Intelligent design bad choice for state

Judge overturns school board policy

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Science took intelligent design to court in Pennsylvania, and fortunately science won. Now one Colorado legislator says he intends to introduce a bill that would allow schools to teach this discredited theory. Given the decisive nature of the ruling, we hope he will think better of wasting the legislature's time.

Federal district Judge John E. Jones III ruled in favor of parents who sued the Dover School District because the school board had mandated that teachers read a disclaimer about evolution at the beginning of their ninth-grade biology classes. That's the former school board, by the way; in November, voters defeated all eight candidates who had supported the mandate.

Jones not only ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, his 139-page opinion is exceedingly harsh on the defendants.

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy," he wrote.

The tracks were readily uncovered, though. The disclaimer told students to consult a textbook called Of Pandas and People. Originally written as an overtly creationist book, in various early drafts it had simply been rewritten to discuss intelligent design instead, in such terms as these: "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc."

As science, this is nonsense.

Yes, it is entirely possible for scientists to believe in a Creator, or more narrowly in intelligent design understood to mean that the universe, and specifically life on earth, are too complex to have developed entirely by natural means. Many scientists do, and as a philosophical or religious position, it is of course intellectually respectable.

But it is not intellectually respectable as a way of doing science, and in that context working scientists overwhelmingly reject it. If you're working in the lab, or for that matter practicing medicine or engineering, you can't count on miracles when you need them even if you deeply believe that miracles do happen.

ID offers no meaningful, testable hypotheses about what the designer did, or when, so it does not belong in a science classroom. The Dover trial made very clear that the ID policy had a religious purpose, and therefore was unconstitutional, and also that it was scientifically vacuous when it had to be presented in a courtroom with clear standards for evidence.

Jones' decision has no legal force outside of this one case, but he clearly wrote it at such length so that other jurisdictions can use it if other school boards are tempted - or encouraged by the legislature - to go down the same unwise road.