Episode Transcript
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[00:00:43] Speaker B: If your goal is to basically dismiss ID and use the Judge Jones said it, I believe it. That settles it. Approach to ID and dismiss ID without actually evaluating what ID theorists actually say.
The Dover ruling was tailor made for you. All right. But if you actually want to consider what ID theorists are saying, you want to take ID seriously. You want to do good scholarship where you let people speak for themselves. You want to actually look at the science, look at what the evidence says on multiple sides, and look at what the previewed evidence says. The Dover ruling is is not where you want to go. In fact, it's going to lead you in some very, very, very bad directions.
ID the Future A podcast about evolution and Intelligent design.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Over after Dover. Maybe you've heard a critic of ID use that as an excuse not to take the arguments of intelligent design seriously. Or maybe you've never even heard of the Dover trial.
Well, either way, today's episode will be illuminating. Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude my conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin, Associate Director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture.
Casey holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg. He's also one of the top legal experts on the issue we're going to be talking about today.
He holds a law degree from the University of San Diego and has been a California licensed attorney since 2005.
In fact, since 2005, Casey might be the only attorney in the USA whose primary and near exclusive area of practice has been the teaching of origins in public schools.
He has traveled all around the USA advising teachers, school board members, legislators on how to teach evolution and intelligent design.
He has also worked on many cases defending academic freedom for scientists and scholars who face persecution due to their descent from the evolutionary consensus.
He has commented on the teaching of evolution in public schools, in numerous major media outlets, including CNN, the New York Times, LA Times, Science, Nature, and many others.
And on top of that experience, he's a legal scholar on this topic as well, authoring or co authoring seven articles in technical legal journals.
And finally, he's an expert on this particular trial that we're going to discuss, the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial. Casey attended part of the trial itself and he co authored the definitive response to the Dover ruling, a book called Traipsing into Intelligent Design and the Kitzmuller vs Dover decision.
In part one of this interview, Cayce sets the stage for us by sharing some of his personal experiences of the trial and the backstory you may never have heard.
Today, he'll add to that by explaining what the ruling got wrong and why the shorter and longer term impact of the trial and why the trial did nothing to slow down the progress of intelligent design over the last two decades.
Now, without further ado, let's jump back into our conversation with Casey now.
Now we're going to switch gears a little bit and we're going to now talk about the outcome of the Dover trial. And we'll also, you know, discuss Judge Jones and some of the decision making that he made during this trial and how that that affects things.
So, Casey, what was the outcome of the Dover trial for. For those who have not followed it and aren't familiar with it, can you review that?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So the outcome, Andrew, was the judge did rule that Intelligent design is a religious viewpoint. Basically, he claimed that it's a form of creationism and it is therefore unconstitutional to teach in public schools. And he also found that it was not science. He kind of did this lengthy famous section in his ruling where he defined science and claimed that intelligent Design does not fit with this definition of science and therefore it's unconstitutional to teach in public schools. That's sort of the short version of what he ruled.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: All right, well, what kinds of things did the judge get wrong? And specifically how did the judge define science? Because you would think that's really important when you're trying to rule something out of that definition.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Well, talking about what Jud Jones got wrong literally requires a book length treatment. Even then that might be long enough. Okay, I have a two and a half hour lecture called ID wasn't over at Dover. I'm sure we'll link to it from the podcast description. I gave that, I gave that YouTube lecture back in like 2015. In fact, I just had knee surgery and this was the longest that I'd stood for, you know, a few weeks when I gave that lecture. So you can see me kind of hopping around, shifting weight from one leg to the next when I gave that, that presentation. So that's also a very exhaustive treatment. We didn't have time to give an exotic discussion of everything the judge gets wrong in the Dover case. But let me, let me just first say this, okay?
A lot of folks sort of who aren't familiar with the legal world, they assume that judges are inerrant. And if a judge said something that, therefore it must be true or well backed, okay? But if you spend literally a day in law school, you find out that judges make mistakes all the time. In fact, law professors literally make a living telling their students what judges got wrong. Okay, so, so anybody who's gone to law school or studied this issue formally knows that judges do get things wrong. In fact, that's why courts frequently get overruled. They make mistakes, they do things wrong. Happens all the time.
