists who fail to distinguish between scientific theory and philosophical speculation when they assert that the theory of evolution reveals a godless universe that is unfolding in a random manner.

“I believe God is the author of all things, seen and unseen, and that would include the laws of physics and chemistry,” he told the Federal Court.

But where Mr. Miller sees an unseen planner, other scientists perceive no plan at all, other than nature’s laws. Since it was first advanced in the mid-19th century, Darwinism has been extended beyond the realm of natural science and — through Social Darwinism — become associated with a mechanistic world view that sees man bound by laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford University zoologist and prominent evolutionary theorist, summed up this worldview in his 1986 classic, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Mr. Dawkins dismissed religion as “the big lie.”

Theistic scientists argue that thinkers like Mr. Dawkins have poisoned the well of public discourse by creating the impression among lay people that the evolutionary theory necessarily entails atheism. And in a country like the United States, where 78 per cent of poll respondents identify themselves as believers, such a perception is bound to cause problems.

“In the context of the war between evolution and creationism in the United States, the problem is perhaps less with believers who read the Bible as a literal account of creation, and more with believers who read Richard Dawkins as a literal account of evolution,” said William Grassie, executive director of the Metanexus Institute, a Philadelphia-based think-tank dedicated to bridging the worlds of religion and science.

Mr. Dawkins took his ironic title, The Blind Watchmaker, from an early version of intelligent-design theory espoused in 1802 by English cleric William Paley, who argued that, much as a watch suggests the existence of a watchmaker, the evidence of complex design in the universe indicates the existence of a designer — that is, God.

Current proponents of intelligent-design theory resurrect Mr. Paley’s watchmaker analogy by arguing that evolution fails to account for exquisitely complex organisms in nature. That complexity, they argue, reveals the existence of a designer.

The movement to promote intellectual design has its genesis in the creationist battles that have been waged throughout the United States. In a 1987 ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the teaching of creationism — a literal biblical account of man’s origins — on the grounds that it was a sectarian religious belief.

As a result, proponents have refined their approach to offer an alternative that does not directly mention God. Mainstream scientists have overwhelmingly rejected intelligent-design theory as unsupportable and untestable.

William Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University who will testify for the school board at the Kitzmiller trial, argues that throughout nature, scientists can see examples of organism that are “irreducibly complex” and could not have been the product of evolutionary processes alone.

But for every one of the examples Mr. Behe provides, Mr. Miller suggests evidence that they are not at all “irreducible” — but comprise constituent parts that had different functions before their appearance in particular organisms.

In the intelligent-design textbook, Of Pandas and People, which the Dover board purchased and recommended students read outside the classroom, authors Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon argue that evolution has failed to provide answers to key questions such as the beginning of life from an inanimate world, or the differentiation of species through a slow mutation process.

Robert Pennock a professor of philosophy, science and technology at Michigan State University, testified this week that scientists continue to work on the unanswered questions of evolutionary theory — but that those gaps do not imply a supernatural answer.

The intelligent-design movement, which is largely backed by fundamentalist Christians, appeared to receive some support this summer when a Roman Catholic cardinal wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times criticizing “neo-Darwinism.”

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, Archbishop of Vienna and lead editor of the 1992 Catholic catechism, wrote that neo-Darwinism — described as “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” — is incompatible with church teaching.

Mr. Miller rebutted his coreligionist, saying he was mistaken to assert that modern Darwinism is inherently atheistic because it was guided by random variation and natural selection.

“Biological evolution fits neatly into a traditional Catholic understanding of how contingent natural processes can be seen as part of God’s plan,” Mr. Miller wrote in reply to Cardinal Schonborn, “while ‘evolutionist’ philosophies that deny the Divine do not.”

Shawn McCarthy is The Globe and Mail’s New York City bureau chief.

Analysis: ‘Intelligent design’ case to undergo 2-pronged test

Sunday, October 02, 2005

By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the parlance of the sports world, defense attorneys in the federal “intelligent design” trial will have to come from behind when testimony resumes this week.

