This year marks both the centennial of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, immortalized in the Hollywood movie Inherit the Wind, and the 20th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design trial, which I attended and reported on.
The Dover trial, decided December 20, 2005, was a modest affair. The judge in the case, John E. Jones III, had little if any training in either science or the philosophy of science, and his ruling was never appealed, so it only applies to the middle district of Pennsylvania. But the media spun the case as a watershed moment in the history of American public science, so it’s worth revisiting.
In some regards Scopes and Dover were polar opposites. In Scopes, the teaching of Darwinism was banned. In Dover, Darwinism was the favored child, and intelligent design was banned. The Scopes attorneys were famous orators; the Dover attorneys, relatively obscure.
At the same time there are striking parallels between the two trials. Both pitted Darwinism against a view that the living world is the work of a designing mind — at the Scopes trial, biblical creationism; at the Dover trial, the theory of intelligent design. Also, in the Scopes trial, pro-evolution attorney Clarence Darrow cross-examined his lawyer opponent, Williams Jennings Bryan, while Darrow himself evaded cross-examination and thus avoided having to defend evolutionary theory from the witness stand. Similarly, in the Dover trial the pro-evolution ACLU and their plaintiffs succeeded in removing from Dover biology classrooms any challenge to evolutionary theory.
There was also an explicit connection. At one point early on, the Dover trial judge told the press he planned to watch Inherit the Wind for “historical context.” This was troubling. The 1960 movie starring Spencer Tracy is widely acknowledged to be a grotesquely inaccurate depiction of the Scopes trial, and one flagrantly biased in favor of Darwinism. Nor did one need to be an expert historian to know this. An eminently accessible popular book about the trial, Summer for the Gods, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, had made this abundantly clear. Judge Jones could have learned this from two minutes of investigation.
That he had, in essence, recommended the film for historical context meant either that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, or that he hoped to get the press to view the Dover trial through the same distorted pro-Darwin lens that Inherit the Wind had trained on the Scopes trial.
Hope in Harrisburg
Yet I still hoped Judge Jones would give intelligent design a fair shake. I had three reasons. First, he had been appointed by President George W. Bush, and that summer Bush had voiced support for open inquiry and opposed a longstanding policy of teaching Darwinism as unquestionable dogma.
Second, in a previous case Judge Jones had ruled in favor of free speech, and hey, the Dover trial was a free speech case. The Dover school district was being tried for having a statement read in biology classes, encouraging students to keep an open mind about Darwinism and noting that if they wanted to learn about an alternative theory, intelligent design, there were books about it in the school library. Was the school district not free to so inform students?
Third, as I sat in the courtroom press section during the trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Judge Jones occasionally looked my way, and his expression seemed full of sympathetic fellow feeling, as if he were telling me, “Don’t sweat it. I’m all about free speech and open inquiry. I’ve got your back.”
Later the obvious occurred to me: Judge Jones had no idea who I was. His expressions of fellow feeling weren’t specifically for me; they were for the press pool, whom he had every reason to believe were, in the tradition of Scopes newsman H. L. Mencken, very much in Darwin’s corner. Also, I noticed that he didn’t look at pro-ID biologists Michael Behe and Scott Minnich in the same way. As they testified, plunging into the necessary scientific details to argue for intelligent design over Darwinism, his eyes would glaze over or wander the room.
This was not a man, I realized, eager to master even the rudiments of this scientific debate. He wanted an easy way out.
False Facts, Plagiarized
When Jones published his ruling, it was clear he had found it. His decision — against the school district and intelligent design — was lauded by the mainstream media as a careful, independent, and “masterful decision.” But the pivotal part — a 6,000-word section arguing that ID isn’t science — was lifted practically verbatim (more than 90 percent of it) from the “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” earlier submitted to him by the ACLU, who represented the plaintiffs in the trial.
It gets worse. Judge Jones copied into his ruling several erroneous factual claims made by the ACLU, errors exposed in the trial itself. As Discovery Institute’s Robert Crowther reported:
For example, Jones claimed that biochemist Michael Behe, when asked about articles purporting to explain the evolution of the immune system, responded that the articles were “not ‘good enough.’” Behe actually said the exact opposite: “It’s not that they aren’t good enough. It’s simply that they are addressed to a different subject.” Jones’ misrepresentation of Behe came directly from the ACLU’s “Findings of Fact.” Again copying from the ACLU, Jones insisted that “ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed… publications.” But, in fact, the court record contained evidence of several such publications.1
So much for careful, independent, and masterful.
Is Intelligent Design Science?
In his ruling, Judge Jones decided to move beyond the narrow legal issue of whether the Dover school board had a legitimate secular purpose in briefly alerting students to the theory of intelligent design, and instead he took it upon himself to tell scientists, science educators, and philosophers of science what is and isn’t science and, specifically, why intelligent design, in his opinion, isn’t science (even while conceding that ID arguments may be true).
According to him, intelligent design was merely “Reverend Paley’s” early 19th-century watch analogy2 updated for the modern era. In this, Judge Jones deftly combined two fallacies in a short space: ad hominem and guilt by association. In essence, he was saying Paley was a reverend arguing for God, so all design arguments, then and now, are just religious arguments.
Judge Jones offered three slightly more substantial reasons for his conclusion, but all three collapse under even the lightest pressure.
The first reason: “ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation.” No. Design theorists argue that an intelligent cause is the best explanation for certain features of the natural world. Whether the intelligent cause is supernatural or not is a separate issue. Jones countered this point by noting that most design theorists believe in the Christian God. But some design theorists do not, and in any case, Judge Jones is here committing the genetic fallacy, dismissing an argument based on its source.
