Teaching the Origins Controversy:

Science, Or Religion, Or Speech?

David K. DeWolf^*

Stephen C. Meyer^**

Mark Edward DeForrest^***

Table of Contents Page

I. Introduction... 40

II. A Brief History of the Origins Controversy. 46

A. Classical Science-Based Design Arguments.. 46

B. Darwin and the Eclipse of Design. 48

C. Problems with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and the

Re-emergence of Design........ 49

III. May Spokes Teach Criticism? 56

IV. A Brief Introduction to Contemporary Design Theory 59

A. A Theory of Intelligent Design. 59

B. Design Theory: An Empirical Basis?. 61

V. But Is It Science? Darwinism, Design and Demarcation. 66

A. McLean v. Arkansas and the Definition of Science 66

B. The Demise of Demarcation Arguments.. 68

C. Majority and Minority Opinions..... 73

D. Novel Paradigms v. Establishment Science: Majority and

Minority Perspectives in Science....... 74

E. Daubert’s Redefinition of Science 76

F. An Answer for Spokes 78

VI. Is It Religion? The Theory of Intelligent Design and the Establishment Clause 79

A. Defining Religion 80

B. Applying the Ninth Circuit’s Test for Religion 85

C. Do Religious Implications Turn a Theory into Religion?. 87

D. Extending Edwards v. Aguillard to Cover Design Theory? 90

E. The Legal Differences Between Creation Science and

Design Theory. 93

F. A Residual Lemon Objection. 95

G. Back to Spokes 98

VII. Is It Speech? Design Theory and Viewpoint Discrimination 100

A. The Rosenberger Revolution 103

B. Edwards v. Aguillard Revisited. 106

VIII.. Conclusion. 109

I. Introduction

One can hardly imagine a more contentious issue in the American culture wars than the debate over how biological origins should be taught in the public schools. On the one hand, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Civil Liberties Union have insisted that any departure from a strictly Darwinian approach to the issue constitutes an attack on science itself, and even an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into the public school science curriculum. On the other hand, many parents and religious activists have long rebelled against what they perceive as a dogmatic attack on their religious beliefs. Beginning in the 1970s, such activists sought to promote a Bible-based curriculum—known as “scientific creationism”—as either a complement or an alternative to the standard Darwinist curriculum advocated by the National Academy of Sciences. And so the battle lines were drawn.

When confronted with a conflict between establishment science and religious fundamentalism, most lawyers have assumed that the law clearly favors the former. And indeed, although the creationists won some battles in state legislatures during the 1980s, they clearly lost the war in the courts. In McLean v. Arkansas Board of Educ.¹ and Edwards v. Aguillard,² the courts ruled that teaching “scientific creationism” or “creation-science” would have resulted in an unconstitutional advancement of religion. Media reports have portrayed all subsequent local controversies as reruns of these earlier battles—some even invoking imagery from the Scopes trial from the 1920s.³

Such reports have, unfortunately, served to obscure rather than illuminate the legal issues that school boards and their lawyers now increasingly face. Not only are the legal issues surrounding the Edwards decision more complex than often reported, but the challenge to the Darwinian curriculum in public education has now changed. Indeed, as the new century begins, a school board lawyer is far less likely to confront a religion-based challenge to the current biology curriculum than he is to face a situation resembling the one portrayed in the following hypothetical:

John Spokes has been teaching biology for several years at a public high school in Middletown, Anystate. In previous years, Spokes has spent several class periods discussing Darwin’s theory of evolution, providing students with a clear overview of the standard evidence and arguments for contemporary Darwinian⁴ theory, as well as key concepts such as natural selection, random mutation, and descent with modification that students need in order to understand the theory. In addition to describing how biological evolution explains the origin of new living forms from existing forms, he also has discussed how the theory of chemical evolution explains the origin of the first life starting from simple chemicals.