They’ll have a tough time overcoming the first week of testimony, in which plaintiffs and former board members from Dover Area School District said the school board was motivated by religion when it changed its biology curriculum last year.

The case pits the school district against 11 plaintiffs, who believe that intelligent design — a concept that says biological complexity presents evidence of a designer — is a Trojan horse that brings God into public schools.

First Amendment professors and constitutional law attorneys following the case seem to agree. After the trial’s first week, it appeared that certain board members were motivated by religion, and not an educational purpose, when they amended the curriculum to include intelligent design.

“I would certainly say that from what I have seen thus far, I find the evidence troubling,” said Valerie Munson, an Eckert Seamans attorney who specializes in church-state issues. “The school board’s policy will probably be found to have a religious purpose, and to advance religion, in violation of the First Amendment. In other words, it [will] fail both the purpose and the effects prongs of the constitutionality test.”

But she also adds that the trial, expected to last more than five weeks, is in its early stages, and the defense team, Thomas More Law Center of Michigan, has yet to offer any evidence. “Cases are never a slam dunk,” she said. “If they were a slam dunk, they would never be going to court.”

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III is being asked to apply the two-pronged test to this case, in which the plaintiffs claim the Dover board violated the Constitution’s establishment clause.

The first test is the “effect” test — whether the theory itself, and its appearance in the ninth-grade biology curriculum, is religious in nature. In other words, to be legal, intelligent design must neither promote nor inhibit religion.

The second test can be called the “intent” test — even if the judge does not determine that intelligent design is an inherently religious concept, he may find that the school board had the purpose of promoting religion. In legalese, the school board must have a bona fide secular purpose in teaching intelligent design.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, must win just one of these match-ups, not both. A third prong, the “entanglement” test, is not being applied.

As with the criminal court system, the burden of proof lies not with the defense, but the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are striking blows on both sides — using expert witnesses to argue that intelligent design isn’t science and using witnesses to show that school board members wanted to bring God into the classroom.

The expert witnesses — two biology professors and a theologian — have testified to the “effect” side of things, arguing that intelligent design, because it infers a creator from biological evidence, is biblical creationism, updated with new scientific terminology.

But the fact witnesses, testifying to the “intent” test, have provided the most compelling evidence, said Eugene Voloch, First Amendment professor at UCLA. The courts, he said, have left the door open for “intelligent design” in a perfectly crafted test case, but this isn’t such a case.

The school board, based on what he’s read, was “animated by a desire to promote the biblical account” of creation. This week, plaintiffs testified that, over a two-year period, the school board intermittently discussed God, religion and creationism, before finally changing the biology curriculum in October 2004. Board meetings were like “old-time Christian tent revivals,” a former school director testified.

“It’s conceivable that if the court was looking only at the ‘effects’ test, the board might have a shot,” Voloch said.

Marc J. Randazza, an attorney with Florida-based Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters, a First Amendment law firm, agreed with his colleagues.

“The first problem I see is testimony that clearly demonstrates that the majority’s motivation was to promote the Christian [theory] of creationism. Although there has been some attempt to characterize this as promoting intelligent design as a means of offering an alternative theory to Darwinism, I can’t see a shred of honesty in this characterization.”

He said the plaintiffs also win the “effect” challenge, but not as convincingly.

(Bill Toland can be reached at btoland@post-gazette.com or 1-412-263-1889.)

October 2, 2005
In Pennsylvania, It Was Religion vs. Science, Pastor vs. Ph.D., Evolution vs. the Half-Fish

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 30 – When Casey Brown testified this week, she embodied the pain and division the intelligent design controversy has wrought in Dover. Mrs. Brown sat stiffly on the witness stand, her mouth as tight as her gray ponytail, recounting how she had run for school board on the same ticket as the board members now facing her from the defense table.

The board is being sued by 11 parents who say that intelligent design is creationism cloaked as science, is inherently religious and has no place in a ninth-grade biology class.

Mrs. Brown said her political alliances and friendships had become strained in the last couple of years as some board members had pressed for changing the biology curriculum to teach creationism on par with evolution. They wanted to buy an intelligent design textbook, “Of Pandas and People,” in place of the newest edition of the standard biology text.