Commented one legal scholar I spoke with at the time: “It is worse than horrible, if that is possible. Essentially, what the judge has concluded is that if one is a religious citizen who offers an argument for a point of view consistent with your religious worldview, you will be segregated from the public square. But not because your argument is bad, but because of your beliefs and the company you keep or may have kept. I can’t believe this could happen in America.”
Lest anyone accuse the judge of bowing to “the hobgoblin of little minds” (consistency), Judge Jones also noted that the Dover school board emphasized that even British philosopher and former atheist Antony Flew came to embrace certain ID arguments. Their point was that even respected scholars who are not Christians, or even theists, have examined intelligent design arguments and found them cogent. Judge Jones somehow twisted this into evidence that the Dover policy was all about religion; otherwise, why would they mention that Flew was a former atheist!
Judge Jones was also unfazed by the fact that design theory emphasizes that ID reasoning cannot identify the designer, and that any such insight must come from other lines of evidence and modes of inquiry — e.g., theology.
A Strawman Refuted
A second reason Judge Jones gave for concluding that ID isn’t science: “The argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s.”
The “contrived dualism” he referred to goes something like this: “If one can punch enough holes in Darwinism, then creationism must be true.” But this is a strawman. ID doesn’t reason that way. Consider Stephen Meyer’s article published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington the year before the trial, one of the peer-reviewed ID articles that Judge Jones claimed didn’t exist. There Meyer examines neo-Darwinian, punctuationalist, self-organizational, and structuralist theories for the Cambrian explosion of new animal forms in the fossil record. After exposing fatal flaws in each theory, he makes a positive case for intelligent design.3
Meyer also sets forth five explanatory categories that exhaust all the live and formerly live possibilities for explaining the Cambrian explosion: (1) We don’t need to explain the origin of the Cambrian animals, because they didn’t originate; rather, they existed for eternity past. (2) The Cambrian forms emerged by chance. (3) They emerged through lawlike natural processes. (4) They emerged by a combination of chance and lawlike processes. (5) They emerged by a process involving an intelligent cause. These options really do cover all the bases. Meyer demonstrated the inadequacy of the first four, and then made a case for the fifth, intelligent design.
Meyer doesn’t argue that he has proved his case in the way a deductive syllogism proves its conclusions. Building on the work of mainstream philosophers of science, he shows that scientific models are routinely advanced as arguments to the best explanation, and he argues from the evidence that intelligent design is the best explanation for the Cambrian explosion.
A third reason Judge Jones offered for concluding that ID isn’t science: “ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.” Not so. ID has merely been denounced by the governing bodies of various scientific organizations. Where Darwinists have mounted actual arguments against intelligent design, typically they have merely attacked strawmen, such as the judge’s misleading depiction of ID as just a negative argument, devoid of positive evidence for design.
The Logic of Intelligent Design
ID holds that we have broad and detailed experience with intelligent causes. Intelligent agents, unlike a blind evolutionary process, can look ahead to a future goal and arrange parts to achieve that goal. Such purposeful activity often leaves behind telltale features in the designed systems, a fact recognized in various scientific fields, including forensics and archeology. Meyer explains:
The scientists arguing for intelligent design do not do so merely because natural processes — chance, laws or the combination of the two — have failed to explain the origin of the information and information processing systems in cells. Instead, they also argue for design because we know from experience that systems possessing these features invariably arise from intelligent causes. The information on a computer screen can be traced back to a user or programmer. The information in a newspaper ultimately came from a writer — from a mental, rather than a strictly material, cause. As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler observed, “Information habitually arises from conscious activity.”4
Judge Jones attempted to dismiss this line of reasoning by quoting an ACLU expert witness who noted that the comparison between design in human artifacts and in natural structures is not perfect. But no design theorist ever claimed it was, nor does the design argument depend on their being identical.
Imagine if someone unfamiliar with British culture said, “Basketball, football, and baseball are all sports, possessing such-and-such common features. It’s very probable this strange activity among the Brits called cricket is also a sport, since it involves these same telltale features.” If we went by the logic of Judge Jones and the ACLU’s expert witnesses, we would find ourselves convinced that we couldn’t reason from the other sports examples to the conclusion that cricket is probably a sport. Why? Because there are some differences between cricket and the other three sports. That is, there is not “a perfect identity.” The reasoning is ludicrous.
The Courtroom of Nature
Judge Jones made many other incorrect assertions and illogical arguments, including the charge that ID isn’t science because it isn’t testable, a claim he discredited by elsewhere insisting that ID had been tested and refuted. (You can’t make this stuff up.)
Judge Jones’s 139-page opinion was a parade of ignorance and illogic. But even if the decision had been more carefully reasoned, it would have amounted to little. The debate between Darwinism and intelligent design will not be settled by courtroom judges. It will be settled on the scientific evidence. And that evidence continues to mount in favor of the view that nature is the work of a designing intelligence — and a most ingenious one at that.
Notes
- Robert Crowther, “Study Shows Federal Judge Copied ACLU Text in Dover Intelligent Design Ruling,” Evolution News and Views, December 12, 2006, https://evolutionnews.org/2006/12/study_shows_federal_judged_cop/.
- Paley argued that if you came across a watch on a heath, you could reasonably infer that it was purposively designed even if you were a primitive who had never seen a watch and didn’t know humans made them. You could infer design from the finely tuned arrangement of parts, arranged for the purpose of keeping time. He said the fine-tuning evident in living things bespoke design in the same way.
- Stephen C. Meyer, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 117, no. 2 (2004), 213–239.
- Stephen C. Meyer, “Not by Chance,” National Post (of Canada), December 1, 2005.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Salvo 73, and is republished here with the author’s permission.