You can always trust Francis Beckwith to get it all wrong. He’s arguing against the Dover decision on false premises.
Should religious motivations of a theory’s proponents disqualify that theory from receiving a hearing in the public square? It’s a point that has become a central issue in the Intelligent Design-evolution debate.
Francis J. Beckwith, associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies and associate professor of church-state studies at Baylor University, told a New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary forum that the striking down of a policy based solely on the religious motives of its adherents is “logically fallacious and constitutionally suspect.”
You know me—I’m brutally materialistic and uncompromisingly atheistic—and even so, I don’t think the quality of a science teacher is determined by whether they go to church on Sunday or not. The Dover decision slammed the creationists hard, not because the backers were religious, but because they had no scientific basis for their arguments and their goals were clearly religious. It didn’t help their case at all that their primary advocates so clearly demonstrated the intellectually vacuous nature of Intelligent Design creationism. It wasn’t shot down because its proponents were Christian, but because they were unscientific and had allowed their faith to mislead and misrepresent their dogma as science.
One more thing from that Beckwith article:
“Intelligent design is not stealth creationism,” Beckwith said.
Rather, ID is a name for a cluster of arguments that reasons the universe to be the result of intelligent agency rather than of unguided matter, Beckwith explained. The theory lacks the accompaniment of religious authority or sacred Scripture.
Renaming the “Creator” as an “intelligent agency” fools no one—it’s saying the same thing with different words. As Judge Jones could see, the theory lacks the religious component because the authors had consciously stripped out the overt religious references to skirt the letter of the law…it is stealth creationism. As we all could see, too, with no religious authority and no scientific evidence, there is absolutely nothing holding Intelligent Design creationism up.
The bottom line: show me the evidence. The ID advocates can’t and don’t, therefore their religious beliefs are irrelevant, and Beckwith is merely trying to refocus the complaints about the Dover decision on a trivial red herring.
“Show me the evidence” has always been my mantra as well. Make all the claims you want but, unless you can back them up with independently verifiable, empirical evidence, your claim amounts to squat. Clearly, the ID camp has no such evidence other than to say, “It looks like it was designed therefor, it just has to be God.” Their argument boils down to being nothing more than a God is in the Gaps argument. To quote Drew Cary, “That is pathetisad.”
–JK–
Hey PZ,
I just ran across this article in the Economist:
http://economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5518892
It’s about the science of origins. Short, sweet, and quite an interesting read. Heck, it was simple enough for me to understand. :)
For people who are paying attention, the IDiots’ response as a group to Jones’s ruling has utterly vindicated it. The ones who argue that Jones was wrong to have ruled on the constitutionality and/or scientific merit of ID and should have based it on the clearly religious motivations of the board are ever so slightly undermined by the other half who say he was wrong to have based his argument entirely on the religious motivations of the board. The complete exclusivity of these equally false positions doesn’t seem to matter to them, even when it’s pointed out. If they find it so hard to interpret coherently a perfectly plainly written document, why should parents trust these people to interpret scientific evidence?
Right. All sorts of motivations exist, and I don’t doubt that religious motivations are part of the reasons behind many theistic evolutionists’ acceptance of science (prominently, the Xian injunctions against lying). Who cares, just so long as they’re doing honest science?
Judge Jones, of course, recognized that the IDists don’t have any science on their side because they are so motivated by their religious preconceptions that they try to re-define science to accommodate their religion. How could they stumble into science, even accidently, when they’re opposed to the standards that preserve science as an empirical pursuit?
Unsurprisingly, Beckwith distorts the issue by pretending that it was solely the religion of these IDiots that made Jones rule that they were egregious IDiots. Which only goes to show that motivations producing incorrect and/or dishonest outcomes really do provide us with an opportunity to judge the value of the output of individuals, whether the motivated distortions are from Beckwith, or from the other IDiots.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
I have to respectfully disagree a little bit.
I was not as impressed with the Dover decision as a lot of us, because I thought it failed to separate out some things in certain places.
In particular, I think it’s important to distinguish between the core idea of intelligent design per se—which is a valid but wildly speculative idea—from the agenda that the IDers are actually pursuing and their motives for pursuing it.
In determining what’s valid scientific knowledge, or a valid scientific speculation, motives shouldn’t matter. (In determining whether there was an illegal conspiracy, of course they should.)
The core idea of intelligent design, not committing to a religious interpretation, is wildly speculative but not unscientific. It’s not an incoherent idea, and it’s even possibly true, so it can’t be out of bounds for science. If there was actual evidence that aliens came to Earth, we’d have to take the possibility seriously, even if it would pose difficulties of second-guessing how aliens might have messed with things.
In that narrow sense, of just that core, speculative hypothesis ID is not the same thing as Creationism. It really is a valid scientific idea, even if there’s no evidence for it at the moment and it’s not the least bit promising.
The ID folks really have learned to formulate a little hypothesis that isn’t flatly unscientific or intrinsically religious. They do deserve a tiny pat on the head for that, and we look bad if we don’t give them that deserved pat on the head—it looks like we can’t tell the difference between a valid hypothesis and Biblical Creationism.
Of course, they must lose big on other grounds. While that little hypothesis is not scientifically invalid, what they’re actually trying to get students to believe is something quite different—e.g., that the hypothesis actually explains things that need explaining, which evolutionary theory can’t explain.
The problem is that the tiny core idea of ID is valid, but is the thin end of the wedge. We should acknowledge that the tiny tip of the wedge is not unscientific or intrinsically religious—but also that there’s nothing beyond that little point-like bit that is scientific.
Many people can tell the difference between that little idea and Biblical Creationism; if we say that ID is just Creationism in a Lab Coat, we can seem blind to that clear fact.
In terms of deciding what’s “unscientific,” the IDer’s do have the right to defend only a very narrow hypothesis, irrespective of whatever else they believe. (That’s one of the ideas behind blind peer review—people should be allowed to defend only narrow claims that they want to defend, without all their other beliefs being used as evidence against what they choose to actually assert and defend.)
