[00:00:00] Speaker A: Because insofar as you're not even able to mention Intelligent Design concepts when you publish articles and journals as part of, let's say, the explanatory structure of what you're talking about, then how do you expect Intelligent Design ever to get a look in? Right. You effectively are institutionally censoring it. Right.
And this is what I said in my testimony, which outraged a lot of people because nobody could imagine that science was in the censorship business.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Idaho the Future, a podcast about evolution and Intelligent design.
Hello, and welcome back to ID the Future. I'm Casey Luskin with the center for Science and Culture. And today we have back on the show with us Professor Steve Fuller, who, on a previous podcast, we had a great conversation about the rich tradition of Intelligent design, which within philosophy, science, and theology, and how it has so powerfully shaped the way that we view the world around us academically today.
Professor Fuller earned his mphil at Cambridge University in History of Philosophy of Science, and then a PhD in the same subject at the University of Pittsburgh. He is now Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. He's also a fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He's written quite a bit about the evolution, intelligent design debate and conversation over the years. And he was also an expert witness in the trial supporting the Dover School District in the Kitzmuller vs. Dover trial. So, Professor Fuller, thank you so much for coming back on the show with us.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Well, thank you for having me again, Casey.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Okay, so having already covered a lot of ground, let's. Let's get into the actual Dover trial itself. The 20th anniversary of the Dover trial is upon us, and you and I found ourselves at a conference a few months back together talking about this. We thought, let's do a conversation about the Dover trial. You were an expert witness in the Dover trial, and you actually testified in support of the school district's actions and saying that their policy should be considered constitutional. So what led you to testify in support of the Dover School District during the trial 20 years ago?
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Well, first of all, I think a lot had to do in this particular trial. I had actually been asked in previous years, to be honest. So this wasn't the first time I was being asked to serve as an expert witness, because I had been writing about this stuff for quite a while. Right. So this trial's in 2005.
I recall being first contacted to be involved in one of these kinds of trials. Back in the early 1990s, actually, at that time I was living in the United States and I decided not to participate partly because I was living in the United States because I thought this would be a very controversial issue. And I wasn't tenured yet at the time.
But, but in the case of the Kitzmiller trial, I had already moved to Britain and I was a, you know, a chaired professor and nobody could touch me 3,500 miles away.
So, so that, that sort of stiffened my spine to do it. But in any case, I was always sort of sympathetic to the issue. And I think in the specific case of the Kitzmiller trial, I think this is where I think your viewers, especially those of you who only know about it through hearsay, what the trial was about.
The trial turned on a very specific point which I thought was very unproblematic, which is why I defended the school board. And that was.
So the idea here was that, that, that this school board in Pennsylvania had received books for high school students that were basically providing a kind of introduction to intelligent design.
And, and they were being, they had been donated and they were in the school library.
And what the, what the school board wanted was for the science teachers to read a piece of paper which said that those books were available in the school library if, if the students wanted to read them. So in other words, the, the science teachers were not obliged to actually teach intelligent design. They were simply obliged to tell the students that it existed. All right? And in the piece of paper, as I remember it, what they were also told was, you know, Darwin, Darwin's theory of evolution is a theory.
And, and, and that there, as it were, there is, there's an alternative, right? At least one alternative, and this one you can find out about in the school library. And in a sense, in principle, that could be the end of the story, right? You just sort of read this thing and then the science teacher can teach the science course however they wish. Right? I mean, and, and that is my understanding of what was actually on the table, okay?
And I thought that was completely unproblematic.
And so I had no problem saying, let him do it. They're not forcing intelligent design down students throats.
You know, they're just saying that there are alternatives, right? And that, you know, Darwin's theory of evolution is not signed, sealed and deliver. It's a kind of. There are still some open questions. And so it's good to think about an alternative.
I mean, I thought it was pretty minor, to be honest with you. So I didn't so from that standpoint, I knew that, I knew that these kinds of trials tend to be very controversial and everybody gets upset and everything.