And it's also important to keep in mind that courts cannot settle scientific debates. And no court ruling has the ability to negate or sort of, you know, settle the debate over the evidence for design in nature. But the reality is that the Kitzenmiller vs. Dover ruling makes numerous false claims about both the facts and the law of this issue that make it a highly unreliable analysis. And so let me just go through a few of the big ones. When the judge adopted his definition of science and claimed that basically ID failed his test of what is science or what is not science, it was a six part test. And it turns out that every one of those six parts of the test, the judge either got the analysis wrong or that part of the test is irrelevant to deciding whether or not ID is science.
So the first part is he claimed that id, quote, unquote, requires supernatural creation. But that position was directly and precisely refuted and denied by ID proponents who testified during the trial who said that, yeah, it is possible that the designer is a supernatural being, but ID doesn't try to address that question of whether the designer is natural or supernatural, especially in biology, which is what was at stake at the heart of this case. That textbook of pandas and people is all about ID and biology. You want to talk biological design, I think it's. And even the textbook said this, that it's. You can't use the evidence from biology, you know, from DNA itself is not telling you whether the designer is a natural or supernatural being. You can see that there's evidence for an intelligence being involved and, you know, designing these molecular machines and generating all this complex information that's in cells, I mean, that certainly is screaming out for intelligent cause. But that information in the DNA itself does not say made by Yahweh or made by Allah or made by Buddha or made by whoever you think the designer is. Okay? It's not telling you who the designer is. It's just pointing to an intelligent cause. So for that reason, ID theorists have been very principled and consistent in saying that at least in biology, ID does not address the question of whether the designer is supernatural or natural. The ID theorists who testified at the trial were very clear on this point. So was the textbook at stake in the case. And the judge basically just ignored and sort of just denied their testimony. And he claimed that id, quote, unquote, requires supernatural creation.
So in my training, you know, in school, I was always taught that you need to let somebody define a position for themselves. Okay, if you're going to, you can disagree with them, you can critique them, but you first need to let them stake out their own position and define what their view, their model, their position actually is. Judge Jones did the opposite of that. He did not let the ID theorists, the ID proponents in the trial define their own position. He came in and said, no, no, no, we're going to ignore how you actually define id. And I'm going to tell you what, I'm going to redefine ID for you and then basically knock down a strawman version of intelligent design. So that's, you know, when people say, oh, ID was struck down at Dover, my response is, well, actually that was not the real theory of intelligent design. That was the critics version of intelligence. If you look at where what we are actually saying, it's very different from the way Judge Jones described it during the Dover ruling. So, you know, the Dover ruling, I guess it would bother me if it was more if it was actually talking about what we were, what we actually say. But instead they had to distort and twist what we're saying, which makes you wonder, you know, why did they have to do that in order to have ID struck down? Why did they have to basically misrepresent what ID is in order to have it declared unconstitutional? You know, if ID was, was so bad, you know, was so bad on its face, they wouldn't have had to do that. Okay, so anyway, that's number one, the second part of his test of whether idea science is, he said that ID employs something that's called this flawed and illogical, contrived Dualism that he says doomed creation science in the 1980s. What did he mean by that? Well, what. The way it was put to the court is that creationists back in the 1980s would say if evolution is wrong, then creationism is right. Okay? So it becomes a totally negative argument against evolution with no positive content for intelligent design.
And he, for whatever reason, I don't know why that bears on whether ideas religion, but he claimed it did. Okay. Or whether idea is science or religion, but he claimed that it did. So the judge claimed that ID argues in the same way that ID is strictly a negative argument against evolution that says evolution is wrong, therefore ID is right. Again, this directly contradicts the way that the pro ID expert witnesses define intelligent design. During the trial, Scott Minick directly testified about the positive argument for design based upon finding information or molecular machines in biology. Michael B. He testified about the positive argument for design. So the judge again here is basically just ignoring what ID theorists actually said in his courtroom and twisting it so he can make ID look more like this position that he claims creationists had in the 1980s. Okay?
So the third part of the test is he said that IDs negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.