I don’t think Judge Jones did an ideal job of keeping that issue apart from the issue of whether Behe is full of shit, whether Pandas is a Creationist book with some textual substituations, and whether there was a religiously-motivated conspiracy by a bunch of liars and crazies. All of those things are true, and quite relevant to some things in his ruling, but they’re different from the issue of whether ID, narrowly construed, is simply “unscientific” or “the same thing” as Biblical Creationism.
I do understand Judge Jones’s use of the term ID to refer to more than the tiny valid hypothesis; I think it’s unforunate that he didn’t clearly make and maintain the distinction.
Did I miss something here? High school science class is not “the public square” and does not hold hearings on opposing views even within mainstream science. Its purpose to pass on our best scientific understanding at an appropriate educational level.
On the other hand such parts of the public square as newspapers, school board meetings, and TV talk shows have been giving a “hearing” to ID ad nauseam. So how can an entirely moot point be considered a “central issue”?
ID proponents sometimes suggest the Intelligent Designer might be aliens. But they also speak of the Intelligent Designer creating the universe, so whence aliens? If visiting aliens were the Intelligent Designer, diddling around with “primitive” life existing on ancient Earth, haven’t we skipped the really hard part of creating those existing, insufferably complex tiny Evinrudes? It seems to me aliens are not contenders; the Intelligent Designer has to be God, or else Yahweh, or else Elohim, or possibly Allah (if not Baal, or …).
Do tell. The core idea of intelligent design is to excise all the overtly religious bits from Creationism in order to circumvent existing legal precedents.
To add to mark’s post, if the Intelligent Designers were aliens, who designed those designers? With that transparent ruse, discarded, there is no getting around the inherent religious nature of IDC: it is a claim for miraculous supernatural intervention in the natural world.
All I’m asking of IDC proponents is that they prove a miracle. Is that too much to ask? If so, then IDC is too much to claim.
But the point Paul is that *everyone* complaining about the cases result is talking about either the religious version of it or the non-existent science they claim gives it credence. Right now, without evidence, the only reason, “It might have been space aliens.”, is any more of a valid premise than, “It might have been leprechauns.”, is the presumption that aliens of some sort actually exist. What if they don’t? All of the sudden the vague and barely scientific validity of the question ceases to exist. And its only barely valid “because” the general concensious is that aliens probably do exist. Not on evidence of them, not on evidence of design, not on evidence of anything, just, “There are probably aliens, therefor they could have done it.” At this point, how exactly does this differ from, “I think God exists, and he could have done it.”? If the presumed alien civilization, due to the laws of physics or other factors, couldn’t have “ever” gotten here at all, then the theory just becomes another supernatural, “They did it somehow anyway!”, explanation.
It think the hypothesis is interesting, but at this point makes better science fiction than science. Nor do I see any chance at the moment of some sudden shift from a mere hypothesis to a solid theory. “If” somehow that sort of shift become possible at some point, then I am sure it can be resurrected as a valid idea. Right now though, its like claiming you only supplied the recipie for unleavened bread and had no idea someone was going to make comunion wafers from it. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean anyone else has much use right now for unleavened bread in the first place. Fighting for the old idea isn’t going to defend “it”, doing so is unfortunately going to simply lend undue credence for the other 99% of the true IDiots, who have taken the recipie for use in religion. No one is going to even notive the 1% left, unless its to cry, “See!! They support our religious theory too! Just ignore their persistent insistent that they don’t.”
Yes, they have the right to defend the tiny grain of a reasonable idea that exists, but they should also apply some common sense to the realization that currently doing so won’t result in “their” idea being defended, but the one that hijacked it.
“In terms of deciding what’s “unscientific,” the IDer’s do have the right to defend only a very narrow hypothesis, irrespective of whatever else they believe. ”
They don’t, though, with a tiny handful of possible exceptions (Heddle?). For the proponents of ID, ID doesn’t consist of that hypothesis, and others that logically follow from it. That is the conclusion with which they start, and starting with the conclusion is why they don’t do science. Their vision of ID consists of whatever holes they they can pick in evolution that they think their sucker followers will believe and pay them to propagate. There’s no science in “irreducible complexity” or “specified complex information”, and nothing to logically connect them to a possibly scientific basic ID hypothesis. Furthermore all their arguments fall into the absurd fallacy of “not evolution=ID”. ID as a pseudo-science (as opposed to a metaphysical position) isn’t actually about saying “We were intelligently designed” it’s about saying “We could not have evolved”.
Bayesian Bouffant, FCD, wrote:
I don’t disagree with that.
What I’m saying is that if they actually had good evidence for the sanitized hypothesis, it would be fine science. I would start thinking hard about aliens, not God, but that is irrelevant—if the evidence was there, that would be good enough for it to be fine science.
And that should not depend on what else those guys believe, if they can do the science and make the case. For example, they might only be interested in evidence for aliens-or-God because their ultimate goal is to convince people there’s a God. But if there were real evidence for an intelligent designer, that would not in itself keep the sanitized ID theory from being fine science. (I’d start thinking hard about ancient astronauts.)
Suppose, for example, some Christians sued PZ for teaching their kids evolution, and they adduced the evidence that PZ is clearly an atheist and anti-religion. His motives are suspect. Maybe he only looks for evidence of evolution by natural selection because he’s part of an Evil Atheist Conspiracy to undermine kids’ belief in God.
The right response has to be: so what? If he can do the science, he can do the science and his religio-political motivations don’t matter when deciding whether he’s doing is science, or whether it’s valid to teach it.
The same standard has to apply the other way, for the most part.
This is roughly analogous to the criteria for libel. It’s not libel if what you’re saying is true, no matter what your motives. However, if what you’re saying is false, your motives matter a whole lot.
The IDers are basically libeling evolution, by saying that the evidence for it is not good, and that the evidence for their competing theory is good. Both are false, so they fail the first test—this stuff isn’t anywhere near ready for teaching in schools, even if the barest core hypothesis isn’t intrinsically unscientific. Too much stuff around that is crap. They’re wrong about the relative status of these “theories,” so their case fails irrespective of their motives.
