Intelligent Design
These conflicts have attracted public attention when school boards have tried either to prevent the teaching of evolution in public schools or to re- quire or allow alternative views, such as so-called “intelligent design,” to be taught alongside standard evolutionary biology. In one recent case, the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania, passed a resolution requiring teachers to read a statement about “intelligent design” aloud in ninth-grade science classes whenever evolution was taught. Eleven parents of high-school stu- dents challenged this requirement in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707. In his opinion, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, partly because it depends on “its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” so the school district’s requirement therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This debate between natural selection and intelligent design, thus, has not only scientific but also legal and religious dimensions. The following selec- tions represent this debate at its best. Michael Behe (professor of biochem- istry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania) is one of the most prominent proponents of intelligent design, and Philip Kitcher (professor of philosophy at Columbia University) is one of his most profound critics. They focus on simple examples that are supposed to cause problems for the Darwinian ap- proach to evolution. These case studies raise more general issues about the nature of religion, the nature of science, and the relation between religion and science—issues that remain alive today in pulpits, classrooms, and courts.
To get simplistic objections out of the way first, explain what is wrong with Stephen Colbert’s satirical refutation of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the following passage:
Hey kids! Now you can disprove evolution in your own backyard. Here’s what you’ll need: one fishbowl, one pitcher of water, one hamster, alive, and one hardbound copy, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species . . . and now here’s the experiment. . . .