In his discussion of these theories, Spokes provided a standard textbook treatment, never departing from the strictly naturalistic or materialistic renderings of these theories that textbooks present. Thus, he explained that the evolutionary process is “random and undirected” and that it occurs “without either plan or purpose” as some textbooks phrase it.⁵ He has also explained that Darwin’s theory explains the appearance of design in living organisms by the “impersonal” mechanism of natural selection, and thus envisions no role for a “guiding hand” or “intelligent designer” in the origin of new life forms.⁶ Following Ayala, and other prominent biologists and biology textbook writers, Spokes has described “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment” as precisely his ability to explain the apparent design of living systems “without resort to a Creator or other external agent.”⁷

Despite regular assurances to his students that evolutionary theory does not conflict with religious belief, Spokes has encountered increasing criticism of his teaching methods over several years. True, some parents (and students) complain that his lessons conflict with the Bible. Yet others have begun to complain that his lectures make “a selective presentation of the scientific evidence.” This disturbs Spokes. After one conversation with several parents, including a local physician and geneticist, Spokes agrees to read several books and articles that they say will provide a specifically scientific critique of contemporary Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theory.

To his surprise, Spokes finds himself impressed with much of what he reads. Articles from the American Biology Teacher, for example, document rather egregious errors in textbooks presentations—errors which have the effect of overstating the evidential case for neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theory.⁸ Spokes is disturbed to find that many of the “icons” of evolution found in his textbook, such as Haeckel’s falsified embryological drawings, the peppered moths, and the Miller-Urey experiment, are seriously misleading.⁹

Other scientific articles suggest that textbooks commit many errors of omission—errors that understate the evidential difficulties with neo-Darwinian claims. In his reading, Spokes learns about the so-called “Cambrian explosion,” a term describing the sudden appearance of most of the major animal “phyla” (or “body plans”) in the Cambrian period (530 mya), in clear contradiction to Darwinian expectations about the fossil record. Spokes also notices that scientists writing in technical journals openly discuss the challenge that these data pose to the neo-Darwinian prediction of gradual step-by-step change.¹⁰ Yet Spokes knows that most basal biology texts do not even mention the Cambrian explosion, let alone that it might challenge contemporary Darwinism.

Spokes’s reading on the Cambrian explosion sensitizes him to another issue—one of definition. Spokes begins to suspect that textbooks have created confusion by using the term “evolution” as though it were a unitary concept, even though it can refer to everything from the universal common ancestry thesis, to small-scale change, to large-scale innovation via a strictly mindless material mechanism.¹¹ Moreover, technical literature suggests that while Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection acting on random variations explains small-scale “micro-evolutionary” changes (such as the beak size and shape of the Galapagos finches), it fails to explain the large scale “macro-evolutionary” transformations required to build novel organs, body plans, and morphological structures.¹² It now seems to Spokes that the equivocal use of terminology has led, again, to overstating the scientific consensus about the sufficiency of neo-Darwinism. The failure to define terms also seems to have created an “all or nothing approach” to the subject of evolution that has prevented careful consideration of separate propositions and a variety of possible views.

For example, by now Spokes has read about a number of scientists who accept “evolution” in one or more of the senses described above, but who do not accept the classical Darwinian explanation of apparent design. Indeed, he notices that many scientists now question whether natural selection (and other similarly naturalistic mechanisms) can explain away all instances of “apparent design,” as classical Darwinism and modern neo-Darwinism assert. Some of these scientists argue that certain features of living systems such as “irreducibly complex” molecular machines in cells, or the “information content of the DNA molecule,” suggest real design by a purposeful or intelligent agent. Spokes finds these ideas provocative and fascinating, though not altogether congenial to his own way of thinking. Nevertheless, he admits that the scientists advancing these ideas have excellent credentials and appeal to scientific evidence not religious authority. He finds a book by biochemist Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box,¹³ particularly impressive in this regard.

