The Intelligent Design Movement and the Dover Decision

On December 20, Judge John Jones released his decision in the case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board. The decision appeared to be a devastating defeat for the intelligent design movement. Now the Discovery Institute--the leading think-tank promoting intelligent design--has published its critique of Jones' decision: David DeWolf, John West, Casey Luskin, and Jonathan Witt, Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2006). Reading the trial transcripts, Jones' decision, and this book allows us to see the general character of the debate over intelligent decision. Although I posted a statement about this case a few days ago, I deleted it because I decided that I was oversimplifying a complex case.

The Dover Area School District in Dover, Pennsylvania, had required that a statement be read to students in the ninth grade biology classes, a statement indicating that there there was controversy over Darwin's theory of evolution, and that they could consider "intelligent design" as an alternative theory by reading a reference book in the library--Of Pandas and People. Parents sued the school district, arguing that this was an unconstitutional establishment of religion, because "intelligent design" was not a genuine scientific theory but a religious doctrine.

Judge Jones decided in favor of the petitioning parents, concluding that those promoting the teaching of "intelligent design" in the school were motivated by religious doctrines of creationism, and that "intelligent design" was not really science at all.

Many American conservatives have criticized Judge Jones. Ann Coulter ridicules him as a "hack judge." Coulter and others see this as an attempt of the federal judiciary to indoctrine students in a liberal philosophy of atheistic materialism as rooted in Darwinian reductionism. I and some other conservatives disagree, because we think Darwinian science supports traditional morality and the general principles of conservative social thought, and because we think Darwinian science is supported by extensive evidence and logic.

From my reading of the trial transcripts, the judge's decision, and the Discovery Institute book, at least four points become clear.

The first point is that it is hard to disentangle the intelligent design movement and biblical creationism. The members of the Dover school board who instituted the disputed policy wanted the biblical account of creation to be taught as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. When they were advised that this would be clearly unconstitutional, they adopted "intelligent design" as a substitute for overt creationist doctrine. The Thomas More Law Center took over their legal representation. Initially, the Discovery Institute supported them and arranged to provide expert witnesses for them. But then shortly before the trial began, the Discovery Institute announced that it opposed the policy of the school district, becaused they feared that the case would be too hard to win. In the book published by Discovery Institute, the authors indicate that "the instigators of the policy were supporters of Biblical creationism, not intelligent design" (p. 8). So here they actually agree with Judge Jones's decision that this policy had a purely religious purpose and the claims of interest in scientific debate were just a cover for their religious agenda. The proponents of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute want to employ the rhetorical strategy of asserting that "intelligent design" is utterly different from Biblical creationism, but the Dover case illustrates how difficult this is to maintain. It is true, however, that advocates of "young Earth creationism" like Ken Ham scorn "intelligent design" as an attack on Biblical literalism.

The second point is that the establishment clause jurisprudence of the Supreme Court is flawed if it requires an absolute separation between science and religion. Of course, most of us would agree that a literal reading of the Biblcial creation story is religion and not science. But something like "intelligent design theory" is harder to classify. It can have religious implications if one believes that the "intelligent designer" is God. But I think the Discovery Institute folks have a good point when they say that many scientific theories can have religious implications even when the theories themselves are not necessarily religious. The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe has religious implications if one believes that the cause of the Big Bang must have been divine. But we can judge the scientific evidence and logic supporting this theory without taking up the religious implications. Similarly, why can't high school students study "intelligent design" reasoning as a scientific theory without deciding the religious issues?

The third point is that intelligent design reasoning is predominantly, but not entirely, negative rather than positive. In other words, most of the argumentation for intelligent design is an attack on Darwinism, with the assumption being that as long as Darwinian science is not conclusively proven, intelligent design remains as the only reasonable alternative. As I have argued, this is a weak position. Michael Behe and others argue that intelligent design does have a positive argument: if we see the purposeful arrangement of parts in living mechanisms, we can infer intelligent design as the cause. But this kind of reasoning is very vague, because we cannot infer from this exactly who (or what) the intelligent designer is, and we cannot infer exactly how this intelligent designer works in nature. (Behe argues that the same could be said about the Big Bang theory: that it happened does not tells us how it happened or what caused it.) The reasoning is also dubious because it works by analogy with human intelligent design. We have all seen human intelligent design at work. But we have not seen how a divine intelligent designer could create "out of nothing."

The fourth point is that Kenneth Miller distorts Behe's position by attacking a straw man. Behe's central argument in Darwin's Black Box depends on the idea that Darwinian evolution cannot explain any "irreducibly complex" system, which is "a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning" (p. 39). The problem for Darwinian evolution is that "an irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional." Behe concedes, however, that this leaves open the possibility of "an indirect, circuitous route" of evolution by which mechanisms serving one purpose might be incorporated into more complex mechanisms with different functions (pp. 40, 66, 111-13, 177). And yet he thinks the probability of this happening decreases as the complexity of the mechanism to be explained increases.

When Miller tries to refute this reasoning (at the Dover trial and in various published writing), he attacks a straw man, because he ignores what Behe says about the possibility--even if unlikely--of an "indirect, circuitous route" of evolution. Miller shows, for example, that the type III secretory system of bacteria resembles some parts of the bacterial flagellum, which shows that one can take away many parts from the flagellum and still have a functioning system, although it will be serving a different function. This reasoning about "exaptation" is a standard response of Darwinian scientists to Behe's "irreducible complexity" argument. But this does not refute Behe's position, unless one ignores what Behe says about the "circuituous route."

It is true, of course, as I have indicated in previous postings, that Behe and other IDers set up an unreasonably high standard of proof for Darwinian science. To show rigorously and in precise detail the step-by-step evolutionary pathway for the emergence of the bacterial flagellum is extremely difficult. If students were permitted to study this debate, they would see this as belonging to what Darwin himself called the "difficulties" for his theory. But they might also see this as an example of the inevitable limitations of scientific reasoning, so that hardly anything is ever conclusively proven in science, although we can still judge theories as more or less plausible by weighing the relevant evidence and arguments.