(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

While all the strategizing in the wake of the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard case was being done by the intelligent design creationism (IDC) advocates under the auspices of the Discovery Institute, three other cases all set legal precedents for what would happen in Dover.

In 2000, a case involving religion in schools but not directly involving evolution reached the US Supreme Court. This was Santa Fe Independent School District v. DOE 530 U.S. 290. This was a case where a challenge was made to a policy where the school district had a practice of one student, who had been elected as Santa Fe High School’s student council chaplain, delivering a prayer over the public address system before each home varsity football game.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court ruled that such prayers were unconstitutional. For its ruling, the court relied on an alternative reading of the purpose and effect prongs of the Lemon test that was written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the 1984 case of Lynch v. Donnelly involving the display of a nativity scene by a municipality. O’Connor articulated what is now called the ‘endorsement test’. She said:

The second and more direct infringement [of the establishment clause] is government endorsement or disapproval of religion. Endorsement sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community. Disapproval sends the opposite message.

Writing for the majority in the 2000 Santa Fe case, Justice John Paul Stevens used that same language to overrule the policy of student-led prayer at football games:

School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are nonadherents “that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.”

This precedent was also used in the Dover case.

The second important case was also one that did not deal explicitly with evolution but had implications for Dover. It was the much publicized 2004 Elk Grove Unified School District. v. Newdow 542 U.S. 1 in which a parent Michael Newdow had challenged his daughter’s school for including the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. The US District Court ruled against him but this was overruled by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who found in his favor. The case was then appealed to the US Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court reversed the Appeals Court verdict 8-0 but on mixed grounds (Justice Scalia did not take part in the case). Five justices said that due to a family dispute about whether the father or mother had custody of the child and the standing to sue, the courts had no jurisdiction to review the case. Thus they did not go into the merits of the case and decide whether saying the phrase “Under God” in schools was constitutional or not. Justices Rehnquist, O’Connor and Thomas agreed with the verdict overturning the Appeals Court decision but said that the Supreme Court should have reviewed the case on the merits. They then proceeded to do so and said that the practice was constitutional.

In her concurring opinion on the ruling, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the decision on whether the government is involved in an impermissible endorsement of religion had to be made from the viewpoint of a ‘reasonable observer’ who “must embody a community ideal of social judgment, as well as rational judgment. . .must be deemed aware of the history of the conduct in question, and must understand its place in our Nation’s cultural landscape.”

The third case actually dealt with evolution and arose in 2002 when a school board in Cobb County, GA inserted stickers into their biology textbooks that informed students that “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

The sticker policy was challenged and in January 2005, in Selman v. Cobb County School District, US District Court judge Clarence Cooper ruled the policy unconstitutional, applying again the Lemon test.

He said that the sticker policy passed the ‘purpose’ prong of the Lemon test:

[A]fter considering the additional arguments and evidence presented by the parties and evaluating the evidence in light of the applicable law, the Court remains convinced that the Sticker at issue serves at last two secular purposes. First, the Sticker fosters critical thinking by encouraging students to learn about evolution and to make their own assessment regarding its merit. Second, by presenting evolution in a manner that is not unnecessarily hostile, the sticker reduces offense to students and parents whose beliefs may conflict with the teaching of evolution. For the foregoing reasons, the Court concludes that the Sticker satisfies the first prong of the Lemon analysis.

However, he said that the sticker failed the ‘effect’ prong and this made it unconstitutional and thus the stickers had to be removed. He used Justice Stevens’ language about endorsement in the 2000 Santa Fe case, and Justice O’Connor’s appeal to how a ‘reasonable observer’ might perceive the action, as part of his justification.

In this case, the Court believes that an informed, reasonable observer would interpret the Sticker to convey a message of endorsement of religion. That is, the Sticker sends a message to those who oppose evolution for religious reasons that they are favored members of the political community, while the Sticker sends a message to those who believe in evolution that they are political outsiders.

All these legal precedents set the stage for the most recent court battle over the teaching of evolution, in which IDC came under direct scrutiny. This occurred in Dover, PA in 2005 in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover, which I will begin to examine in the next post in this series.

POST SCRIPT: What topics are conservatives most interested in?

Some time ago, I wrote about how some people are trying to create an alternate reality on the internet so that people will not find their beliefs routinely challenged. Remarkably, such people consider Wikipedia and YouTube as part of this threatening reality, and created alternatives called Conservapedia and GodTube.

So now that time has passed, what topics are conservatives most interested in finding out about? Conservapedia has published the statistics. The results are interesting.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

To understand why there is such a deep-seated opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and how intelligent design creationism (IDC) came into being, one needs to understand its essential idea and the motivations of the people behind it.