That’s a different issue from whether there’s a conspiracy, or whether such a conspiracy is not allowed when you’re right. In libel law, your motives don’t matter much if you can prove that what you said is true. The courts generally punt on deciding what’s an acceptable motivation for saying something true.
I think the same principle has to more or less apply in this kind of case, or it opens people like PZ up to being sued. After all, he’s a government employee. He has no business imposing his religious biases on students, on the public dime. If there’s a vast left-wing anti-fundamentalist conspiracy to teach evolution, what then?
And arguably, there is a vast conspiracy to do that, for anti-fundamentalist reasons. A fair number of people, like me, are motivated to promote science and particularly evolutionary science for partly religious reasons—to inoculate people against fairy stories, and keep the religious right in check. Part of our concern is that if they control science, they can control politics.
I think that should be okay. As long as what we’re teaching is true—e.g., the theory is as well corroborated as we say—we should be allowed to teach it for those reasons. The government shouldn’t be second-guessing our science by second-guessing our motives; that way lies witch-hunts.
This principle is important in other areas, too. Some of my friends are environmental scientists, who are generally opposed to Republican policies. I don’t think their work should be judged by their political motivations; if they can make their scientific case, that’s enough. The courts shouldn’t be trying to solve chicken-and-egg problems about whether people’s political motivations drove their science, or vice versa.
Going back to the libel analogy and the Dover case, there’s a two-part test thing going on. When you convict somebody of libel, the issue of whether what they said is separate from and prior to the issue of whether they said it maliciously.
In the dover case, that amounts to (1) teaching bad science and (2) doing so in violation of the establishment clause.
These things are mostly independent, except for the crucial a-because-b linkage. What makes it bad science isn’t the people’s motivations. The science stands or falls on its own. (And it falls.) The motivations are relevant only to determining that teaching that bad science is a violation of the establishment clause—they don’t make the science any worse as science. It is what it is, and it’s bad, irrespective of the motives of the people doing it.
That’s not quite true, and that’s something I wish Judge Jones had discussed more carefully, rather than running together several issues.
The corrupt nature of the allegedly scientific process used by the ID folks is relevant—it explains and in some sense corroborates the conclusion that what they’ve produced is not a solid body of scientific knowledge. But that’s very weak evidence that what they produced isn’t good scientific knowledge—it has to be much less important than the plain evidence that what they produced is in fact mostly crap. It’s much better and more relevant evidence to the issue of conspiracy—their negligence in the process indicates that in fact there is a conspiracy to violate the Establishment clause.
Kagehi writes: But the point Paul is that *everyone* complaining about the cases result is talking about either the religious version of it or the non-existent science they claim gives it credence.
Unfortunately that’s not quite true, and there’s a crucial ambiguity in the term ID.
Right after the decision came down, I read it, and I went “uh-oh,” seeing a hole in the way Judge Jones put things. I knew the ID folks would exploit it. Sure enough, the next day, they did, in a press release from the Thomas More Law Center.
They said that a judge has no business saying that “ID isn’t science,” because it’s a hypothesis that hasn’t been disproven yet.
They are right about that, on one interpretation of the word ID—I noticed that right off, because that’s how I tend to interpret the word ID, myself.
I distinguish between the core hypothesis of ID and the assemblage of Beheshit and other crap around it—the “ID theory” currently in vogue—in much the same way I distinguish between psychology and Freudianism. A judge saying “ID is not science” now sounds a lot like a judge saying “psychology is not science” 60 years ago, just because the psychology then in vogue was pretty dubious stuff.
I realize that there is an ambiguity there, and many people think of ID as being exactly and only the current assemblage of “ID theory” pushed by the ID movement—not a generic term for any possible science based on the core ID hypothesis. To many people, it’s a proper noun for all that Discovery Institute shit, as opposed to a generic term for a subject domain.
On that interpretation, which I do understand, I pretty much agree that “ID is not science”—or at least, that it’s such a mess of bad, wrongheaded “science” as to make no difference.
I wish Judge Jones had clarified that the basic ID hypothesis is just not something that can be “not science.” It’s a bare hypothesis, and the pseudoscience is in overrating it wildly and buttressing it with bullshit—not in the hypothesis itself, or the subject domain.
In a certain sense, I’m “just quibbling,” but I’m afraid it may matter in two ways. It gives the ID people something to rail about—a judge censoring a hypothesis. And it gives other judges something to pick apart, and an excuse to ignore a lot of the very good stuff in Jones’s decision.
He was arguably out of line in apparently censoring a valid hypothesis, by lumping it together with the supporting bullshit as one thing called “ID,” and equating it with creationism. I would guess that Judge Jones can actually tell the difference, but it would have been better if he’d made it clear and gotten it exactly right, making his decision bulletproof.
The more important thing here is that when many of us say things like “ID is just creationism in a lab coat” it sounds like we can’t tell the difference between a random alien and the God of Genesis. To people like some fundamentalists I know, it sounds like intentional misrepresentation, failing to acknowledge an utterly obvious difference.
I think it’s better to say something like “ID is a hoax perpetrated to promote creationism.” That’s less subject to misinterpretation that makes us look bad.
“Speculative” depends upon context, and once ID was not taken to be so very speculative. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a design hypothesis, it’s just that it failed. Does that make it not science? Not necessarily, it’s just that it’s a dead idea, one that has never been of any value in real science.
It could be resurrected, sure, but then it dies immediately again. There is negative evidence, but not positive evidence for ID (vestigial organs, “poorly designed” organs, the lack of easily designed but difficult-to-evolve structures in living beings), and the only positive evidence is in favor of evolution (patterns of neutral and selectionist evolution in the genomes, for instance). Should we credit ID with being scientific because an honest version can make predictions? Well, shouldn’t any hypothesis be based at least somewhat on actual evidence?
