For a bit of schadenfreude I moseyed on over to the Discovery Institute's website to see their reaction to
Judge John Jones III's decision that the Dover (PA) Area school district's decision to require the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative theory to evolution violated the No-establishment Clause.
Since the decision struck at their mission's central nervous system, the institute has an army of news and opinion pieces on it, and I'm not going to take the time to read all of them. I did, however, read a short opinion piece by institute fellow David Klinghoffer published in the Seattle Times December 23. Despite the article's brevity, it still managed to present several falsehoods and fallacies. In fact, almost the entire article is misguided. But the worst part about it (for the institute) is that it is good evidence for what everyone knows but the institute continues to deny: intelligent design is just a front for fundamentalist Christianity.
Klinghoffer took issue with Jones' position that evolution does not necessarily conflict with belief in a supreme being.
...this week when U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III released the first federal ruling on intelligent design, there was at the core of his written decision an unambiguously theological ruling: that evolution as formulated by Charles Darwin presents no conflict with the God of the Bible.
[snip]
As a matter of fact, Jones is wrong. Darwinism is indeed "antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general."
Darwinism definitely conflicts with the "God of the Bible" if one uses literal translation of all of the Bible. There is no question that evolution and the creation stories in the Bible are to at least some extent mutually exclusive. But Jones never said "God of the Bible" anywhere in his 139-page decision, and thus the phrase is not in the quote in Klinghoffer's article:
Wrote Jones, "[M]any of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, [p]laintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution... in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator."
Where in this quote does Judge Jones mention "God of the Bible?" He does not because he knows that there is a substantial difference between affirming a divine creator in general and affirming a divine creator with all the characteristics attributed to it in the Bible.
The majority of Christians do not believe in a wholly literal translation of the Bible anymore. Obviously, there are substantial portions of the Bible which are non-historical: allegories, poems, pslams, myths, fables, and so forth. These Christians do not take literally all the characteristics attributed to God, for example how God created life on earth. Hence, they are not beholden to claiming evolution as "antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general." More significantly, they are not beholden to claiming evolution is against even a Christian god.
On the contrary, prominent Christian writers such as John Haught affirm the reality of evolution. Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown who testified at the Dover trial, believes that Christianity and evolution can be reconciled. He believes this precisely because he realizes intelligent design is not scientific inquiry and thus has no place in a science classroom. From page 26 of the testimony:
[Haught:] ...certainly there is no controversy, logically speaking, between intelligent design and evolutionary biology because intelligent design, just to repeat, is simply not a scientific idea.
Q. [Mr. Wilcox, attorney] Does that mean intelligent design doesn't belong in a biology class?
A. Yes.
So even some learned Christian scholars do not accept intelligent design as having any merit in biology. To be sure, Haught eventually accepts intelligent design, but at a metaphysical level, not a scientific one, which is, of course, expected for a Western theist. (As a pantheist, I would eventually disagree with him that there exists some "outside" entity which is behind the metaphysical [rather than biological] composition of the universe, but in the current "intelligent design" debate, we agree.) As I've
metioned in my blog, the metaphysical argument is more convincing, although still ultimately flawed. It is called the "fine tuning" argument, and I predict that twenty years down the road, after today's intelligent design movement has gone the way of outright creationism, fine tuning will be the next refuge of today's intelligent design advocates. Ultimately, the "controversy" will shift from biology to physics.
Getting back to Klinghoffer, he goes on to fallaciously argue that because Darwin asserted that evolution specifically rules out "miraculous additions," then Darwinism and a supreme being are mutually exclusive:
It is only in the absence of a supreme being working out his will in the evolution of life that we would even undertake Darwin's search in the first place. That was a search for a purely materialistic explanation of how complex organisms arise.
As Darwin himself clarified in his correspondence, "I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent."
Religion, by contrast, does not assume that material reality is all there is.
But Darwin himself was not an atheist, which is the ideological position that would "assume that material reality is all there is." From an 1879 letter quoted
here:
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
Darwin didn't go out of his way to assert a divine presence, but he didn't deny it either, which is the insinuation of Klinghoffer's claim. Could not someone believe in a supreme being but hold that this being has no bearing on evolution of species? Of course.
Klinghoffer's flawed reasoning leads him to make his major point:
What this says about the public-policy question -- What may be taught in schools? -- should be clear enough. Whether children are taught materialism (Darwin), or an openness to what transcends nature (intelligent design) [read: "the God of the Bible"], they are being taught not merely science but a philosophy about life and existence itself.
The idea that it is constitutional to expose young people to one such worldview, but not lawful to introduce them to another, is not really education. It is indoctrination.
This is just a run-of-the-mill ID talking point. It wrongly puts evolution (a scientific theory for which there is overwhelming evidence) on the same academic level as a theory with no positive evidence that has arisen from fundamentalist Christian motivations. It wrongly calls evolution a "worldview" and teaching it "indoctrination." Most importantly, with his explicit defense of "the God of the Bible," Klinghoffer reveals the world's worst-kept secret, that intelligent design is just a front for fundamentalist Christianity. Everyone knows it, but the Discovery Institute will not admit it. By publishing this misguided op-ed by one of their fellows, they just did.
(Cross-posted at The Brudaimonia, my blog.)