Aided by the ACLU, 11 parents of Dover, PA schoolchildren have filed a federal lawsuit against the town’s school board, accusing it of violating the principle of separation of church and state.  The reason?  The school board requires that at the beginning of the 9th grade unit on evolution, teachers are required to read a statement to the biology class:  “Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered.  The theory is not fact. . . Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”  (The ACLU believes that Intelligent Design is a Trojan horse to introduce religion into public schools and has filed the lawsuit.)  The official name of the case is Kitzmiller et al v. Dover Area School District and is expected to draw national media attention.  The case, which most believe will last about five weeks, will be closely watched by scientists, educators and politicians within the US.  The outcome of the case will no doubt influence state school boards in Kansas and Ohio, which have permitted a critique of Darwin’s theory.  How the case is decided will either legitimize Intelligent Design within curriculums across the nation, or will, most likely, repudiate its legitimacy in the eyes of the law.  Several thoughts about this potentially volatile and rather significant case:

• First, a quick review of Intelligent Design as an approach to the matter of life’s origins.  The proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) do not claim to have a coherent scientific theory about how life actually changed over time on earth.  They simply offer arguments about what evolution could not do, and then conclude that a designer is the best hypothesis.  Three major examples of the ID argument:  (1)  Irreducible Complexity.  Based largely on the work of Michael Behe, the example of a mousetrap is used.  The parts of a mousetrap do not catch mice unless they are put together.  Much of the biological machinery in cells, like the motor-driven tails, or flagella, at the back of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and other bacteria, is similarly complex.  Taking away one piece breaks the machine.  Because evolution makes slow, incremental improvements, it would not have produced all these separate pieces that would have had no use until they were assembled into the final, working mechanism.  (2)  The Pace of Change.  Since natural selection deals with small changes in DNA, which in turn alter proteins the cell produces, it cannot create fundamentally new body shapes and new forms of life, as occurred during the Cambrian explosion a half a billion years ago, or during the rise of mammals after dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.  (3)  Information Theory.  Look at Mount Rushmore and you think it must have been carved.  Look at a cell and you should think it must have been designed.  Scientists who will not consider this are doing the same thing as looking at erosion and tectonic explanations for Mount Rushmore.  (This summary comes from Kenneth Chang, New York Times (22 August 2005.)  The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the leading backers of Intelligent Design, argues that they are trying to solve some of the deepest mysteries of science.  John West, Associate Director, argues, “It’s not about trying to reconcile science with some religious text.  It’s about this longstanding question in biology about the appearance of design.” 

• Second, the Dover trial has potential ramifications for public education at all levels, including public higher education.  For example, the University of California at Berkeley faces a lawsuit from students at Christian private schools who say they cannot go to the prestigious campus because the science courses they took—based on anti-evolution textbooks—do not fulfill admission requirements.  At Ohio State University, a review of a doctoral dissertation in science education by an Intelligent Design proponent was put on hold this spring after faculty protests.  Further, at Iowa State University, where a faculty member who teaches astronomy wrote a book contending that the earth must have been created by design, more than 120 faculty members signed a petition this year saying that Intelligent Design is not science.

• Third, Intelligent Design is not only growing in popularity within the US, it is finding appeal in other unexpected parts of the world.  Both Pope Benedict XVI and the Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism have expressed unhappiness with evolutionary science and a tacit support of Intelligent Design ideas.  Both share an aversion to the notion that life emerged blindly, via random mutation, without supernatural design or guidance.  In a recent book by the Dalai Lama (The Universe is a Single Atom:  The Convergence of Science and Spirituality), he laments what he calls “radical scientific materialism,” warning that seeing people as “the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes” is an invitation to nihilism and spiritual poverty.  He adds, “The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.”  In comparison, at his installation as pope, Benedict XVI stated that “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.  Each of us is the result of a thought of God.”  Furthermore, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the archbishop of Vienna, wrote, “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”  John Paul II wrote, as well, that “The truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy.  These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity.”  See George Johnson, “For Anti-Evolutionists, Hope in High Places,” New York Times (10 October 2005). 

• Finally, a comment about Intelligent Design and one of the core values of the modern academy, namely academic freedom.  Allow me a few additional thoughts about the Iowa State University faculty petition.  As I mentioned above, 120 Iowa State University professors signed a petition denouncing Intelligent Design and calling for a thorough-going repudiation of the idea by the University.  The statement read, “We the undersigned faculty members at Iowa State University reject all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor. . . .Whether one believes in a creator or not, views regarding a supernatural creator are, by their very nature, claims of religious faith, and so not within the scope or abilities of science.”  As Chuck Colson has observed, perhaps the most outrageous claim of this petition is that Intelligent Design represents the abandonment by science of “methodological naturalism. . . .Methodological naturalism, the view that natural phenomena can be explained without reference to supernatural beings or events, is the foundation of the sciences.”  This last statement is very difficult to defend and gets at the heart of academic freedom.  I thought the pursuit of truth was the “foundation of the sciences.”  To argue that methodological naturalism is that foundation is to presuppose the path of truth and reject all others.  That is not academic freedom!  That is ideology!  This is the tragedy of the modern university.  Institutionally, the modern university promotes freedom of thought and inquiry.  But there are boundaries to that freedom of thought and inquiry:  One cannot bring any supernatural thought or idea into the pursuit, for to do so is to prejudice the pursuit.  That is fallacious and ludicrous.  The pursuit of truth is just that—a pursuit, wherever it leads; even it leads to the conclusion of Intelligent Design.  We are in a sad state of affairs as a culture if we cannot admit that the pursuit of truth is our core objective, not methodological naturalism.  May God have mercy on us as a nation and as a culture.  See “Breakpoint” (30 September 2005).

Also see the news article on the Dover case in the Wall Street Journal (22 September 2005).

The former are quite liberal theologically and socially, while the latter are rather consistently quite conservative theologically and socially.  The growing divisions between the two groups is coming to head over the widening acceptance of gay sex by leaders of Anglicanism in the West.  This issue of legitimizing homosexuality in the church is the final nail in the coffin for these Third World Anglicans.  Influential and evangelical Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the fast-growing Church of Nigeria (18 million members), is the emerging head of the conservative voice of Anglicanism.  Akinola strongly argues that Anglicanism is defined by biblical boundaries rooted in an exegetical study of Scripture and the historic doctrines of the church.  He rejects legitimizing homosexuality in the church, as the Episcopal church did in ordaining a bishop in New Hampshire.  As head of the General Synod of the Nigerian Church, Akinola has made it clear that he is willing to separate from the Anglican Communion over these issues of theology.  He holds the Anglican West responsible for the growing and seemingly imminent schism.  They are, in his words, “walking apart from the Communion. . . . If England adopts a new faith, then I reserve the right to let them walk alone.”  Is Akinola an exception in Africa?  Henry Orombi, of the 8-million member Anglican province of Uganda, maintains that Akinola “speaks for all the primates of Africa.”

In Philip Jenkins' powerful new book, The Next Christendom, he argues that the center of Christendom is shifting from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere.  No better example of this truth can be offered than what is happening within the Anglican Communion.  The Anglican (and Episcopalian) churches of the West are leaving the throes of genuine, historic, biblical Christianity, while the Anglican churches of Africa are holding on to genuine, historic, biblical Christianity.  What an incredible development!  God is still building His church—but it is stronger in Africa than it is in the West!!!

See World (1 October 2005), p. 37.