Viewpoint intends to run a short series of posts on Judge John Jones' decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover which was handed down last week. It is our opinion that the judge was correct in finding that the defendents were motivated by their religious beliefs and that he was correct to find fault with the consistency of their testimony. He was therefore constrained by Supreme Court precedent to find in favor of the plaintiffs. Nevertheless, much of his reasoning seems to us to be flawed and his decision is much broader than is warranted by his written opinion.
Throughout the first forty pages or so of the judge's opinion on the Dover case he is at pains to show that the disclaimer the school board wanted to have read to biology students in their high school biology classes violated the endorsement test that resulted from Santa Fe Independent Sch. Dist. v. Doe (2000). In that case the Supreme Court ruled that:
The judge then mounts a sustained argument to the effect that the Dover disclaimer was indeed a religious message and that it indeed violates Sante Fe. His argument, however, gets things exactly backward.
He tries to show that ID is creationism by showing that it grew out of earlier creationist thinking and that since creationism is religious so, too, must ID be. He also argues at length that most of the proponents of ID are Christians and that they have a religiously inspired agenda and that therefore ID is a violation of the establishment clause of the First amendment to the constitution.
Let's unpack this. The first claim, that ID must be religious, even though it doesn't appear to be, because it evolved from (forgive me) creationism, is silly. Because one theory emerges from the embers of another doesn't entail that it necessarily bears all or even many of the traits of the other. Modern theories of the atom are all descendents of Democritus' belief that such entities exist, but the belief that there are atoms pretty much exhausts the similarities between the modern and the ancient views. Modern chemistry is directly descended from alchemy but chemistry is not alchemy. It is logically illicit to infer that because ID is a descendent of creationism it is therefore creationism in disguise.
The only thing that ID and creationism share in common is a belief that the universe is not the product solely of blind, unintelligent processes. Indeed, it could be argued that ID shares more in common with Darwinian evolution than it does with creationism since it is compatible with almost everything contained within the Darwinian paradigm except its materialist exclusivism.
The second claim, that many ID proponents are theists in their personal lives and have a religious agenda may be true, but it bears not at all upon whether ID is a religious theory. It is, after all, the case that many, perhaps most, ardent evolutionists are atheistic materialists and desire to promote materialism in the public schools. Should we conclude from this, therefore, that evolution is an atheistic theory? Should we refrain from teaching evolution because it advances the atheists' agenda? Of course not. The theory should stand on its own merits and not on the beliefs or agendas of its advocates. Likewise with ID.
Suppose, for example, that some new theory of geology had tremendous explanatory power but also had as one of its entailments that the earth could not possibly be more than a few million years old. This theory would be seized upon by creationists as vindicating their position and would be rejected by materialists as unsound because it doesn't allow enough time for evolution. Should the theory be banned from schools because it has religious implications and is embraced by religious people? If not, then why ban ID from schools simply because it has religious implications?
When Darwinism, i.e. the view that natural forces are the sole factors in producing the universe and liife, is taught in class many students see it, correctly or not, as an assault on their most deeply cherished religious convictions. Indeed, this is how many Darwinists themselves see it. The number of atheistic biologists and others who point to their study of evolution as having put the kibosh on the religious beliefs of their youth is legion. Since our courts have privileged Darwinism and permited this perceived assault on students' religious beliefs in the name of science, it seems incumbent upon those in authority who would wish that their schools not give the appearance of favoring religiously corrosive views over the views held by many students to take some action to demonstrate their neutrality on these matters. The school authorities must not, in allowing only Darwinism to be given an official hearing,
The authorities have a moral and legal responsibility to inform students that even though the view that the universe and life are the product solely of natural forces is going to be taught in the classroom, students who do not accept that view should not feel that they are isolated outsiders. There seems nothing at all wrong with informing students that there are dissenting voices in the scientific community on this matter, that a growing number of scientists believe that natural forces by themselves are inadequate to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the specified compexity of living things, even though the dissenters may still be only a small minority. It seems more than strange that it should be illegal to encourage students to explore those dissenting points of view so that they don't feel their convictions threatened.
