From Scopes to Dover-26: The Discovery Institute’s dilemma

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The Dover school board policy was challenged in December 2004 as a violation of the establishment clause and so the two sides prepared to go to trial. The lawsuit for the plaintiffs led by Tammy Kitzmiller was filed by the ACLU of Pennsylvania and included experienced constitutional attorneys from the firm of Pepper Hamilton and from the Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The lawyers who appeared for the Dover school board were from the Thomas More Law Center based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which saw itself as a kind of Christian counterweight to the ACLU. The center was created in 1999 by Thomas Monaghan, founder of the Dominos pizza chain and financial backer of conservative Catholic causes. Their website is very direct about its mission: “Our purpose is to be the sword and shield for people of faith, providing legal representation without charge to defend and protect Christians and their religious beliefs in the public square.” They were the ones who urged the Dover school board to adopt their policy, offering to represent them in court if challenged. The fact that the Dover school board had this offer of free legal representation undoubtedly influenced board members in the decision to adopt a policy they knew would be controversial.

But as the Dover case prepared to go to the trial that began on September 26, 2005, it became clear that the More Center lawyers were going to face difficulties. While they were surely earnest in their beliefs in the rightness of their cause, dedicated to fighting for it, religiously gung-ho, and eager to do battle against evolution, they simply did not have the legal resources or expertise or even people to mount the kind of research and sophisticated arguments necessary for such an important case. In addition, they faced a highly sophisticated and well-organized team of constitutional lawyers for the plaintiffs. They seemed to be out of their league.

As we have seen, the Dover school board’s actions went contrary to the long-term strategy of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement advanced by the Discovery Institute. But once the die was cast and the Dover policy was adopted and challenged in the courts, the Discovery Institute was placed in a quandary. They could see that the More Center was not fully up to the task facing them but it was not clear how they could help. Should they completely disassociate themselves from the Dover school board actions and distance themselves from the case as it went down to likely defeat? Or should they throw themselves fully into the fray, provide their own expert witnesses, pour their considerable financial and legal resources into the case, and hope to secure victory? While the latter was a better tactical option since it increased the chances of winning this case, it had the considerable strategic downside in that if they still lost the case despite their full participation, then the entire IDC movement, not just the Dover school board, would be perceived as having been defeated, and this would have serious repercussions, even possibly dooming their long-term plans.

It was a difficult choice and they waffled. At first they agreed to be part of the case and to provide lawyers and expert witnesses, but that collaboration turned out to be short-lived and they later withdrew, giving as their reason that the Thomas More Law Center objected to their request to have the Discovery Institute’s own lawyers representing their clients. One serious and negative consequence of the Discovery Institute’s decision to withdraw their expert witnesses at the last minute was that it was now too late for the More Center to get alternative expert witnesses for their side. As a result, the plaintiffs were able put forward their own expert witnesses in science and philosophy and theology to provide testimony on important questions that was not rebutted in court and thus was accepted as fact, seriously weakening the defense’s case.

The whole episode caused bad feelings between the Discovery Institute and the More Center which spilled out into the open, as The Toledo Blade reported on March 20, 2006:

In fact, when Mr. Thompson [the head of the Thomas More Law Center] decided to defend the Dover intelligent design policy, he angered the group most associated with intelligent design: the Discovery Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Seattle.

“We were incredibly frustrated by arrogance and bad legal judgment of goading the [Dover] school district to keep a policy that the main organization supporting intelligent design was opposed to,” says John West, the associate director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

The Thomas More Center acted “in the face of opposition from the group that actually represents most of the scientists who work on intelligent design.”

. . .

The Discovery Institute has never advocated the teaching of intelligent design, and told the Dover board to drop its policy, Mr. West says. It participated in the trial only reluctantly.

“We were in a bind,” Mr. West says. “Our ideals were on trial even though it was a policy we didn’t support.”

The More Center’s head Richard Thompson countercharged that all these were just excuses to hide the real reason, which was that the Discovery Institute people were essentially cowards, people who talk a tough game but don’t put their beliefs on the line when it counts:

Mr. Thompson says the Discovery Institute’s strategy is to dodge a fight as soon as one appears imminent.

“The moment there’s a conflict they will back away . . .they come up with some sort of compromise.” But in Dover “they got some school board members that didn’t want compromise.”

This intramural battle between two groups supposedly on the same pro-IDC side did not augur well for the trial.

