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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
During cross-examinations, Irigonegaray asked questions intended to bring out this connection, making intermittent headway. For instance, when Russell Carlson, an intelligent design advocate and biochemist from the University of Georgia, testified, Irigonegaray queried him about the integral role a deity plays in the theory. "In your view the intelligent designer is God, is it not?" asked Irigonegaray. "Well, yeah, I would agree with that," Carlson replied. It may not seem likely that a Christian who believes in intelligent design pictures a designer other than God, but most intelligent design advocates were more circumspect in their answers than Carlson.
Looming behind this kind of sparring, like backdrops on a stage set, lie political and legal events that show why creationists are taking a more indirect approach. Politically, in 1999, Kansas became the butt of jokes after bluntly dropping evolution from its science requirements. The ensuing backlash helped pro-evolution moderates regain power on the Board of Education. "At the time, I said democracy got us into this and it will get us out of it," says John Staver, a professor of science education at Kansas State University, who co-chaired the state's science curriculum committee after the 1999 debacle and helped reinstitute evolution in the classroom.
But in 2004, some conservative Republicans unseated their more moderate GOP counterparts in primary elections for the Board of Education, tipping the balance back to the creationists. "When the primary elections were tallied last summer, we knew we would have an ultra-conservative religious-right majority of 6 to 4," says Staver. Democracy, he adds wryly, has "now gotten us back into it." Abrams, Martin, and their creationist colleagues promptly used the state's regularly scheduled curriculum review to reopen the door for creationism -- by handpicking pro-creationist allies to serve on the state's curriculum committee and draft their own report (as a counterpart to the one Martin has merely skimmed).
A principal aim of the creationists is to scrub the definition of "science" from Kansas classrooms -- now described as "human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations" for phenomena -- and to replace it with a more general definition lacking the words "natural explanations." If that sounds like an innocuous change -- well, that's the aim. By removing the notion of "natural explanations" as part of science, the creationists aim to give religion a foothold in the classroom, in the name of scientific balance.
"They are just as creationist as ever," Eugenie Scott, president of the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, Calif., pro-evolution clearinghouse, told me in an interview before the Kansas hearings began. "But they've learned not just to boot evolution out, since that gets them laughed at on 'Letterman.'" Fox, the Wichita pastor, acknowledged as much in March: "The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We're trying to be a little more subtle."
This approach is not just a political or public-relations strategy, however, but a legal one. The legal backdrop to the 2005 Kansas evolution dispute is, plainly, the U.S. Supreme Court's 1987 decision banning creation science from the classroom -- a ruling that also fits into some familiar-feeling political contours. When then-Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas lost his reelection bid to Republican Frank White in 1980, White, riding a wave of conservative confidence after the election, wasted little time signing the so-called Balanced Treatment Act mandating that creationism join evolution in the classroom. Based on the model recommended by the dominant creationist think tank of the time, the Institute for Creation Research in Southern California, the act featured an approach to creationism based on biblical literalism.
The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Arkansas law in court and won, with the presiding judge ruling that the law was inspired by the book of Genesis, had "no scientific merit," and had as its sole goal "the advancement of religion." This violated the First Amendment by bringing sectarian beliefs into the classroom. Soon after, a Louisiana judge struck down a similar measure in that state -- a ruling creationists appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court upheld the ruling, with Justice William Brennan's majority opinion saying the Louisiana law was meant to "provide persuasive advantage to a particular religious doctrine that rejects the factual basis of evolution."
These days, therefore, Genesis and biblical literalism are out as the public rationales for creationism. Intelligent design and its leading think tank, the Discovery Institute of Seattle, are in, as creationists search for an approach that appears broad enough to withstand legal scrutiny. In this vein, this year the Kansas Board of Education also brought in advocates with a variety of religious backgrounds -- like Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish newspaper columnist and Muslim who tried to make the case that teaching evolution in the United States generates "anti-Westernism" in other parts of the world. In so doing, they are trying to present a public face for creationism that cannot be defined as representing a particular religious sect.
"I think there's no doubt that in order to solve some problems that got defeated back in the 1980s, the I.D. movement has been designed to make things look more like science, and less like religion," says Krebs. And it might work. While both sides, predictably, have claimed to have scored points at the hearings, the Kansas' Board of Education will almost certainly get its way for now.
