No sooner had the Darwinists ended their 80th anniversary
celebrations of the Scopes trial than they turned their attention
to conducting censorship trials of their own. The ACLU has gone
from defending teachers to prosecuting them. In a federal courtroom
this week, the ACLU argued that science teachers in the school
district of Dover, Pennyslvania, are not free under the
Constitution to question evolutionary theory. That the Dover school
board has to defend the constitutionality of its science curriculum
before a federal judge is one more illustration of the insane First
Amendment jurisprudence of the last 50 years.
The elite, sensing a chance to score a victory against critics
of Darwinism, are watching the trial breathlessly. Slate
has assigned famed correspondent Hanna
Rosin to cover the trial; the New York Times
dispatched Laurie Goodstein — note that she is a religion
(not science) reporter — to cover it. There is an
all-hands-on-deck feel to the reporting, which has been made even
more critical by the presence of the Dover school board’s star
witness, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe. A dreaded
scientist who perversely refuses to accept the overwhelming and
obvious “consensus” in favor of Darwinism.
While neither Rosin nor Goodstein are up to the task of
explaining evolutionary theory convincingly, they do realize the
sacred duty of stopping this scientist. He’s wandered much too far
on to the Darwinists’ turf.
Garbling the elite’s dogmatic schema, Goodstein, in the
Wednesday edition of the Times, had Behe challenging the
“Darwinian theory of random natural selection.” Random natural
selection? No, no, Ms. Goodstein, nature selects not randomly but
necessarily, choosing random mutations that happen to prove useful,
under Darwin’s theory. What is nature? And how does it choose with
such incredible precision and marvelous efficiency? Well, that’s
not important and certainly not within the province of science,
even if Aristotle, who probably believed in the gods and went to
temple, did consider these questions in The Physics and
concluded that nature requires an intelligent cause.
Goodstein doesn’t have the Darwinian terminology down, but she
is keenly aware of the elite’s favorite argument for evolutionary
theory: the scientific establishment says it is so and no
reasonable person would question these omniscient scientists.
Here’s how she presents that point: “Scientific critics of
intelligent design — and there are many — have said for years
that its proponents never propose any positive arguments or proofs
of their theory, but rest entirely on finding flaws in evolution.”
What delightful casualness.
Never mind that through history scientists — and there are many
— have considered it “science” to examine a theory and find it
inadequate if it couldn’t explain the facts they did know, such as
that beings in nature contain awe-inspiring intricacy, beings they
couldn’t replicate with their own intelligence. But then what do
they know next to the scientific experts at the ACLU?
Aristotle was one of those creationists in a cheap toga who
concluded that the abundant design in nature points to an
intelligent cause even if that cause isn’t visible. “For teeth and
all other natural things either invariably or normally come about
in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or
spontaneity is this true,” he wrote in The Physics, a book
that the ACLU would argue violates the separation between church
and state.
Though Darwinism resembles an astonishing fable of chance — the
Greek mythmaker Empedocles, not Darwin, deserves credit for
launching the idea that nature is undesigned and the product of
genetic happenstance — Goodstein feels confident enough to lampoon
Intelligent Design as no more scientific than “astrology.” She
provides no proof in her story, but leads with the claim that Behe
“acknowledged that under his definition of a scientific theory,
astrology would fit as neatly as intelligent design.” Doesn’t
Goodstein know that astrology is one of her secularist audience’s
favorite hobbies?
The problem with Behe’s testimony for Hanna Rosin was not too
little scientific explanation but too much. She found it all very
taxing.
“The courtroom, it turns out, is a poor place to conduct a
science class. Behe runs through specific examples of ‘irreducible
complexity’ — his idea that certain biochemical structures are too
complex to have evolved in parts: blood clotting cascades, the
immune system, cells,” she writes. “He claims his critics have
misread crucial bits of data. To a nonscientist such as myself (and
presumably the judge), this is like Chinese: I recognize the
language, but I have no idea whether the speaker is faking it. I
have no context, no deeper knowledge of the relevant literature.
The reporter seated next to me has written only four lines of notes
for three hours of testimony. The mere fact that the trial is being
conducted in such highly technical language means, for the moment,
ID is winning.”
Nevertheless, she is sure Behe’s wrong, and adduces herself as
evidence that intelligent design is impossible, “I need look no
further than myself for counter-evidence: weak ankles, diabetes,
high probability of future death. If there is a designer, she
doesn’t seem so intelligent.”
Scientists who stood alone used to inspire a little more
deference in the left. But Michael Behe is one nonconformist they
won’t defend. The silencers of unpopular science once feared ACLU
lawyers. Now they retain them.