And that's why it was very important that I was in Britain and not in the United States during this period. But I thought from an intellectual standpoint, this is a no brainer. This should be allowed.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So by the time this podcast comes out, our listeners will have heard the conversation that Andrew McDermott and I had about the Dover trial, where we made a very similar point that you just made, Steve, that although Discovery Institute wouldn't say that Dover's ID policy is maybe the best way to, to approach the issue, you know, it certainly was not the worst thing that was ever done to read a short statement before class telling students that, hey, you know, there's this alternative idea called Intelligent Design. If you want to learn more, you can go pick up this book in the library, check it out and keep an open mind. I mean, what's the big crime in that, you know? And so I would very much feel a similar way that you would, you know, if I could dictate what students would learn, I don't know if this is the way I would do it.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: So.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: But if this is what you want to do, this certainly should not be off the table.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: And it seems, I think it was very minimal. I thought it was. And in fact, I would, I would go. Part of what was informing my judgment as well, having thought about this issue for quite a while by this time, is that in a sense, if you don't tell high school students that there are alternatives, by the time they get to university, their minds will have already been closed. Okay. And, and, and, and this is so there, you know, because obviously, because it's a high school context and all these trials are about high schools generally, there's always this kind of pedagogical issue that sort of hangs over about, you know, when is the best time to teach students certain things.
And my view about this is that if you genuinely want students to have an open mind when they come to science, the high school is the period when you really have the opportunity to open their minds. But because by the time they get to university, they will be majoring in a subject and the subject is based. And that major, right, is basically designed to get them down a certain kind of path, right, so that they can become researchers or they can at least pass exams, right, that are very much, you know, or the orthodox way of thinking about things.
And so that opportunity of openness will have disappeared and by the way, of course, this is one reason why with a lot of American universities, especially right there, is like the first year or two when students can sort of shop around and not have to concentrate in just one subject immediately. In Europe, actually the situation is much worse because when you enter university in Europe, you enter in a subject and so the high school is really the ideal place to open up students minds.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, would you want to talk about science literacy? Which of course is a big buzzword that's been around for a while.
They want people to develop scientific habits of mind. And one of those sort of, you know, intellectual virtues that they want, that the science literacy advocates want students to develop, is keeping an open mind, being able to think critically, being able to consider alternatives. You can find all this reflected in statements from leading scientific organizations about how to teach science. So one school district dares to do that with regards to intelligence and evolution, and that immediately triggers folks and they, they call up the ACLU and file a lawsuit. You know, that's, that's basically what happened here. All right. You know, they took them seriously when.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: They said it's like a ton, a ton of brooks bricks fell on them.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: Yeah, they didn't know what they were in, in for. So yeah, I mean, I, I, I, the spirit of what you're saying, Steve, I'm 100% with you and very, very, very similar sentiments.
So I mean, let's just get down to the Dover. I mean, what was the main thrust of your testimony at Dover? I mean, why did you say that the actions were pedagogically defensible and justified? Well, I said maybe the stuff went over this.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I said some of the stuff I just said now. But I think the reason why I was put on there primarily was to testify about the historical importance of intelligence design for the development of science.
And also I was there to testify, you might say, wearing my sociological hat, about the kind of the institutional conformity of modern science that actually prohibits intelligent design in the contemporary world from actually getting a proper hearing. Because insofar as you're not even able to mention intelligent design concepts when you publish articles and journals as part of, let's say, the explanatory structure of what you're talking about, then how, how do you expect intelligent design ever to get a look in? Right. You effectively are institutionally censoring it. Right. And this is what I, this is what I said in my testimony, which outraged a lot of people because nobody could imagine that science was in the censorship business. But it seems to me that this is patently obvious if people are sending articles to respectable journals where, you know, all of the, you know, actual, you know, methods and findings and statistics, everything works out fine. But then when it comes to their explaining why, you know, the findings are the way they are, and they even suggest that this is a possible explanation, something to do with intelligent Design, right, that all of a sudden they say this is not allowed.