Of course we get into the quagmire of where the cutoff point for science is when we start speculating that ID just might be science–or not. There are no hard and fast lines, but we can tell that it isn’t the usual desire of scientists to deal honestly and well with the evidence that drives the IDists.
The judge decided on the version of ID that was being pushed at Dover. While I might grant Paley a charitable pass for making a reasonably scientific hypothesis (if not an especially good one) in his day (if God is thought to design like humans, that is), one that would soon be shown false, there is nothing in the current ID push that resembles science more than pseudoscience. The scientific versions of ID are dead, and the pseudoscientific versions refuse all of the standards of testing and falsification. As such they cannot be accorded any scientific status at all (except for the ideas they take from the scientific realm).
IDists do not really posit aliens to have directed evolution, or to have started it, because then they’d have to start paying attention to real tests of design, which uniformly fail. I agree that I could come up with a hypothesis that aliens produced life, but I’d have to be able to say something meaningful about these aliens. So I could hypothesize that human-like aliens are responsible for life. But what comes of that? Immediately it can be demonstrated that the patterns and orders seen in life are not like those produced by human designers, and the hypothesis must be discarded.
If I say that unknown aliens having unknown purposes, unknown capabilities, and unknown cognitive faculties, might have produced life, I cannot be gainsaid. Such a “hypothesis” is about the same as saying that “God did it”, since it leads to no meaningful predictions. So I could be right, but the problem is that I didn’t really say anything. The words are there, but they don’t refer to anything in physics, biology, psychology, or even literary analysis. It isn’t sound science in the least, even if it is a “valid idea”.
I think that perhaps this is the stumbling block, because not every “valid idea” or “valid concept” rises to the level of science. It isn’t that the idea of an unknown alien producing life unfathomably like that predicted by evolution is not at all a “valid idea”, but it is empirically empty.
What we have with ID is a possibly scientific hypothesis in the time of Paley and thereabouts (if we shift it away from God, that is, or claim that God would design like humans do) which has failed. Every attempt at resurrecting the idea has either been easily falsified (human-like aliens would not be expected to design what we see in organisms) or is empty of reference to knowable and observable processes. In either case it fails to be science in the sense meant by “the body of science” (since failed hypotheses are discarded), and as such deserves to be ruled as non-science.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
frank,
“I just ran across this article in the Economist”
It’s an interesting article for me who has just started to learn about abiogenesis.
However, I think the discussion of where the raw material come from is flawed. It was recently shown that the primordial atmosphere indeed could have been reducing and not neutral. I think I saw that info on Panda’s Thumb, but I haven’t hunt the reference down yet.
Ok, think hard about this: who designed the aliens?
It’s not irrelevant, and it’s been brought up already.
Paul W ideas has company. Sean Carroll (I think), a cosmologist on Cosmic Variance, put forward a similar reasoning about the scientific legitimacy of a design hypothesis. I think he immediately went on to say that it was such a ridiculously improbable theory, even without considering the success of evolution, that it wouldn’t go far. (My words, not his.)
At the time I had no good understanding of this reasoning. So I like Glen’s analysis here.
Beckwith said:
“Should religious motivations of a theory’s proponents disqualify that theory from receiving a hearing in the public square?”
further demonstrating his ignorance of constitutional law.
(1) Yes, religious (properly, “sectarian”) motivations do matter. However, even assuming something other than religious motivations in Dover (et al.),
(2) The public-school classroom is most emphatically not a “public square”, or more properly “public forum.” The facility is; but all that means is that if the school allows any after-school group to meet on school grounds, it must also allow religious after-school groups to meet on school grounds. Inside the classroom, however, is not a public forum. Instead, inside the classroom is an arm of the government. I seem to recall some restrictions on establishment of religion somewhere in the Constitution.
It is possible to get more ignorant of the law, and of the philosophical and historical foundations of the Constitution, than the Inscrutable Design folks have thus far demonstrated. I can’t think of exactly how, but I’m sure it must be possible.
I would like to thank Frank for the link to the Economist article in the 2nd comment. I cannot believe that that sacreligious cartoon of the Revered Darwin has not sent scientists rioting into the streets.
I don’t think that’s as big a problem with their basic position as its often made out to be.
It is often scientifically valid to mostly “push a problem back a step” if there’s evidence that it actually happened that way.
Sometimes the simple explains-it-all theories turn out to be wrong, and you stumble into evidence that reveals a bigger scientific problem. It just turns out that way, sometimes—you can’t solve the problem you started out to solve, because of something even bigger and more mysterious that turns out to be important.
Real scientists(TM) do that, too, when awkward facts actually warrant it. (Consider the zoo of subatomic particles that physicists have discovered… the awkward truth is that there really are a whole lot of particles and interactions… even if “protons, neutrons and electrons” was a prettier theory. So we accept the ugly truth, push things back a step, and start looking for a more fundamental theory that’s elegant.)
Suppose actually dug up some ancient, abandoned spaceships, and found that they had various DNA charts and machinery for synthesizing primitive organisms.
That would be very awkward—it would suggest that intelligence arose somewhere else first, and affected life here, and the actual origins of life and intelligence would likely be very difficult to study. But faced with those facts, it wouldn’t be unscientific to conclude that life from elsewhere likely shaped life here—it’d be unscientific not to.
That illustrates the truth that the ID hypothesis per se is not unscientific, or intrinsicallly religious. It’s just not currently a contender.
It isn’t incumbent on the IDer’s to solve the whole problem of the origin of life and intelligence—if they actually had good evidence that it did come from elsewhere, they’d win their point. The fact that it posed huge new scientific problems wouldn’t undermine their argument much.
Of course, in practice it’s more complicated than that. The widespread intuitive appeal of ID stems largely from a naive sense that it’s a simpler theory overall; I’m just saying that’s a separate issue from their (main) “official” argument—that there’s evidence that such a problematic, theoretically ugly event really did occur.
