Last night I had the privilege of attending a debate at the Harvard
University School of Law between Discovery Institute Fellow Francis Beckwith
and Boston University School of Law Professor Jay Wexler, sponsored by the
Harvard chapter of the Federalist Society. What follows is a summary of the
event based on hastily-scribbled notes and recollections; almost all
"quotes" are in fact my best attempts at paraphrase, and I invite and
implore anyone else who attended the event to supplement or correct my
account.
Professor Beckwith began with a definition of ID as a "research program
regarding the actions of some intelligent agency as being responsible for
some physical system or possibly the universe as a whole, along with a
critique of naturalism." [i.e. "something, somewhere, somehow for some
reason is wrong with some part of some science."] He referred to
"materialism" as the "prime target" of this critique, and argued that it is
in fact the burden of scientists to provide *positive* refutations of
non-naturalistic theories, rather than dismissing them a priori. At this
point, he had not yet acknowledged any distinction between methodological
and metaphysical naturalism.
He then proceeded to briefly enumerate some of the extant philosophical
critiques of naturalism, and mentioned that Ken Miller's support of the idea
that God created the laws which gave rise to life has in fact once gotten
him labeled by [someone] as a "fine-tuning creationist".
He then moved on to a history of the last few decades of the evolution of
creationist legal strategy, from Epperson through McClean through Edwards,
and appeared to agree that the YEC statutes in question were clearly
unconstitutional, but had reservations about the reasoning used by the
courts to arrive at that determination, especially the requirement of a
"clear secular intent".
At one point he more or less explicitly equated "intelligent" with
"non/supernatural" by definition.
He closed with language reminiscent of his earlier Legal Times article
(http://homepage.mac.com/francis.beckwith/LegalTimes.htm, see
http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000776.html for a critique) WRT
creationists being in a "catch-22" because of the unusual burden placed on
persons who happen to have religious motivations attempting to pass
legislation that would otherwise be found to have a legitimate secular
purpose.
In Professor Wexler's opening comments, he pointed out that the
Establishment Clause does not forbid the teaching of something just because
it happens to be extremely *bad* science. He also pointed out that U.S.
courts have yet to develop a "demarcation criterion" for what is and is not
a religion for the purposes of 1st Amendment law, and proposed a test along
the lines of the way courts currently ascertain whether a given civil suit
"sounds in tort" or "sounds in contract" - a practice is religious for the
purpose of the law not dependent on whether it is part of a "complete
worldview" or whether it involves supernaturalism, but on whether it "sounds
in religion". The proposed test would be whether a reasonable person, aware
of the facts and background of the case, would consider the issue to be a
religious one.
In the case of ID, as he has documented thoroughly in a previous law review
article, the connections between the current crop of ID creationism and the
YEC predecessors of the 80s is sufficiently clear to establish that ID
"sounds in religion".
For him, the three factors weighing against the constitutionality of
teaching ID in schools *even* *if* ID was scientifically reasonable were 1)
the fact that it seems highly irregular compared to how science is normally
taught (we don't normally start to teach things in high school when only a
small minority of scientists believe them), 2) there does not seem to be any
good material or textbooks suitable for teaching ID, and 3) there does not
seem to be a way at present to teach it "objectively" and without
unnecessary entanglement with religious issues.
For Beckwith's second statement, he attempted to relativize the importance
of peer review by pointing out that the amount of intellectual scrutiny is
actually on a continuum between "hard science", "soft science", philosophy
journals, and other forms of journals, and ventured that at least in his
view the peer-review process which philosophical and theological arguments
for ID have undergone in philosophy journals should "count" as much as
scientific publication.
He also rebutted the "no peer-reviewed papers" charge by citing an article
in J.Mol.Bio., by DI fellow Axe, and mentioned that he had a list of 10 or
15 other articles supportive of ID theory, although I hasten to add that I
cannot recall the exact phraseology in which he expressed exactly how
strongly these were supportive, or what they were supportive of. While I
did not catch a title, I suspect it may have been 'Extreme functional
sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors.' J Mol
Biol. 2000 Aug 18;301(3):585-95. [Note: after the talk he explained that the
list had actually been given to him by one William Dembski; I am currently
in the process of obtaining this list. If this was indeed the article he was
referring to, it seems he may have been an unwitting victim of the "DI noise
machine" and the tendency to disseminate false or misleading information by
citing one another round-robin, without ever attempting to verify the
accuracy of the citation. For more on Dembski's shenanigans with this
particular paper, see http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000614.html .]
He said he had been asked to testify as an expert witness in favor of the
school district in the current controversy in Dover, PA, but turned it down.