Judge Jones' reasoning seems especially contorted in the light of a statement from Edwards v. Aguillard which he actually cites in his opinion:
Apparently, the judge feels that this caution only applies to students whose families object to the religious implications of creationism. If the family or the student objects to the religious implications of Darwinism well, then, Judge Jones tells them, that's just tough.
Judge Jones, presiding in the Dover ID trial, takes the school board to task for singling out evolution from all other topics in the high school curriculum as the focus of a disclaimer to be read to students. This, he argues, makes evolution suspect in students' minds which the school has no legal authority to do. The disclaimer, he writes:
...singles out evolution from the rest of the science curriculum and informs students that evolution, unlike anything else that they are learning, is "just a theory," which plays on the "colloquial or popular understanding of the term ['theory'] and suggest[ing] to the informed, reasonable observer that evolution is only a highly questionable 'opinion' or a 'hunch.'"
....Whether a student accepts the Board's invitation to explore Pandas, and reads a creationist text, or follows the Board's other suggestion and discusses "Origins of Life" with family members, that objective student can reasonably infer that the District's favored view is a religious one, and that the District is accordingly sponsoring a form of religion....
It is important to initially note that as a result of the teachers' refusal to read the disclaimer, school administrators were forced to make special appearances in the science classrooms to deliver it. No evidence was presented by any witness that the Dover students are presented with a disclaimer of any type in any other topic in the curriculum. An objective student observer would accordingly be observant of the fact that the message contained in the disclaimer is special and carries special weight. In addition, the objective student would understand that the administrators are reading the statement because the biology teachers refused to do so on the ground that they are legally and ethically barred from misrepresenting a religious belief as science, as will be discussed below....This would provide the students with an additional reason to conclude that the District is advocating a religious view in biology class.
That's one way of looking at it, but it's not the only conclusion a fair-minded person might arrive at. It could well be that these people see Darwinism, unlike anything else in the high school curriculum, as a challenge and a threat to students' religious beliefs, which even many Darwinians believe it is. Rather than prohibit it, they feel it necessary to try to maintain some measure of religious neutrality by letting students know that the school, even though it teaches Darwinism, is not endorsing the religious implications of Darwinism and seeks to offset those implications by referring students to works that present other possibilities. It might well be that the works the board chose to commend to students were of inferior quality (I have not read Pandas and People), but then they should be criticized for not picking the best resources available instead of castigating them for having the temerity to present an alternative to evolutionary dogma so that students don't get the feeling that the school is trying to undermine their religious convictions.
The judge is not saying here, is he, that it's wrong for teachers to remind students that they can rightly hold on to beliefs they've been taught by their parents on this or any subject? Is he really saying that it's constitutionally acceptable to undermine in the classroom a student's religious beliefs, but it's wrong for schools to say anything that would protect students from having their religious beliefs subject to corrosive scrutiny? Is this what the constitution mandates, that we send our children to school to have everything they've been taught by their parents called into question, and the school dare not do anything to attempt to soften the blow? How Judge Jones can claim later that he's not an activist judge after writing something as arrogant and as radical as this completely escapes us.
This is utter nonsense. Which position is most likely to foster "a willingness to alter and shift existing viewpoints," teaching evolution in the classroom and encouraging students to check out dissenting views on their own time, or teaching only evolution in the classroom and not permitting even the mention of any criticisms of the theory and refusing to encourage students to entertain the possibility that there may be other explanations for the design which permeates nature besides the blind mechanisms of neo-Darwinism? How can students alter and shift existing viewpoints if they're only exposed to a single view?
Apparently the judge is tone deaf to irony. He quotes Dr Alters' testimony that a reasonable student observer would conclude that ID is a kind of "secret science that students apparently can't discuss with their science teacher" which he indicated is pedagogically "about as bad as I could possibly think of." and then proceeds to forbid the teaching of ID and the weaknesses in the Darwinian creation story, an unprecedented judicial action in the experience of almost all high school students. Does he not recognize that by banning ID from the classroom he's doing exactly what he criticizes the board for doing?