As long as the ID folks don’t make and defend the claim that they have a simpler theory overall, their case doesn’t hinge on overall elegance. If there was real evidence that the truth was awkward and inelegant, they’d be in good shape “pushing the big question back a step.”
Both PZ and Pettit are mistaken.
First P.Z.: (1) I did not claim that ID was not supportive of belief in a creator. Of course it is. What I did say–as I say in my recent article in Journal of Law and Religion (which can be obtained on my website here: http://homepage.mac.com/francis.beckwith/downloads.htm–the premises of ID arguments are not appeals to religious authority or sacred scripture. The fact that you think that ID helps establish theism (if in fact the arguments are sound) that is a philosophical point, but is certainly not a conclusion that relies on religious data (e.g., authority and/or scripture). None of these points, of course, suggest that the ID arguments are good or bad. If they are the latter, then they fail as arguments, regardless of their apparent implications for theological beliefs. (2) The “religious motives” test has to do with a legislator or citizen’s motivation for a particular policy. His or her attending church is in fact not dispositive for this test. What is relevant is the apparent causal connection between the citizen’s policy proposal and his advocacy of it. Let me suggest you read the last section of my paper (cited above). This will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about. I also have an article–“The Court of Disbelief”–that is coming out in a few months in Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly–in which I offer an extended critique of the religious motive test, tying my critiqe to the long-held principle of American jurisprudence that “freedom of conscience” is absolute in our regime (though actions, of course, may be regulated, as Jefferson himself maintained in his famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists). A pre-publication of my Hastings piece may be found here on the AEI website: http://www.aei.org/events/f.video,eventID.1126,filter.all/event_detail.asp. (3) I agree with you that Judge Jones’ opinion rejected ID as a scientific account of anything. Fair enough. But that alone should have done the work in his opinion. Since, after all, if a theory did have scientific support and its advocates were absolutely motivated by religion to advance it, their motivation would be irrelevant. My lecture did employ Jones’ opinion as a point of departure to make my point. However, my lecture was not a critique of his opinion as a whole. It was just a general critique of the religious motive test and how Jones it employed it.
Now Petit. He writes: “Beckwith said: “Should religious motivations of a theory’s proponents disqualify that theory from receiving a hearing in the public square?” further demonstrating his ignorance of constitutional law.”
Actually, I did not say what you put in quotation marks. The writer of the news report said that and the words between the quotation marks are his words, not mine. So, please edit your comments in order to correct this mistake.
Petit continues:
“(1) Yes, religious (properly, “sectarian”) motivations do matter. However, even assuming something other than religious motivations in Dover (et al.),”
You’re right, under current Supreme Court ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE jurisprudence. But I was arguing that that jurisprudence is wrong for three reasons: (1) it is logically fallacious; (2) it is inconsistent with the Court’s own free exercise jurisprudence; and (3) it is inconsistent with the long-held views of Madison, Jefferson, et. al. that defend “freedom of conscience” and condemn government punishment or reward of religious beliefs. But since motives are causually effective beliefs, then employing motives in order to limit a citizen’s or legislator’s rights or powers is to violate “freedom of conscience.” Like I suggested to PZ, read the Hastings piece. I think it will clear things up. The argument I presented in Atlanta relies on the reasoning in that article.
Petit again writes:
“(2) The public-school classroom is most emphatically not a “public square”, or more properly “public forum.” The facility is; but all that means is that if the school allows any after-school group to meet on school grounds, it must also allow religious after-school groups to meet on school grounds. Inside the classroom, however, is not a public forum. Instead, inside the classroom is an arm of the government. I seem to recall some restrictions on establishment of religion somewhere in the Constitution.”
Again, you’re relying on a newspaper reporter’s account and not on the words I used. You are, of course, right that the public-school classroom is not a publc square per se, except if during after school hours it function as a limited public forum. But you rightly point out that that’s another matter all together.
When I say “public square” I am not referring to the public shool classroom, and never suggest that. I am referring to the square in which deliberative democracy is conducted: public support, the legislative process, electoral politics, etc. It is in that set of interconnected activities that the public square resides. This is why in my lecture and papers on the religious motive test I speak only of citizens and legislators in public squares and assemblies, and never of teachers and classrooms.
Jones’s opinion, as well as the opinion of Overton in McLean, points to the religious motives of those in that public square, and that is what I am writing about. I have no idea how you inferentially moved from “public square” to “public school classroom.”
Petit:
“It is possible to get more ignorant of the law, and of the philosophical and historical foundations of the Constitution… I can’t think of exactly how, but I’m sure it must be possible.”
Yes, it is possible. Indeed it is.
I can always trust you to get all cockeyed and wrong.
Look at the words in my article I put in bold. I did not say “ID was not supportive of belief in a creator”. I said it was struck down because there was no scientific evidence supporting it. There was no supporting evidence, so no science…and the only support for it was religious in nature, and it therefore violated the separation of church and state.
Yes you did: “Renaming the “Creator” as an “intelligent agency” fools no oneit’s saying the same thing with different words.” Since you made these comments right after quoting my claim that ID is not stealth creationism and givnig you reasons for it, it seemed reasonable to conclude that you were in fact saying that ID is an attempt to support some sort of theism, and thus it is stealth creationism. You then, as you rightly note (in bold), that there is no evidence for the conclusion IDers attempt to draw. I get it.
Having said that, it seems that you and I in fact agree: religious motives are irrelevant, all should be assessed are the arguments. We are in intense agreement.
Frank
Oh, really? Then you agree that ID is a crock?
Frank:
Frank, would you acknowledge that while in their “official position,” that the IDers want to defend in court, ID is not explicitly religious, that’s still fooling no one, and that ID is de facto stealth the Creationism?
Even people like me who acknowledge that the tiny core hypothesis of ID is not religous can tell that the only reasons it’s being pushed into the schools are religious.
Really, there are roughly three senses of the term “intelligent design”
1. a speculative hypothesis with no support
2. a body of pseudoscientific theory that falsely makes that hypothesis seem more credible
3. a movement motivated by religion and intended to promote religion, which uses #2 in order to get ideas supportive of creationism into the schools
In other words, the overtly secular #2 is being used as a cut-out to insulate #3 from getting nailed for violating the Establishment Clause.