You know, why is that? Right? I mean, the point is, look, in a way, the scientific establishment can't have it both ways. It can't say it's a free and open space and that if Intelligent Design was just doing something that was scientific, we'd pay attention to it and then censor Intelligent Design people every time they do try to publish something. And I think this was really made evident, you know, so I'm talking about this, you might say, at the kind of sociological level about how this looks like from the standpoint of the institution of science. But Michael Behef, right, who was one of the other people to testify in the trial, right. He spoke about it from his own personal experience, right. As somebody who, you know, has been trying to get stuff published and is a respectable biochemist, you know, getting stuff published normally. But as soon as he starts mentioning any of these intelligent design concepts, they just rule it out of court or they say you have to take it out, otherwise we won't publish it.
Right. I mean, he testified to this extent. And, and the thing, of course, was that, that I don't know. I mean, for some, you know, given the kind of mindset of the judge and the way the ACLU and their very clever ways framed the trial, this wasn't taken sufficiently seriously, but it's a serious problem.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, and given your testimony as well about the long history that the intelligence ion perspective has in science, it's not like when people bring this up, it's a new idea that hasn't, you know, has. Has no roots, it's completely foreign, that has no ability to speak to scientific questions. I mean, people have been doing this for hundreds of years. So you may. You made a very good case, I think, Steve, not only that ID belongs within science, but that it's also being inappropriately censored. And, and that's. That's ongoing. I mean, you know, we're here, we are 20 years after Dover. I could tell you stories. I mean, I won't go into this right now, but we're still, we're still, we're still seeing it. People who don't Want ID to have its say in the scientific community?
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Well, you know, there was this big conference at the Royal Society back in 2016 about the problems of evolution. Right, right. Where, where the idea was to the Royal Society would bring in all of these, all these kind of more dissenter, dissenting people in biology who in various ways are representing various kinds of inadequacies of Darwin's theory and various alternative ways that might be scoped out. You know, so evil divu.
And. And the complexity people, all sorts of characters were being brought in.
But ID was not right. ID was excluded from this, from this. And it was a. No, it was a noticeable exclusion given the kind of broad range of, of acknowledgment that there were lots of problems with, with the neo Darwinian paradigm in biology. And so again, yes, so we, we, we have basically institutional censorship. I mean, I think, to be honest with you, it's a, it's a kind of theophobia. Right? I mean, afraid of the very idea that there might be God somewhere in this.
I think this scares the daylights out of people, you know, but, but the point is that, that this is the state of play.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean, I don't know if I told you this story, Steve, but last year Vanderbilt hosted this 100th anniversary, the Scopes Trial, Scopes Symposium. And they had a whole session on, actually it's like part of a day on Intelligent design and the Dover trial. And they didn't invite a single pro ID voice to participate in their Scope Symposium. And so I actually emailed some of the organizers of this, folks who were involved with the Evolutionary Studies Institute, some folks at the NCSE were involved in organizing this. I emailed some of the organizers and I said, hey, like, I would be very happy to give you a list of ID friendly scientists who would love to participate. You know, these are people who are civil, thoughtful, credible people, PhDs from Vanderbilt. That was actually the guy I was going to recommend, Joe DeWeese, who got his PhD in biochemistry at Vanderbilt. He's now a professor of biochemistry. And I was going to say, you know, just have, and have one person on your panel to represent the ID perspective. They wouldn't even respond to my email. And I didn't even deserve the courtesy of a response. So this is what we're up against. Now, that being said, I mean, the cat's way out of the bag. People want to learn about id. They can go online, they can find out that, you know, we're not the crazy people that, you know, everybody in that Camp says we are, and they can find out what we're really saying. So anyway, but let's, let's get back to the Dover trial here. So, obviously, the Dover ruling probably didn't go the way any of us would have liked.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: And it went, I mean, it went worse. I, I, I think that this is kind of, this is kind of, you know, so in the spirit of what, you know, because people often ask me, are you nuts? Why did you even get involved with this trial? Right.
Because people thought that this was kind of, this wasn't going to turn out well for the ID people. I think a lot of people knew that from the very beginning, actually.
And I think the issue was, and it's certainly, you know, since I did speak to the legal team, you know, during, during my period during the trial, I think the under, I think the, the understanding was that a good outcome for the Dover trial would have been that, let's say, the school district was wrong and because there was an issue about how the school district was representing itself in terms of, you know, why it was doing exactly what it was doing and, and, and so forth.