So this is really interesting because the judge is claiming that this means that ID fails to be science. Why does it fail to be science? Because, quote, IDs negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. In other words, ID science is wrong. Now, anybody who studies philosophy of science or history of science for like a day, you know that like the history of science is littered with scientific ideas that have been proven wrong. Okay? So I don't think ID was proven wrong in the court case, but, but let's just say it had been. Being wrong does not make you therefore unscientific. In fact, every scientific theory that is actually scientific has to be, according to many folks, has to be falsifiable, has to have the ability to be falsified. So the history of science is littered with ideas that are scientific, they are science, they're just bad science, they're incorrect science. But that doesn't mean that they're not science and therefore religion. They're just false science. In fact, even philosopher of science Philip Kitcher, who I took a class from when I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego, he says that ID is science, but it's dead science. Now, he claims it's dead science because it's refuted by junk DNA. You know, we all know that's not a very Good way to refute id. But it's very interesting, he says, that ID is science. It's just bad science, like many other scientific theories that have been refuted throughout the history of science. So Judge Jones there was using very dubious philosophy of science to say that if ID has been refuted, therefore it can't be science. Every philosopher of science knows that you can have something refuted and it can still be science. Now, that being said, we can talk about whether ID actually was refuted during the Dover trial, and I would argue certainly it was not.
Let's talk about the bacterial flagellum.
During the Dover case, Ken Miller claimed that because a few parts of the flagellum can perform another function in the cell, you know, forming part of the type 3 secretory system that that refutes irreducible complexity. That's not true at all.
The fact that it can be used, that a few parts of the flagellum can be used in the type 3 secretory system does not, is not a test that actually refutes irreducible complexity. The test is whether or not you can do genetic knockout experiments on the flagellum and find that you can basically reduce the parts and in a stepwise manner and find that it still works. And Scott Minick actually testified during the Dover case about his own genetic knockout experiments on the flagellum, where he found that if you knock numerous genes out, you know, any one of these many genes in the flagellum, not any one of them, but a large number of them, you get a flagellum that actually you don't get a flagellum, it doesn't work. So Scott Minick testified about the proper way to test iriducible complexity by doing genetic knockout experiments. And he actually testified about this experimentation that he did in his own lab at the University of Idaho during the Dover case. We'll come back to that in just a few minutes. The point, though, is that the proper way to test irreducible complexity is to ask if there is a way to reduce the complexity and have it still work, not to see if a couple parts can go do something else. Let me give you an example. My laptop, okay, arguably my laptop is irreducibly complex. There's multiple components. You have to have the motherboard, the ram, the cpu, a battery, et cetera, et cetera. If you don't have all those parts, the laptop is not going to work. Now, I could take my power cord for my laptop and maybe go, you know, tool around with a little bit and get my laptop's power cord to power my toaster.
Now, does that mean that therefore my laptop is not irreducibly complex and you can have sort of a stepwise, you know, very, very gradual all the way to evolve a laptop? No, I don't think it does. That's a strawman way of testing for reducible complexity. And that's basically what Ken Miller did. He said, yeah, a few proteins can be used to form the basal body of the type III secretory system. That does not mean that, therefore, there's a stepwise pathway to the flagellum. And that does not mean you can reduce the complexity of the flagellum one little step at a time, backwards, and have it functional the whole way. And that's what you have to be able to show to refute irresistible complexity. Another example, Ken Miller, claimed that the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade had been refuted. And he talked about certain components that you can find are missing in certain organisms, and this supposedly. And yet they can still clot their blood. And it turns out that what those components that Ken Miller testified during the Dover trial that he said can be missing and blood clotting can still take place, this could have been actually a better way to test irreducible complexity. But it turns out that none of those components were the components that Michael Behe actually claims are part of the irreducible complex core of the blood clotting cascade. So again, he did not actually test Behe's arguments. During the Dover trial, Ken Miller looked at some other components that Behe never claimed were part of the irreducibly complex cascade of the blood clotting system.