On one hand, as I said in my comments above, there is a lot of merit to the idea that these people’s motives “shouldn’t matter,” in principle. If they managed to get #2 right—and had real science behind their claims—their motives wouldn’t matter.
But there’s a problem, of a sort our legal system has to deal with, such that the principles of law do not correspond directly to such lofty and absolute principles.
That problem is a predictable pattern of systematic attempts to circumvent the principle of the law. The people trying to get creationism into the schools can generate an endless stream of new labels and pseudoscientific theories, bombarding school systems with mutant versions of creationism—and inevitably bombarding the courts with what amount to repetitive and frivolous lawsuits about them.
I think Judge Jones was justified in taking motives very heavily into account there. There is in fact a kind of conspiracy at work here, and that is not okay; there should be some defense against an endless onslaught of religious conspirators pushing pseudoscience to promote their religious agenda through the government.
That should shift the burden of proof, in a certain sense. A school board pushing an overtly secular theory in support of creationism should be suspect; it should have to meet a reasonable standard of burden of proof, such as not teaching theories as science that don’t get much traction in the scientific community.
So, in the specific case of the current version of ID, the problem is that the theory is going nowhere as science. In a more ideal world, maybe that would be fine; such an out-there theory might come up, and get taught in a school here or there, but mostly be recognized as junk, or just be a rare, inconsequential oddity. No big deal.
Clearly that is not the situation. This pseudoscience is being used as a weapon in a culture war by an organized network of conspirators, with the general support of a more loosely organized but much more numerous network, i.e., the Religous Right.
Because of that obvious fact, Judge Jones was justified in ruling considerably more broadly, rather than dismissing the case as an oddity from a few oddballs. He was justified in specifying a standard which such suspect theories must meet, to have a hope in court—rather than assuming such cases would be rare or inconsequential, and ruling narrowly.
So, on one hand, I agree that motives mostly don’t matter much, in a particular case, in determining what counts as science.
But motives have to matter a lot when ruling on a case that is representative of a class of cases, if those motives are characteristic of something like a conspiracy, and support the conclusion that there is a systematic, predictable, and problematic pattern that must be addressed.
The right to free exercise cannot be as absolute as you seem to be making it out to be. There has to be some limit somewhere.
In particular, it can’t include the right of a large minority to engage in a conspiracy to promote the majority religion through the auspices of government, by overwhelming the defenses of the educational community with an endless stream of minor mutants of a failed idea.
Without some protection from such systematic patterns of subversion by majority interests, free exercise becomes meaningless—it is effectively free exercise for the majority only, which is mockery of a sham of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.
I’m not a scientist, I’m not a lawyer and I haven’t read Jones’ decision all the way through, so I may be jumping in way over my head getting between FB and PZM here. But it seems to me that the religious motives of the board in Dover were not “the reason” for the decision; they were *evidence* or an *indicator* that pointed to the conclusion that the true intent and effect of their policy, once put into action, would be a stealth propagation of a religious philosophy. The lack of science in ID, and the dishonesty of some of the policymakers in describing their motivations, were further indicators or lines of evidence pointing to that conclusion.
This is not what PZ said. He said both that IDC is religion, and that it is not science. Once the latter is established (in spades, in Kitzmiller v. Dover), then the fact that IDC is religion remains, and is quite relevant. This is important because most of these lawsuits are based on separation of church & state.
A retreat into science fiction illustrates something about “truth”? Truth != fiction.
Suppose pigs flew out of your ****. Suppose Michael Behe admitted he doesn’t believe his own words. Suppose you consider the possibility that, if you had a meaningful answer, it wouldn’t have to buried in a full page of excess verbiage.
Let me encourage all of you to read my papers–the one that was published in Journal of Law & Religion and the one forthcoming in Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly (a pre-publication version of which is on the AEI web site).
Again, my talk at Greer-Heard was not about Dover; it was about a particular type of reasoning found in Dover. I agree that Jones’ opinion is much more than that particular slice of reasoning, and I say that in my lecture. My concern–as a defender of religious liberty–is what I consider to be one of the worst developments in the history of Con Law, the “religious motive test.”
Also, I do not say that free exercise is absolute. Read the papers. I say that “right to belief” is absolute, and that actions, even those grounded in religion, may be regulated (e.g., Reynolds v. U. S.). Because a motive is a type of belief, and beliefs may never be touched by government (including courts), the religious motive test violates Free exercise. That’s the skeleton of my argument.
The fact that some of you are willing to marginalize and disenfranchise citizens because of their religious motives is a bit frightening to me. The fact that there is so little shame attached to this tactic in our centers of higher learning shows to me how deep and pesuasive the hatred of religious citizens has become among the “enlightened” class.
Intead of relying on a press account of an argument authored by a reporter not trained in the disciplines discussed, why not actually read the papers in which this argument is offered? It’s one thing to quote mine; it’s quite another to hearsay mine.
I’m not so much against religious motivations as I am against hiding them, which is what the ID movement attempted as part of their efforts to disguise the religious nature of ID.
A retreat into science fiction illustrates something about “truth”?
Yes. I guess you’re not a scientist, or not much of one, if you don’t understand the possible value of a thought experiment.
Truth != fiction.
I’ll try to keep that deep insight in mind, Ivy.
Suppose pigs flew out of your ****.
Suppose Michael Behe admitted he doesn’t believe his own words. Suppose you consider the possibility that, if you had a meaningful answer, it wouldn’t have to buried in a full page of excess verbiage.
Suppose you got a clue, Ivy and learned to make better, more careful arguments than “oh yeah, who designed the aliens?”
Sorry it took me so long to explain why your slam-bam argument was wrong; too bad you still don’t get it.
The fact that some of you are willing to marginalize and disenfranchise citizens because of their religious motives is a bit frightening to me. The fact that there is so little shame attached to this tactic in our centers of higher learning shows to me how deep and pesuasive the hatred of religious citizens has become among the “enlightened” class.