While the Dover trial did not involve larger-than-life, nationally known and flamboyant personalities like the Scopes trial, or dramatic moments like the questioning of Bryan by Darrow, it did have its comedic moments, such as when IDC theorist Michael Behe, who had advocated broadening the definition of science so that IDC would be included under it, conceded under cross-examination that such a broadened definition would result in astrology too being considered a science. Observers considered that moment a pivotal one in dooming the IDC case.

As almost everyone interested in this subject knows by now, on December 20, 2005 federal US District Court Judge John E. Jones III ruled resoundingly in favor of the plaintiffs and against the Dover school board. Not only did he rule that the Dover school board action was unconstitutional, he was also harsh and unsparing in his criticism of the school board’s actions, saying: “The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.” (p. 138)

The judge said that both the Lemon test, and the reconceptualization of its purpose and effect prongs as an endorsement test by Justice O’Connor, would be applied to determine the constitutionality of the Dover policy.

The history and actions of the Dover school board clearly showed that it had religious motivations in implementing their policy and thus made it easy for the judge to rule against the school board on the grounds that they had failed to meet the purpose prong of the Lemon test and was thus unconstitutional by virtue of that fact alone. In addition, he found that the policy also violated that effect prong and failed the endorsement test.

The judge went further and also ruled on whether IDC was science. The IDC strategists had desperately wanted to avoid having a judicial determination on whether intelligent design was a science and in fact the Discovery Institute had filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief explicitly asking him not to rule on the question of the scientific validity of IDC.

But the judge felt that such a determination was proper, justifying this action by saying that the lengthy discussion on this very question in the trial meant that the issue had received a thorough airing and making such a determination was both useful and even essential. He said: “[W]e will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us.” (p. 63)

The judge ruled that IDC was not a science but a religion.

It is this aspect of the judge’s ruling that is likely to be most damaging to IDC’s future prospects. Because the topic had received such an exhaustive examination during the trial, and because Judge Jones in his opinion had analyzed this question in such detail extending to 25 pages (p. 64-89), it seems likely that any future case involving intelligent design will depend heavily on his opinion and thus have a strong presumption that IDC is a religion. This is what happened with the Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard, where they depended heavily on the analysis of the nature of creation science that was written by US District Judge Overton in the 1982 case of McLean v. Arkansas.
It is worthwhile examining Judge Jones’s reasoning in his opinion in some detail because although, like the Scopes trial, this case will not reach the Supreme Court, it seems likely to cast a similarly long shadow. This will be done in the next post.

POST SCRIPT: Roy Zimmerman explains Creation Science 101

From Scopes to Dover-24: Three trials leading up to Dover

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

While all the strategizing in the wake of the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard case was being done by the intelligent design creationism (IDC) advocates under the auspices of the Discovery Institute, three other cases all set legal precedents for what would happen in Dover.

In 2000, a case involving religion in schools but not directly involving evolution reached the US Supreme Court. This was Santa Fe Independent School District v. DOE 530 U.S. 290. This was a case where a challenge was made to a policy where the school district had a practice of one student, who had been elected as Santa Fe High School’s student council chaplain, delivering a prayer over the public address system before each home varsity football game.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court ruled that such prayers were unconstitutional. For its ruling, the court relied on an alternative reading of the purpose and effect prongs of the Lemon test that was written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the 1984 case of Lynch v. Donnelly involving the display of a nativity scene by a municipality. O’Connor articulated what is now called the ‘endorsement test’. She said:

The second and more direct infringement [of the establishment clause] is government endorsement or disapproval of religion. Endorsement sends 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. Disapproval sends the opposite message.

Writing for the majority in the 2000 Santa Fe case, Justice John Paul Stevens used that same language to overrule the policy of student-led prayer at football games:

School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are 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.”

This precedent was also used in the Dover case.

The second important case was also one that did not deal explicitly with evolution but had implications for Dover. It was the much publicized 2004 Elk Grove Unified School District. v. Newdow 542 U.S. 1 in which a parent Michael Newdow had challenged his daughter’s school for including the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. The US District Court ruled against him but this was overruled by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who found in his favor. The case was then appealed to the US Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court reversed the Appeals Court verdict 8-0 but on mixed grounds (Justice Scalia did not take part in the case). Five justices said that due to a family dispute about whether the father or mother had custody of the child and the standing to sue, the courts had no jurisdiction to review the case. Thus they did not go into the merits of the case and decide whether saying the phrase “Under God” in schools was constitutional or not. Justices Rehnquist, O’Connor and Thomas agreed with the verdict overturning the Appeals Court decision but said that the Supreme Court should have reviewed the case on the merits. They then proceeded to do so and said that the practice was constitutional.