And he said, oh, well, we're missing these parts. And Michael Behe's response, you know, I assume would be, well, fine, that's. I never argued that you couldn't have those parts. All right? It's a different set that he was talking about. So, again, the point of all this is that ID was not refuted. As far as the science goes during the Dover case. We could go on and on and on about this, all right? But the science of ID was not refuted. Now, what the judge did have evidence of during the case was evidence of a scientific debate between Michael Behe and Ken Miller, two experts on molecular machines. Michael Behe coming from a pro ID perspective, Ken Miller being very much a critic of id, both very well credentialed biologists, both very good experts in their own right. What the judge. If my opinion is that what the judge should have done is he should have said, look, we have experts on both sides of this issue, but it's not my role as a judge who's not an expert in to settle these scientific debates. So I'm going to just set this aside and let science decide this. And I think that actually it's not even relevant to whether ID is, you know, showing that ID is religion. I don't see how it would. So I. That's the way I would have approached it. And that's what we are. The judge did, but instead he decided to rule on, you know, just about everything he could think of from, you know, whether the Type 3 secretory system could be a precursor to the flagellum to even whether or not evolution conflicts with religion. We can get into that. Okay, so the last few parts of Judge Jones's test for what is science?
Talk about that idea has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community. He claimed it has not generated peer reviewed publications, nor has it been subject of testing and research.
Now each of these are also irrelevant to a question of whether or not ID is science.
And they also. He got the analysis wrong on each of these.
Sure. Is ID the majority scientific view? Of course not. Nobody's saying that ID is a majority scientific view. But to claim that ID has failed to gain, you know, essentially any acceptance the way it sounds in the scientific community is false. There are ID friendly scientists in the scientific community. We submitted an amicus brief that had about 80 scientists who were urging the court to protect academic freedom for intelligent design. So there are many scientists who think that ideas is a meritorious view that's worth taking seriously. But on top of that, think about what the judge said here. Let me read it exactly. He said it is important to note that ideas fail to gain acceptance in the scientific community. And according to the judge, that is evidence that idea is not science.
Now, if we were to adopt Judge Jones's philosophy of science, then any new scientific idea that has not yet gained acceptance in the scientific community has to be ruled out of hand from the outset because it can't be science. So basically, if what Judge Jones says is true, then new scientific ideas can never be considered and taken seriously because by definition, if they fail to gain acceptance, then they're not science. Okay, so this is actually a very dangerous philosophy of science which takes the degree of acceptance of an idea as a measure of whether or not it's true. And we all know that every single scientific revolution started off as a minority scientific view. Okay, if we don't give room for minority scientific views to be Considered and taken seriously, then science can never progress. So this is a very dangerous philosophy of science that Judge Jones was imposing here in the ruling. The last two items claiming that ID has not generated peer reviewed publications nor has it been the subject of testing and research. He said this in no fewer than, I think four or five places in the ruling. I think just to make sure you didn't miss that ID has never generated any peer reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing of research. Well, this was false. This was just not even true. In fact, the judge had multiple peer reviewed papers presented to him. Pro ID peer reviewed papers presented to him during the case Scott Minick testified about, I think he said that there were like between seven and ten peer reviewed pro ID papers. Even Barbara Forrest, one of the anti ID expert witnesses, she talked about Stephen Meyer's paper in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. That paper had come out the previous year in 2004 and it explicitly mentions and supports intelligent design. Explicitly. And yet the judge says it is, quote, not generated peer reviewed publications. That paper was cited before the court. Our amicus brief had an appendix which I drowned to draft, okay? And I felt really lame. I left a, one of my track changes, I forgot to hit accept on that appendix.
But that appendix actually listed a number of peer reviewed pro ID publications.
So this claim that Judge Jones made, it just wasn't even true. But here's what I find interesting about this. All right? I mean we could debate, you know, does ID use the supernatural? Does id, you know, does it use this contrived dualism? I think the judge has completely misrepresented what the ID theorist testified. But maybe we could debate that. The question of whether ID his published peer reviewed publications. That's a black and white question, Andrew. The question is either yes or no. And the answer to that question is yes, because the judge had direct evidence of this, presented him in the courtroom, and yet the judge got it wrong. All right, so like what's going on here? You know, the judge is like refusing to give even an inch to intelligence line has to fail on every level whatsoever, regardless of the evidence that was actually given to him and presented to him in the courtroom. But this is just false. And not only was it false then, it's way more false now. I just did an updated count of IDs peer reviewed publications. We're now up to about 329. Okay, Andrew, so I mean if it was false in 2005, it's way more false now in 2025. And so his claim that ID hadn't been the subject of testing and research. That was also false. Remember, I mentioned that Scott Minick, he testified to the court that he himself had done genetic knockout experiments which showed that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex with respect to its approximately 35 genes.
