In its second opening statement, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS) writes, “Public schools are not supposed to be in the business of promoting religion.” Who would disagree with that statement? I certainly agree with that statement. But as I argued in my first and fifth opening statements, ID is not a religious argument, and therefore teaching ID does not unconstitutionally advance religion.
As evidence that teaching ID promotes religion, AUSCS claims that “Phillip Johnson, the so-called ‘father of Intelligent Design,’ once told a religious audience that his goal is to use ID to instill doubt about evolution in people's minds and then introduce them to ‘the truth’ of Jesus Christ.”
AUSCS, an organization that often gets involved with litigation, should know that this argument would never pass muster in a court of law: This is a mere anecdotal assertion that someone “once told a religious audience” about alleged religious motivations, and no quotes or documentation are provided by AUSCS to verify the quote.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that AUSCS has the citation handy in its back pocket, and that somewhere, sometime, Phillip Johnson “once told a religious audience” about his allegedly religious motives.? Does this make ID unconstitutional? Not unless AUSCS wants neo-Darwinism to be considered unconstitutional under its rule.? As I explained in my third opening statement, in science, motives don’t matter; only the evidence does. Moreover, many leading Darwinists have expressed explicitly anti-religious motives for promoting evolution.
For example, Eugenie Scott is a physical anthropologist who now serves as Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and was called by the scientific journal Nature “perhaps the nation’s most high-profile Darwinist.”(1) But Scott is also a public signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto, an aggressive statement of the humanist agenda to create a world with “without supernaturalism” based upon the view that “[h]umans are … the result of unguided evolutionary change” and the universe is “self-existing.”(2)
Another leading pro-evolution activist, Barbara Forrest, believes that “philosophical naturalism” is “the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion.”(3)? Dr. Forrest sits not only on the Board of Directors of the NCSE but is also on the Board of Directors of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, an associate member of the American Humanist Association, which publishes the Humanist Manifesto III.(4)
Richard Dawkins is Oxford University’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and is probably the most famous evolutionist in the world. Yet Dawkins argues that belief in God is a “delusion” and that "Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”(6) Dawkins has stated his goal is “to kill religion”(7) and when he received an award from the American Humanist Association, he declared that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”(8)
Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, who has been a public advocate of teaching evolution in a one-sided pro-Darwin-only dogmatic fashion in public schools,(9) says that his scientific career is motivated by a desire to disprove religion:
“I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science—to free people from superstition.”(10)
Weinberg elaborates on what he means by “superstition,” as he hopes that “this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas will come to an end, that we’ll see no more of them. I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”(11)
In November, 2006 the New York Times covered a conference held at the scientific research hub The Salk Institute. The story reported a striking agenda on the part of leading scientists present at the conference to stifle religious belief in order to promote Darwinism to the public: “one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief.” The scientists were worried that evolution by natural selection and other views are “losing out in the intellectual marketplace” and one scientist sarcastically said the viewpoints “have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”(12)
I do not raise these examples to argue that one cannot accept evolution and religion or to argue that neo-Darwinism is not science.? And I should note that these anti-religious advocates of evolution have every right to hold their anti-religious beliefs and motives. But these examples expose the intense hypocrisy and failure of the AUSCS’s harping upon the alleged religious motives of ID proponents:
The AUSCS should remember that the Lemon test requires that public schools neither “advance” nor “inhibit”(13) religion. If, as AUSCS argues, the religious motives of ID proponents make ID unconstitutional, then the antipreligious motives of leading neo-Darwinists would make evolution unconstitutional. So unless AUSCS wants neo-Darwinism to be disqualified from public schools due to the anti-religious motives of its leading proponents, then it might want to consider dropping its argument that the alleged religious motives of ID proponents make ID unconstitutional.
AUSCS's Selective Enforcement of the Law
A wise person once told me that a hallmark of tyranny is selective enforcement of the law. But based upon its behavior, AUSCS seems to selectively enforce its view of the First Amendment where AUSCS claims that ID is a religious viewpoint, but it only attacks those who promote that view in public schools and turns a blind eye to those who denigrate that viewpoint. AUSCS is filing lawsuits against schools that use textbooks promoting ID, but it hypocritically ignores schools that use textbooks that attack ID.
For example, Biology by Peter H. Raven and George B. Johnson (2002) states, "The intelligent design argument" says that "The organs of living creatures are too complex for a random process to have produced—the existence of a clock is evidence of the existence of a clockmaker." but argues that "Biologists do not agree.”(14)
Similarly, Douglas Futuyma's popular textbook, Evolutionary Biology (1998) says that “still other nonbelievers in evolution, including a very few scientists present supposedly rational arguments against evolution, and instead of specifically invoking the biblical account as an alternative, argue that the only possible explanation of biological phenomena is 'intelligent design.'" He then equates ID with "creationism" and goes on to say, "Here are some of the most commonly encountered creationist arguments, together with capsule counterarguments…”(15)
Were AUSCS to be consistent, they would have to file lawsuits to strike down these textbooks as unconstitutional. Somehow I doubt they will do that, exposing their selective and hypocritical enforcement of the First Amendment.
As for me, I’m not into censoring science from public schools, and so don’t think that ID or evolution should be considered unconstitutional. This means that it should be constitutional to teach both the scientific evidence for or against evolution, and for or against ID. (Note: As I explain in my fifth opening statement, this does not mean I think ID should be mandated in public schools.)
Thus, as I recognized in my third opening statement, “in science, the motives or personal religious beliefs of scientists don't matter; only the evidence matters.” For example, the great scientists Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton were inspired to their scientific work by their religious convictions that God would create an orderly, rational universe with comprehensible physical laws that governed the motion of the planets. They turned out to be right—not because of their religious beliefs—but because the scientific evidence validated their hypotheses. (At least, Newton was thought to be right until Einstein came along.) Their personal religious beliefs, motives, or affiliations did nothing to change the fact that their scientific theories had inestimable scientific merit that helped form the foundation for modern science.
Conclusion
AUSCS concludes its second opening statement saying, “If convincing someone to adopt a new religion is your end goal, what you are doing is not science. It is proselytizing.” Perhaps AUSCS should be giving that reminder to leading Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, Barbara Forrest, and Steven Weinberg.
What AUSCS is really doing is playing on the emotions of readers—who of course reasonably oppose proselytizing in the classroom—never telling them that leading Darwinists have expressed a desire to proselytize. Moreover, students can learn about both ID and evolution in a manner that does not advance religion or inject religious discussions into the curriculum.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: if AUSCS claims the religious motives of leading ID proponents make ID unconstitutional, then under their poorly conceived legal rule, the anti-religious motives of leading Darwinists should similarly make neo-Darwinism unconstitutional.
My solution is this: stop censoring science, start talking about the evidence, and leave the personal religious (or anti-religious) motives of scientists out of the discussion. That’s the only way to truly respect the First Amendment’s provision that Americans can worship however they wish, and not send scientists who happen to be religious to the back of the bus.
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