Court Battle Joined on Teaching of Intelligent Design

c. 2005 Religion News Service HARRISBURG, Pa. _ In Harrisburg on Monday, as the nation watches, a 21st-century courtroom drama will emerge from an old and ongoing cultural divide in America. It’s about evolution. In a nonjury civil trial expected to last until late October, the latest challenge to evolution in public schools receives its […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

HARRISBURG, Pa. _ In Harrisburg on Monday, as the nation watches, a 21st-century courtroom drama will emerge from an old and ongoing cultural divide in America. It’s about evolution.

In a nonjury civil trial expected to last until late October, the latest challenge to evolution in public schools receives its first courtroom scrutiny.


U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III will hear a suit to stop the Dover (Pa.) School Board from introducing intelligent design in science class as an alternative to evolution.

Intelligent design holds that Charles Darwin’s theory can’t explain all the complexity of life; there must have been a designer. The movement has spawned disputes about science teaching nationwide since the 1980s. They’re raging now in Kansas, California, Colorado and other states.

Asked by a reporter last month, President Bush weighed in for intelligent design. “Both sides ought to be properly taught,” he said.

Dozens of newspapers, networks and magazines from across the country have reserved seats in Jones’ windowless ninth-floor courtroom here. So has the BBC. Court TV would be televising the trial, but Jones denied the request.

The story began last fall, when the school board in Dover, a town of about 1,900 people 25 miles south of Harrisburg, became the first in the nation to require introduction of intelligent design in science class.

Science teachers balked. So just before the ninth-grade unit on evolution, which state standards require, an administrator went to class and read a statement.

Evolution is “theory … not fact,” and it has “gaps,” the statement said. It went on to alert students to intelligent design and point them to a book on the subject in the school library.


Eleven parents sued _ backed by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, with pro bono representation from Pepper Hamilton LLP of Philadelphia. The Thomas More Law Center, defender of “the religious liberty of Christians,” took the board’s side.

Evolution _ the theory that all life descended from common ancestors over eons through natural selection _ is a mainstay of modern science.

“There are probably more scientists who believe Elvis is alive” than scientists who reject evolution, says Ed Larson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author on America’s battles over evolution.

Ask the population at large, though, and you get a very different picture. A Gallup Poll last fall showed 45 percent of Americans say God created people pretty much in their present form in the last 10,000 years _ a timeline asserted by biblical literalists.

And so the battle goes on. Both sides say its likely direction in coming years hangs on the case that begins Monday in the federal building in Harrisburg.

Many people who accept Darwin’s theory, scientists among them, also believe in God as a creator who used the entirely natural process of evolution. That position is often called theistic evolution.


Still, 70 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, evolution remains a cultural faultline in America, Dickinson College political scientist Crispin Sartwell says.

The 1925 trial in Dayton, Tenn., which was later dramatized in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” came to symbolize the clash between modern science and literalist religion.

Intelligent design “at least is a set of arguments, not simply an assertion of biblical literalism” _ but, “it’s still a biblical and religious outlook on the world vs. a scientific and secular outlook,” Sartwell says.

“You see that clash all over. … You could call it red state-blue state, rural-urban. It corresponds to a lot of basic divisions in American culture.”

Intelligent design argues that some life forms are so complex that they amount to scientific evidence for a designer _ obviously God, though supporters are generally careful not to say so.

That is a convenient approach, because courts have said that only science, not religion, belongs in public school science classes.


The Supreme Court ruled more than three decades ago that evolution cannot be barred from science class. Creationists arguing for equal time in class lost in court 18 years ago.

Since then, opponents of evolution have rallied around intelligent design. The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which promotes the idea, has said it aims to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.”

The movement includes some scientists, who tend to accept most of Darwin’s theory but say it claims too much.

One scheduled witness for the school board is Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, probably intelligent design’s best-known scientist. He has been publicly isolated by his biology colleagues at Lehigh.

“It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific,” says their statement on the university Web site.

“Of Pandas and People,” the intelligent design textbook in the Dover library, explains the concept this way: “Various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact _ fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings, etc.”


The trial that starts Monday will analyze whether intelligent design is really science and what motivated the board to introduce it to students. By law, the board’s purpose can’t be religious.

News reports at the time quoted board member William Buckingham advocating the policy this way: “Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

Attorney Richard Thompson, arguing now for the board, says its purpose was “valid and clearly secular” _ to inform students of “the existing scientific controversy” about evolution.

He characterizes the policy as “merely mentioning the phrase intelligent design in a statement read to the students,” and the lawsuit as “much ado about nothing.”

Eric Rothschild, the parents’ lawyer, describes the suit this way: “It’s an extremely important case for protecting the principle that government officials cannot impose their religious beliefs on citizens, especially public school children.”

The case will be heard by a former Liquor Control Board chairman who was nominated to the federal bench three years ago. Jones has emerged as a no-nonsense judge who insists on promptness and is known to cut short long-winded attorneys.


His decision in the Dover case will cover only the 34 counties of the U.S. Middle District of Pennsylvania _ until, as is likely, the decision is appealed and a higher court rules.

Election Day will be another watershed for the dispute, though. Two slates of seven candidates _ one for and one against the intelligent design policy _ are running for Dover School Board.

If the slate that opposes intelligent design wins in November, there will no longer be a dispute. As of now, though, both sides in the lawsuit say they are prepared to appeal, and the case appears bound for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Science classes will remain a flashpoint for religious people who feel Darwin contradicts their world view, says Michael Silberstein, director of the Center for Science and Religion at Elizabethtown College.

The trial that starts Monday won’t solve that, but it will help shape the strategy for attacking Darwin in public schools for years to come, Silberstein says.

MO RB END WARNER

(Mary Warner is a staff writer for The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa.)

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Embargoed against use before Sunday _ A version of this story is being transmitted by Newhouse News Service.

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