[Afterwards, I asked him what it was Dover would have had to have done
differently in order to overcome his reluctance to testify that he believed
it was in fact constitutional. He replied that his reason was one of policy,
not law: he believed that teaching ID in schools is simply a bad idea. He
also mentioned that other DI personnel had reservations about Dover,
although I inferred that their reasons were more strategic than
pedagogical.]
He again appeared to equate science itself with the doctrine of ontological
materialism. Still no distinctions made between materialism, ontological
naturalism, and methodological naturalism.
On his second round, Wexler raised the intriguing constitutional question of
what would occur if a given religious doctrine such as reincarnation or ID
became incontrovertibly true, or at least highly plausible scientifically.
There is no easy legal answer for this.
Question and answer period followed. The first questioner informed the
audience about Project Steve, pointed out Beckwith's association with the
DI, and specifically denounced its funding by Christian Reconstructionist
Howard Ahmanson. He asked how Beckwith could have uttered some of the
sillier factual inaccuracies WRT ID's "scientific" claims in his opening
speech and "still keep a straight face". Beckwith responded that he knew
Ahmanson personally, said that he had renounced some or all of his previous
Reconstructionist views, and decried the argument of guilt by association.
At this point, the exchange became quite heated, and in my personal judgment
the questioner was needlessly hostile, frequently interrupting Beckwith,
monopolizing the room's floor time, and generally being obnoxious. The
honorable moderator did his level best to try to steer the conversation to
the next questioner, but several students actually stood up and left at this
point. While I sympathize and even empathize with the questioner's disdain
for creationists' intellectual sloppiness and contempt for the odious
political views underlying them, this was supposed to be a scholarly and
collegiate exchange on the jurisprudence of a particularly nuanced
church-state separation issue, not a debate on the (lack of) substantive
merits of ID creationism. What was supposed to have the decorum of a
colloquium of law at Harvard briefly turned into a tawdry internet chat-room
flame-circus. Without exception, the students I spoke with after the debate
remained unconvinced by Beckwith's position, but were embarrassed by the
belligerence of this one Lone Ranger in the audience.
One questioner was an attorney with a philosophy background, and inquired as
to why ID proponents didn't attempt to argue for a more Aristotelian
teleology, which incorporates ideas such as souls, purpose, and a Prime
Mover but which is distinct from the theological baggage of evangelical
Christianity. Beckwith referred back to his article 'Explanatory Power of
the Substance View of Persons' as an example of this, and also mentioned
Searle as a philosopher of mind who was trying to move away from a strictly
mechanistic account. The questioner responded that she asked this because as
it stands it was "disingenuous to separate the religious issues" in this
debate, and that ID is clearly religious.
One questioner expressed concern about Professor Wexler's argument against
the constitutionality of teaching ID by asserting that he was simply
committing the genetic fallacy, unfairly discriminating against the
possibility of ID because of the cultural and legal background from which it
arose. He responded essentially that there needs to be some test to keep
religion separate, and that under his proposed interpretation of the
endorsement test, a reasonable person would still understand that ID was
religious in nature, and so in order to be acceptable IDC's would have to
make a stronger showing of an independent secular purpose.
When I was called on, I submitted that there may be a "catch-22" for ID
advocates, but that Beckwith had identified it upside-down. I pointed out
that he seemed to have a lack of legal principle, because when ID is trying
to *win*, they claim that they are secular for the purposes of the 1st
Amendment, but when they *lose* (as they did in Cobb County), Beckwith and
others claim that they are victims of "religious discrimination". I
suggested that the way for ID to overcome its legal troubles was the same
way for it to overcome its scientific deficiencies: develop a *positive*,
testable theory of ID, initiate the research program, perform experiments,
and create a body of published work in (real) peer-reviewed journals. If
they did this, their "secular purpose" problems would evaporate instantly.
[Because I was listening to his response, I was not able to write much of it
down, except for his statement that he objected to the reasoning in the Cobb
County disclaimers case even though he agreed with the result.]
I think the most salient conclusions I can draw from the evening are as
follows: 1) DI speakers continue to overstate the existence of any positive
ID theory whatsoever, offering as a substitute a series of (mostly refuted)
criticisms of this or that part of science, while undervaluing the need for
peer-review, 2) even DI legal scholars (who, let's face it, are what the
Wedge Strategy is really all about) think that teaching ID in schools is a
bad idea, 3) absolutely no one in the audience really believes that ID is
anything other than creationism in a cheap tuxedo, 4) the temptation for ID
opponents to turn into mirror-images of the fundie who came to Dembski's
debate and said "Why do you hate Christ?" is real, is strong, and should be
resisted (come on people, a little basic tact please), 5) Professors Wexler
and Beckwith are charming, outgoing people, and the Federalist Society of
the Harvard Law School is staffed with first-rate folks (even though their
views on the Constitution seem bloody loony to me at times).