But that, in a sense, intelligent design as a theory would not be touched by the judge. Right. So in other words, the ruling would be made on a narrow front, namely about the actions of the school board without implicating the fate of the theory itself. Okay.
That was kind of what was considered a kind of hopeful outcome.
But the problem was that, of course, what happened in the outcome was, was the judge basically did a blanket condemnation not only of the school board, but also of intelligent design. And I think while that, while, you know, that possibility, of course, crossed one's mind, I guess, you know, it wasn't, one didn't quite expect it was going to come down so hard, let's put it that way. At least. I didn't.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. I, we had a very similar mind to you, Steve. You know, just so our listeners kind of understand the legal framework that was at play in the case, there's this legal test called the Lemon test. And the first part of the Lemon test says that a government policy cannot be enacted for predominantly religious motives. The second part of the legal test, it's called the Lemon test, says that the primary or principal effect can neither advance nor inhibit religion. And so, and you probably would agree with this, and we would agree with this, there was a lot of evidence that came out at trial that the school board probably had religious motives. And so we would not have at all been surprised if the judges said, well, this particular ID policy is unconstitutional because of the religious motives of the school board. I think the evidence was pretty clear on that.
But there's actually very good Supreme Court precedent that if you find that a government policy was enacted for religious motives. And by the way, that's a whole separate debate whether motives should be part of a legal analysis that's actually very controversial among legal scholars. But, you know, it was the law. So there is very good precedent actually coming from the Edwards vs. Aguilar case, which was a case over creationism, which says if you find religious motives, your analysis should stop right there. You don't have to then go further and look at the effect of the policy and ask whether the effect of the policy is to advance or inhibit religion, etc. The judge didn't do that. In fact, he ruled. This is a quote from the ruling. He said, since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the ID policy is the advancement of religion. So he's kind of quoting the Lemon test there. And so I found that statement very interesting, Steve, because when he's saying, you know, if since ID is not science, it's inescapable, the only real effect is the advancement of religion, it's as if he's saying there are only two things in this world, science and religion. And if it's not science, it's that it must be religion. And the judge was always complaining about false dichotomies, you know, in the trial. But from your perspective of, you know, studying history and philosophy of science, what do you think of the judge's logic there?
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I think, Judge. I mean, again, for those of. For those people who. Who have it. Who were not. Who had the blessing of not having to be in this trial, I think the. The most characteristic thing I would say about the judge's ruling was the extent to which it was cut and paste from the ACLU playbook. Right. So the. You know, so the plaintiffs. Right. So. So in other words, the judge. I don't think. I think the judge basically bought the plaintiff's case and just sort of airlifted it into his judgment. Right. And then sprinkled it with quotes from what us people, the people who were testifying said.
That's kind of the way it was constructed. Okay. It's a very long judgment, but it didn't take very long to produce.
And. And so, you know, you could draw your own conclusions there. So I don't think the judge did a lot of heavy thinking over this. Okay. But I do think, you know, for talking about the, the, the larger constitutional issue about the relationship between, you know, the state and, and, and the church and, and science and religion and stuff like that, here's what I would say.
I think from a constitutional standpoint, the way I understand the separation of church and state is that primarily, it's primarily aimed at not reproducing what happened in the UK where we have a state church, right? So in other words, it is about, again, it's against having an established church.
Now, when you say you're not going to have an established church, that doesn't mean you ban religion.
On the contrary, what you do is you allow for religious pluralism. And this is one of the reasons why in the American Constitution, right, responsibility for education is devolved to local authorities, okay? There is not a national ministry of education, unlike Europe and most countries around the world, okay? All, you know, you know, while there are textbooks and so forth that are recommended and so forth, local school districts all over the place are making their own kinds of decisions. And it's only when something seems to be violating the Constitution that something goes to court. But otherwise you've just got lots of different school districts pretty much teaching students according to quite different ways of doing things. And that's intentional, right. That, you know, this is a kind of a Thomas Jefferson moment, you might say, in the American Constitution, right? Namely the idea that you want to encourage local communities to experiment with different ways, you know, of organizing their minds, their lives, right? And in a sense, people can learn from each other by looking at how these different experiments work. And that's kind of part of what the whole new formation of America was going to be. That would make it different from the kind of uniform setting of Europe, okay? And so religious pluralism is part of the mix of open education, okay? And so that means that, you know, if you have some school district that wants to teach intelligent design, there is nothing inherently unconstitutional about that, right? I mean, as long as it, you know, as long as it's being taught openly. Right. And not in a doctrinaire manner, which is what you would say about any other thing that's being taught in the schools.
