Usos del Recurso

Dover is a town in south central Pennsylvania with a population of about 2,000 people. Until 2005 no one could have anticipated that this small American town would attract attention from scientific and religious communities all over the world.

In 2004 the Dover Area School District made an announcement that aston- ished many local teachers, students, and parents. Their press release said that from January 2005 teachers would be required to read the following state- ment in their ninth-grade biology class at Dover Area High School:

The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a

well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to indi- vidual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.

As mentioned above, intelligent design, which this statement introduces as an alternative to evolution, is the idea that certain features of nature are best explained by reference to an intelligent cause, rather than to an undirected process. Intelligent design has been promoted since the early 1990s by theistic scientists and philosophers, particularly those at the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute is a conservative think tank in Seattle founded in 1990 by former politician, diplomat, and journalist Bruce Chapman, the writer and political activist George Gilder, and a philosopher, Stephen C. Meyer.

Three school board members in Dover who voted against the above statement about evolution and intelligent design resigned in protest and teachers refused to read the statement on the basis of the Pennsylvania code of education, according to which teachers cannot present information they believe to be false. When the teachers refused to read the statement an administrator came into the classrooms and read it instead. In December 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of 11 parents in Dover, who claim that the introduc- tion of intelligent design by the Dover school board violated their constitu- tional rights. The suit was brought in the US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. By that time people in Dover had realized that they were being involved in something reminiscent of the long, exhausting battles over evolution and creationism that had taken place in the 1980s. In 1981 the governor of Arkansas signed into law the ‘Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science’ Act (Act 590). The act explains the requirement for what it regards as a balanced treatment as follows:

Public schools within this State shall give balanced treatment to crea- tion-science and to evolution-science. Balanced treatment to these

two models shall be given in classroom lectures taken as a whole for each course, in textbook materials taken as a whole for each course, in library materials taken as a whole for the sciences and taken as a whole for the humanities, and in other educational programs in public schools, to the extent that such lectures, textbooks, library materials, or educational programs deal in any way with the subject of the origin of man, life, the earth, or the universe.

Act 590 defines creation science as ‘the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences’. The ‘scientific evidences’ and related inferences that creation science includes are, according to the act, the following:

(1) Sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing; (2) The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism; (3) Changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of animals and plants; (4) Separate ancestry for man and apes; (5) explanation of the earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood; and (6) A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.

In 1982, however, US District Court Judge William R. Overton ruled that Act 590 was unconstitutional in light of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which reads, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …’. Judge Overton concluded that creation science is not science because it fails to meet the following essential characteristics of science: (i) it is guided by natural law; (ii) it has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (iii) it is testable against the empirical world; (iv) its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; (v) it is falsifiable.

By (i) and (ii) the judge means that creation science, despite its name, is not a scientific theory because it is not formulated in terms of the laws of nature. Creation science tries to explain the origin of nature by appealing to supernatural intervention, which is fundamentally different from anything that standard scientific research addresses. By (iii) the judge means that creation science does not qualify as a scientific theory because it is impos- sible to test its validity empirically. There is no established scientific method to determine whether or not the universe and things in it were created by an

intelligent agent that transcends the nature. By (iv) and (v) the judge means that, unlike scientific theories and hypotheses, creation science is not open to revision and falsification. It is often said that one of the most distinctive features of scientific theories is that they are always open to being revised in accordance with counter-evidence. Creation science, however, does not seem to share such a feature with conventional science.

The defeat in Arkansas did not stop creationists. In 1982 the state of Louisiana passed the ‘Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act’, which prohibits the teaching of evolution in the public schools without also teaching creation science. In response to the act, 72 Nobel Prize laureates, 17 state academies of science and 7 other scientific organizations filed an amicus curiae brief stating that teaching creationism ‘misleads our youth about the nature of scientific inquiry’. The brief claims, first, that the act does not define creation science. The act does mention ‘scientific evidences of creation’ as the focus of creation science but that is a circular definition of creation science. The brief also criticizes the claim of the act that creation science and evolution science are mere theory rather than ‘proven scientific fact’. (It is interesting to note that the state- ment of the Dover Area School District mentioned earlier presents the same idea when it says, ‘Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact.’) According to the brief, such a claim creates a false impression that since evolution is ‘only a theory’ it is not an established fact. In science, according to the brief, a fact is a ‘property of a natural phenomenon’, while a theory is a ‘natural explanation for a body of facts’ and hence the label of evolution as a theory by no means implies that it is not an established fact.

In a seven-to-two decision written by Justice Brennan in 1987, the US Supreme Court ruled that the act is unconstitutional because, again, it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The state had claimed that the act was necessary for maintaining academic freedom for teachers. The court ruled, however, that such an act was unnecessary because teachers had always been allowed to introduce more than one theory. The act, by making it compulsory for teachers to teach creationism along with evolution, would ironically limit teachers’ academic freedom to teach what they think is appropriate. The court did not rule out in principle the educa- tional merit of teaching about a controversy, saying, ‘[T]eaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness

of science instruction.’ This did not save the act, however, as the court ruled that it supports specific religious views.