After two summers of reading such materials, Spokes finds himself in a quandary. Spokes is not entirely sure how to incorporate what he has read into the way he teaches his high school students. For one thing, he is not politically naive. He has read statements issued by the National Academy of Sciences,¹⁴ the National Association of Biology Teachers,¹⁵ and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,¹⁶ which urge him to ignore any criticism of Darwinism as unscientific and religiously motivated. He realizes that he may be accused of “attacking science,” or “teaching creationism,” or even “bringing religion into the science classroom.” Still, he finds it troubling that his students learn nothing of important differences of opinion among scientists, and he is confident that, regardless of anyone else’s motivation, his motivation is only to “teach the controversy”¹⁷ and to discuss scientific evidence and how scientists interpret it differently.

Spokes decides that at a minimum he must modify his presentation to reflect the additional information and diversity of scientific opinion that he has encountered in his study. In addition to presenting evidence and arguments for the standard biological and chemical evolutionary theory as he has done before, he plans four changes in his pedagogy. First, he wants to correct the blatant factual errors in his textbook that overstate the evidential case for neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theory. Second, he intends to tell students about the evidential challenges to these theories that current textbooks fail to mention. Third, he wants to define the term “evolution” without equivocation and to distinguish clearly between those senses of the term that enjoy widespread support among scientists and those that remain controversial, even if only among a minority of scientists. Finally, he wants to tell his students that a growing minority of scientists do see evidence of real, not just apparent, design in biological systems.

Wisely, Spokes decides to bring his plan to his principal, and ultimately to the school board, to be sure he is on safe ground. Is he?

Although this portrait of Spokes is hypothetical,¹⁸ the issues it raises are not. Indeed, an increasing number of teachers around the country have begun to implement very similar changes to their own biology curriculum, often, though not always, creating controversy.¹⁹ School boards, fearing both ideological strife and costly litigation, have often not known how to react to such teachers. On the one hand, forbidding any dissent from Darwinian theory smacks of censorship. On the other, even school board members sympathetic to such changes assume that federal law forbids science educators to deviate from an exclusively Darwinian curriculum. In short, many school boards do not know what the law allows.

This article will attempt to clarify what the law does allow teachers to teach in their biology classrooms. In the process, it will answer three key questions necessary to deciding the legal status of Spokes’s proposed curriculum. These are:

• Is It Science? Are Spokes’s intended changes in his biology curriculum scientific? Is his plan to correct and critique textbook presentations of neo-Darwinism scientific? Are the alternative theories that Spokes wants to present (including the theory of intelligent design) scientific?

• Is It Religion? Does Spokes’s plan to correct and critique textbook presentations of neo-Darwinism constitute an establishment of religion? Does Spokes’s plan to expose his students to evidence of design and design theory qualify as teaching religion? Does the First Amendment prevent the presentation of this point of view?

• Is It Speech? Do Spokes’s plans to correct and critique textbook presentations of neo-Darwinism, and to expose students to the alternative theory of intelligent design, enjoy protection under the First Amendment, either in the prohibition of viewpoint discrimination, or as an exercise of academic freedom?

Before addressing these questions, however, we must first place them in a broader historical context.

II. A Brief History of the Origins Controversy

A. Classical Science-Based Design Arguments

Prior to the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, many Western thinkers, for over two thousand years, had answered the question “how did life arise?” by invoking the activity of a purposeful designer or creator. Design arguments based upon observations of the natural world were made by Greek and Roman philosophers such as Plato²⁰ and Cicero,²¹ by Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, and by Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas.²²

The idea of design also figured centrally in the modern scientific revolution (1500-1700).²³ As historians of science have often pointed out, many of the founders of early modern science assumed that the natural world was intelligible precisely because they also assumed that it had been designed by a rational mind. In addition, many individual scientists—Johannes Kepler in astronomy,²⁴ John Ray (1627-1705) in biology,²⁵ Robert Boyle (1627-1691) in chemistry²⁶—made specific design arguments based upon empirical discoveries in their respective fields. This tradition attained an almost majestic rhetorical quality in the writing of Sir Isaac Newton, who made both elegant and sophisticated design arguments based upon biological, physical, and astronomical discoveries. Writing in the General Scholium to the Principia, Newton suggested that the stability of the planetary system depended not only upon the regular action of universal gravitation, but also upon the very precise initial positioning of the planets and comets in relation to the sun. As he explained:

