Ken Miller, Genie Scott & Barbara Forrest: 15 Years After Dover

I have been discussing the the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial which ended exactly 15 years ago last Sunday . Three of the key figures who supported the plaintiffs recently sat down for interviews with S. Joshua Swamidass and (on two of the interviews) Nathan Lents for the Peaceful Science blog. Videos of the interviews can be found at the bottom of the page.

Ken Miller (left), a cell biologist and textbook author, appeared at the trial as an expert witness. If you attended high school anytime after 1990 you likely used the biology text book he co-authored with Joseph Levine. (Whereas if you’re my age, it was probably the textbook your children used.) In fact, it was the Dover School Board’s objection to what they saw as that book’s insufficiently critical approach to evolution that instigated the actions which led to the lawsuit.

Miller is a veteran of the war against creationism and his 1981 debate against Henry Morris, one of the founders of the modern Young Earth Creationist movement, remains a model of how to debate a science denier. (Audio of the debate can be heard on the NCSE’s Youtube channel.)

At the time of the trial, anthropologist Eugenie (Genie) Scott (left) was director of the National Center for Science Education, which acted as consultant to the plaintiffs and was instrumental in forming the legal strategy.

Philosopher Barbara Forrest (below) also appeared as an expert witness, and her testimony was largely based on the argument that ID did not qualify as a science because it is not grounded in methodological naturalism. We will return to this point later.

One thing that emerges from these interviews is that those involved on both sides of the conflict were expecting the issue of ID to come before the courts eventually. In fact, the Discovery Institute was actively seeking a school district that would provide a test case to support their position that ID was distinct from creationism and, therefore, not subject to the Constitutional limitations that prohibited the teaching of creationism. Forrest mentions that the book she co-authored with Paul R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, was written, in part, to ensure that ID’s historic roots in creationism would be documented when the trial took place.

However, it was also apparent that Dover was not the trial that the DI wanted. It is little remembered that the DI did, in fact, get the hearings it wanted, which took place before the Kansas State Board of Education just a few months prior to the Dover trial. Those hearings were boycotted by the scientific community and resulted in ideas and language promoted by the Discovery Institute being implemented as school policy. Although, to that extent, the Kansas hearings were a success for the DI, in the end the result was of little consequence after the verdict in Dover was delivered. The DI’s campaign to have ID adopted as part of the curriculum by US school boards fizzled out after the trial. Today, while ID has not gone away by any means, its proponents are no longer seriously pursuing a grandiose plan to overthrow secularism and implement a society grounded in fundamentalist religion. Instead, their energies are increasingly directed to limiting the degree to which religious faith is brought into line with the findings of science.

Was the Dover verdict correct?

It’s important to understand that this case did not depend solely on demonstrating that ID is not supported by good scientific evidence. There are no laws in the U.S. that ban the teaching of of bad science. The plaintiffs had to demonstrate that the policies adopted by the school board amounted to an endorsement of a particular religious view. The legal strategy had two prongs. The first prong relied on demonstrating that, in this specific instance, those promoting Intelligent Design, both from the school board and within the ID movement in general, were motivated by the desire to promote religion. Since the teaching of creationism had already been found by the US Supreme Court to violate the Constitution, in order to argue this point it was sufficient to demonstrate that ID was a derivative of creationism.

The second prong entailed making philosophical arguments regarding the nature and definition of science which, it was claimed, excluded ID by virtue of its failure to adhere to methodological naturalism (MN). However, it is not a matter of universal agreement among philosophers of science that MN is a necessary aspect of science, and it appears this position has only become less widely accepted since the trial. I have touched on this issue in a previous post and, as Larry Moran mentioned in an article written on the 10th anniversary of Dover, Genie Scott has since acknowledged this divergence of opinion. It should be noted that Miller, Scott and Forrest use the term “methodological naturalism” in the sense of what philosopher Maarten Boudry would call intrinsic methodological naturalism, as opposed to provisional or pragmatic methodological naturalism.

It seems to me that this understanding of MN would lead to the exclusion of many other ideas that are now considered part of science . For instance, Scott mentions that there is no such thing as a “theometer” that can detect and measure the actions of God. However, phenomena that occur beyond the event horizon of a black hole are also beyond our ability to measure. This does not prevent theoretical physicists from formulating hypotheses about what is happening within black holes. Scott also says that the actions of a god cannot be controlled and manipulated in an experiment. But if that places God outside the purview of science, then it would also be true that science could not be used to determine whether climate change is due to the actions of intelligent beings like humans.

It is, in fact, common for religious apologists to claim that God has left evidence of his existence in the physical world, whether in the form of miracles or of natural phenomena like the fine tuning of universal constants. One does not not have to accept these as sound arguments to point out that they are arguments that can be scrutinized by using the tools of science.

In the Eugenie Scott interview, there is much discussion of how an educator should best deal with students who are unwilling to learn about evolution because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. The consensus among the three discussants is that the teacher should take the position that science is limited to considering natural explanations only. They also suggest a teacher should reassure creationist students that they need only understand how an evolutionary biologist would answer a particular question, and not to actually agree with this answer. I can see, in pragmatic terms, how this might keep the creationist student quiet and allow the other students to learn in peace. It might also allow the creationist student to give the correct answer on an exam. However, it would not likely result in the student actually accepting that answer as the correct one.

This approach also encourages a view of science as nothing more than a particular belief system that is no more or less valid than the belief system to which this student might be exposed every Sunday when he is told in his church that the earth is only 6000 years old. This student, and his parents, might well then question why only one belief is being taught to him during the week, at tax payer expense no less, just because that particular belief is arbitrarily given the name “science” rather than “religion.” Which is how the Dover case ended up happening.

By no means do I wish to diminish the very thorough and skilled job done by Miller, Scott, Forrest and the rest of the team supporting the Dover plaintiffs. However, that job was made easier by the actions of the creationists themselves. The school board members promoting ID came across as self-righteous and dishonest bullies and had made little effort to hide their religious motivations prior to the trial. The Intelligent Design activists also left a trail of evidence that clearly tied ID to creationism (cf. “Cdesign Proponentsists”). If the creationists had not been so careless and stupid, would persuading the judge to accept a philosophical view of science that is, at the very least, subject to scholarly disagreement have been sufficient to obtain a favorable verdict?

I cannot, of course, claim to be an expert on US Constitutional law. But for what it’s worth, I would say that the verdict in this case was correct as it applied to the specific set of circumstances that were the subject of the lawsuit, whereby a group of religious activists abused their position of authority to force teachers to proselytize in science classes. It does not necessarily follow from this, however, that Intelligent Design, in and of itself, can never be legally taught in a US classroom. And it may not always be possible to rely on the First Amendment to prevent this from happening.

All that aside, these interviews are essential viewing for anyone interested in this important trial as well as in the history of the creationist movement in general.