Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution

Susan P. Liebell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136016400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie & Ethik in der Wissenschaft

Should alternatives to evolution be taught in American public schools or rejected as an establishment of religion? Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution argues that accurate science education helps shape a democratic temperament. Rather than defending against Intelligent Design as religion, citizens should defend science education as crucial to three aspects of the democratic person: political citizenship, economic fitness, and moral choice. Through an examination of Tammy Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, contemporary political theory, and foundational American texts, this volume provides an alternative jurisprudence and political vocabulary urging American liberalism to embrace science for citizenship.

1 The Evolving Jurisprudence of the Supreme Court

Unpacking Dover and Intelligent Design

Dover is a predominantly Christian, white, and economically modest school district of 3,700 students just south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 2002, the president of the Dover School Board, Alan Bonsell, publicly declared two goals for the district—reinstate public prayer and teach creationism— even though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that both are unconstitutional establishments of religion. In 2003, Bonsell personally expressed his dissatisfaction with the teaching of evolution to the District’s teachers. The district leadership and teachers clashed openly when the teachers requested a new biology textbook. The chair of the curriculum committee, William Buckingham, objected that the text extensively covered evolution and failed to adequately consider creationism. At a public meeting, several members of the school board supported the exclusion of the teacher-chosen textbook. Buckingham’s wife (as a member of the public) spoke against offering anything but the Bible to the children and urged the audience to become bornagain Christians. Alan Buckingham then challenged the audience to trace their ancestors to monkeys. He insisted that courts that have excluded the teaching of creationism take away the “rights of Christians.” He concluded by asking the audience to stand up for Jesus.¹ In this religiously charged debate, preventing evolution education was central to the Board president’s plan to return prayer and creationism to the public schools.

As the controversy brewed, Buckingham was contacted by the Discovery Institute—an institution at the forefront of the Intelligent Design movement— which supplies books, videos, and legal advice to school districts that encourage teaching ID as science. By 2004, Buckingham had discovered Of Pandas and People, an Intelligent Design work published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. An earlier version of the book used the term creationism, but, following the 1987 Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard excluding creation-science from public schools, the Foundation meticulously edited the book: design replaced the word creationism.² Taken with ID as a possible approach for Dover, Buckingham made approval of the biology textbook contingent upon including Of Pandas and People as a reference work. Given the clear ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, the board attorney expressed concern over a possible lawsuit.³ Amidst intense discussion in the community and among board members, 60 copies of Panda were anonymously donated to the high school. Later, testimony revealed that Buckingham had called for donations at his church, Harmony Grove Community Church, and Bonsell and Buckingham had worked to conceal the source.

Just as the books appeared in the library, the democratically elected school board passed a resolution (6 to 3) requiring teachers to caution their biology students about evolution:

The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s theory of evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.

As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the origins of life to individual students and their families. As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on standards-based assessments.⁴

The three dissenting school board members resigned. The teachers refused to read the statement, arguing that the statement violated their responsibilities as professional educators. Referring the students to Pandas as a “scientific resource” breached the teachers’ “ethical obligation” to provide the students with “scientific knowledge that is supported by recognized scientific proof or theory.”⁵ The teachers cited a Pennsylvania law that forbids teachers from “knowingly and intentionally” misrepresenting subject matter or curriculum.⁶ The community exploded with members attending meetings and writing letters. The two local newspapers received 225 letters to the editor and responded with 62 editorials. Sixty-five percent of the letters and 73 percent of the editorials framed the issue as religious.⁷

Pushing forward without the teachers, the administrators read the statement to the students.⁸ In response, 11 families sued the district, insisting that the statement violated the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion. In the U.S. District Court, the families were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and Eric Rothschild, a partner at Pepper Hamilton LLP and a member of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) legal advisory. The Thomas More Law Center, a conservative Christian not-for-profit center committed to the religious freedom of Christians, represented the school district.

In Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (2005), the U.S. District Court ruled that ID was religion, not science, and must be excluded from the public school science curriculum. John E. Johns III, a conservative Republican appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote a lengthy and aggressive opinion excluding Intelligent Design. Even though God or Christianity was not mentioned in Intelligent Design materials, ID was creationism with a false scientific rhetoric. As such, ID must be excluded as religion using the Establishment clause of the First Amendment. When the school district held elections in 2005, none of the members who had voted for the Intelligent Design policy were reelected. The new board rejected the policy and refused to appeal the ruling to a higher court.