That was presented and testified to the court.
And yet the judge said that ID has had no testing or research. Other tests have been presented to the court even at that time, Andrew. Doug Axe had already published his two papers in the Journal of Molecular Biology research, by the way, which was funded by Discovery Institute, showing that functional protein sequences for a typical enzyme are very, very rare. And this is a direct measure of finding specified complexity in proteins, which is a direct test for intelligent design. So ID absolutely had been tested and had done research at this time in 2005. And again, if that was true then, it's far less true now. But the reality is, you know, this was presented to the judge. These are black and white questions, and he just got them wrong. Okay, so we go on and on and on and on and on about this. Andrew, about what the judge got wrong.
I do want to say one last thing. Okay. The judge also adopted a very dangerous double standard of legal analysis where the religious implications and beliefs and motives and affiliations always counted against id, but never against Darwinism. Okay, so he actually cited the fact that Michael Behef believes in God.
I mean, that's crazy. He cited that fact as evidence that ID is somehow religion. The fact that Michael Behe believes in God. Now, Behe made it very clear during the trial that he does believe in God. He's not trying to hide anything. Nobody's trying to hide their personal religious beliefs. But he also said, and we quoted some Behe's writings to Judge Jones to this effect that, you know, his personal belief in God doesn't mean that that's the conclusion of id.
Id, he said, basically says hypothesis non fingo about the identity of the designer. That's a phrase that Newton used that basically means, I don't try to make a hypothesis about who the designer is. So ID sort of remains agnostic about who the designer is. And this is not some legal strategy. This is ID trying to limit its claims to what we can learn from a scientific investigation. And if the data, you know, if the evidence and DNA can't identify who the designer is, then ID is not going to go further beyond what the data can tell you and try to speculate about those questions. ID tries to take a scientific approach and not get into larger religious questions that go beyond what the data itself can tell us. So Behe said all this effectively to the judge and yet somehow said that the fact that Behe believe in God counted against ID being a science and showed that it is religion. I mean, from my view, this is really unconscionable that you would take the private religious views of a citizen and say that therefore their scientific views cannot be taught in a public school because of the private religious views of a scientist. That is not how America is supposed to work. But this is not the only example. Basically, the judge, whenever the religious implications, beliefs, motives or affiliations of ID came up, they always counted against id, but never against Darwinism. But if we were to actually try to do that analysis, you would find all kinds of, of evolutionary evolution scientists, evolution proponents, who have said, you know, evolution refutes belief in God, evolution supports atheism.
Eugenie Scott, who is sitting there at the trial with the, you know, with the, the plaintiffs, she's a signer of a third humanist manifesto which says, you know, trying to create this aggressive statement to create a world without supernaturalism. Okay, so, and of course she has every right to have those views. I'm not contesting any of that. I'm fine with her having that view. The point is that the judge never considered that if you start to look about the, you know, the anti religious implications, beliefs, motives and affiliations that are affiliated with Darwinism, you know, you might have a problem for the constitutionality of teaching evolution in public schools. Okay? And again, I have no problem with folks having those views. And I'm not saying that, you know, you can't believe in God and evolution, but those, those affiliations are out there. I have a whole, you know, multiple hundred citation law review article I wrote documenting all the associations between evolution and atheism. And if we take Judge Jones approach to id, then you would have to count those against evolution and it could actually jeopardize the teaching of evolution in public schools. And I don't think that's good. I think the judge used some very, very basically irrelevant and bad legal tests for trying to show that ID is religion.
So here's where it gets interesting.
After the Dover ruling, there was a leading anti ID legal scholar who said that the section of the Dover case which found that ID is not science was quote, unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous to both science and freedom of religion. This is coming from Jay Wexler, who, who at that time was a law professor at Boston University and a leading anti ID legal scholar. I mean, he'd published articles in Stanford Law Review against the teaching of id. Okay, so we have leading anti ID legal scholars saying that the Dover rulings section, which found that ID is not science, is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and perhaps even dangerous to science and freedom of religion. Wow. And I would agree with every word he said there. He hit every nail that needed to be hit in that statement. He's exactly right.
So the Dover ruling is not a reliable guide to the issue. Okay. It misrepresents id.
