Op-Ed: Religion Masquerading as Science—'Intelligent Design' is on the march again

Ms. Christine Castillo-Comer, an award winning teacher of over 35 years experience and Director of Science Education at the Texas Education Agency for nine years has been fired. Her crime? She forwarded an email about "Intelligent Design" to a colleague.

That's it! She simply forwarded an email that she had received about a lecture from an opponent of Intelligent Design, or ID, with the message "FYI," and thirty-five years of good service went down the drain. Only a hour after MS Comer forwarded the email Lizette Reynolds, former deputy legislative director under Governor Bush and now TEA "senior adviser on statewide initiatives, sent a memo to Comer telling her that she could either resign or be fired. Reynolds' memo stated that by forwarding the email Comer had given its recipients reason to "assume this is a subject that the agency supports," which Reynolds claims is a violation of the agency's policy of neutrality on the topic of evolution. This was a bogus rational since the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills in Biology standards specifically mandate that the agency must support evolution. The departure of MS Comer comes at a convenient time for the supporters of "Intelligent Design" which is simply religion masquerading as science. Ever since their humiliating defeat in the case of Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. 1995 Creationist, who now call themselves proponents of "Intelligent Design," have been looking for new areas to spread their gospel of anti-science. For these anti-intellectual crusaders the upcoming rewriting of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, or TEKS, must look like an ideal opportunity. But their hoped for substitution of religious dogma for science cannot happen if teachers knowledgeable in evolution, or administrators versed in the legal presidents surrounding creationism in the classroom are allowed to mount a counter attack, hence the firing of Ms Comer helps send a message to those who would oppose them of the consequences of standing to the Intelligent Design zealots. In the case Kitzmiller v Dover School District it was shown beyond all reasonable doubt that Intelligent Design is simply repackaged Creationism, which the US Supreme Court has already ruled an unconstitutional attempt to smuggle religion into the classroom in the guise of science. ID is not science it is a fraud pure and simple. Its proponents are intellectually dishonest hucksters who lack any scientific support for their claims and therefore resort to playing semantic games in order to sow confusion among those lacking the scientific knowledge to combat them. In a reprise of George Orwell's famous "newspeak" they twist the meaning of the scientific term "theory" to mean something entirely different from what scientist themselves mean by the term. To the average American "theory" is simply a rung on the ladder running down from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Disciples of ID claim that evolution is "only a theory," implying that it is something scientist are uncertain about when nothing could be further from the truth. As the late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould put it:

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs on a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientist debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in midair pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from ape like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.(1)

In the 150 years since Darwin first proposed his theory it has withstood countless assaults and every single new advance in science only serves to confirm it all the more. Even sciences, such as molecular biology and DNA, that had not been invented in Darwin's day have produced new evidence in support of evolution. As University of Chicago professor Neil H. Shubin explained in the NOVA program "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trail":

Darwin didn't even know about molecular biology and DNA, yet that's where some of the most profound evidence is being uncovered today. Think about that. That somebody in the 1800s made predictions that are being confirmed in molecular biology labs today. That's a very profound statement of a very successful theory.

In the same program Kenneth R. Miller, biology professor at Brown University adds:

Not a single observation, not a single experimental result, has ever emerged in 150 years that contradicts the general outlines of the theory of evolution. Any theory that can stand up to 150 years of contentious testing is a pretty darn good theory, and that's what evolution is.

Some may question the importance of the battle over creationism in the classroom but the sad fact is that Americans have more fights over evolution in their class and courtrooms than rest of the developed world put together and it is no coincidence that we are lagging behind the rest of the world in science education as a consequence. Science is a network and one cannot deny part of it and have the rest work. A person can't say "evolution is just a theory," as though theories were some sort of nebulous and unimportant bit of fluff instead of the very building blocks of science, and then expect for any of the other "theories" that science is built on to count for very much either. The rigorous and elaborate work that goes into one of these "theories" is as close to "truth" as humans are capable of at the moment and to weaken one is to weaken them all. What is worse is that this sort of thinking trivializes science and makes teaching it and inspiring students to learn it, vastly harder. As Robert Pennock of Michigan State University put it:

It's an explanatory framework within which all the rest of biology fits. It's something that we use in practical biological applications: medicine, agriculture, industry. When you're getting a flu vaccine—that really depended upon evolutionary knowledge. In many, many specific ways, evolution makes a practical difference. It's not just something that happened in the past, evolution's happening now.

How can we teach biology if we cannot say that humans evolved from other animals? How can we teach geology if we say that the world is only six thousand years old in the face of a ten million year old rock? How can we teach astronomy if we can't say that the sun and moon developed out of a gas cloud billions of years ago? How can we teach anything if we have to be constantly checking with religious leaders, untrained in science, to see if we have their permission to teach it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gould, Stephen Jay "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History." p. 254 NOVA: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial