Intelligent Design Proponents Have Cajones

A quick follow-up to my post on the NOVA Judgment Day special on Evolution and Intelligent Design...

According to New Scientist, the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design think tank and publisher of the book Of Pandas and People which was a prominent feature of the Dover trial, has alleged that the teaching materials that accompany the NOVA special "encourage unconstitutional teaching practices."

At issue are teaching materials that state:

Q: Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion?
A: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently anit-religious is simply false?

This is an interesting issue. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten this far in Constitutional Law yet, but I'll take a stab.

We need to ask whether these statements either promote or criticize a particular religious view. This depends on how you read the statements. Are these statements about evolution or about religion? Here is an example of two ways someone could paraphrase the statements in question.

1. "Evolution does not make any claim about the validity of religion." (about evolution)
2. "Religions that are inconsistent with evolution are false." (about religion)

If you think the Q&A boils down to statement 1, then you would think it is constitutional. If you think statement 2 is a fair assessment of the Q&A, then you should think that these statements are unconstitutional.

Obviously, I'm in the statement 1 camp. Evolution doesn't rule out God, and I think that is the point that these statements are trying to get across. However, I can see how the statement 2 folks have an argument. If you believed in a religion that didn't support evolution, you might conclude that the Q&A was speaking directly to your religion rather than religion in general.

Even if statement 1 was intended by the authors, the effect of promoting or suppressing a particular religious position is probably enough to make it unconstitutional. Though, I have to believe there is some sort of reasonableness standard that applies here.

But how do you decide whether this is a reasonable conclusion for someone to make? Imagine if the Q&A had been about "eating pork" or "engaging in premarital sex." There are some religions which strongly abhor these practices. Is it a religious statement to say, "The common view that (eating pork/engaging in premarital sex) is anti-religious is simply false"?

In thinking about this, I keep drifting back to the validity of the statements. The Q&A is unquestionably true. It could be false only if no one believed in both evolution and some religion. Since there are probably more than a hundred million Americans who hold both views, the statement certainly isn't false.

A religious statement, on the other hand, would be much harder to validate. I don't think we could say definitively whether statement 2 is true or false. However, statement 1 is verifiable like the Q&A. But does any of this matter?

At any rate, in raising this issue, the Discovery Institute has made it clear that they think there are religious implications to evolution. For an organization that worked so hard to sanitize ID so that they could pass it off as science rather than religion, this is a gutsy position.