As we argued above, there's no reason why any of these things have to be seen as an endorsement of religion. There's no reason why they cannot be interpreted as the actions of men and women concerned to avoid the appearance of lending the weight of the school district's prestige to a theory that is a manifest threat to the religious beliefs of students and thus violating the clear intent of Sante Fe.
With this post we continue our examination of Judge Jones' much acclaimed opinion which he handed down in Kitzmiller v. Dover, and turn to his discussion of whether ID is science sensu strictu. Parenthetically, this is a question we find largely irrelevant to whether it should be permitted in science classes, for reasons we'll explain below.
The judge writes:
As previously noted, the Supreme Court held in Santa Fe that a public school district's conduct touching on religion should be evaluated under the endorsement test from the standpoint of how the "listening audience" would view it; and, if members of the listening audience would perceive the district's conduct as endorsing religion or a particular religious view, then the conduct violates the Establishment Clause.
Moreover, a review of the letters and editorials at issue reveals that in letter after letter and editorial after editorial, community members postulated that ID is an inherently religious concept, that the writers viewed the decision of whether to incorporate it into the high school biology curriculum as one which implicated a religious concept, and therefore that the curriculum change has the effect of placing the government's imprimatur on the Board's preferred religious viewpoint.
Accordingly, the letters and editorials are relevant to, and provide evidence of, the Dover community's collective social judgment about the curriculum change because they demonstrate that "[r]egardless of the listener's support for, or objection to," the curriculum change, the community and hence the objective observer who personifies it, cannot help but see that the ID Policy implicates and thus endorses religion.
Of course, many of those same letter writers believed that Darwinism is a religious concept as well, and they were moved to write because they're tired of that religious view being granted immunity and preference in our schools to the exclusion of all others. Evidently, however, the opinion of these folks on the religious implications of Darwinism is of little interest to the judge.
...we find it incumbent upon the Court to further address an additional issue raised by Plaintiffs, which is whether ID is science. To be sure, our answer to this question can likely be predicted based upon the foregoing analysis. While answering this question compels us to revisit evidence that is entirely complex, if not obtuse, after a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area.
Aside from the fact that the judge probably meant to say abstruse, not obtuse, it is ironic that just a few days after his decision a philosopher from Amherst, Alexander George, published a column in the Christian Science Monitor in which he claimed that ID is indeed science, but that it's bad science and for that reason shouldn't be taught. His column pretty much dismantles the arguments of the "ID isn't science" brigades, and is really quite well done except for the interesting fact that, although he effectively argues that nothing about ID disqualifies it as science, he never really demonstrates that it's "bad" science. He merely asserts it.
Anyway, even if it were granted that ID is not science per se, it's certainly part of the domain of the philosophy of science and, specifically, the philosophy of biology. As such there is no reason for excluding it from a science classroom unless it is, indeed, bad philosophy, which no one has suggested it is. There is much philosophy taught in any science classroom, even bad philosophy (such as the standard scientific method), to which no one objects. Indeed, there's one bit of metaphysics that masquerades as science in our classrooms which Judge Jones has himself immunized from criticism - the idea that all of life has arisen as a result solely of blind, purposeless processes. We'd like to hear how the judge would subject that claim, a fundamental tenet of Neo-Darwinian evolution, no less, to scientific scrutiny.
Well. It's certainly true that there has been a tremendous waste of resources and time in the adjudication of this question, but one wonders whose fault that is, really. Is it the fault of some misguided board members who tried to the best of their abilities to neutralize the corrosive threat to their students' religious beliefs that the "universal acid" of Darwinism presents? Or is it the fault of the handful of parents and their abettors in the ACLU who were just scandalized that their board would ever dare to do such an innocuous thing as put a disclaimer in a textbook, clumsily worded though it was, suggesting that there may be other theories on the matter of origins that students could investigate if they're so inclined?
Our thoughts on Judge Jones' decision in the Dover ID trial continues. In this installment we continue our look at his reasoning on the question of whether or not ID is true science. In his opinion he makes this comment:
Each of the Judge's assertions is dubious.