[T]hough these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws . . . [Thus] [t]his most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.²⁷

Or as he wrote in the Opticks:

How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent . . . .²⁸

Despite the objections of some enlightenment philosophers, notably David Hume, science-based design arguments continued well into the early nineteenth century, especially in biology. William Paley’s (1743-1805) Natural Theology, published in 1803 (several years after Hume’s criticism of the design argument), is the most notable example. Paley’s work catalogued a host of biological systems that suggested the work of a superintending intelligence. He argued that the astonishing complexity and superb adaptation of means to ends in such systems could not originate strictly through the blind forces of nature, any more than could a complex machine such as a pocket watch.²⁹

B. Darwin and the Eclipse of Design

Acceptance of the design argument finally began to abate during the late nineteenth century with the emergence of increasingly powerful materialistic explanations of apparent design, particularly Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.³⁰ Darwin argued in 1859 that living organisms only appeared to be designed. To make this case, he proposed a concrete mechanism, natural selection acting on random variations, that could explain the adaptation of organisms to their environment (and other evidences of apparent design) without actually invoking an intelligent or directing agency. Darwin saw that natural forces would accomplish the work of a human breeder, and thus that blind nature could come to mimic, over time, the action of a selecting intelligence—a designer. If the origin of biological organisms could be explained naturalistically,³¹ as Darwin argued, then explanations invoking an intelligent designer were unnecessary and even vacuous.³²

Even so, natural selection as a causal mechanism had a mixed reception in the immediate post-Darwinian period. As the historian of biology Peter Bowler has noted, classical Darwinism entered a period of eclipse, in part because Darwin lacked a theory of the origin and transmission of new heritable variation.³³ By the late 1930s and 1940s, however, natural selection was revived as the main engine of evolutionary change as developments in a number of fields helped to clarify the nature of genetic variation.³⁴ The resuscitation of the variation/natural selection mechanism by modern genetics and population genetics became known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis. According to the new synthetic theory of evolution, the mechanism of natural selection acting upon random variations (especially including small-scale mutations) sufficed to account for the origin of novel biological forms and structures. Small-scale “microevolutionary” changes could be extrapolated indefinitely to account for large-scale “macroevolutionary” development. With the revival of natural selection, the neo-Darwinists would assert, like Darwinists before them, that they had found a “designer substitute” that could explain the appearance of design in biology as a result of the action of a wholly natural mechanism.³⁵ As Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr has explained, “[T]he real core of Darwinism . . . is the theory of natural selection. This theory is so important for the Darwinian because it permits the explanation of adaptation, the ‘design’ of the natural theologian, by natural means.”³⁶

C. Problems with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis

and the Re-emergence of Design

Since the late 1960s, the modern synthesis that emerged during the 1930s and 40s has begun to unravel in the face of new developments in paleontology, systematics, molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. Since then a series of technical articles and books—including such recent titles as Evolution a Theory in Crisis (1986) by Michael Denton, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (1987) by Soren Lovtrup, The Origins of Order (1993) by Stuart A. Kauffman, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots (1994) by Brian C. Goodwin, Reinventing Darwin (1995) by Niles Eldredge, The Shape of Life (1996) by Rudolf A. Raff, Darwin’s Black Box (1996) by Michael Behe, The Origin of Animal Body Plans (1997) by Wallace Arthur, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999) by Jeffrey H. Schwartz—have cast doubt on the creative power of neo-Darwinism’s mutation/selection mechanism. As a result, a search for alternative naturalistic mechanisms of innovation has ensued with, as yet, no apparent success or consensus. So common are doubts about the creative capacity of the selection/mutation mechanism, neo-Darwinism’s “designer substitute,” that prominent spokesmen for evolutionary theory must now periodically assure the public that “just because we don’t know how evolution occurred, does not justify doubt about whether it occurred.”³⁷ As Niles Eldredge wrote as early as 1982: “most observers see the current situation in evolutionary theory—where the object is to explain how, not if, life evolves—as bordering on total chaos.”³⁸ Or as Stephen Gould wrote in 1980, “the neo-Darwinism synthesis is effectively dead, despite its continued presence as textbook orthodoxy.”³⁹

