No time for design: A judge strikes down ID in Pa.
> (Photo: Steve JurvetsonFlickr)

Federal Judge John E. Jones III ruled Tuesday that the Dover Area School District violated the separation of church and state in revising its science curriculum to include mention of intelligent design in biology classrooms. Jones’ decision also upholds the idea that science and religion are not inherently in conflict — a thought that may have repercussions for the future of science-and-religion.

Ruling in favor of the 11 Dover parents in Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District, et al, Jones said intelligent design is inherently religious in nature, and, therefore, runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment of religion clause in the First Amendment.

“The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism,” Jones wrote in his 139-page decision. Jones pointed to the prosecution’s evidence of the text Of Pandas and People, which was the text offered to Dover students who disagreed with evolutionary theory. The revised version of the text replaced words like “creationism” with “intelligent design.”

Although the defense attempted to distance itself from ID as religion and instead proffer evidence that intelligent design was science, Jones disagreed.

Intelligent design “violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation,” wrote Jones. “It is notable that not one defense expert was able to explain how the supernatural action suggested by ID could be anything other than an inherently religious proposition.”

Jones dismissed the testimony of Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe as using “the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s.” Jones said Behe’s theory of “irreducible complexity” — that some biological systems are so inherently complex that removing one aspect of them causes the system to fail — doesn’t prove intelligent design to be a science because evolution can’t explain it. “ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed,” wrote Jones, citing evolutionary biologist Kevin Padian’s testimony. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” said the University of California, Berkeley scientist.

That isn’t to say that evolution has all the answers, said Jones. “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect,” wrote Jones. “However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions,” Jones wrote.

Intelligent design proponents not only do a disservice to science, but they also drive a wedge deeper between science and religion — a division that Jones, and Brown University biology Kenneth Miller, said is artificial.

Miller testified that introducing intelligent design as a “God-friendly” alternative to evolution sets up a false duality: It tells students “quite explicitly, choose God on the side of intelligent design or choose atheism on the side of science.”

In his final ruling, Jones agreed with Miller and chastised ID proponents for creating a division between religion and science. Jones wrote that ID proponents make a false assumption. “Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general.” The theory of evolution “in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator,” Jones wrote.

Jones said that Dover citizens were "poorly served" by the Dover Area School District former board members who voted for the ID policy. Of those members — most of whom were voted out of office in November — Jones concluded: “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.”