Over time, we've discovered that it has basically just fake quotes from ID theorists that don't even exist in it. I mean, like, it's just a completely poor piece of scholarship. It does not let ID proponents speak for themselves. It misrepresents what they're saying. It gets the facts wrong, and sometimes it even, like, attributes things to ID proponents that they didn't even say or actually said the opposite of in the courtroom. So it is not a reli. It's a great tool if your goal is to basically dismiss ID and use the Judge Jones said it. I believe it, that settles it. Approach to ID and dismiss ID without actually evaluating what ID theorists actually say.
Dover ruling was tailor made for you. All right, but if you actually want to consider what ID theorists are saying, you want to take ID seriously, you want to do good scholarship where you let people speak for themselves, you want to actually look at the science, look at what the evidence says on multiple sides, and. And look at what the previewed evidence says. The Dover ruling is. Is not where you want to go. In fact, it's going to lead you in some very, very, very bad directions.
And that's all about. I have to say about that.
[00:28:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Great summation, Casey, especially what you said at the end there. Tailor made for those who wish to dismiss it out of hand without really facing up to it.
But just as you were. As you were describing all that, I'm just thinking, gosh, so many wrong turns taken, so many fallacies that were on display here, including, you know, building up this straw man and then watching it burn to the ground. Now, this, we should point out, didn't all just come from Judge Jones's brain. Right.
And his. His. His mind, that there were things that were informing him of these points. Can you speak to that for a moment?
Why did the ruling get so many things wrong?
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I mean, most of what I'm saying here, Andrew, I'm Just going off memory. I mean, I've talked about this a lot of the years, but there's so much more we could say about what the Dover ruling got wrong. But there's a reason why it got so much wrong, and that is because that celebrated section on whether idea is science. We did a study after the, a few months after the Dover ruling was issued, and we found that over 90% of that section was copied either verbatim or nearly verbatim from an ACLU brief that was submitted to the court just a few months before the ruling. In fact, many of these really erroneous claims about, like, ID having no peer reviewed publications or no research or ID using supernatural creation, et cetera, et cetera, those were all direct copies from this ACLU brief. And the judge basically copied that inaccurate and false information from the ACLU brief, either verbatim or nearly verbatim, into his ruling. Now, some folks are thinking right now, well, does this mean the judge plagiarized or did something unethical? No, we're not accusing Judge Jones of plagiarism. Courts are allowed to basically incorporate briefs from parties to sections of briefs into rulings when they think they're persuasive. So we're not calling judge, you know, a plagiarist or saying he did anything unethical. However, however, you can find very good precedent from higher courts that have severely frowned on the practice of judges basically taking, you know, briefs that have been handed to them from one or the other party during a court trial and then essentially just incorporating them without much critical change into their rulings. And that's exactly what the court did. This is why they don't like that. It's because courts have recognized that attorneys, their job is to do zealous advocacy for their parties. Right? And so as a result, we all know that attorneys sometimes push the envelope with their arguments. The judge's role is supposed to be like Solomon, you know, yeah, you have to issue a ruling, but kind of split the baby at least a little bit and find, you know, where did the judge, where do the parties maybe argue a little bit too strongly and pare down to get to that objective ruling somewhere more in the middle. Okay, of course you're going to side with one party or the other, but. But the judge is supposed to give that objective analysis rather than just signing off on, you know, large swaths of what one party said. And so that for that reason, courts have frowned upon this practice of courts sort of signing their names to briefs, not that the judge did exactly that here. But he did basically do that in a section of on whether Idea Science. It was. It was about 90% of it. A little over 90% was verbatim or nearly verbatim from an ACLU brief. So that right there tells you why it was so inaccurate and it just helps trace back what really happened here.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Now, if the Dover ruling got so much wrong, was it appealed?
[00:31:49] Speaker B: So that's a very interesting question, Andrew. It turns out that the Dover ruling was not appealed. And you might be asking why, if the ruling. Yeah, exactly like you put it. If the ruling was so wrong, why wasn't it appealed? Well, the Dover case was an interesting case where the defendant was actually an elected body. It was the Dover school board. Right. And elected bodies, their composition can change.
So the folks who were on the school board at the time, at the beginning of the Dover trial, they were the same folks, to my recollection at least, they were largely the same folks who actually had passed the Dover ID policy the previous year. Okay. And so they supported the Dover ID policy, obviously, and they didn't want to see it struck down.