Indeed, scientists writing in technical journals across the subdisciplines of biology have questioned neo-Darwinian theory on many evidential and theoretical grounds, including:

(1) The neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random variations does not seem sufficient to produce:

(a) novel specified genetic information,⁴⁰

Basal biology textbooks have almost universally failed to report these and other difficulties found in recent technical literature.⁵⁸ Instead, standard textbooks continue to affirm both neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theory unequivocally and without qualification. Moreover, as noted in our hypothetical, many texts continue to include significant factual errors, either of omission or commission—though Spokes is hypothetical, the problems in the texts are not.⁵⁹

III. May Spokes Teach Criticism?

It may seem obvious that there can be no rationally defensible grounds for preventing teachers from exposing students to well-documented scientific critique of a theory or obsolete textbook material. Nevertheless, teachers like Spokes often feel an understandable reluctance to break with textbook orthodoxy and expose students to articles and other supplementary materials documenting problems with neo-Darwinism or its textbook presentation. Indeed, many official spokespersons for an exclusively Darwinist curriculum now treat any criticism of neo-Darwinian (or chemical evolutionary) theory as tantamount to an attack on science itself. Others assume that criticism necessarily derives from religious motive or equate critique with advocacy of “creationism.”

This rhetorical strategy fails for several reasons. First, it implicitly equates a particular theory of biological origins—albeit a long dominant one—with the science of biology itself. In no other field would such a self-serving rhetoric stand unchallenged for long. Imagine the Freudians equating psychology with the Freudian theory of the mind or the advocates of phlogiston equating their theory with the field of chemistry itself. Science has long involved theoretical competition among multiple competing hypotheses and explanations. Science, therefore, requires criticism as well as the articulation and defense of reigning theories. Thus, those biologists who seek to insulate their preferred theories from critique by rhetorical gerrymandering—that is, by equating dominant evolutionary theories with science itself and then treating all criticism of such theories as necessarily “unscientific”—themselves act in a profoundly unscientific manner.

Note, secondly, the list of evidential difficulties cited above. Each can be found in standard scientific journals—journals such as Paleobiology or Developmental Biology or Natural History. Of course, some religiously-motivated creationists may want to make polemical use of these evidential difficulties. Yet, that does not mean that scientific critique of neo-Darwinism necessarily conceals a religious motive, if indeed motive is even germane to deciding the scientific legitimacy of this critique. In any case, the pedagogical issue is not the motive of the critics, but the existence of specifically empirical critique of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theory that textbooks do not report to students. Spokes wants to eliminate this disparity between textbook presentations and the current state of the scientific discussion of the issue. This hardly seems to constitute either “religious” or “unscientific” activity.