Under cross-examination by Patrick Gillen, a soft-spoken defense lawyer, Mrs. Brown was asked whether she recalled visiting the home of a board member and admiring a carving of the Last Supper.

“The Lord’s Last Supper, yes sir,” Mrs. Brown said. “I had never seen such a beautiful carving.”

But she said she did not feel comfortable when the board member asked her if she was a born-again Christian. She also said she felt disturbed when another board member, who was among those most insistent about teaching creationism, drove her home from a meeting and asked the same question.

Suddenly, his manner changing, Mr. Gillen pounced: these were Mrs. Brown’s friends, she was in their homes, in their cars, and she found it offensive to be asked about religion?

“Yes, I do, and I still do, sir,” she said.

A bite in his voice, Mr. Gillen asked if she thought religion should not be discussed at all.

“I wouldn’t presume to discuss religion within normal circumstances,” she said, “except within my own family.”

Mrs. Brown and her husband quit the board the night members voted 6 to 3 for intelligent design.

Worlds in Conflict

The trial presents a particular challenge for the journalists from science magazines. In the courtroom hallway during a break last week, Celeste Biever, a reporter for NewScientist, was interviewing a courtroom regular, a bearded local pastor who says he considers evolution a lie.

“You want half-bird, half-fish?” she asked, drawing a dotted line on her notepad.

“Yeah, why not,” the pastor said.

Later, out of the pastor’s hearing, Ms. Biever said with fascination, “He thinks evolution is a bird turning into a fish turning into a rabbit” – one straight line of common descent, instead of a tree with common roots.

Ms. Biever was finding that she could not cover the trial the way she would a classic courtroom face-off. When you put intelligent design up against evolution, she said, “It’s not a head-on collision between two scientific arguments; it’s orthogonal,” with the opponents coming at each other from right angles.

“It’s apples and oranges,” Ms. Biever said.

Her readers do not take intelligent design seriously, she said, so she was striving for “local color.” Her readers want to know, she said, “Why is this happening here?”

“We’re not just science cheerleaders, and I don’t want to overlook any valid argument for intelligent design,” Ms. Biever said. “As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t heard one yet.”

As for the pastor, after four days of listening to science experts dismantling the case for intelligent design, he was unimpressed.

“They’re babblers,” said the pastor, the Rev. Jim Grove, who leads a 40-member independent Baptist church outside of Dover. “The more Ph.D.’s you get, it seems like the further away from God you get.”

Dover school board members were well aware they were inviting a lawsuit over church-state issues when they voted last October that biology students should hear a statement telling them that there were gaps in the theory of evolution and that intelligent design was another theory the students should examine.

But the board forged ahead, having been assured that they would have the backing of the Thomas More Law Center, a nonprofit law firm dedicated to providing legal representation to Christians, and its chief counsel, Richard Thompson.

One Side of the Culture War

In courtroom breaks Mr. Thompson occasionally sits next to board members and puts an arm around their shoulders. White-haired and dapper, he has said little in court, leaving most of the cross-examination to his two co-counselors.

But this week, he became the public face of the intelligent design movement, stepping into the ring of cameras and microphones outside the courthouse each afternoon, taking every question until, one after another, the reporters slipped away.

As a former Michigan prosecutor who tried repeatedly to convict Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Mr. Thompson is comfortable in the spotlight. He failed in his prosecution of Dr. Kevorkian and eventually lost a bid for re-election; voters told pollsters they did not share his outrage over assisted suicide.

Mr. Thompson’s major argument in defending the board is that intelligent design is not religion, but science. He is, however, absolutely open about his own religious motivations.

During the lunch break on Thursday, Mr. Thompson said he founded the law center to defend Christians who he thought were losing the culture wars. The center was initially financed by Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza. Both men are Roman Catholics.

“There are two worldviews that are in conflict,” Mr. Thompson said. “I do feel that even though Christians are 86 percent of the population, they have become second-class citizens.”

Home

Corrections

XML

Help

Work for Us

Site Map

Leave a Reply