On the surface, IDC seems to accept almost all of evolutionary ideas since it seems to leave unchallenged almost all of the key elements of the Darwinian structure, such as the non-constancy of species (the basic theory of evolution), the descent of all organisms from common ancestors (branching evolution), the gradualness of evolution (no sudden discontinuities), the multiplication of species, an old Earth, and natural selection as the driving mechanism for the process.

So how was IDC to advance the cause of religion if it seemed to accept so many evolutionary ideas? The strategy is explicitly outlined in an internal strategy document that has been labeled the ‘Wedge Strategy’ or the ‘Wedge Document’ put out in 1999 by the Center for Science & Culture of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which is the well-funded ‘think-tank’ that funds and supports the work of intelligent design creationists. This document came to light fairly recently, before the Dover trial, and it helped to undermine the case for the school board since it showed the religious motivations of those behind IDC.

Here is an extended passage from the introduction of the document that outlines the issues as seen by them:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art. (my italics)

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.

Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. (my italics)

This is why these religious people violently oppose Darwin’s theory. They see him, along with Freud and Marx as the source of the decline of modern society. Of course, Darwin is the most prominent target since the works of the other two do not carry quite the same paradigmatic status and are not taught in public schools.

A little later in the Wedge document one comes across the “Governing Goals” of the movement, which are:

• To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
• To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

So the goals of the IDC movement are clear. It takes aim at what it sees as the source of all evil, the idea that materialism is the basis of all knowledge. They feel that if they can displace materialism as an operating principle, then they can hope to eventually bring back a non-material god into the schools as an acceptable explanation of phenomena. The way they tried to do that was by arguing that there were a few biological systems of so-called ‘irreducible complexity’ whose existence was inexplicable using Darwinian materialistic methods and thus had to have non-material causes.

The long-term strategy of the Discovery Institute seems to be to first have the ideas of evolution undermined by allowing for the possibility of non-material causation for at least some evolutionary changes, then later introduce IDC as an alternative to the undermined theory of evolution, then bring god back into science education, and finally put god and the Bible and prayer back into public schools everywhere, thus saving the world from sin. They saw this as a slow, incremental advance, taking many years to reach its goal.

The strategy was quite carefully crafted and seemed to be making some progress. They got supporters elected to state school boards in Kansas and Ohio who inserted IDC-inspired language critical of evolution into their state science standards.

The IDC movement knew that eventually someone would challenge the use of IDC ideas in schools in the courts, and tried to avoid giving any reason for ruling IDC out on the basis of establishment clause violations. Their whole approach was to run a stealth campaign, based on what was essentially a public relations strategy. They carefully avoided talk of god as much as possible (at least in public). They did not even insist on teaching intelligent design in schools. Instead they adopted the strategy of asserting that evolution was ‘just a theory,’ that it had problems, that there was a controversy over some of its basic tenets, and that good science and teaching practices required that students be exposed to the nature of this alleged controversy. They got Cobb County in Georgia in 2002 to insert stickers in their biology textbooks that asserted that evolution was only a theory and not a fact.

This stealth approach caused some tension within the religious community since many religious people did not quite get it. Many fundamentalist Christians are militantly proud of their faith and do not feel at all apologetic about their attempts to kick evolution out and put god back in the classroom, since they felt he rightfully belonged there. They were proud of being Christians and they felt that the US was a Christian country. They viewed the delicate maneuvering of the IDC strategists not as a constitutionally astute strategy but as being somewhat cowardly, and needlessly accommodating of anti-Christian beliefs.

When I attended various IDC meetings in 2002 and 2003 I found a huge gulf between the IDC theorists who were the main speakers, and the rank and file attendees. The latter were largely fundamentalist, young Earth, Biblical literal Christians and they did not speak the sophisticated language of the IDC theorists. These people had a much simpler view of the world. In their view, the US was rapidly going to hell in a hand basket. Everywhere they looked, they saw signs of increasing decadence: more nudity, sex, pornography, abortions, crime, violence, profanity, blasphemy, and so on. They saw this as a direct consequence of removing god from the schools and teaching godless evolution, which said that we were no better than monkeys,

So while everyone agreed on the ultimate goal of removing the teaching of evolution from schools, the religiously naïve wanted to mount a direct assault to bring religion back into the classroom, while the more sophisticated IDC strategists felt that one needed to first subtly undermine the idea that materialist explanations were the only ones allowed by science, before introducing more overtly religious ideas.

These internal differences and tensions within the religious community about how to deal with the Darwinian menace stayed below the radar screen. It took the Dover trial to bring them completely out into the open.