So this is the way I look at it that really, I would understand the separation of church and state really to just mean that there is no established church. And by the way, no established church also means no established church of Darwin, okay? So in other words, we should not have Darwin being mandated as the only way to be teaching biology or anything like that, right? So that's part of the other side of the story as well, at least as far as I'm concerned. Because one of the things that I worry about, about these kinds of rulings that try to ban religion altogether from school and certainly from science. Right. Is that what it does in its place is to smuggle in establishment science.
Instead of establishment religion, we get establishment science functioning as the religion of the educational system. And I think, you know, if we're going to live up to the spirit of the American Constitution, that we have to, you know, be very careful and vigilant about that happening.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Well, this is where you've said in your writings before, Steve, that that idea is an anti science, as it's often labeled, but rather it's anti establishment.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: And I think that that really was IDs crime in this case is that it went against the establishment and the establishment did not want any dissent from its authority and its, you know, its established view being taught. Is that sort of a better framing of what was really going on at Dover? What do you think?
[00:23:33] Speaker A: So I think so, because this is where, you know, you get these very dogmatic statements that were being made by various people, both the lawyers and, and the witnesses, you know, like this guy Pennock, you know, and Miller and all these other people who were brought in where they made these overly dogmatic statements about the nature of science that just were not true. Right.
And certainly very much against the spirit of openness that actually leads to the sorts of new discoveries and things that we normally see as characteristic of the epistemology of science.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: You know, it's interesting that you, you mentioned Robert Pennock. He wrote an article recently in the journal American Scientist Talking about the 20th anniversary of the Dover ruling. And in that article he says that the quote, unquote, fundamental beliefs of what he calls ID creationists are, quote, continuous with those of creation science. And he goes on to say that id, quote, depends on defining evolution as, and intelligent design as mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive options. Now, he never really clearly defines what he means by evolution, but you know, this is sort of reflecting the mindset, I think, that was inculcated in the Dover ruling. And Pennock obviously played a major role in that. He was also an expert witness who testified for the plaintiffs. As a philosopher of science, would you say that the way that he's characterizing ideas basically being indistinguishable from creation science and ruling evolution out of hand, you know, anything evolution is just can't be part of ID are those fair characterizations of id and you know, I don't know, what do you think is going on here?
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Well, my view about, okay, so my view about this, the part that is definitely wrong is the part that ID and evolution are mutually exclusive. That part of the statement, the latter part of the statement is definitely wrong.
And in fact it's a bit, how should we say, almost mischievous. Right. Because, right. Because when you're Robert Pennock, evolution is all of biological science. Right. So when you're saying that ID and evolution are mutually exclusive, you're basically saying ID is not science at all.
And, and so I think, and I think that's definitely wrong. And, and I think that even if you look at it from the evolution side, so, you know, ID people have varying kinds of relationships with evolutionary theory because they're idea is not one theory, first of all, right. I would say Intelligent Design is more like a meta theory, more like a research program, and there are lots of different versions of it and they have varying degrees of relationship, the varying aspects of evolutionary theory. I think that is fair to say.
But I would say that from the evolution side, throughout the history of evolutionary theory there, there have been people who, who have postulated degrees of teleology or intelligence or mindfulness as it were, at various levels of the process, sometimes macro, sometimes even micro.
