God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (16 page)

The play and film
Inherit the Wind
does a good job of depicting the mood of the time, although it takes a number of liberties with the facts.
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Laws forbidding the teaching of evolution remained on the books in several states until being overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1968. With the teaching of evolution legalized, a push came to teach biblical creationism as an alternate science, termed “creation science.”
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That movement began in the early twentieth century when a Seventh Day Adventist evangelist with a minimal college education, George McCready Price, wrote a number of books challenging the conclusions of geologists that Earth was much older than the six thouand years implied in the Bible.
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Price wrote, “Do you know that the theory of evolution absolutely does away with God and with His Son Jesus Christ, and with His revealed Word, the Bible, and is largely responsible for the class struggle now endangering the world?”
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Price's ideas were scoffed at by professional geologists and paleontologists, but they caught on among fundamentalists.
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Price was referred to by Bryan at the Scopes trial, although Price was in England at the time and did not testify. This brought Price some recognition but also led to a retort from the acerbic Darrow: “You mentioned Price because he is the only human being in the world so far as you know that signs his name as a geologist that believes like you do…. Every scientist in this country knows [he] is a mountebank and a pretender and not a geologist at all.”
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With two world wars and a worldwide depression sandwiched between the two, little public attention was paid to evolution. But with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 and the suddenly awakened threat to US dominance, America became increasingly focused on science. The government generously funded the rewriting of science textbooks, including the incorporation of evolution. The flooding of classrooms with evolution textbooks produced a backlash among conservative Christians who began to take action to counter the trend.
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In 1961, in Louisiana, a civil engineering professor, Henry Morris, followed the lead of Price and attempted to put the biblical story on a scientific footing by claiming geologic evidence for a young Earth and worldwide flood.
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While strongly criticized by the scientific community for inaccuracies, biased data selection, and placing religious beliefs ahead of science,
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the book
sold more than two hundred thousand copies. A law requiring the teaching of creation science in public schools in Arkansas was struck down in federal court in 1982.
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A similar law in Louisiana was rejected by the US Supreme Court in 1987.

All the court rulings were based on the clearly overt purpose of the laws to teach religion disguised as science, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The US Supreme Court has issued several interpretations of this clause, but perhaps the most important was in the case of
Lemon v. Kurtzman
in 1972 when it established the so-called Lemon Test:
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1. The government's action must have a secular legislative purpose
   
2. The government's action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion
   
3. The government's action must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion.
   

However, the judge in the 1982 Arkansas ruling, William R. Overton, went further than necessary in declaring that creation science was not a science. This part of the ruling was disputed by the eminent philosopher of science Larry Laudan, later a colleague of mine at the University of Hawaii. Laudan pointed out that creation science had many of the properties that the court itself had used to define science, such as referring to empirical data. Creation science was science—just wrong science, since it disagreed with the empirical facts on matters such as the age of Earth.
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After their failure to enable public schools to teach creation science, creationists came up with a better plan. Led by biochemist Michael Behe and theologian William Dembski, a theory was proposed called
intelligent design
(ID). This theory raised no objections to the established scientific view of evolution over a vast time period of hundreds of millions of years. Behe and Dembski simply claimed that many life forms are too complex to have arisen solely by the Darwinian process of random mutations and natural selection and that this was evidence for intelligent design. Here we see the argument
from design once again, although despite their indisputably religious motives, Behe and Dembski insisted they were not claiming any specific entity or deity as the source of design.

It took no time at all for the evolutionary science community to demonstrate the flaws in ID arguments. Nevertheless, supported by large sums of money provided by wealthy fundamentalist Christians, Behe, Dembski, and their collaborators enjoyed several years of media attention and attracted a huge following among believers, including a modest number of scientists who were not specialists in evolutionary biology. Neither were Behe or Dembski, although otherwise their academic credentials were sound—an improvement over earlier creationists.

Behe argued that many biological systems contain parts that cannot be reduced to simpler parts that still have functions and so had to have been designed.
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Examples of what he called “irreducible complexity” included the eye, the blood-clotting cascade, and bacterial flagella.

Bacterial flagella have provided the prototype example. These are little whip-like molecular propellers composed of forty complex proteins that drive certain bacteria through water. Behe claimed that if a single part of the flagellum were missing, what remained would have no function and hence could not have evolved. However, evolutionary biologists have provided plausible scenarios for how bacterial flagella could have evolved.
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Behe proved unaware of much of the earlier research in this field. What he failed to understand was that parts of organisms often evolve for one function but then combine with other parts to form a new, more complex system with another function.