1. Judge Jones suggests that modern science excludes non-natural causes. This is not quite accurate. It doesn't exclude them, or at least it has no business doing so, it simply seeks to explain as much as it possibly can by means of natural causes. The problem is that some scientists argue that because naturalism is methodologically useful that therefore it is metaphysically true. They glide from its usefulness as a heuristic platform to the conclusion that only naturalistic hypotheses can be admitted into science. They assume that because non-natural causes can only be inferred and not empirically discerned, that therefore they're irrelevant. When scientists draw such conclusions they have wandered beyond the bounds of science into the realm of metaphysics.
There's an irony here incidentally. The assumption that only natural causes should be considered by scientists is not itself a scientific proposition, it's a philosophical preference. Nevertheless, it's a philosophical preference to which the Judge is willing to give free reign in science class, to the exclusion of any other philosophical alternative.
2. His second assertion is strange. In a passage we'll cite below, Judge Jones separates Irreducible Complexity (IC) from ID. He asserts there that IC is testable, but that it is a distinct theory from ID and so its testability doesn't assist ID rise to the level of true science. Now here in this passage he asserts that IC is central to ID. Are we confused or is the Judge?
But that aside, what, exactly, is flawed and illogical about inferring design from irreducible complexity? The problem with IC, if it has one, is that it's difficult to demonstrate that a particular system actually is irreducibly complex. If, however, it could be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that a system is indeed irreducibly complex, should we nevertheless ignore the telic implications of that finding simply because it would suggest a non-natural provenience. Judge Jones demands that the answer be "yes." He says, in effect, that we should deny ourselves scientific knowledge because the process of acquiring that knowledge conflicts with the philosophical preference for naturalism. Only naturalistic explanations can be permitted into Judge Jones' science classroom even if they're known to be inadequate and no non-natural explanation may be admitted even if it's believed to be highly probable. In his attempt to banish philosophy from the classroom he actually allows one philosophical position to prevail over another.
3. Judge Jones is confusing a response to a challenge with a refutation of that challenge. Just because scientists suggest logically possible answers to some of the questions raised by IC doesn't mean their answers are correct, plausible, or even physically possible. Much less does it mean that they've refuted IC. Since Michael Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box and posed his challenges to the scientific community many people have tried to come up with answers to the questions he raised, but whether the answers are adequate is not a judgment Judge Jones is qualified to make. Nor can he simply rely on the testimony of those who have suggested those answers that they have sufficiently refuted Behe. The scientific community as a whole must make that determination and that takes time. As of now, the outcome is uncertain.
The Judge goes on to make several more questionable claims:
If the judge thinks this is a refutation of ID, he's mistaken. No ID theorist would disagree with it. Design is itself an inference from confirmable data. It's an explanation based upon the empirical evidence of the natural world. It would be well, though, for physics teachers who explore with their advanced students cosmogeny, string theory, and the existence of other universes, to take note that they are running afoul of the Judge's guidelines for what they are permitted to teach.
Well, no, it's not a "science stopper." Would the Judge repeat this assertion to Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Galileo, or any of dozens of other scientific worthies who continued to seek the natural causes of phenomena even while convinced that their ultimate cause was God? Of course not. All these men believed that the causes they were seeking to discern were proximal causes. The ultimate cause may be intelligence, but that is no reason to stop searching for the means by which the designer accomplished what it did.
This is incorrect. ID looks at natural phenomena such as genetic information, bio-machines, and complex biological processes and instead of accepting inadequate explanations, i.e. those which seek to explain these phenomena as just an incredible fluke of nature caused by blind, purposeless mechanisms, asks whether the ultimate explanation might not involve intention and purpose. Intelligence is not proffered as proximal causes for natural entities. Rather it's considered an ultimate explanation of phenomena for which there is no plausible naturalistic explanation.
This is philosophically naive and tendentious. Surely the Judge knows that neither science nor philosophy proves anything. To fault the concept of irreducible complexity because it falls short of being a proof is to hold it to a standard that nothing else in science must meet. Nor is the Judge's statement that "irreducible complexity is a negative argument against evolution" correct. Michael Behe, the chief advocate of IC, is himself an evolutionist. Irreducible complexity is an argument not against evolution but against naturalism. This point has been made so often by so many different people that it's astonishing that the Judge still hasn't grasped it. Nor are IC arguments merely negative arguments. Irreducible complexity, if it truly exists, is a powerful affirmative argument in support of the proposition that intelligence undergirds the fundamental architecture of life.