And, and so, and so there is no, you know, on the evolution side, I think it would be a complete mischaracterization of evolution to say that it, that it is completely chance driven, you know, or something like that. That in fact, depending on which theory of evolution you're looking at, there is, there can be actually varying degrees of teleology and mentality that are implicated. Okay. And so, and so I do think that, that, that is a mischaracterization there now with regard to the relationship between idea and creationism, again, this is where, you know, maybe I'm more theological than you are.
I'm a little relaxed about this. Okay. I'm a little relaxed about it. However, I do take. What he's getting at is the fact that if you look at, you know, some of the early, early creationist trials and certainly certain, you know, if you're looking at the characterizations that were going on in, in Dayton, Tennessee at the Scopes trial, this idea of relying on the Bible as some kind of ultimate authority of science.
Right. You know, kind of, if the Bible doesn't agree with it, it's not true. True, right.
I think if you're talking, you know, if, if, if you're talking about that kind of Creationism. Right. Intelligent design is clearly not part of that. Okay.
Nevertheless, I do think that there is a sense in which, if you look at the history of Intelligent Design theory, and I don't mean just the recent history, but I'm talking about if you go back to the scientific revolution and so forth, you will see that a lot of these major scientists will. Were, in fact, inspired by reading the Bible. Okay. So we shouldn't think that the Bible in some way has no relationship to science. Right. In fact, you know, when we talk about catastrophism, for example, think about that. Right, Right. This idea that there have been these punctuated moments. Right. In the history of life, you know, the Cambrian explosion, for example, being very important, but also other ones. Right. So Stephen Jay Gould used to talk about punctuated equilibria over the course of evolution. Well, that is an idea. Catastrophism, if you go back into the 18th century and you see its development comes from a kind of scientific updating of the story of the Flood and all the other catastrophes that the Jewish people underwent.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: In light of the kind of science that was being developed through the understanding of geology as they were digging in the earth and seeing the different layers with different organisms. Different layers in the rock with different organisms. And that's how catastrophism basically came about, as a kind of theory of the history of the Earth. It started with the biblical story, but then refined, nuanced. Right. Made more scientific. And I think, you know, with a lot of these fundamental scientific ideas that have ended up being very influential, you can usually go back and find some kind of biblical origin for a lot of them. And. And you could certainly do that back in the scientific revolution. So I don't think it's fair, you know, to dismiss the Bible as somehow not having anything to do with science. What, of course, is not the case is that just because the Bible says something that therefore you could count it as an unvarnished scientific fact or authority. Right.
So that's why I'm a little, you know, because I don't want. I don't want readers to think that somehow, if you're going to do intelligent design, you have to put away your Bible. I don't think that's necessarily true at all, actually.
Yeah.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: And I. I think that actually, Steve, we would. We would agree with that in a nuanced sense.
You know, nobody's saying that there are no religious beliefs or motives or affiliations that, you know, that are connected to intelligent design.
Now, the idea is a very diverse big Tent, as we like to say, there are folks in the ID community who don't really have any religious beliefs or backgrounds, so to speak, but there are certainly many who do. So we're not at all trying to deny that there can be religious beliefs and motives and affiliations connected with intelligent Design. I think what we would say is that when you actually are doing ID as a science, you don't have to have those religious beliefs in order to do ID science. And at the end of the day, what matters is whether the evidence supports intelligent Design. You know, and we would argue that it does. And that's what shows ID is a meritorious scientific theory, is the fact that the evidence supports what we're saying. But we would also make this point. The judge and the plaintiffs in the Dover case love to talk about the supposed religious beliefs, affiliations, motives, connections of id, but never seem to be interested in asking the question, what about Darwinian evolution? If you want to talk about know, anti religious beliefs or motives or affiliations, you know, Darwinian evolution has that in spades. Now of course, I'm not saying that if you believe in evolution you have to be an atheist, but you know, if you want to start digging into people's, you know, religious, what they do on Sundays or Saturdays whenever they go to worship, you know, and you want to start asking, well, I mean, Eugenie Scott, who is sitting there in the courtroom advising the aclu, she's a signer of the third Humanist Manifesto. Okay. And Barbara Forrest, another one of the expert witnesses, she is on the, you know, board of directors of these secular humanist groups. That's fine. They have every right to do those things. I actually don't object at all to their rights to be involved with those kinds of worldviews and those activities. And I don't think that those things should count against the teachability of evolution. But the judge seemed to not really, you know, think about the fact that if you're going to start harping upon the religious beliefs and motives and of idea theorists and you're going to make an issue of the fact that Michael Behe believes in God, which he did, you know, what about Darwinian evolution? How could that kind of reasoning potentially jeopardize the teachability and the constitutionality of, of evolution in public schools, I think that's a can of worms that they really, they really don't want to open.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's really interesting because shortly after that trial took place, of course there was this kind of effloresis of new atheism right Where New Atheism was kind of trying to present atheism as a kind of positive worldview, right. I mean, so in other words, had this trial taken place, let's say five years after 2005, you know, when the likes of Dennett and Dawkins and Hitchens and all these characters, right, were actually talking about atheism as a positive worldview, then there might have been subtraction there, right, of the kind that you're talking about. Because then you could say, well look, these people under the name of atheism, right, are saying that there's a kind of worldview, right? And that that needs to be promoted in the society. And they're doing in a very proselytizing way, kind of the way you would expect, right, your evangelical Christians to be.