POST SCRIPT: Chomsky on Iran

An interesting interview with Noam Chomsky on US-Iran relations.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

It was with this history of US Supreme Court decisions in mind that we can understand the emergence of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement. IDC has to be understood as a carefully crafted theory that was designed to overcome the legal restrictions placed by the establishment clause on inserting religion back into the public schools.

The fundamental goal was still the same: to undermine the theory of evolution and to bring back into schools a god-centered view of creation. But mindful of all the legal setbacks that previous efforts had met, IDC advocates like Berkeley law professor Philip Johnson, tried to find a way to make it acceptable to the courts. Johnson is considered the father of the intelligent design creationism movement, and his book Darwin on Trial (1991) marked its beginning.
[Read more…]

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Following the overturning of the 1974 Tennessee “equal emphasis” law, neighboring Axis of Weevils member state Arkansas took the lead in trying to find ways to undermine evolution and introduce religious ideas of creation into the biology curriculum in ways that would not violate the establishment clause. The lesson they drew from the Tennessee case was that any legislation aimed at achieving these goals had to be worded in neutral ways that avoided any and all religious language or references to the Bible. What emerged from this effort is what is now known as ‘creation science’, a superficially non-religious alternative to the theory of evolution by natural selection.
[Read more…]

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The 1968 Epperson ruling left open the question of what should be done about the teaching of some scientific theory that went clearly went against a religious belief. Wouldn’t allowing the teaching of just that theory without balancing it with the teaching of the religious belief violate the strict neutrality, as required by the 1947 Everson verdict?

The concerns raised by Supreme Court Justices Black and Stewart in Epperson were good ones and it was another case in 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 that, although not dealing directly with the teaching of evolution, led to further clarification of this tricky issue and lay the groundwork for future evolution cases.

The Lemon case arose from two separate laws bundled together. One was passed in Rhode Island that provided “for a 15% salary supplement to be paid to teachers in nonpublic schools at which the average per-pupil expenditure on secular education is below the average in public schools. Eligible teachers must teach only courses offered in the public schools, using only materials used in the public schools, and must agree not to teach courses in religion.” The second law was passed in Pennsylvania and authorized “the state Superintendent of Public Instruction to “purchase” certain “secular educational services” from nonpublic schools, directly reimbursing those schools solely for teachers’ salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials. Reimbursement is restricted to courses in specific secular subjects, the textbooks and materials must be approved by the Superintendent, and no payment is to be made for any course containing “any subject matter expressing religious teaching, or the morals or forms of worship of any sect.” ”
[Read more…]

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The landmark 1968 Epperson case is interesting for a couple of reasons. The shadow of Scopes influenced the ruling and, although the verdict was unanimous, the differences in reasoning by the various justices influenced the strategies adopted in later attempts to combat the teaching of evolution.

In their opinions giving their different reasons for overturning the statute, Justices Abe Fortas and Hugo Black essentially repeat the debate that had occurred nearly a half-century earlier between Darrow and Bryan. In fact, Fortas resurrected the ghost of the Scopes trial in his opinion, referring to the “sensational publicity” surrounding that trial.
[Read more…]

(Note this has been updated)

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

1968 was a watershed year for attempts to ban the teaching of evolution in schools. The events of that year arose because of the rise of creationist thinking in the 1960s. Influential in the rise of the creationist movement was the publication in 1961 of the book The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris. This was a 500-page book that tried to make the case that scientific evidence supported a literal interpretation of the Bible, down to a 6,000 year old Earth and Noah’s flood. While Whitcomb was a theologian, Morris had a doctoral degree in hydraulic engineering with minors in geology and mathematics. He later founded in 1970 the Institute for Creation Research to advance these ideas.

These new creationist groups took the Bible very literally, more so than William Jennings Bryan, and in fact they thought that during the Scopes trial Bryan had betrayed Christianity by allowing that the creation days of Genesis may have lasted longer than 24 hours, thus allowing the possibility that universe may have been around for more than 6,000 years. The new creationists were having none of that wishy-washiness. Coupled with their strict literal interpretation of the Bible was the powerful feeling that the teaching of evolution had to be countered.

As I wrote in Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs (2000, p. 4):

Initial challenges to the theory of evolution took the form of demands that schools and textbook publishers acknowledge that Darwinian evolution was “only a theory” and not a scientific “fact,” and hence it should be eliminated from the science curriculum since science was supposed to be only concerned with facts. . . But these initial challenges had only minor success. Schools and teachers could hardly be expected not to say anything at all to students about how life and the universe came to be. Since Darwinian evolution had become accepted by professional scientists as the main organizing principle in understanding the appearance of different life forms, it was inevitable that science textbooks and the training of science teachers would reflect that thinking, albeit in a fairly ad-hoc manner.

