A judge and his court have spoken. Intelligent Design is not science. Science classes cannot mention God as the Creator of life. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III made the following ruling in the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board case regarding teaching Intelligent Design as a competing theory to Darwinism: “Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.” This is nonsense. If a teacher can’t mention the existence of a “divine creator” in a science classroom, then what are students to think about the origin of man? If a student asks, “But how did all this stuff get here?,” he or she will be told that science can’t ask or answer this question. That’s a question for the philosophy and religious departments. But public schools don’t teach classes in philosophy or religion, and if they did, teachers could not say with certainty that God did anything.

Judge Jones seems to be ignorant of the fact that evolution and atheism are two sides of the same coin. To teach evolution is to teach atheism. Daniel C. Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, are the high priests of atheistic Darwinism. It’s their ideas that are driving the anti-creation and anti-Intelligent Design movements. Dawkins admits that in the study of biology “complicated things give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”[1] But it’s his atheism that forces him to conclude that in spite of what he sees, there is no design or purpose in any living thing. The facts are shaped by his atheism. “Darwin,” he writes, “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[2] Rousas J. Rushdoony, and Cornelius Van Til before him, dealt with the Dawkins’ methodology years ago, exposing it as a secular religion:

All thinking rests on pre-theoretical presuppositions, religious commitments in essence, which condition the nature of thinking. These pre-theoretical presuppositions determine which experiences out of all man’s sense impressions shall be regarded as facts. Thus, before there are facts, there are already presuppositions, which lead to various beliefs and theories, which determine what shall be regarded as factuality. In other words, before there is a fact, there is faith about facts.[3]

His pre-commitment to atheism forces him to dismiss what his eyes and mind tell him is a designed world.

While Dawkins dismisses design even when he admits to seeing it, Eugenie C. Scott, an evolutionist and anti-creationist, admits that “no paleontologist has ever observed one species evolving into another.”[4] Dawkins sees design but rejects it; Scott doesn’t see evolution taking place, but accepts it. How can evolution be taken seriously given these two arguments?

Given these admissions, and so much else besides, Judge Jones needs to explain how evolution represents “good science.” Furthermore, he needs to demonstrate how questioning Darwinism promotes “religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment clause.”

This brings me to the Intelligent Court decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that affirmed the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky upholding Mercer County, Kentucky’s inclusion of the Ten Commandments in a display of historical documents in the county courthouse. The other documents in the display include the Mayflower Compact (“In the name of God”), the Declaration of Independence (“Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Divine Providence”), the Magna Carta (“the grace of God”), the Star Spangled Banner (“In God is our trust”), the national motto (“In God We Trust”), the preamble to the Kentucky Constitution (“grateful to Almighty God”), the Bill of Rights to the U. S. Constitution, and a picture of Lady Justice. Except for Lady Justice, each of these documents presupposes and declares the existence of God. The Bill of Rights is part of the United States Constitution which states that it was “Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven. . . .”

Judge Jones could take some lessons from the Kentucky decision. Writing for the Court, Circuit Judge Suhrheinrich said that the ACLU’s “repeated reference ‘to the separation of church and state’ . . . has grown tiresome. The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state.”

Footnotes:
[1]. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 1. [2]. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 6.**
[3]. Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1967), 86.
[4]**. Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 14.