And so that would have made things a little trickier actually if the new atheist movement was already, you know, kind of as visible as it was five years later. Because you're absolutely right. I mean, I do think, and I do think, you know, again, this goes to the issue about that if you're going to try these kinds of cases, the legal teams, you know, in terms of cross examination really need to be up to speed to be able to ask the right questions of these people. Because I do think the question that you would want to ask of someone who is non religious, who believes in Darwinism is to say, well, I mean, the fact that you don't believe in God, doesn't it make it easier for you to believe that there's a chance based universe? Right, right. So in other wor, there's a sense in which you don't ask any further questions because you're sort of already expecting that there's really nothing there.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: So the point is, sure, universe came about by chance. I don't believe in God. That's not a total coincidence because I'm not inclined to ask the further question about where the chance comes from. Right.
And so, you know, that is about, you know, just like you might say, I'm not satisfied with chance because I keep on thinking there's something beyond it. You could ask the other question, say, well, you're satisfied with chance because you already start off by thinking there is nothing behind that. Right. So kind of can, you know, be. But you, you actually need the lawyers to cross examine the witnesses to get them into that position.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: Yeah, no, you're right, you're right about all that. And yeah, certainly psychology does play a role of, you know, opening people up to being more, I guess, open to consider one view over another. But at the end of the day, you know, what matters is not a person's psychology, but the evidence and whether they're making a claim that can be tested scientifically. And so, you know, all these, you know, religious beliefs of id, apparently, according to the judge, okay, well, is it, is it science? Is there evidence backing up what they're saying? And the same goes for evolution. That's what matters. I mean, I really, I think that Eugenie Scott and her humanist manifesto connections are irrelevant to asking whether evolution is science and is supported by the evidence. It's, I'm not trying to deny any. And we can, we can say that in the same way say we're not denying that these religious or anti religious beliefs and motives and affiliations exist. We can fully acknowledge them. They're just not relevant to.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: Let me, let me address your point about the evidence issue because I think that's a really, I mean, because I know id, ID people continue to return to this and I think, I think one of the things that you might want to consider, and this is where I think historians of science could be very helpful to you.
That's if they're willing to stick their head above the parapet.
And, and that is that one of the, you know, we live in a, you know, part of the institutionalization of science is that there's a sense in which the dominant theory in any field has a kind of winner take all control over the evidence, right? So even if the evidence in your field was in fact, you know, originally discovered and explained by people who do not share the dominant view, they get assimilated into the dominant view and you forget about the fact that the people who came up with it were actually operating with a different theory. Okay. And if you look at all of the stuff, you know, so, so in other words, one of the things that, that enables Neo Darwinism to have this kind of hegemony over all of science is it basically claims all the evidence as its own, right? So in other words, an exclusive property of the paradigm. Even if you actually look at the particular researchers who have contributed key parts of what is considered to be evidence for the Neo Darwinian paradigm, you'd realize these people weren't all singing from the same hymn sheet, right? That they were in fact coming from quite different theoretical perspectives that actually didn't sit that well with each other. But what happens when you have a dominant paradigm and is that effectively what you do is you asset strip the evidence, right? So in other words, you get rid of the theoretical Baggage in which the evidence originally came, and you just use the stuff for your own purposes. And so what that means is that a lot of people who have contributed evidence to neo Darwinism may in fact have been rather sympathetic to Intelligent Design. Right? But the point is they're not, they're not remembered that way. They're remembered only for having contributed the evidence. And so this is where the history comes in. Because if you do a kind of excavation of who are these people who came up with this crucial finding, you very often realize they actually started off with rather different beliefs from the theory that ends up appropriating the evidence.