Wow, Frank. If that’s the way you put it, maybe Ivy’s right and it’s a waste of bandwidth to talk about this stuff carefully, with you.
We don’t want to disenfranchise anybody, and we don’t hate religious citizens. Keeping a minority from perpetrating a fraud and misrepresenting pseudoscience as science in classrooms is not disenfranchising anybody. And being afraid of majorities that use such techniques to consolidate their power isn’t shameful or hateful; it’s the American way.
I find it sad and pathetic that a law professor would talk that way. You should know it’s not true, and if not, you should at least understand how we see it differently, such that we’re unlikely to see any fairness in the way you put it. You owe us a little more credit than that. Have you no shame?
What is truly ironic about Beckwith’s appearance here is that he’s complaining about being taken out of context, then turns around and essentially makes the same statement that set PZ Myers off in the first place–“some of you are willing to marginalize and disenfranchise citizens because of their religious motives.”
Then there’s the fact that a number of us made reasonable arguments and protestations against such a blatant mischaracterization of our opposition to bad science coming from religious motivations, which were largely ignored. Nevertheless, that pales in comparison to the strangeness of his complaint about the newspaper quote, juxtaposed with the same clearly false charge being made yet again on this forum.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
Paul:
Reread my comments. I said “some of you,” which is undoubtedly true. Again, you miss my point. I am talking about the science classroom; I am talking about a test employed by the federal courts to determine religious purpose in a variety of cases including the evolution ones. I would still be against the test even if there were not cases of the latter sort.
Embracing this test, I believe, puts in place a way of thinking that is deleterious to religious liberty, for it states that a citizen’s or legislator’s belief is a legitimate object of judicial inspection. This is why it is no coincidence one of the commentators above requests that ID supporter reveal their religious beliefs. Why should that matter, unless such knowledge imparts to some a type of cultural leverage that can not be had by debate on the actual questions at hand? I have spoken about ID only three or four times in my career, mostly in hostile venues. Every single time–yes, every single time–I am asked about my religious beliefs in a way that is condescending and mean-spirited. The questioner–with smirk on face and fallacy in hand–acts as if he’s won some forensic point by exposing my secret “God love.” This, my friend, is the behavior of bigots, not serious-minded people wanting to engage friends and adversaries in a spirit of respect and colleageality. You, of course, do not strike me as such a person. And that’s why, I suspect, you reacted the way you did.
After being called a member of the “Texas Taliban,” a “theocrat,” part of a huge “Right Wing” conspiracy, and other assorted ugliness right out of the Know-Nothing playbook, I am frankly sick of it.
Take care,
Frank
Correction above: I meant to write in the second sentence: “I am NOT talking about the science classroom…”
Francis — if motive matters in cases of murder, why should it be excluded in other cases?
We only care about motive when faced with behavior.
If we include motive in other behavioral issues as part of determining whether or not a crime has been committed, why should we exclude motive when it comes to the areas you are so concerned about?
NO ONE cares what these peoples’ beliefs are insofar as they do not impinge on the public arena. When people impinge on the public arena, motive is perfectly reasonable to include in the analysis of what’s going on.
Should it be the sole criterion? Of course not.
Who, other than the dishonset and mean-spirited, pretend otherwise?
hugs,
Shirley Knott
Frank writes:
I thought the implications were obvious, and still do. In context, it makes it sound like
there’s a serious problem of people being “willing to” disenfranchise and marginalize people by accepting the validity of a test that takes intent into account.
I think that’s substantially false, and quite misleading. The point of an intent test is not to unfairly disenfranchise or marginalize anybody. It certainly limits their freedom in certain ways—notably their freedom to exert undue democratic pressure to get the government to promote their religious views, and especially their ability to organize a conspiracy to systematically exploit loopholes and gray areas, compounding the bias you already get from majorities exerting undue pressure.
I think that’s a reasonable limitation on free exercise, balancing it with freedom from establishment.
No test is perfect, and I think taking intent into account is reasonable.
Sorry, but I see the tests as valid in other contexts, too, e.g., religious displays, public prayer, etc. How is Kitzmiller v. Dover a bad example?
As Shirley pointed out in the case of murder, and I pointed out in the case of libel, intentions are often taken into account in law; why should establishment vs. exercise juriprudence be different?
Any test is going to be a heuristic, drawing a line through a gray area, and people will try to game the system, giving the majority a further advantage. Such “working the system” should be discouraged, and that’s one function of an intent test.
It’s one thing to sincerely misjudge a balance—e.g., to take a small risk that costs somebody else something. It’s another thing entirely to willfully discount another’s interest.
So, to pick a non-ID example, suppose a historic preservation board is deciding whether to make a church a historic monument. If they sincerely misjudge the balance between historic value and promotion of religion, that’s one thing. Mistakes happen, and as long as they don’t happen too often, it’s no big deal; some variation is acceptable, and if it’s relatively random, it’s not terribly biased overall.
But if a board intentionally monumentizes a church mostly to promote Christianity, and misrepresents its historic value, that’s quite another thing. They are intentionally shifting a balance and introducing a systematic, illegitimate bias in favor of the majority religion.
And if they engage in a widespread conspiracy to do that, e.g., with an organization intended to greatly increase the number of churches by improperly making them historic monuments, that’s especially different.
That is systematically exploiting the structure of government to promote a religious agenda, and there should be mechanisms in place to prevent it.
Unless you simply let “free exercise” win, at the expense of non-establishment, then you’d need more draconian tests of effect, to counter this “gaming the system” and maintain a balance.
For example, in the face of a conspiracy to monumentize lots of churches, you might just exclude all churches from consideration, to avoid such abuses. Is that what you want? I don’t.
Motive matters in murder when a murder is attempted or a murder occurs. It doesn’t matter if there is no act. One cannot be arrested for a murderous motive, unless it is accompanied by the forbidden action. Nevertheless, religion is different, and has been since the founding. “Freedom of belief,” as Jefferson points out, is absolute.