As part of the wider debate about religion in American life, the Dover case illustrates what has become a standard formula for adjudicating the separation of church and state: a categorical determination of what counts as religion. Occasionally, courts determine whether what is taught qualifies as science, but the Supreme Court has never accepted this approach. To win in Dover, the claimants had to successfully prove that ID was “religion.” Although the Constitution encourages the courts to frame the issue as one of keeping religion out of public schools, the more important question remains: why does a liberal polity need to keep science in? By tracing the precedents relied upon in Dover and providing a critical evaluation of the Dover decision, this chapter demonstrates that the Constitution pushes the Court to provide a defensive strategy for the exclusion of creationism rather than creating a positive case for teaching evolution as best available science or the ability of potential citizens to distinguish between science that is good or bad. Although Dover fails to articulate how science education creates liberal democratic subjects, it provides valuable tools for crafting a new legal and theoretical approach.

The Evolution of Evolution in America

Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. By the end of the century, evolution was selectively taught in U.S. public schools. Some courts have appealed to the history of evolution education to contextualize the “neutral” requests for creation-science or Intelligent Design in science classrooms. Opponents of evolution often stipulate that teaching evolution falsifies religion (William Jennings Bryan argued this position during the Scopes trial) or that evolution itself is a religious belief: atheism. Yet the first fights over Darwinian evolutionary theory did not pit science against religion in such a simple way. When Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, conservative—particularly Calvinist— theologians embraced it and found ways to place evolution within their theological frameworks. Liberal theologians struggled to square Darwin’s theory (which emphasized the role of chance in natural selection) with their progressive conception of God, including an inevitable “material, social, and spiritual progress” in the world.⁹ Yet anti-evolutionism and Christian fundamentalism are inextricably linked in the American case because anti-evolution played an integral part in a religious and political protest movement, beginning at the start of the twentieth century: Christian Fundamentalism. Evolution helped transform fundamentalism into a successful mass political movement, in part, because the teaching of evolution— first in colleges and later in secondary schools—could be easily identified and targeted. The authors of The Fundamentals—a massive publication— provided scientists—often discredited or unknown—to discredit evolution. ¹⁰ Although early Fundamentalist writers affirmed the compatibility of science and religion, later writers insisted that faith and reason were separate “spheres” and evolutionists were “increasingly defined as enemies of religion and society.” Given the popularity of science in the early part of the century, anti-evolutionists tried to redefine science such that it came to be “linked in the public mind with biblical creation rather than evolution.” These patterns repeat in contemporary debates over Intelligent Design, including the manipulation of scientific definitions of theory and fact as a means of discrediting evolution.¹¹

Ultimately, Roman Catholicism, most forms of Judaism, and most denominations of Protestantism reconciled evolution and belief in a monotheistic god. Indeed, members of these groups have challenged laws mandating the teaching of creationism or filed amicus curiae briefs on behalf of parents. Although Christian literalist fundamentalists do not fully represent America’s religiously faithful, a committed minority of literalists in the United States have long believed that teaching evolution denies biblical truth and weakens arguments for Divine creation. At the turn of the twentieth century, they organized to turn their views into legislation.

During the 1920s, 45 anti-evolution bills were introduced in 21 states and became law in Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. In addition to legislative efforts, governors pushed for changes, including the censoring of textbooks.¹² In 1925, the state of Tennessee banned the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” in a public school. The ACLU located a teacher, John Scopes, who was willing to test the law.¹³ Tennessee charged Scopes with teaching evolution.¹⁴ In this first major legal challenge regarding science education, the court asked whether the state could ban material that conflicted with Genesis, not whether the state could teach creationism without violating the Establishment clause. The Supreme Court of Tennessee upheld Scopes conviction, and—most remarkably—the law remained in effect until 1967.

For roughly 35 years, states taught either evolution or creationism without a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. Although education is one of the responsibilities traditionally left to the states, such deference ended in 1968. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down an Arkansas statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. The Court found that the law attempted to “blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read” and thus violated the Establishment clause.¹⁵ From this point forward, the legal game changed. Now, the question was whether creation-based approaches constituted teaching religion in a way that violated the Establishment clause. Defending Genesis was off the table. Something else changed as well. Anti-evolution groups now carefully crafted approaches to education that aimed to evade the Establishment clause exclusion (and one sees this dynamic at work in the most recent critical inquiry laws). After Epperson, opponents of evolution proposed “balanced treatment”: if evolution is taught, creationism must be taught for fairness. The U.S. Court of Appeals rejected balanced treatment in Daniels v. Waters (1975), arguing that by assigning a “preferential position for the Biblical version of creation” over “any account of the development of man based on scientific research and reasoning,” the challenged statute officially promoted religion.¹⁶ This Court of Appeals ruling was influential but not binding nationwide.

Until 1975, opponents of evolution successfully argued that evolution should be banned because evolution contradicted the creation story of Genesis, or creationism must be taught to counterbalance the effects of teaching evolution on particular religious beliefs. When Daniels ruled out both strategies, “creation-science” was offered as an alternative scientific theory. Creation-science claimed to supply scientific evidence for the biblical account of creation. In McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (1982),¹⁷ a U.S. District Court overturned Arkansas’s Balanced Treatment fo...