In her concurring opinion on the ruling, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the decision on whether the government is involved in an impermissible endorsement of religion had to be made from the viewpoint of a ‘reasonable observer’ who “must embody a community ideal of social judgment, as well as rational judgment. . .must be deemed aware of the history of the conduct in question, and must understand its place in our Nation’s cultural landscape.”

The third case actually dealt with evolution and arose in 2002 when a school board in Cobb County, GA inserted stickers into their biology textbooks that informed students that “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

The sticker policy was challenged and in January 2005, in Selman v. Cobb County School District, US District Court judge Clarence Cooper ruled the policy unconstitutional, applying again the Lemon test.

He said that the sticker policy passed the ‘purpose’ prong of the Lemon test:

[A]fter considering the additional arguments and evidence presented by the parties and evaluating the evidence in light of the applicable law, the Court remains convinced that the Sticker at issue serves at last two secular purposes. First, the Sticker fosters critical thinking by encouraging students to learn about evolution and to make their own assessment regarding its merit. Second, by presenting evolution in a manner that is not unnecessarily hostile, the sticker reduces offense to students and parents whose beliefs may conflict with the teaching of evolution. For the foregoing reasons, the Court concludes that the Sticker satisfies the first prong of the Lemon analysis.

However, he said that the sticker failed the ‘effect’ prong and this made it unconstitutional and thus the stickers had to be removed. He used Justice Stevens’ language about endorsement in the 2000 Santa Fe case, and Justice O’Connor’s appeal to how a ‘reasonable observer’ might perceive the action, as part of his justification.

In this case, the Court believes that an informed, reasonable observer would interpret the Sticker to convey a message of endorsement of religion. That is, the Sticker sends a message to those who oppose evolution for religious reasons that they are favored members of the political community, while the Sticker sends a message to those who believe in evolution that they are political outsiders.

All these legal precedents set the stage for the most recent court battle over the teaching of evolution, in which IDC came under direct scrutiny. This occurred in Dover, PA in 2005 in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover, which I will begin to examine in the next post in this series.

POST SCRIPT: What topics are conservatives most interested in?

Some time ago, I wrote about how some people are trying to create an alternate reality on the internet so that people will not find their beliefs routinely challenged. Remarkably, such people consider Wikipedia and YouTube as part of this threatening reality, and created alternatives called Conservapedia and GodTube.

So now that time has passed, what topics are conservatives most interested in finding out about? Conservapedia has published the statistics. The results are interesting.

From Scopes to Dover-23: Why some religious people hate the theory of evolution

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

To understand why there is such a deep-seated opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and how intelligent design creationism (IDC) came into being, one needs to understand its essential idea and the motivations of the people behind it.

On the surface, IDC seems to accept almost all of evolutionary ideas since it seems to leave unchallenged almost all of the key elements of the Darwinian structure, such as the non-constancy of species (the basic theory of evolution), the descent of all organisms from common ancestors (branching evolution), the gradualness of evolution (no sudden discontinuities), the multiplication of species, an old Earth, and natural selection as the driving mechanism for the process.

So how was IDC to advance the cause of religion if it seemed to accept so many evolutionary ideas? The strategy is explicitly outlined in an internal strategy document that has been labeled the ‘Wedge Strategy’ or the ‘Wedge Document’ put out in 1999 by the Center for Science & Culture of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which is the well-funded ‘think-tank’ that funds and supports the work of intelligent design creationists. This document came to light fairly recently, before the Dover trial, and it helped to undermine the case for the school board since it showed the religious motivations of those behind IDC.

Here is an extended passage from the introduction of the document that outlines the issues as seen by them:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art. (my italics)

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.

Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. (my italics)

This is why these religious people violently oppose Darwin’s theory. They see him, along with Freud and Marx as the source of the decline of modern society. Of course, Darwin is the most prominent target since the works of the other two do not carry quite the same paradigmatic status and are not taught in public schools.