Dembski also claimed that life is too complex to have arisen without intelligent design. His argument was based on the notions that the more complex a system, the greater the information it contains and that no natural process can result in an increase in information. He called this the
law of conservation of information
.
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In my 2003 book
Has Science Found God?
I showed that the law of conservation of information is provably incorrect.
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Dembski had used the conventional definition of information introduced in 1948 by the father of information theory, Claude Shannon.
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Shannon mathematically defined the information transferred in a communication channel as proportional to the
decrease in the entropy between the transmitter and receiver. Entropy is a measure of disorder, so an entropy decrease, or information increase, represents an increase in the order of a system.

Here Shannon used the standard equation for entropy found in statistical mechanics textbooks. As is well known, the entropy of a system is not conserved in physics. It can increase or decrease depending on the interaction of the system with other systems. If a system is isolated, that is, does not interact with anything else, then the entropy of the system will remain the same or increase. This is the
second law of thermodynamics
that was discovered in the nineteenth century. Since information is defined as the
decrease
in entropy, information for an isolated system is either unchanged or lost; it can't increase.

However, a transmitter and receiver are two interacting systems. They are not individually isolated. So, the entropy lost by one system can be gained by the other. Or, equivalently, the information lost by one can be gained by the other. So a physical system, such as a biological organism or Earth itself, which gets energy from the sun, can become more ordered by purely natural processes.

Although Behe and Dembski claimed to be strictly scientific, the large movement that grew around them was clearly motivated by religion. Their work and the huge propaganda machine that promoted it in the media was largely financed by a Seattle organization called the Discovery Institute. In a 2004 book,
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent
Design
, philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross document how the institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (now called the Center for Science and Culture) sought nothing less than a scientific and cultural revolution by overthrowing “scientific materialism.”
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The movement to renew science and culture was spearheaded by a retired criminal law professor, Phillip Johnson, who wrote a series of books denouncing evolution. Johnson recognized what many people still fail to grasp about the impact of Darwinian evolution on religion. As Johnson says in his book,
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds
, evolution “doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it.”
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That's exactly what I have been trying to say.

Johnson attributes to naturalism many of the evils of the world, from homosexuality to genocide.
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He proposed the “wedge strategy”
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adopted by the Discovery Institute, a five-year plan to drive a “wedge” into the trunk of scientific materialism and split it at its weakest points. The primary goals of the wedge were:

• To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies
  
• To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
  

The method was to promote intelligent design theory and see it become the “dominant perspective” in all fields of science until it permeates “our religious, cultural, moral, and political life.”
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The startup funds for the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture were provided by the estate of Howard F. Ahmanson, whose company, the parent of Home Savings of America, had over $47 billion in assets in 1997. Ahmanson and his wife were associated with the movement called Christian Reconstruction, which seeks nothing less than to replace American democracy with a fundamentalist theocracy. This organization, according to one source, would require the death penalty for adulterers, homosexuals, witches, incorrigible children, and those who spread “false” religions.
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In 2005, intelligent design met its Waterloo in a Dover, Pennsylvania, courtroom. Across the country, legislatures and school boards had been considering mandating the teaching of ID in public school science classes as an “alternative” to Darwinian evolution. The Dover school board had adopted a policy requiring teachers to read a statement in class stating that intelligent design provides an alternative to evolution as an “explanation of the origin of life.” This was challenged by a group of parents represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other national organizations. Both sides called expert witnesses, including Michael Behe and sociologist Steve Fuller for the defense and Barbara Forrest and biologist Kenneth Miller for the plaintiffs.

Behe did not fare well. Under cross examination he was forced to admit, “There are no peer-reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent
design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.”
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Fuller, who is a highly controversial participant in disputes over the nature of science, argued for an “affirmative action” program for intelligent design.

Forrest gave testimony on the history of intelligent design and its connection with the Discovery Institute and the institute's wedge strategy as documented in her book mentioned above,
Creationism's Trojan Horse
, coauthored with Paul Gross.

Miller was asked what harm would be done if the board's statement were read in school classrooms. His answer: (1) “It falsely undermines the scientific status of evolutionary theory and gives students a false understanding of what theory actually means;” and (2) “As a person of faith who was blessed with two daughters, who raised both of my daughters in the church…had they been given an education in which they were explicitly or implicitly forced to choose between God and science, I would have been furious, because I want my children to keep their religious faith.”
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Miller is one of the most effective spokespersons in support of Darwinian evolution not only because of his intricate knowledge of the science and gifted ability to explain it to laypeople, but also because he is a devout Catholic who sees no conflict with his beliefs.
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While this may be positive for the goal of teaching evolution in schools, it is negative if it leads people to the wrong conclusion about the compatibility of Darwinism and faith. In fact, Miller's theology is more deism than theism. He postulates that God set up evolution as the means by which to achieve his ends and, at the same time, allow for human free will.
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The Enlightenment deist god set the universe in motion according to its fully deterministic laws and had no further need to intervene. Miller and several Christian theologians seem to envision a new form of deism in which God “plays dice,” allowing chance to operate, giving considerable freedom to the universe and humanity to evolve independently of God's direct involvement.
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