However, it was an interesting quirk of history that right in the middle of the Dover trial, In November of 2005, there was an election.
And as I recall, the vast majority of the pro ID Dover school board members got voted out of the school board. And then the Dover ruling comes down in December of 2020. And by the time the ruling came down or very, very soon thereafter, there was entirely new composition of the Dover school board that was largely anti id. In fact, a lot of these candidates, they ran unlike an anti ID campaign slate. All right? And so they actually ran promising to get rid of ID out of Dover's school board and they school district, and they won. Okay? So by the time the ruling came out, or at least very, very soon after the ruling came out, within like a couple of weeks, you were in a very weird and unusual position where you actually had a defendant, an elected body, who was the defendant that actually agreed with the ruling that had just been issued against them.
So very strange. But that's what happened. So as a result, you know, these folks obviously were not going to appeal a ruling that they both agreed with and actually had campaigned hoping that Dover would get ID out of its curriculum. Okay, now this does raise an interesting, potentially troubling question. And I'm not saying I know that there was some vast conspiracy here.
I really don't like conspiracy theories at all. But it is kind of interesting at the very Least there was kind of a conflict of interest here. Okay. Because the judge assessed a $1 million attorney's fees judgment against the Dover School board. That was the plaintiff's attorneys being really nice, saying, oh, we're going to slash our fees to just a million dollars. All right, well, that's a quarter. At that time, at least that was about a quarter of the annual Dover School district budget. Okay. And they didn't even push back on that at all, as far as I'm aware. They're just like, okay, this is fine. We'll pay this million dollars quarter of our budget to the ACLU attorneys and other attorneys working with the plaintiffs. We'll pay that. And they did.
Isn't that interesting? I don't know if there was any thing going on there. Maybe not. Maybe they had no option. Maybe they were advised by their. By their legal advisors. You have to pay this. There's no getting out of it. Don't even try to push back. Just put it behind you. I really don't know. But I do know there was a bit of a conflict of interest there because they basically paid a million dollars to attorneys in a judgment against them. Attorneys who they actually were rooting for.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. A strange twist there. Now, where does this leave the current state of legal status of teaching ID in public schools?
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So, as I said earlier, it leaves as an unsettled legal question. The Dover ruling was never appealed, and there have been no other lawsuits since Dover that have brought ID into the public school curriculum, and therefore, there have been no more lawsuits over this question. So at a national level, this is an unsettled legal question. In fact, the only part of the US Right now that officially has a ruling on the books where ID is unconstitutional is the middle district of Pennsylvania.
And that's where the Dover ruling happened, in that part of the federal district court's jurisdiction there. So it's an unsettled legal question. Here we are 20 years later.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Okay, now, as we wrap up our discussion, what do you think was the short term legacy in the years immediately following Dover and then the long term impact of Dover. Where is ID today? Can you speak to those things?
[00:35:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mentioned this earlier. The short term impact of. Of the Dover ruling was what I call the post Dover purge. Okay. And you guys see the movie the Purge? I actually have not watched them because I just really don't like horror movies, but I certainly know the plot, and I have. I have a good friend. I won't say who. They work at Discovery Institute. They love the Purge movies, they've seen them all.
So this person knows who they are as they watch this. So we saw a purge, an attempted purge to get ID proponents out of academia in the years following the Dover case. And that is why we, we have the expel movie that came out in 2008, about three or so years after the Dover ruling that basically told the story of many of these scientists. And what was interesting is that in not just a couple of these persecution cases, we actually saw the folks who were pushing to get the ID people ousted from academia. They would cite the Dover case as justification for what they were doing. You know, so like literally, you know, using the Dover ruling to light the fire as they burned the person at the stake, metaphorically speaking. Okay. But that's what was going on here. And this is exactly what we warned Judge Jones. We said, look, if you do a broad ruling about id, we know it's going to happen. We've already seen enough academic freedom cases before the Dover case to know that if there was this ruling, it would severely hinder academic freedom for intelligent design in the academy. And again, as I said earlier, you wish sometimes that your predictions weren't right, because it was very hard to watch. We saw some very good people losing their jobs. We had to counsel other people to go deep undercover and to basically keep their heads down. And we still counsel people that for the most part. And the Dover legacy is still here with us to some extent. Twenty years later, there's still a lot of intolerance out there. Things are a little bit better today, but it's still an issue.
