There's not a lot to say about yesterday's opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover. The oucome was as predictable as the sun rising, with the only question of interest being the possible breadth of the ruling. On that score, Judge John Jones III went for the Full Overton (see below), with an added half-rotation before entry. Splash: Judge Jones swims to the side of the pool, to ecstatic applause from the audience. A few reflections to note the ending of another long, noisy, largely irrelevant federal trial.
1. I know I've seen this movie before. Same plot, anyway.
On a cold January day in 1982, as a college sophomore studying the philosophy of science and evolutionary biology at the University of Pittsburgh, I walked into an honors college course on the "creation/evolution" controversy to hear Professor James Lennox read at length from Judge William Overton's opinion in McLean v. Arkansas, issued the day before. Lennox, who later became a friend and recommended me to graduate school, was then and is today a staunch atheist firmly persuaded of the soundness of evolutionary theory. He was delighted with Overton's ruling, more or less (see below about the "or less"), and, after reading for some time from the text, made a happy joke about the archaic phrase Overton employed at the end of his opinion, viz., "The relief prayed for is granted."
Lennox's reaction that day, and science and popular press accounts at the time, could be summarized under the heading, "Beginning of the end for dissent from Darwinian evolution." The crazy creationists have had their day in court, and they were utterly trounced. It's all over.
One can readily find similar reactions in the wake of the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision from the Supreme Court. As I commented previously, Stephen Gould said "What else can they do?...It's all over."
But of course it wasn't all over -- see the headlines in your local paper and on the web today, 18 years after Edwards v. Aguillard and 23 after McLean v. Arkansas -- because the debate at hand is not, at bottom, a legal matter. Sure, the federal courts (at all levels) in the United States frequently become entangled with "creationism" and now "intelligent design," but these legal proceedings turn out to be oddly repetitive moving picture shows in a flapping canvas tent. Although the title on the marquee changes, the plot is strangely the same. You have seen this movie before. You know how it ends: the "creationists" lose in the courtroom. And yet the debate about origins continues.
Now, why is that?
2. "Easy to answer, Paul -- you're a bunch of stubborn idiots who don't know when to quit."
Or maybe courtrooms are less-than-optimal settings for philosophical, scientific, and theological debates -- debates that would have been familiar to Agassiz and Darwin, Hume and Paley before them, Leibniz and Bayle before them, and so on...back to the author of these passages, and before him into deepest antiquity.
Pop quiz. Who wrote the following, and when?
Our master has taught us that the world was made by a natural process, without any need of a creator: and that this process, which you say can only be effected by divine wisdom, in fact comes about so easily that nature has created, is creating, and will create, worlds without end. But as you cannot see how nature can do this without the intervention of mind, you follow the example of our tragic playwrights, and take refuge in a divine intervention to unravel the intricacies of your plot.
Next, from the same author, book II of the same text:
Is is not a wonder that anyone can bring himself to believe that a number of solid and separate particles by their chance collisions and moved only by the force of their own weight could bring into being so marvellous and beautiful a world? If anybody thinks that this is possible, I do not see why he should not think that if an infinite number of examples of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were shaken together and poured out on the ground it would be possible for them to fall so as to spell out, say, the whole text of the Annals of Ennius. In fact I doubt whether chance would permit them to spell out a single verse!
Answer? Both passages were written by the Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, in 45 BCE. The text is his classic dialogue On the Nature of the Gods .
45 BCE? Not a Christian -- not a "fundamentalist" -- in sight? Pagan philosophers were debating intelligent design? What gives?
If you're bored enough, it can be instructive to wander out of the old canvas tent where the loud, dull movie about the American legal controversy over evolution is going through yet another loop (dopey policy adopted...always starts that way...ACLU sues...seen that...briefs filed...yeah, seen that...witnesses...ditto...here comes the ruling, and "creationists lose"...yup, same story, same ending). When a controversy is not really about what everyone thinks it's about, the location of greatest noise -- the courtroom -- is likely to be the place of greatest confusion and least enlightenment. The debate about design and naturalism is a matter of differing perceptions of truth: scientific, philosophical, theological. If a law were passed outlawing the public discussion of design, that discussion would go underground. If design advocates were pursued underground, they would continue developing their ideas in prison or wherever. Truth, wily woman that she is, does not care in the least what laws or policies exist. She serves no master, least of all a federal judge.
So Cicero smiles. We debated that matter, he says. As any philosopher could have seen in my day, you would debate it too, as indeed you are -- and the debate will continue, Case No. 04cv2688 notwithstanding.
3. Don't want to harsh anyone's endorphin rush, but are those Judge Jones's swimtrunks floating in the water?
The problem with attempting the Full Overton with the added half-twist, is, well, overreaching. Recall that I said Jim Lennox was "more or less" happy with Judge William Overton's 1982 opinion in McLean. The "less happy" part came when Lennox read through the philosophy of science sections of the opinion (the area he knew the most about, interestingly). "I'm not sure he should he doing this," said Lennox of Overton's attempt to define science.
In surveying the ecstatic reactions yesterday around the blogosphere to Jones's opinion, I didn't see any mention of problems with the reasoning. Endorphin rushes do that to one: oh wow we won won WON.
And then one reads the opinion carefully, the next day, in a more sober frame of mind. Propositions such as the following (p. 66) jump up, looking not so felicitous as the day before:
This rigorous attachment to 'natural' explanations is an essential attribute to science by definition and by convention.
By definition and by convention. Let the words settle into your field of conscious attention. Did the convention of naturalism come first, as an historically contingent shift in practice...and then the definition followed? So science wasn't always defined as applied naturalism? If so, could practice shift again, in the light of new evidence, bringing a new convention, and hence a new definition? Then how can science be "rigorously attached" to any definition, given its history?
Those are his swimtrunks. And that's only one section of the opinion.