A little later in the Wedge document one comes across the “Governing Goals” of the movement, which are:

To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

So the goals of the IDC movement are clear. It takes aim at what it sees as the source of all evil, the idea that materialism is the basis of all knowledge. They feel that if they can displace materialism as an operating principle, then they can hope to eventually bring back a non-material god into the schools as an acceptable explanation of phenomena. The way they tried to do that was by arguing that there were a few biological systems of so-called ‘irreducible complexity’ whose existence was inexplicable using Darwinian materialistic methods and thus had to have non-material causes.

The long-term strategy of the Discovery Institute seems to be to first have the ideas of evolution undermined by allowing for the possibility of non-material causation for at least some evolutionary changes, then later introduce IDC as an alternative to the undermined theory of evolution, then bring god back into science education, and finally put god and the Bible and prayer back into public schools everywhere, thus saving the world from sin. They saw this as a slow, incremental advance, taking many years to reach its goal.

The strategy was quite carefully crafted and seemed to be making some progress. They got supporters elected to state school boards in Kansas and Ohio who inserted IDC-inspired language critical of evolution into their state science standards.

The IDC movement knew that eventually someone would challenge the use of IDC ideas in schools in the courts, and tried to avoid giving any reason for ruling IDC out on the basis of establishment clause violations. Their whole approach was to run a stealth campaign, based on what was essentially a public relations strategy. They carefully avoided talk of god as much as possible (at least in public). They did not even insist on teaching intelligent design in schools. Instead they adopted the strategy of asserting that evolution was ‘just a theory,’ that it had problems, that there was a controversy over some of its basic tenets, and that good science and teaching practices required that students be exposed to the nature of this alleged controversy. They got Cobb County in Georgia in 2002 to insert stickers in their biology textbooks that asserted that evolution was only a theory and not a fact.

This stealth approach caused some tension within the religious community since many religious people did not quite get it. Many fundamentalist Christians are militantly proud of their faith and do not feel at all apologetic about their attempts to kick evolution out and put god back in the classroom, since they felt he rightfully belonged there. They were proud of being Christians and they felt that the US was a Christian country. They viewed the delicate maneuvering of the IDC strategists not as a constitutionally astute strategy but as being somewhat cowardly, and needlessly accommodating of anti-Christian beliefs.

When I attended various IDC meetings in 2002 and 2003 I found a huge gulf between the IDC theorists who were the main speakers, and the rank and file attendees. The latter were largely fundamentalist, young Earth, Biblical literal Christians and they did not speak the sophisticated language of the IDC theorists. These people had a much simpler view of the world. In their view, the US was rapidly going to hell in a hand basket. Everywhere they looked, they saw signs of increasing decadence: more nudity, sex, pornography, abortions, crime, violence, profanity, blasphemy, and so on. They saw this as a direct consequence of removing god from the schools and teaching godless evolution, which said that we were no better than monkeys,

So while everyone agreed on the ultimate goal of removing the teaching of evolution from schools, the religiously naïve wanted to mount a direct assault to bring religion back into the classroom, while the more sophisticated IDC strategists felt that one needed to first subtly undermine the idea that materialist explanations were the only ones allowed by science, before introducing more overtly religious ideas.

These internal differences and tensions within the religious community about how to deal with the Darwinian menace stayed below the radar screen. It took the Dover trial to bring them completely out into the open.

POST SCRIPT: Chomsky on Iran

An interesting interview with Noam Chomsky on US-Iran relations.

From Scopes to Dover-21: The death of ‘creation science’

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous post we saw how the goal of trying to get creationist ideas back into the science classroom took the form of the birth of ‘creation science’ and calling for it to be taught along with evolution. While ‘creation science’ had no explicitly religious language, it was clearly a Genesis-based, young Earth, Biblical creationism. The 1981 Arkansas law calling for the balanced treatment of creation science and evolution was promptly overturned in 1982 by a US District Court judge.

The Louisiana ‘balanced treatment’ act of 1981 was less restrictive than the Arkansas one, since its call for teaching creation science merely meant talking about the “scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences”. So while that gave its backers initial hopes that it would survive constitutional challenge, by now the historical record of religious-based efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution, starting with the Scopes trial, was too heavy a baggage for these efforts to overcome. It had become increasingly difficult to argue that the fight against the teaching of evolution was not religion-based, and this ended up dooming the Louisiana statute. The Louisiana Act, like its Arkansas counterpart, was overturned by a US District Court. The case was then appealed to a federal Appeals Court, where the District Court ruling was upheld by a narrow 8-7 margin.
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From Scopes to Dover-21: The death of ‘creation science’

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