Good old American Democracy worked pretty well here. The school board essentially got replaced, and the courts were there to protect the First Amendment. Freedom from religion was upheld. What more could you ask for?I'm not sure, but I suspect that the "Freedom from religion" phrase was probably not a typo, but was a way of implying that the Dover decision was just one more secularist victory in the ceaseless "war" being waged on religion. If that is what is was, it is a cute little barb, but no less than the supposed "war on Christmas" the claim it makes is utter nonesense. There is no "war on religion" going on in America today. Quite to the contrary, the "war," if there is one, is on people who have beliefs different from James Dobsen, Tony Perkins and their ilk.
But let's ignore that for the moment and focus instead on the larger point. Yes, the system did"work." And, the part of this story I like the best is the congruence between the political and judicial. For once, the court is not out there by itself in rejecting this stuff. In fact, the voters themselves beat the courts to it.
(Note, though, that, as reported in the Washington Post, this political and judicial congruence has not prevented personal attacks on Judge Jones, nor has it vitiated the expectation that Bush's Supreme Court nominees will be sufficiently activist to bring an end to 50 years of Establishment Clause jurisprudence.
"This decision is a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror that's coming to a rapid end with Justice Roberts and soon-to-be Justice Alito," said Richard Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is a political ally of White House adviser Karl Rove. "This was an extremely injudicious judge who went way, way beyond his boundaries -- if he had any eyes on advancing up the judicial ladder, he just sawed off the bottom rung.")But the final question in my friend's e-mail message -- "What more could you ask for?" -- gives me some pause. It seems to me that there is a LOT more I could ask for, quite reasonably. The ballot box, and even more so the courts, are last lines of defense. They are like anti- ballistic missile systems: when someone lobs a nuke at me, I sure am glad such systems are in place and work; but, it is not unreasonable for me to also ask that people quit lobbing nukes at me.
Unfortunately, the effort to make the public school curricula conform to evangelical Christian theology is not going to end any time soon. Despite Judge Jones' best efforts, even intelligent design is far from dead:
[P]roponents of intelligent design emphasized that the court decision would not cast them into the political and cultural wilderness. They have pushed their theory, which holds that life is too complicated to have arisen without the hand of a supernatural creator, to the center of legislative debates in more than a dozen states, and they intend to keep it there.It is still very much alive in Kansas, for instance, and true believers in Iowa and elsewhere are reported to be largely indifferent to a federal court ruling in Pennsylvania:
"I don't think that a judge in one state is going to be able to tell everybody in all other states what to do," said Paul Brooks, a school board member and retired principal in Muscatine [Iowa] who favors teaching intelligent design. "So I don't get too excited about what he said." . . .Moreover, intelligent design is not the only stratagem being pursued. There is also a whole movement to persuade school districts to offer "elective" courses that will are claimed to fit with the Supreme Court dicta noting that the objective study of the Bible as history and literature in a non-required course might well be permissible under the Establishment Clause. See this: Texas District Adopts Disputed Text on Bible Study. The problem, though, is that unless Roberts and Alito do work some radical shift in Establishment Clause jurisprudence, there is almost no chance that such courses will survive challenge for one simple reason: the proponents of such courses are not at all interested in presenting anything approaching a neutral, academic study of the Bible, especially in a comparative sense. As even a brief tour of the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools website will make clear, the goal is not to teach the Bible as literature or history; it is to teach the Bible as a source of truth and a guideline for living.
In South Carolina, State Senator Mike Fair has introduced a bill to encourage teaching criticism of evolution. Mr. Fair is also on a state education committee that is evaluating biology standards. He said although he had not read the Pennsylvania ruling, it offended him because it impugned board members' motives because they were Christians. "This case hasn't settled anything," Mr. Fair said.
And, therein lies the problem. On the one hand, even my friend would agree, I suspect, that teaching the Bible as truth violates the Establishment Clause. Yet, in the end, this is what the people supporting these causes are committed to having the schools do. The efforts to hide this fact inevitably fail, as they did in the Dover case, because they are so obvioulsy pretenses.
Why won't they just stop? There are innumerable forums in which to teach religion to children, from the family dining room to Sunday School to private religious schools, to televangelism, to innumerable private organizations. Why is it also so very important that the public schools, which must also educate students having profoundly different religious beliefs from those held the the Christian Right, be involved as well?