If my motive to support policy X is purely motivated by religion, but policy X is in fact supported by publicly accessible reasons and not religious authority, the policy should stand on its own merits, with my motive being of no relevance to its plausibility as a policy.
Again, your examples make my point: why should citizens’ motivation to advance a policy consistent with their religious tradition be dispositive when that same policy would stand if these citizens did not have that motive? Singling out “religious motive” for special sequestering is, in fact, disenfranchising citizens based on their beliefs (the belief being “the motive,” a belief that is causally effective in contributing to the bringing about of an action).
You perceive the system as being gamed because you think the policies are mistaken. I suspect that if the policies were “enlightened” and offered by the Archbishop of Canterbury as consistent with “Anglican doctrine,” you would, like the NCSE does with other religious pronouncements, praise the cleric for his clear headedness. If I were to bring up his motives as dispositive, you would rightly flame me for my illogic. And I would not quibble with your denouncement of my ignorance.
In sum it’s the policies, not the motives of the policy crafters, that should be the focus of our critiques. That seems so obviously correct, that I cannot believe anyone else, in a liberal democracy, would think otherwise.
Peace,
Frank
Correct. By analogy, then, what the creationists were trying to do is commit a wrongful act — smuggling poor guesswork without evidence into a science class. At that point, motive IS relevant. Why were they doing it? Was it just an ignorant mistake? Or did they have some other nefarious intent?
So what Judge Jones determined is that they did do a wrongful deed. Naughty school board. Then he determined why they did it: to sneak religion into the public school. Double naughty.
I’m stymied by the excessive use of “naughty.”
Please, please, please,
Support ID, that is the way that my noodly appendage can wriggle it’s way into logic.
After all, if God can have manifested himself through intelligent design, but ID isn’t necessarily limited to God, and aliens, as the God fearing know, don’t exist, then the noodly appendage has as much possibility of existence (and meddling in the physical universe) as the upstart God.
Frank, if “naughty” stymies you, how did you ever graduate law school?
And why are your pronouncing on public policy issues?
hugs,
Shirley Knott
PS. EXTREMELY nice job of shifting the argument. Who, other than you, is claiming that religious intent is in itself sufficient warrant to rule something illegal? Hmmm?
So, if I am a Christian, and my Christian belief system motivates me to advance a policy that sets witches and black people on fire, or otherwise destroys abortion clinics and the lives of their unholy doctors … we can shield that policy from scrutiny by claiming as a defense that “Religion is different” and “Freedom of belief” is absolute?
It seems to me that the major flaw with this argument is the nonsequitur from the striking down of a law to the effect of forcing those who hold the rejected beliefs to abandon thise beliefs. Show me how Judge Jones’s decision prevents others from believing that ID is true. Otherwise, how is the freedom to believe restricted by striking down illegal Creationist policies?
Frank writes:
The Dover board didn’t get in trouble for believing it would be good to institute a policy pushing religion through the public schools. They didn’t get in trouble for wanting to do it.
They got in trouble for doing it, intentionally.
Right. One can be arrested for negiligent homicide, for murder, or for committing murder as part of a widespread conspiracy to murder a lot of people, i.e., genocide.
Intent generally matters a lot.
Wait a second—are you saying that what you said before that sentence is irrelevant, so this is a (reverse) non sequitur?
No, it is not, and obviously cannot be. For example, if my religion tells me that killing certain people is okay, even good, I am allowed to believe that, and even to want to actually do it.
I am not allowed to kill people, to kill people on purpose, or even to attempt or conspire to kill people. Murder is murder, even if your motives are religious.
Conspiracy to commit genocide is still conspiracy to commit genocide. Motives are relevant to the seriousness of a crime, even if the motives are religious.
You seem to be saying that free exercise is so “absolute” that we can’t make a distinction between beliefs or desires, acts, and intentional acts or actual conspiracies. What a bizarre idea.
For the same general reason it’s illegal to take bribes. People acting on behalf of the government are not supposed to let their personal financial motivations matter. If they don’t think they get paid enough, that doesn’t give them the right to skim.
Likewise, they’re not supposed to let their religious motivations matter, except insofar as the government has struck an impersonal balance between accommodation and non-establishment. Individual government officials do not have the right to decide what the right balance is, to favor their religion; that’s just not their job.
What we’re talking about is pious corruption of governmental processes in favor of the majority religion. Government officials shouldn’t pander to rich people, and they shouldn’t pander to the majority religion.
You seem to think corruption is okay as long as it’s pious. But in general, it can’t be. That would justify government officials taking bribes, so long as the motive was religious rather than for personal gain—e.g., taking bribes and giving them to churches. This isn’t exactly that, but it’s close—using government resources to do church work, telling children pious lies.
Maybe, the following case is more illustrative. If I am an American Muslim who sincerely believes that President Bush and his advisors should all die in a nuclear blast… are my rights to believe being infringed by the latest surveillance policies, when my policy is to share and talk about my beliefs with others across the Internet and the phone? Am I being disenfranchised by the Federal Gov’t? If so, why is Beckwith wasting his time on something as trivial as Creationist policies in some school in Nowhere, PA?
Did you? I must have missed that.
I’m afraid so.
Not that it’s a bad counterargument to a certain intuitive appeal of ID. Just that it’s not a compelling argument, and the Dover case didn’t hinge on that.
I can carefully explain that, but I’m afraid you’d consider it excessive verbiage, etc.
Oh, you mean where you handwaved for a page about how you didn’t have to answer my question because of all the evidence you imagined you had; that non-answer was your answer?
BTW, you should call it a “wish experiment”. ‘Imagine we had a bunch of evidence that things are exactly as the real evidence says they are not’ does not rise to the level of “thought experiment” one might be familiar with from the likes of Einstein or Shrodinger.
Ivy, I think I explained myself reasonably well; if you didn’t buy it, I can accept that, and you can have the last word on the subject.