Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [46]
The 1981 Arkansas trial was over the constitutionality of the state’s Act 590, which required equal time in public school science classes for “creation-science” and “evolution-science.” The federal judge in that case, William R. Overton, ruled against the creation-ists on the following grounds: First, he said, creation-science conveys “an inescapable religiosity” and is therefore unconstitutional: “Every theologian who testified, including defense witnesses, expressed the opinion that the statement referred to a supernatural creation which was performed by God.” Second, Overton said that the creationists employed a “two model approach” in a “contrived dualism” that “assumes only two explanations for the origins of life and existence of man, plants and animals: It was either the work of a creator or it was not.” In this either-or paradigm, creationists claim that any evidence “which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism.” Overton slapped down the tactic, writing “evolution does not presuppose the absence of a creator or God.”
More important, Judge Overton summarized why creation-science is not science by explaining what science is:
1. It is guided by natural law.
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law.
3. It is testable against the empirical world.
4. Its conclusions are tentative.
5. It is falsifiable.
Overton concluded: “Creation science as described in [the Act’s] Section 4(a) fails to meet these essential characteristics,” adding the “obvious implication” that “knowledge does not require the imprimatur of legislation in order to become science.”5
The 1987 Louisiana case amplified the description of science even more because this case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thereby fulfilling the ACLU’s original intent for the 1925 Scopes Tennessee trial. For the case of Edwards v. Aguillard, seventy-two Nobel laureates, seventeen state academies of science, and seven other scientific organizations submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Court’s justices in support of the appellees’ challenge of the constitutionality of Louisiana’s “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act,” an equal-time law passed by the state in 1982. The brief is one of the most important documents in the history of the evolution-creation debate and presents the best short statement on the central tenets of science endorsed by the world’s leading scientists and science organizations.6
The brief responds to all of the attacks on evolution and science, opening with a demonstration that “creation-science” is just a new label for the old religious creationism of decades past. It then defines the criteria of science, a field “devoted to formulating and testing naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. It is a process for systematically collecting and recording data about the physical world, then categorizing and studying the collected data in an effort to infer the principles of nature that best explain the observed phenomena.” At the heart of science is the scientific method, and these preeminent scientists took their opportunity to enter it into the Court record. From facts to hypotheses to theories to conclusions to explanations, the toolkit of science became, for better or worse, a subject for government decision:
Facts. “The grist for the mill of scientific inquiry is an ever increasing body of observations that give information about underlying ‘facts.’ Facts are the properties of natural phenomena. The scientific method involves the rigorous, methodical testing of principles that might present a naturalistic explanation for those facts.”
Hypotheses. Based on well-established facts, testable hypotheses are formed. The process of testing “leads scientists to accord a special