The “religious right,” have been persistent as moral entrepreneurs to push creationism/intelligent design in to public science curriculum for some time now. As we know from Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Court established the three prong test to determine if legislation has violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The three prongs are, legislation must: have a secular purpose; must neither inhibit, nor advance religion; and must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.
In Edward v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law which mandated the teach of creationism with the theory of evolution was indeed in violation of the Establishment Clause. Since then, the religious right faction of our country have started a social movement centered around the concept of intelligent design. The major player in the movement is a conservative think tank called The Discovery Center, which is marking intelligent design as a scientific theory. The “Theory of Intelligent Design” is in fact based on a concept which they call “irreducibly complex,” meaning that, taken what we know about the Universe to the point where we have not yet explained a phenomenon or observation scientifically, and calling it “irreducibly complex.” This is a fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam which means it is an argument from ignorance, which is based on the idea that if something cannot be proven false, it must be true. Furthermore the “theory” of intelligent design is not a theory at all, at least not in the scientific sense, since there is no way to test its validity.
Even still despite the fact that the scientific community almost unanimously rejects the idea of intelligent design as anything that is even closely related to science, there is an active social movement to affect public policy around this issue. These are the reasons the framers of the Constitution saw fit to separate church and state. These are the reasons that Alexander Hamilton warned us of the dangerous nature of factions.
1 comment:
I completely agree with your points. The Supreme Court made a fine decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman in introducing the three prong test. It ensures that the United States government is still prohibited from establishing a religion by promoting a religious idea as scientific fact in public schools. I too saw the fallacy in a theory that claims that since the idea of a creator cannot be disproved, it ought to be unanimously accepted. Really, intelligent design is just the religious right’s fancy name for a theory that says, “Holy cow! That thing is pretty cool and complex! It seems too daunting of a task to actually figure out how it works or how it came here, so we’ll just say a creator made it instead. Case closed.”
Fortunately, I can sit here with the reassurance that, despite the power and size of the religious right, the Supreme Court has sided with the rest of the scientific community and recognized the invalidity of intelligent design as a true scientific theory. In another related case in 2005, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District involved a group of parents challenging the school district’s requirement for teachers to present intelligent design as an alternative in biology classes. Thankfully, judge John Jones III ruled that since intelligent design "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", it is not science. Therefore, the school district's promotion of intelligent design violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Post a Comment