7 comments:
"the system worked" well now. Perhaps it did, this time. But try hard enough, keep the propaganda machine a la Hannity, keep up the mantras "activist judges", "democratic will of the people", the "religous ideas" of the founding fatheres;the sainthood of the founding fathers, the constant and mindless harangues about attacks on Christians, etc, etc, and eventually these ideas will get some play. So many cross notions run wild during stories like this. For instance, I take it the Dover Board who installed intelligetn desing are good republicans, good republicans are really free market people, so if you are a God fearing, Bible Believing, republican, vote with your feet and put Johnny in a "christian school". (typed not read, sorry for typos and other errors)
Bill...
I've been involved in an Intellegent Design conversation on another bulletin board I post to frequently. While I don't advocate teaching ID as a given in public schools, I think we have to acknowledge that evolution doesn't necessary hold all the answers either...
Here's a couple of posts I made there...
"Okay, so ID doesn't meet the technical definition of a "Theory". That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means it's not a scientific theory.
ID has actually been around for a long time. The debate around it is richer than just a name calling contest between toe-headed convervative Christians and wild eyed Godless liberals, as it is often portrayed (Click here for more info.)
As theories go, I'm not sure evolution or the Big Bang or the Big Inning theories can positively be proved. But they do provide coherent frameworks within which we can explain lots of natural phenomenon.
(But not all natural phenomenon: Why is DNA more complex than is necessary? And then there's the thermodynamic problem: If the universe is a closed system why does entropy appear to be decreasing in violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Gee, maybe there's a grand plan behind all of this after all.)
Actually, I'm not much of one for mixing religion and science. As someone once said, Science provides the "How"; Religion provides the"Why". But the lines do get fuzzy sometimes."
...and this one...
"What bugs me about this debate is not the passion amongst the ID proponents, it the passion amongst the evolution only proponents.
The history of science proves that we always underestimate the complexity of nature. For example: We went from four elements (earth, water, fire, air) to alchemy to a gradual foundation of chemistry to the Bohr model of the atom (the one we all tend to visualize, the one that looks like the little solar system) to quantum mechanics. And we now know that the quantum model is close but not quite right.
So who says the conventional wisdom on evolution is 100% correct? Instead let's teach that evolution -- like quantum mechanics, like the Big Bang, like a lot of other things -- is a well defined model that best fits our current understanding of nature. But let's also be clear that our understanding isn't perfect.
So when we tach about these things, let's not be so arrogant as a society that we presume to have all the answers. We don't know what we don't know, so let's at least acknowledge the possibility of a greater plan that drives the universe. Not as a theory, not as a fact, but as a possibility.
To me this makes the universe more wonderous, not less so."
After hearing more reporting on the court case, my thoughts were "It sounds like the media reporting was, as usual, an oversimplification of the real debate. Once the intolerant branch of Christianity takes over, bad things seem to happen.
(Like all this Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas stuff. As Ann Quindlan says in the latest Newsweek, "O ye of little faith, who believe that somehow the birth of Christ is dependent upon acknowledgment in a circular from OfficeMax!")"
All of that to say that there's room in our school curricula to state that
1. Evolution provides many of the answers but it doesn't provide all the answers.
2. That many people interpret this in light of their religous faith or other belief system and, based on those belief systems, have come to other conclusions.
Anything less makes the evolution only proponents as guilty of proslytizing as the creation only proponents; anything more crosses the fuzzy line between science and religion a little too far.
-- Gary Scoggin
Gary --
Welcome back.
The problem I have with ID -- even with regard to the sane advocates like you -- is that it seems to assume that, if current scientific knowledge does not explain something, then the explanation must be an intelligent designer. Why is DNA more complicated than it needs to be? I don't know. But the fact that it is (assuming it is) does not seem to me to provide any indication that there is an intelligent designer. (Indeed, if it is more complicated than it needs to be, that would seem to support rather than refute the idea that it is all due to randomness). But in the end, "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer to me. What I have problems with is the idea that gaps in human knowledge somehow prove the existence of God or a designer or even a design. Gaps, it seems to me are simply that: gaps. The absence of evidence never proved anything.
"What I have problems with is the idea that gaps in human knowledge somehow prove the existence of God or a designer or even a design. Gaps, it seems to me are simply that: gaps. The absence of evidence never proved anything."
Bill...
I couldn't argee more. The gaps don't prove anything, they just open possibilities for alternate explanations.
I don't really consider myself an ID proponent in the classic sense. I just advocate teaching the two things I mentioned above and leaving it at that. Maybe ten-minutes or so out of a much larger lesson.