To illustrate this point more concretely, consider an example mentioned above. Origin-of-life researchers now acknowledge that Stanley Miller’s famous experiment simulating the production of amino acids under allegedly pre-biotic early earth conditions does not support chemical evolutionary theory. Origin-of-life scientists, including Miller himself,⁶⁰ now admit that no evidence supports the strongly “reducing” mixture of gases that Miller assumed in his 1953 experiment. Indeed, considerable geochemical evidence now contradicts that assumption.⁶¹ They also know that if simulation experiments are rerun with more realistic mixtures of gases they do not produce amino acids in any appreciable yields. Yet most basal biology textbooks do not report any of these scientific developments.⁶²

If Spokes reports these developments, can anyone credibly maintain that he has acted in an “unscientific” or “religious” manner? Instead, Spokes critics act in a most illiberal way. By stigmatizing critique as either “unscientific” or “religious,” advocates for the exclusive presentation of orthodox evolutionary theories discourage teachers from teaching students what scientists actually know and report in their technical journals, and encourage instead the presentation of a simplistic caricature of scientific method and the origins controversy.

Of course, some Darwinist advocacy groups have expressed concern that providing critique of, as well as evidence and arguments for, orthodox evolutionary theories would confuse students.⁶³ But clearly students would not be well served by presenting a false picture of agreement where in fact there is controversy. Indeed, even a prominent Darwinist, Will Provine, has complained that this failure to present the controversy makes science education deadly dull and robs it of the interest that would motivate students.⁶⁴ Granted, textbook presentations in many fields fail to capture the full richness and detail of front-line research. But the errors of fact in many basal biology texts do not seem to reflect mere oversimplifications. Instead, many are egregious, easy to correct, and almost universally overstate the evidential support for orthodox evolutionary theories. Thus, there is every reason to encourage Spokes to speak to students about the existence of evidential criticism of neo-Darwinism in the scientific literature and to correct textbooks where they are clearly in error.

Of course, the question of the legitimacy of Spokes’s intended curricular change involves another issue. Recall that Spokes does not intend merely to expose students to scientific critique of neo-Darwinism. He also now intends to teach them about an alternative theory—known as “the theory of intelligent design” or “design theory”—that directly challenges a key proposition of both neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theory, namely, the denial of actual design in biology. Of course, if the neo-Darwinian mechanism cannot explain the origin of apparent design, as many biologists have argued, then some scientists will quite reasonably want to reconsider the possibility of actual (i.e., intelligent) design as an alternative explanation. Not surprisingly, many scientists have done exactly that and teachers like Spokes will increasingly want to tell their students about this development in science. Nevertheless, Spokes’s desire to teach about design raises additional issues. Some have argued that “design theory” does not qualify as a scientific theory. Others have maintained that it constitutes an establishment of religion, or at least a religious theory. To assess the legality of Spokes’s entire curriculum, therefore, requires making an assessment of the scientific and religious status of “design theory.” Before we can do this we must review the main tenets and features of this theory.

IV. A Brief Introduction to Contemporary Design Theory

Since the 1980s, a growing number of scientists have asserted that, contrary to neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, nature displays abundant evidence of real, not just apparent, design. These scientists, known as design theorists, advocate an alternative theory of biological origins known as design theory or the theory of intelligent design (sometimes abbreviated simply design). They have developed design theory in such books as Darwin’s Black Box,⁶⁵ The Mystery of Life’s Origin,⁶⁶ Of Pandas and People,⁶⁷ Mere Creation⁶⁸ and The Design Inference,⁶⁹ as well as in articles in scientific and technical journals. Design theory holds that intelligent causes rather than undirected natural causes best explain many features of living systems. During recent years design theorists have developed both a general theory of design detection and many specific empirical arguments to support their views.

A. A Theory of Intelligent Design

Developments in the information sciences have recently made possible the articulation of criteria by which intelligently designed systems can be identified by the kinds of patterns they exhibit. In a recent book titled The Design Inference,⁷⁰ published by Cambridge University Press, mathematician and probability theorist William Dembski notes that rational agents often infer or detect the prior activity of other designing minds by the character of the effects they leave behind.⁷¹ Archaeologists assume, for example, that rational agents produced the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Insurance fraud investigators detect certain “cheating patterns” that suggest intentional manipulation of circumstances rather than “natural” disasters. Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those that carry encoded messages. Dembski’s work shows that recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully rational mode of inference.⁷²