Not only does this paragraph contradict what the Judge said in the paragraph at the beginning of this post, it is simply ridiculous on its face. The argument appears to be that since IC only seeks to show that three systems are intelligently designed, and since ID argues that all of life is ultimately designed, therefore IC is not ID. If, however, only one of Behe's systems could be shown to be intelligently designed then that would confirm not only IC but also ID since it would entail that there is, in fact, an intelligent designer.
The Judge doesn't think that IC makes it's case, though, because Dr. Miller says that it doesn't:
The conclusion the Judge should draw from this is that there is serious scientific debate as to whether Behe is right. The jury is still out. Just because some people say that the flagellum might have evolved solely through unguided mechanisms and blind chance doesn't mean that they are correct. Once again, Judge Jones is content to consider a conjecture to be a refutation.
Behe said they're not good enough because he believed these articles and books failed to show that the immune system could have evolved through purely natural means. The quantity of speculation about something is not evidence of its facticity. There've been many books and articles written about the possibility of other universes. Does Judge Jones think that we should accept the existence of such universes based on the copious speculation about them? And why does he think that demanding plausible explanations is an "unreasonable burden of proof"?
Wouldn't it be incumbent upon those who believe ID is false to conduct this test? If a flagellum were to appear in a laboratory environment that was only minimally affected by the intelligent input of the researcher, it would pretty much falsify ID, at least in the minds of most people. The reason no such test is conducted is because none of the opponents of ID really thinks that such a structure could ever be produced in the laboratory by chance and physical mechanisms alone in any reasonable amount of time.
In other words, not only do ID opponents believe they can't falsify ID, they tacitly acknowledge that their own theory is untestable. If a flagellum failed to arise in whatever amount of time was spent trying to have one appear the researcher could always plead that naturalistic evolution takes more time. But no matter how much time was granted, even billions of years, if the organelle still failed to materialize, the same plea for more time could be made. Put simply, naturalistic evolution is unfalsifiable and by Judge Jones' lights should be banned from science classes.
Judge Jones repeatedly trots out the Pandas textbook in order to discredit ID, but this is a straw man argument. It's easy to find bad science in books which endorse naturalistic evolution, too, but that's not a compelling reason to reject the theory. Any fair-minded person should base his judgment not upon the worst arguments that are offered on behalf of a proposition, but upon the best.
Of course, as we've argued above, it is possible that it's neither science nor theology but rather that, just like its Darwinian alternative, it's philosophy of science. However, to make the claim that it's not science requires of the Judge that he separate IC from ID because, as he's noted, IC is testable. The attempt to affect this divorce is philosophically awkward, though, and at the very least calls for a more modest conclusion than the Judge's confident assertion that ID is not science. He may be right, but much of the reasoning that leads him to his conclusion is deeply flawed.
In this our last installment in our series on the opinion of Judge John Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover we'll follow the Judge as he moves from his critique of the scientific standing of Intelligent Design to an examination of the motives of several prominent board members in trying to get ID formally mentioned in biology classes. If it can be shown that the primary movers on the board had a religious purpose in trying to accomplish their goal then, the Judge argues, their attempt would fail the Lemon test (from Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971) which explicitly forbids such motivations in introducing curricular materials into schools.
Whether Lemon is good law or not, it is the law, and it does appear that the board members violated it's stipulation that there must be a secular purpose to all public school curricular materials. Highlights of the Judge's reasoning are excerpted in what follows:
We initially note that the Supreme Court has instructed that while courts are "normally deferential to a State's articulation of a secular purpose, it is required that the statement of such purpose be sincere and not a sham."
Although as noted Defendants have consistently asserted that the ID Policy was enacted for the secular purposes of improving science education and encouraging students to exercise critical thinking skills, the Board took none of the steps that school officials would take if these stated goals had truly been their objective. The Board consulted no scientific materials. The Board contacted no scientists or scientific organizations. The Board failed to consider the views of the District's science teachers. The Board relied solely on legal advice from two organizations with demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions, the Discovery Institute and the TMLC. Moreover, Defendants' asserted secular purpose of improving science education is belied by the fact that most if not all of the Board members who voted in favor of the biology curriculum change conceded that they still do not know, nor have they ever known, precisely what ID is. To assert a secular purpose against this backdrop is ludicrous.