So, yeah, in fact, I won't even say the example right now. I'm just going to say that we counsel people to keep their heads down.
Sometimes even the research that we are funding in our research program, we can't talk about it because we don't want to jeopardize the careers of wonderful up and coming scientists in our research community. And this happens more frequently than we all would like. It's very, very difficult. And we've been put in this position by people in power who chose to not stand up for academic freedom. For the little guy. You know that old liberal slogan, silence is violence? Well, silence is persecution as far as ideas concerned. And when people in power have not stood up for academic freedom, good scientists who are highly credible people, they have suffered. And I've seen this firsthand. I've had to do more cases than I want to remember over the years.
[00:38:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
So we've had to put in a lot more care and concern about how we do things. But in the meantime, in the last 20 years, you know, the ID research program has thrived and you and I are actually going to do a separate discussion where we'll talk about examples of ID thriving.
So, you know, this really ends up being a speed bump, so to speak, the Dover trial. Because ID is booming, you know, in lots of ways and we're going to unpack that in a little bit.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Long term impact of Dover. You said it perfectly. Dover was a speed bump, okay. The ID research program. I mean, I may have just sort of been on a downer note just now, but overall, as we'll talk about in the next podcast, I am extremely excited, optimistic and really just, you know, gratified to see how well it has done in the post over years. A lot of folks have been doing great research. We published hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers and, and the ID research program is thriving here in 20, 25, 20 years after the Dover trial. So I think in the long term, Dover is going to be a footnote. It's going to be a cited, an example of how to not approach the topic of origins when you're a court. And it's going to be used as an example of how to not understand intelligent design in the long term. But of course, you know, in the long term we're all dead. So I don't know how long this all takes, but, but certainly I think that even for right now, we are so encouraged about the, how great the ID research program is going that we don't feel like, you know, Dover had the devastating effects of killing ID like many of our critics, friends hoped and claimed that it would have. ID is doing quite well and it's going, it's, it's here to stay and it's not going away anytime soon, that's for sure.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: And you know, I'm glad we're having this discussion because this is not ancient history. I mean, this was only 20 years ago that this, this challenge happened in the court and, but I really appreciate you putting in, putting the proper historical context in place for us. And you know, it's still likely today that you, me, somebody listening or watching are going to get thrown the Dover card, you know, so to speak.
Just, hey, isn't ID just something that was killed off back in 05? And so it's good to have this background that you've given us and just the layout of, of everything that the, the trial got wrong and the ruling got wrong so that we can take those points and adequately respond to those who are still hoping that somehow ID is over after Dover. So, yeah, I mean, we put out.
[00:41:12] Speaker B: A lot of resources over the years responding to the Dover ruling. We had the book Traipsing and Evolution, which you mentioned earlier, a law review article in Montana University Law Review, which David Wolff, John west and I published in 2007.
We have that. It's not, it wasn't ID wasn't over at Dover lecture that I gave. It's on our YouTube channel. Hopefully this podcast will help. Another great resource, by the way, is in 2015, around the 10 year anniversary of the Dover trial, former Discovery staff member Sarah Chaffee and I, we wrote a series of 10 articles called the Top 10 Myths About Dover. And I think that those are still very accurate commentaries on this issue. So we've got a lot of resources for folks if you, if you, if somebody comes at you with the judge Jones said it, I believe it. That settles an approach to intelligence which we've seen, you know, more times than I can count over the years. Send them to these resources and they'll see that the, you know, the reality is a little bit more complicated than maybe they thought it was.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And we'll definitely link to all those resources you mentioned in the show notes for this discussion. Well, Kasey, thanks again for your time today.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Thank you, Andrew.
[00:42:19] Speaker A: Well, listener, viewer, don't forget to subscribe to our new idea, the future YouTube channel where you can watch and share full video interviews as well as our original commentaries and readings on the show. And we've also got clips that we share on YouTube, so those are great for sharing with friends and associates. So go ahead and subscribe to our channel today at YouTube.com d the future and you'll be the first to know when we're publishing these things. Thanks for your Support. Well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