And this is one reason why Intelligent Design has a very hard time getting traction. Because as long as we live in a scientific world, that is a kind of winner take all proposition where all the evidence goes to the dominant theory. How is intelligence.
Intelligent Design can't even claim the evidence that people who held it produced, right? If you go back to the past, if you go back to the 19th century, where clearly Intelligent Design people were contributing evidence that now the evolutionists have taken over, you see, so there is this kind of problem, right?
So when we do talk about evidence, yes, evidence is fine to talk about, but the point is that the evidence has to be able to be. You have to be able to appropriate the evidence, you know, properly. It can't just be, you know, that one theory owns all the evidence.
[00:38:45] Speaker B: No, absolutely. I think what you're saying is 100% right. I think it's. Unfortunately, it's hard for a lot of people because people are not good at thinking critically, they're not good at thinking about competing models in their head at the same time, interpreting the data one way or another way. They want it black and white, they want a paradigm, they want a model. But your advice is good advice that we need to take, Steve. So I want you to know that we in the ID community need to listen to our friends in the philosophy of science community. And I mean, just as a final question here, you've been something of a friendly observer of ID for many years now, and I just want to ask, do you think that ID is currently in a phase of ascendancy when we look at the research program?
Are we in a season of opportunity for ID right now? And any wisdom or reflections that you'd like to share for us in the ID community before we sign off here?
[00:39:34] Speaker A: Well, I think. Well, first of all, there have been papers published. I'm not going to deny that there have been papers published in ID notwithstanding all of these Institutional obstacles, which I think, in that respect, I think the institutional obstacles haven't changed that much. But what is going in IDs favor is the general political, cultural climate, because I think it's fair to say that even though the Dover trial went the way it did, I don't think it actually changed many minds. And if anything, if you're looking at what the general public, including the public that knows science, thinks about this kind of debate that we've been talking about here, I think the intelligent Design community, in terms of people potentially sympathetic to it, has grown.
Okay.
Certainly, you know, the neo Darwinian paradigm, I think, is actually weaker than it was 20 years ago from the standpoint of the public understanding of science. Okay.
And, you know, we could start talking about Donald Trump and the. And the role that he's played in that, because I do think that is part of the story, actually.
And so, you know, it's allowed a kind of more public voicing and also, you know, at very high levels of government, a sort of recalibration of how we judge what good science is and bad science and stuff like that. And of course, this has been very controversial across many fields. But just getting, as it were, the policymakers to kind of, in a way, think in a more fundamental way about what the nature of science is, that can only help id.
And, you know, as I've told you privately, and I could say it here, I suppose, I think there should be another trial.
I think that the legal climate is much more open to a trial of this kind that might at least shift the dial from a legal standpoint in Intelligent Design's direction. And so I would be in favor of that and would be up to participate in such a trial were it to come up in the future.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Okay. Well, Professor Steve Fuller, thank you very much for your reflections and thoughts and sharing your experience and knowledge and wisdom on this topic.
I'm Casey Leskin with ID the Future.
Not looking to go to trial tomorrow, but if it ever happens, we will certainly keep your name in our Rolodex.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Steve, thank you.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: We appreciate that. So thank you so much, Steve, for sharing all your thoughts with us today.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: Okay, thank you, Casey.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: I'm Casey. Casey Laskin with ID the Future, reflecting on where intelligent design is 20 years after the Dover trial. Thanks for listening.
Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is.
[00:42:17] Speaker A: Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
