Thoughts in a Haystack

Sadly, there is yet more trouble to report in the "big tent."

In South Carolina, State Senator Mike Fair is trying to get the state science standards related to evolution rewritten. Fair is quoted as saying:

While it isn’t clear how "it all" relates to various isms, it seems Fair is stumbling towards a Discovery Institute approved "teach the controversy" position. Problem is, one of Fair’s supporters on the state Board of Education, Ron Wilson, a believer in a literal interpretation of the biblical account, thinks Fair doesn’t go far enough:

As the IDeologists learned to their sorrow in Dover, you can lead creationists to a school board but you can’t make ‘em think.

Meanwhile, the good folks of Lebec, California have ventured out into the treacherous waters of Intelligent Design versus evolution and may soon know what Pete Seeger meant about being waist deep in the Big Muddy.

The El Tejon Unified School District has . . . um . . . created a course for credit that purports to examine the philosophical questions surrounding ID and evolution. Having made pretty much a botch of the attempt (see the original syllabus for a prime example of letting the cat out of the bag), they got themselves sued by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which was a major player in the Dover school board case that resulted in the seminal decision by Federal Judge John E. Jones III that held that ID is a theological proposition, not a scientific one.

Some authorities have argued that ID could constitutionally be covered in comparative religion or philosophy courses. Perhaps relying on such opinions, a district teacher, Sharon Lemburg, proposed an elective course, entitled "Philosophy of Design," which is apparently being fully supported by the District’s Superintendent, John Wight. Ms. Lemburg is a special education teacher whose certification is in physical education, bringing to mind Woody Allen’s mot: "Those who can't do teach. And those who can't teach, teach gym." A casual glance at her original syllabus makes it almost superfluous to mention that she is the wife of an Assemblies of God minister.

After a couple of days of castigating "Darwinists" for being dogmatic and wanting to ban ID, the Discovery Institute woke up to the fact that, despite more than a decade of its best efforts to teach creationists the proper "nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean," the folks in Lebec had come up with a course that "wrongly mixes intelligent design with young earth creationism or Biblical creationism."

That, of course, is not the real objection to this class. Even if the young earth creationism was removed, the problem would remain that the focus is on the wrong level of the relevant philosophy. Evolutionary theory rests on exactly the same philosophical basis that underlies every other scientific field. The discussion, therefore, should be between the philosophy of science and the philosophy under which ID operates which, as we learned from Michael Behe in his testimony in Dover, would allow astrology equal scientific status with astronomy. Creationists don’t want to be seen as criticizing the whole of science, however, as that would make it all too clear that they are, in truth, intellectual Luddites who want to return the world to a pre-scientific age. The difficulty is, just as Judge Jones found it was illicit to single out evolution for "scientific" criticism because it was historically opposed by certain religious views, it is just as illicit to create a class to select evolution, out of all the sciences, for philosophical criticism.

In this light, it becomes obvious that the El Tejon Unified School District has attempted the mirror image of the original ID ploy. Despite all the DI’s protests to the contrary, the ID program was to inject a theological/philosophical proposition into elementary and high school science classes to give it the cache of science. Now, post-Dover, El Tejon seeks to take the scientific proposition that is evolutionary theory and "reduce" it to a philosophical argument mislabeled "Darwinism." In either case, the attempt to put creationism on the same epistemological footing as evolutionary theory in public schools is a violation of the Establishment clause in that it seeks to further a religious view.

This makes the letter the DI sent to the school district even more than usually ironic:

Perhaps the DI thinks that it has a copyright on the word "design." At the very least, one has to wonder how "scientists and other scholars" could be damaged by a high school course being found to be improper. Do you suppose Einstein, toiling away at the patent office, was worried about the Theory of Relativity being despoiled by the machinations of phys ed teachers?

Oh, wait! Einstein wasn't engaged in a political attempt to circumvent the United States Constitution, was he?