My motives on this come not from wanting to "convert" young impressionable minds or from undermining the evolutionary model as we understand it today but to instill a sense of curiosity and questioning. We do our kids a disservice when we treat things as absolutes or cold-hard facts when they are not.
Whether gaps in knowledge point to the existence of God is an interesting topic, but it is a topic which I think we both agree has no place in a public school classroom.
Unforunately, what has happened here is that ID has created another wedge issue that the partisans of both sides can use to rally the cause. By making people take positions for and agin' we are creating the polarization that precludes meaningful discussions (like the one we're having here). The partisans don't want the discussions as they threaten the moral authority upon which their positions are based.
-- Gary Scoggin
Gary --
Hope you had a good Christmas. And a happy holidays as well.
Before going any further with this, let me state the obvious: at a literal level, this whole debate over a sentence or two in an entire high school biology curriculum is just silly. To worry about the impact of one, or even a handful of, sentences -- especially ones as dry and carefully written as these -- requires one to assume a level of attention in high school students that far exceeds anything remotely realistic. Absent the much more explicit debate that is going on outside the schools, such sentences would either go entirely unnoticed by students or, for those very, very few paying close enough attention to actually hear them, be seen simply as curiousities. It is not the words than matter, in short. The words -- whatever they are -- are simply a reminder of the larger controversy that exists outside the schools.
You seem to be saying that the schools should not be participating in this controversy, when you write:
"Whether gaps in knowledge point to the existence of God is an interesting topic, but it is a topic which I think we both agree has no place in a public school classroom."
Yet, that seems to contradict your earlier argument that "there's room in our school curricula to state that
1. Evolution provides many of the answers but it doesn't provide all the answers.
2. That many people interpret this in light of their religous faith or other belief system and, based on those belief systems, have come to other conclusions."
The students already know this. What is the point of having the teachers remind them? The point, I think, is to have the schools and teachers affirm that it's OK for students to prefer religious explanations to those offered by science. As such, it does not seem to me to be very much different than telling students prior to an astronomy unit that it's OK to believe in a geocentric universe if they (or more precisely their parents) are still ptolemists.
The point of education is to teach children what we know. Of course evolution doesn't provide a complete explanation of everything. Neither does astrophysics. But, as with astrophysics, evolution does explain a lot. And it seems to me to be wrong-headed to require teachers to affirm that it's OK to ignore what evolution does teach us becuase it can't (yet) explain everything about the emergence and development of life. There are people out there who devoutly believe that the earth is 4,000 years old. Are we, becuase of that, to tell our children that archeology, palentology and geology "provide[] many of the answers but [don't] provide all the answers [and that] many people interpret this in light of their religous faith or other belief system and, based on those belief systems, have come to other conclusions[?]" And, if so, what COULD we teach without a similar disclaimer?
I am not asking the schools to be hostile to religious belief. I am asking them to ignore religious beliefs, to teach what we know, and to refrain from calling what we do know into question simply becuase it might be inconsistent with the religious beliefs of some parents. At that point, the role of the schools is at an end. How people reconcile what we know with their religious beliefs is entirely up to them.
You know Bill, you make a good point. As the father of a high school junior, I can categorically state that, based on my observation of him and his friends, most high school kids are immune to any nuances taught in the classroom. In fact, they are often immune to the main point of the lesson.
The question is then, is this much ado about nothing. Yes, of course. At the partisan level, this debate is not about the kids, it's about who wields the power over our schools. This is a good thing, in that that it imples the outcome of the ID debate is, in the long run, pretty inconsequential one way or another.
So much for the strategic part of the discussion.
Now back to the tactical part:
Let's look at my alleged inconsistencies:
The first statement...
"Whether gaps in knowledge point to the existence of God is an interesting topic, but it is a topic which I think we both agree has no place in a public school classroom."
...is an opinion, pure and simple.
The second set of statements...
1. Evolution provides many of the answers but it doesn't provide all the answers.
2. That many people interpret this in light of their religous faith or other belief system and, based on those belief systems, have come to other conclusions."
... are, in my mind, a set of facts.
Anyway, I agree that this can be a bit of a slippery slope and that is why the disclaimer shouldn't be prominent, protracted or distract from the main lesson.