Finally, although Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony, such a strategy constitutes additional strong evidence of improper purpose under the first prong of the Lemon test. As exhaustively detailed herein, the thought leaders on the Board made it their considered purpose to inject some form of creationism into the science classrooms, and by the dint of their personalities and persistence they were able to pull the majority of the Board along in their collective wake.
Any asserted secular purposes by the Board are a sham and are merely secondary to a religious objective.... Defendants' previously referenced flagrant and insulting falsehoods to the Court provide sufficient and compelling evidence for us to deduce that any allegedly secular purposes that have been offered in support of the ID Policy are equally insincere.
Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause.
The core notion animating the requirement that . . . [an official act's] 'principal or primary effect . . . be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion,' is not only that government may not be overtly hostile to religion but also that it may not place its prestige, coercive authority, or resources behind a single religious faith or behind religious belief in general, compelling nonadherents to support the practices or proselytizing of favored religious organizations and conveying the message that those who do not contribute gladly are less than full members of the community.
It's unfortunate that Judge Jones has never read Roy Clouser's The Myth of Religious Neutrality. Clouser demonstrates in the first part of his book that the only thing that all religions share in common, and which therefore distinguishes a religion as such, is a divinity belief. By this he means that every religion holds a belief that something is unconditionally, non-dependently real and is the ultimate source of everything else. Since everyone holds that something is the non-dependent source of everything else, everyone, even the naturalist who believes the ultimate, non-dependent source is nature, or the materialist who believes it is matter, holds a religious belief.
When the Darwinian therefore claims that all of life is the product purely of natural, blind, purposeless mechanisms he is advancing a religious belief. The effect of the Judge's ruling, though he is unaware of it, was not to ban religion from the science classroom because that's an impossible task, but rather to ban a certain kind of religious claim from the classroom - the claim that matter, or the cosmos, might not be the non-dependent source of everything else.
In an astonishing contortion of justice the judge has banned the claim that the cosmos is not divine and privileged the claim that it is divine against any and all official criticism.
Judge Jones goes on to write:
This is simply untrue. As we have pointed out in earlier posts on this decision, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of biologists and other scientists who have testified in print that the theistic beliefs of their youth were extinguished precisely by their education in the theory of materialistic evolution.
It is true that evolution need not be seen as antagonistic to theism, but it is disingenuous of the plaintiffs' witnesses to say that "it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator." Indeed, the Judge regarded the assertion made by ID proponents that ID doesn't entail the existence of the God of the bible as a sham. Yet he does not see that if it is indeed a sham then certainly the claim that there is no conflict between a materialistic, naturalistic theory and a theory that suggests that theism is true is a forteriori a sham as well.
In his conclusion, the Judge states the following:
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. 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.
With this we are in agreement. It is exceedingly distressing that people who call themselves Christians would not act more honorably than a couple of the board members chose to act. We're all weak. We all fail in one way or another, but one wishes that Christians in such a high-profile position, Christians upon whom the eyes of a hostile secular press are focussed, would rise above the level of the rest of us and bring more credit and less disgrace to the Faith to which they claim to adhere.
With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.
It must be noted here what the Judge's decision entails. The italicized sentence above is clear that it does not prohibit ID from being mentioned or discussed by science teachers at their own discretion, nor does it prohibit those teachers from discussing problems within evolutionary theory. It merely prevents the Dover school board from requiring that any of this be done. Nor does his ruling prohibit ID from being taught in other classes besides science classes, but it is unclear whether his opinion would prevent a school board from mandating that a philosophy or social studies class, especially an elective, be set up to accomplish this.
Of one thing, though, we can be fairly confident, and that is that the shortcomings of the Judge's reasoning in support of his decision are going to leave plenty of openings for further challenges down the road. It's doubtful that we've seen the last of this issue.
RLC