Encore Post

On the road for a day and a half. Here is an encore post from last October, an issue that remains salient, sadly, as creationists have stepped up their presence in Texas before the next round of biology textbook approvals before the Texas State Board of Education. I discuss why intelligent design should not be in science books.

[From October 2006]: We’re talking past each other now over at Right Reason, on a thread that started out lamenting Baylor’s initial decision to deny Dr. Francis Beckwith tenure last year, but quickly changed once news got out that Beckwith’s appeal of the decision was successful.

I noted that Beckwith’s getting tenure denies ID advocates of an argument that Beckwith is being persecuted for his ID views (wholly apart from the fact that there is zero indication his views on this issue had anything to do with his tenure discussions). Of course, I was wrong there — ID advocates have since continued to claim persecution where none exists. Never let the facts get in the way of a creationism rant, is the first rule of creationism.

Discussion has since turned to the legality of teaching intelligent design in a public school science class. This is well settled law — it’s not legal, not so long as there remains no undisproven science to back ID or any other form of creationism.

Background: The Supreme Court affirmed the law in a 1987 case from Louisiana, Edwards v. Aguillard (482 U.S. 578), affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment against a state law requiring schools to teach creationism whenever evolution was covered in the curriculum. Summary judgment was issued by the district court because the issues were not materially different from those in an earlier case in Arkansas, McLean vs. Arkansas (529 F. Supp. 1255, 1266 (ED Ark. 1982)). There the court held, after trial, that there is no science in creationism that would allow it to be discussed as science in a classroom, and further that creationism is based in scripture and the advocates of creationism have religious reasons only to make such laws. (During depositions, each creationism advocate was asked, under oath, whether they knew of research that supports creationism; each answered “no.” Then they were asked where creationism comes from, and each answered that it comes from scripture. It is often noted how the testimony changes from creationists, when under oath.)

Especially after the Arkansas trial, it was clear that in order to get creationism into the textbooks, creationists would have to hit the laboratories and the field to do some science to back their claims. Oddly, they have staunchly avoided doing any such work, instead claiming victimhood, usually on religious grounds. To the extent ID differs from all other forms of creationism, the applicability of the law to ID was affirmed late last year in the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover.

Against this legal background, Dr. Francis Beckwith has been arguing that school boards may legally inject creationism into their curricula. His analysis is long and off the point; among other things he thinks that, philosophically, courts should not inquire into the religious motives of school boards and other legislative bodies when they pass such silly laws. In this argument, Beckwith appears to miss the essential elements upon which the courts rule: That there is no demonstration of science in the various flavors of creationism, and consequently no valid, secular reason to put it into school curricula.

In my days in intercollegiate debate, we called such cases “squirrels.” They depend on one’s roping-in the opponent to an off-topic discussion on some point where you actually have a case, in order to avoid arguing on all the issues where you are weak. In the case of creationism, the ID advocates wish to avoid arguing on the issues of whether they’ve done any significant or substantial lab work since 1981, because they haven’t. Having not paid the dues to be called science, having not purchased the research ticket to respectability the courts require, they need to argue something else to stay in the game.

The bottom line is this: Dr. Beckwith claims that it would or should be legal to teach intelligent design (ID) in public school science classes, as science. These claims are predicated on an assumption that science is behind the ideas of intelligent design — and that assumption is completely unwarranted. There is not enough science in ID to get a nomination for the IgNobel Prizes, let alone to warrant teaching it as science to innocent children.

Beckwith doesn’t see it that way, of course. He’s got a book out, Law, Darwinism, and Public Education, in which he argues that ID should be treated like just an alternative proposal, and in which he concludes that if a school district were to make the ruling just right, ID would be found to be good science to be taught to kids. I bought the book a couple of years ago — at a church conference featuring the Discovery Institute’s best videos and books, a science conference being something too scary for intelligent design, it appears — and I have intended at various times to make a good fisking of it. But there are problems: First and foremost, the book is so rife with error that I can’t get more than a couple of pages at a time without throwing it down in disgust at its lack of editing. Nor is there any financial incentive — one more analysis that shows ID is still outdated and bad science, and that the law has not changed since 1788, is not much in demand. Perhaps someday, when I get some real library time, I might fisk it anyway.

In other places I have likened Beckwith’s claim to a claim that, philosophically, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) should regulate pig farms in air traffic lanes near major airports, since, if pigs could fly, they might pose a hazard to commercial and general aviation. Such a claim is nearly indistinguishable from Beckwith’s claims in the soundness of their reasoning and arguments, and in the utter failure of the argument due to the error in a major premise. ID isn’t science, and pigs don’t fly.

Pig flight is a good analogy to Beckwith’s claims, I think. Logically, one can make the case that the FAA would have jurisdiction over farms with flying pigs. One can make that case under current law, which charges the FAA with worrying over hazards to aviation, and which in practice requires FAA and airports and airlines to seriously consider risks from birds around airports, as well as things like deer on the runways (hello O’Hare?). So, logically, philosophically, the case makes sense. It is a perfect squirrel case, except for this issue: Pigs don’t fly.

At Panda’s Thumb, earlier, I put it this way:

You have assumed that ID is science. It’s not. You’ve assumed that the science can be well demonstrated in a courtroom. No one has tried. It is unjustified, therefore, to make the leap to the position that teaching ID in a government-sponsored science class could be constitutional. I think the repeating of this canard is part of what makes non-legal scholars, like Tom DeLay, angry when the judges merely apply the law that exists, instead of the law that non-party partisans have told DeLay and others could exist. One could, philosophically, argue that the Federal Aviation Administration should regulate effluents from pigs, if it can be shown that pigs do fly. The effluents could, arguably, pose a hazard to commercial and recreational aviation, and they could have effects on the ground around pig airports. If the pigs fly in FAA-regulated areas, then the law is pretty clear that they fall into the purview of the FAA. But if the FAA shows up at an Arkansas pig farm to inspect the pigs, the farmer would be well within his rights to throw them off the farm. Pigs don’t fly, no matter the philosophical validity of the FAA’s having jurisdiction, if they did. ID is not science. That pig hasn’t even sprouted wings yet.

Dr. Beckwith, later in that thread, came as close as he ever has to dealing with the issue:

Ed. I don’t recognize my arguments in your comments. As you know, if you have read my book, I am not offering legal advice to teachers. I am assessing a debate over Constitutional Law. To employ an illustration, prior to our current First Amendment regime, lawyers argued in law reviews that hard core pornography is protected by the Constitution, even though those lawyers would not advise their individual clients to start purchasing pornography. So, there is a difference between the sort of advice one may give a client, and the more scholarly debate about the nature of our legal regime and what sorts of actions are permissible under it.

The difference between pornography and intelligent design being only that pornography really does exist, and can be found easily, and in some cases may be argued to have socially redeeming value (see, c.f., the Sistine Chapel).

In any case, I think we can conclude that Beckwith and I agree on this: Teachers, administrators, don’t try ID in the classroom. That pig won’t fly.

Update, December 2012: You probably ought to read subsequent pieces, by scholars with much more stature than I have.

That pig still ain’t flyin’!

Also, even more:

(Why are we still discussing this stuff, 9 years after ID got skunked in Texas before the education authorities, 7 years after the Dover, Pennsylvania decision, in which ID got skunked in federal court and declared “not science” before God and the whole world, and 87 years after the Scopes trial?)