Nor do I believe should the basic processes of evolution be downplayed or disregarded as you imply ("And it seems to me to be wrong-headed to require teachers to affirm that it's OK to ignore what evolution does teach us becuase it can't (yet) explain everything about the emergence and development of life.") In fact, I think I say almost the opposite, that evolution is a useful model for understanding nature. ("So who says the conventional wisdom on evolution is 100% correct? Instead let's teach that evolution -- like quantum mechanics, like the Big Bang, like a lot of other things -- is a well defined model that best fits our current understanding of nature. But let's also be clear that our understanding isn't perfect.")
In the Scoggin theory of Intellegent Design, which is likely different from the fundementalist theory, we (I?) don't say evolution is wrong. We say it's incomplete. Newtonian physics wasn't wrong, it's incomplete. It expains most phenomenon completely perfectly. It doesn't explain all phenomenon though, hence the development of quantum mechanics.
I view Darwinian evolution as the equivalent of Newtonian physics. The implcation (for me) being that the mutations that drive the development and specialization of species may not be completely random and may unfold according to a larger plan. Or maybe not. It's a difficult, if not impossible, point to prove.
We teach Newtonian physics perfectly well acknowledging at some point that there are places it doesn't apply. All I'm advocating is that we take a similar tact for Darwinian evolution: The theory fits very well most, in fact almost all, of our obeservations in nature. It can be successfully applied in the laboratory. Current scientific thought says that mutations appear to happen randomly and those mutants best suited to an environment tend to prosper and their mutations become the building blocks for subsequent mutations, leading to adaptation and specialization. However...
-- Gary Scoggin
As I have known all along, our differences on all of this are negligible. Still, I feel compelled to worry those small differences still further.
"Anyway, I agree that this can be a bit of a slippery slope and that is why the disclaimer shouldn't be prominent, protracted or distract from the main lesson."
My question: Why should it be there at all? What purpose does it serve? Cui bono?
Should we teach our children that there are gaps in the fossil record that would need to be filled before we could say that our current understanding of how life evolved is both true and complete? Absolutely. Should we teach our children that further investigation may yield surprises that would force us to revise or supplement our current understanding, just as Einsten forced us to revise our Newtonian understanding of time, space and motion? Of course. Should we teach Bebe vs. Miller on "irreducible complexity?" Probably. My sense is that this is a little like staging a debate on alchemy vs chemistry. But, it does seem a bit strange to teach evolution without also discussing the central argument currently raging about that theory. Indeed, by ignoring that debate, we may actually be undermining our efforts to teach evolution itself, since students, being well aware of the controversy, may get the idea that they are only hearing one side of the story. So long as the teacher remains neutral, and so long as the counter-arguments are taught as well, I don't see any huge problem even with discussing the merits of the irreducible complexity argument. My point generally, is that we can and should teach the uncertainties and unknowns at the same time we teach the relatively certain and pretty nearly known.
But it is right there that I think teachers should stop. Once we let (or force) teachers to get away from the facts and start talking about the philisphical implications of those facts, we have gone to far. Yes, it is a "fact" that some people do reach different conclusions about evolution based on their religious beliefs. But it is also a "fact" that some people conclude that evolution negatives religious belief by proving that universe is random. Should the teacher be required to point that out as well?
No one, least of all the Christian Right, wants that of course. Can you imagine the horror with which an effort to really "teach the controversy" would inspire in our fundamentalist friends? Teaching evolution is bad enough. How much worse would it be if the teachers actually also presented the full gamut of philosophical conclusion people have drawn from the theory? That is not what they are after at all.
And therein lies the problem. What the advocates of these kinds of statements want today is what they have wanted ever since this whole debate began back with the Scopes trial: to tell kids that evolution is inconsistent with their religious beliefs and should therefore be ignored. To their considerable consternation, every strategem thay have tried for delivering this message through the schools has, one by one, been rejected by the courts becuase the message itself is not one that the schools should be delivering. As a result, they have now been reduced to formulating various "statements" for the teacher to recite, that, while ostensibly neutral on the issue of religion, are, becuase of this histroy, nonetheless known by all who hear or read them to be a thinly veiled invitation (perhaps even instruction) to ignore what is about to be taught in favor of the teachings of one particular religious creed.
As finely crafted and rigorously neutral as your own statement is, it suffers from the same defect. Absent the context provided by the wider debate on these issues, your formulation would be both unremarkable and unobjectionable. But given the context, the students, teachers, parents and scool boards will all inevitably see it -- or any other statement on this issue -- as a code. And the message buried in the code is that the teacher and the school system have taken sides in that debate. That is not a message we want to send.
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