Locals react to intellegent design ruling
By William Dillon, Staff Writer
12/21/2005
While Tuesday's ruling against the teaching of intelligent design applies to one federal court district in Pennsylvania, the implications of the decision could be felt by proponents and opponents alike here in Iowa.
Tuesday's decision by a federal judge said school board members in Dover, Pa., violated the constitution by mandating biology classes to include a statement on intelligent design - the idea that an intelligent cause or agent had a hand in the makings of the universe. The judge ruled that "the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom."
Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University's most outspoken proponent of intelligent design, said Tuesday's decision will have absolutely no effect on his pursuit of intelligent design in his research, but it could harm his work if opponents use the ruling to further attempt to censor his work.
"Frankly, I wouldn't put it past them to try to use this in some way to claim that what I am doing is not legitimate science," he said.
In his ruling, the judge wrote that intelligent design is a secular repackaging of creationism, an idea which the courts ruled 18 years ago could not be taught in public schools.
Gonzalez said he is concerned that people may see this as a decision that definitively shows intelligent design as repackaged creationism when it may have only been the particular actions of the Dover school board.
Those motivations are inappropriate with intelligent design, said Casey Luskin, a program officer of public policy and legal affairs with the Discovery Institute, a conservative Seattle think tank leading the intelligent design movement.
"The entire decision is predicated on the false understanding that intelligent design is just a supernatural explanation," Luskin said. "In my opinion, this decision really mischaracterizes intelligent design."
In a statement from the staff of the Discovery Institute, of which Gonzalez is one of 10 senior fellows, the organization said it will continue its interest in intelligent design.
"The empirical evidence for design, the facts of biology and nature, can't be changed by legal decree," according to the statement.
Gonzalez has already come under criticism by the mainstream science community for incorporating intelligent design into his work. Last summer, Gonzalez premiered a 60-minute film based on his book at the Smithsonian Institute, gaining national prominence with media coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The attention prompted ISU faculty to speak up.
A few months later, a statement "rejecting all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor" was signed by 120 ISU faculty members. A similar statement was later circulated among faculty at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa.
Although the authors of the statements said they were not singling out any scientists in particular, Gonzalez said he saw the acts as a personal attack.
Hector Avalos, one of the three authors of the original statement at ISU, said Tuesday's ruling "reiterated powerfully" what intelligent design critics in Iowa have been saying all along: intelligent design is a religious concept, not a scientific one.
"I think it is a great day for science," he said.
Avalos said this ruling may now deter other school districts from teaching intelligent design.
According to the Muscatine Journal, several members of the Muscatine School District Board of Education believe that students should know about intelligent design and are likely to discuss during the coming years implementing intelligent design into coursework.
"Any good attorney is going to see what happened in Dover, and they are not going to want to go through the expense," Avalos said.
Tara Smith, a UI assistant professor who helped circulate the statement on the Iowa City campus, said she believes the ruling will help in the effort of what many in the scientific community consider "good science."
"I think the ruling will make it a little bit easier for us, but I don't think we can rest in our laurels," she said. "It goes beyond just intelligent design to the issue of teaching good science in general, which is what most of us are primarily concerned with."
In his ruling, the judge wrote it is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public school science classrooms, but he did not believe intelligent design should not be studied or discussed.
One ISU course that currently teaches the debate and controversy surrounding intelligent design is Thomas Ingebritsen's class "God and Science." The honors seminar focuses on issues of origin and the relationship between theology and science.
Ingebritsen's course does not argue for the inclusion of intelligent design in science. Rather, it educates students of the debates surrounding such issues including intelligent design, young earth creationism and evolution.
As the debate of intelligent design in science began to bubble on the Ames campus last fall, ISU President Greg Geoffroy took a stance recognizing the discussion of intelligent design in campus courses as an academic freedom.
Ingebritsen said he does not believe Tuesday's ruling will have a negative effect on his class.
"The director of the honors program has indicated that he is very strongly supportive of academic freedom," he said.
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Ames School board has not entered debate
By Luke Jennett
Special to The Tribune
Even as the debate surrounding the emerging field of intelligent design continues nationwide, Ames School Board members have said they haven't yet been asked to consider the idea.
"The school board has not had to deal with intelligent design, and I hope we do not have to," said school board member Pat Brown. "The teaching of intelligent design belongs in a comparative religion class where students study the basis of religious belief and the origin of life from a religious point-of-view."
In Kansas, intelligent design was awarded a victory this year as the state school board voted, 6-4, in favor of allowing the teaching of intelligent design in public school classes. But in Pennsylvania, eight intelligent design supporters were voted out of their seats on the state board.
Iowa is somewhat unique in that the curriculum is decided on a district level, rather than by the state, said Kathy Slaughter, spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Education. The state, too, has yet to consider the matter.
"We haven't had any requests to look at the issue," Slaughter said. "And we haven't heard of any districts teaching intelligent design."
Local board members have expressed their views on the virtues of teaching intelligent design.
"Science class is a place where you teach scientific principles," said Gail Johnson of the Ames school board. "Intelligent design is not science."
Studies about the theory, Johnson said, might be better suited for other areas, such as religion classes or social science studies. But she doesn't forsee the board having to deal with the issue of intelligent design in the near future."
"We're a well-educated community," she said. "I don't see the issue coming before the school board. It's a religious concept, and I do not believe public schools should teach religion as fact."
Board member Roy Cakerice said he, like other proponents of intelligent design, believes there is "purpose and pattern in the cosmos."
"I am of the opinion that the whole universe just doesn't happen to fit in such a neat pattern as it does now," he said. "I do believe that there is some force, call it what you want, that does have some bearing on the patterns of the universe. I believe there is some form of purpose to all this."
Although the Ames school board is still silent on the issue, ISU has seen more than its fair share of debate on the issue. Guillermo Gonzalez, author of a book supporting the theory, "The Privledged Planet," writes that existence may be too complicated to simply be the outcome of chance.
A petition against the theory as a scientific concept was circulated by other faculty.
One of the petition's authors, James Colbert, a professor of biology, says that the petition, which was signed by 120 ISU faculty members, wasn't in response to Gonzalez's studies, but rather to a statement made by President Bush earlier this year that intelligent design and evolution should be taught side-by-side.
"This is something I have been following and had been interested in for some time," said Colbert. "I teach introductory biology, and so I teach evolution ... When Bush made his comments in early August that he was supportive of evolution and intelligent design being taught side-by-side in biology classrooms, that's, in my opinion and the opinion of virtually all scientists, a very bad idea."
Colbert maintains that the debate over intelligent design isn't a scientific one, virtually all scientists have rejected the theory, he said, but rather an education issue. However, Colbert and Gonzalez are in agreement that high school science classes are no place for intelligent design, although for different reasons. Gonzalez says the field is new, and needs study and discussion at higher academic levels before being taught in public schools. The debates being held across the country, he said, are doing little to help the advancement of the theory, and actually help create the stigma that ID is a religious concept, inseparable from God.
"It's the school board fights," he said. "That's where it all comes from. Certain people feel very opposed to ID being brought into public schools because they see it as a way to bring religious ideas into schools. The conspiracy theory goes, 'Oh, they just reformed their plan of attack and re-named it, re-labeled creationism as intelligent design. Which is, of course, not true."
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