The paradox was that despite the near universal teaching (in one form or another) of Darwinian evolution in schools, surveys showed a surprising resistance among the general public to key tenets of the theory, especially the one that said that humans and apes had common ancestors. As recently as 1988, 38% of college students believed that human life originated in the Garden of Eden. Feeling that perhaps the reason for this state of affairs was that evolution was not being taught properly, the scientific community planned and implemented a thoroughgoing reform of biology science texts, culminating in the 1960s with the BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) textbook series that had evolutionary ideas as a major theme permeating the texts. In these books, there was no escaping the fact that evolution was seen as the organizing principle in biology with no viable alternative.

The BSCS series was widely adopted by schools; but was perceived by creationists as a direct assault by the scientific community on their religious beliefs and galvanized them into responding.

Part of the thrust towards better science education was due to the shock that the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 created. The sense of panic that accompanied the idea that the US was falling behind the Soviet Union in science and technology no doubt helped policymakers override religious believers. These developments led to the next round of court cases.

Recall that even as late as the 1960s, the 1925 Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of evolution was still technically on the books in Tennessee as being constitutional although in the wake of the Scopes trial nobody had enforced it. Texas and Louisiana had also passed laws prohibiting any mention of evolution in textbooks that were approved by the state. ((Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson, 1997, p. 221)

In 1928, Arkansas (like Tennessee in 1925) had passed a law by popular referendum that made it unlawful for a teacher in any state supported school or university to teach or to use a textbook that teaches “that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals.” This law, like the Butler Act after Scopes, was also never enforced until 1965 when the state adopted the BSCS textbooks that emphasized evolution. But since the law banning the teaching of evolution was still on the books and since the new textbooks explicitly required the teaching of evolution, the state teacher’s organization saw the opportunity to put the law to the test and challenged it using, as in Scopes, another young biology teacher (Susan Epperson) as the key player, this time as the lead plaintiff challenging the validity of the law, rather than as someone accused of breaking the law.

The trial judge ruled in favor of Epperson and overturned the law on the grounds that it unconstitutionally limited the teacher’s freedom to teach about theories of origins. The state appealed and the Arkansas Supreme Court overruled the trial judge saying that the Arkansas law was a valid exercise of the State’s power to specify the curriculum in public schools.

(As a footnote, as the Arkansas case worked its way up to the Supreme Court, in Tennessee another teacher Gary Scott was threatening to take similar legal action against the Butler Act. This case was initiated in 1967 and coming along at the same time as the release of the memoirs of Scopes, had the potential to make Tennessee the laughing stock of the nation again. This put pressure on the state legislature and in 1967 they finally decided to repeal the Butler Act, bringing that particular chapter of the religion-evolution wars to a close, although other battles would continue.)

So after the passage of more than four decades, the Epperson case achieved what the Scopes case had aspired to do but had failed: be a test case on basic First Amendment issues to be adjudicated by the US Supreme Court. When the Epperson v. Arkansas case finally reached the US Supreme Court in 1968, the court unanimously ruled that the statute effectively banning the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional. But the court but did not agree on the reasons for doing so. Most initially wanted to overturn it on the grounds that the statute was too vague rather than that it violated the establishment clause, but in the end Justice Abe Fortas wrote the majority opinion saying that it was indeed a First Amendment establishment clause violation.

In the summary of the ruling on Epperson v. Arkansas 393 US 97, it states among other things:

“(b) The sole reason for the Arkansas law is that a particular religious group considers the evolution theory to conflict with the account of the origin of man set forth in the Book of Genesis. . .

(c) The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion. . .

(d) A State’s right to prescribe the public school curriculum does not include the right to prohibit teaching a scientific theory or doctrine for reasons that run counter to the principles of the First Amendment.. . .(my italics)

(e) The Arkansas law is not a manifestation of religious neutrality.”

Note that in the italicized section, the court rejects simple majoritarian thinking, saying that constitutional restrictions limit the power of school boards to completely prescribe the curriculum.

But while the 1968 Epperson ruling was a clear victory for the teaching of evolution and provided the definitive answer that the 1925 Scopes case had sought and failed to deliver, the opinions of the various judges provides some interesting perspectives and arguments that are worth reviewing, and will be the subject of the next post.

POST SCRIPT: Teasing telemarketers

Telemarketers are annoying but I also feel sorry for them because it must be a really awful job. I do not give them a hard time, instead politely terminating the conversation quickly. But someone named Tom Mabe decided to have some fun at the expense of a telemarketer.