The Way of the Cell

I just finished reading a fascinating book called, The Way of the Cell; Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life by Franklin M. Harold, emeritus professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Colorado State University. The book describes in detail the unbelievable complexity of life at the cellular level.

Dr. Harold pulls no punches in his rejection of Intelligent Design theory. He writes, “Let me, therefore, state unambiguously that I, like the vast majority of contemporary scientists, see the living world as wholly the product of natural causes…” (190).

Fifteen pages later he goes on to say,

“We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity; but we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations” (205, emphasis mine).

As “a matter of principle”? Not as a matter of science? I find it amusing how atheists and some scientists pretend that they have “science” on their side while Christians have only faith (what they mean is “gullibility”). While I admire Dr. Harold’s honesty, I hardly think “wishful speculations” falls under the category of science. Dr. Harold goes on:

“Cell components as we know them are so thoroughly integrated that one can scarcely imagine how any one function could have arisen in the absence of the others. Genetic information can only be replicated and read out with the aid of enzyme proteins, which are themselves specified by those same genes. Energy is harnessed by means of enzymes whose production requires energy input. Darwinian evolution is at bottom the struggle among individuals defined by cell membranes, yet how could membranes and transport catalysts arise without genes, proteins and energy?(245)

Excellent questions! Dr. Harold chooses, as a matter of faith, to believe that it all came together by chance, natural laws, and natural selection. Many of us don’t have that much faith. We prefer to postulate a designer. Dr. Harold continues:

The origin of life is also a stubborn problem, with no solution in sight…Biology textbooks often include a chapter on how life may have arisen from non-life, and while responsible authors do not fail to underscore the difficulties and uncertainties, readers still come away with the impression that the answer is almost within our grasp…In reality, we may not be much closer to understanding genesis than A.I. Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane were in the 1930’s; and in the long run, science would be better off if we said so.” (235-236)

I agree. It would be better if many scientists, and especially the new atheists, had the kind of honesty and integrity that Franklin Harold exhibits. Finally, Dr. Harold writes:

“It would be agreeable to conclude this book with a cheery fanfare about science closing in, slowly but surely, on the ultimate mystery; but the time for rosy rhetoric is not at hand. The origin of life appears to me is incomprehensible as ever, a mater of wonder but not for explication” (251).

Amen!

"How Life Began"

I just finished watching a fascinating program on the History Channel called “How Life Began.” According to this program, the most ancient rocks on earth show that the origin of life occurred “almost the same geological moment” that earth was capable of sustaining life.

And yet, the simplest living organisms are more complicated than the computer I am typing on! So how is it that billions of microscopic life forms, each more complicated than my computer, just happened (all by themselves!) to emerge from dead chemicals--not after billions of years of evolution, but at almost the same geological moment that earth was capable of sustaining life?

The program never gave a satisfactory explanation to that question and frankly, I just don’t have enough faith to believe it happened all by itself.

The Mystery of Life

I just finished watching a DVD entitled, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. It was quite possibly the most amazing documentary I’ve ever seen. The computer animations showing the complexity of the inner workings of the cell were phenomenal, almost like something out of science fiction.

The DVD convincingly demonstrates--through remarkable computer graphics and interviews with scientists--how impossible it is for life to have originated and evolved purely by natural selection.

Click on the link and purchase a copy for yourself.

Expelled, the Ben Stein movie

I just finished watching Expelled, the movie by Ben Stein. The movie was sometimes funny and sometimes sober and powerful, but always provocative and informative.

One of my favorite parts was the interview with renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins, in which Dawkins admitted that neither he nor any other scientists had a clue how life began, but he conceded that life could have began as a result of intelligent design from outer space—as long as we’re clear that such alien intelligent designers could not possibly be God.

Now that’s real science, isn’t it?

Please, take time to see this powerful movie. Bring your family and friends.

Ben Stein's movie, "Expelled"

Ben Stein's new movie called "Expelled" is opening in theaters tonight. The movie is about how some in the scientific establishment are using pressure, manipulation and force to keep alternative scientific views from gaining a hearing. Click on the link and find a theater near you. See it tonight.

Expelled, The Movie

Watch the trailer for "Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed." Then go see the movie when it comes out.

Atheism and monkeys

Anthony Flew is a world renowned philosopher who has aggressively advocated atheism for more than 50 years. Recently he changed his mind. He says he is now convinced on the basis of reason alone that atheism is no longer a viable option. He has just published a new book entitled “There is a God; How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind” (He notes that the title was not his idea). In this book Flew says,

“I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder’s point-by-point refutation of what I call the ‘monkey theorem.” This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using
the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and
eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.”

Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), the monkeys produced fifty pages—but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I). A is a word
only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard
has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), then the
likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is
27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of
27,000. (76-77)

Schroeder then calculates the probability of producing a Shakespearean sonnet. All sonnets are 14 lines long. The one he chose happened to have 488 letters in it. The chance that these monkeys would produce a sonnet like this by chance turns out to be a 1 followed by 690 zeros. If you wonder how big that is, Schroeder points out that the number of estimated particles (protons, electrons, neutrons) in the entire universe is only 1 followed by 80 zeros!.

Needless to say, the very simplest living cell is incalculably more complicated than a Shakespearean sonnet! Most of us simply don’t have enough faith to believe the universe originated without some kind of intelligent designer.

Leading atheist finds God

Anthony Flew is “an Oxford educated philosopher described by some as ‘legendary.” For years he was one of the world’s leading proponents of atheism. Indeed, “His ideas paved the way for thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, the UK’s most virulent opponent of religious belief.”

In 2004 Dr. Flew changed his mind. He is now convinced of the existence of a personal God who created the universe, though Flew is careful to add that his view of God so far is more like that of Aristotle rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. All of this according to a recent article by Hilary White. Excerpts of the article appear below but please read the entire article at LifeSiteNews.

Flew has emphasized that his “discovery” of a god who created life was a result of relentlessly “following the evidence”. “It was empirical evidence,” he told an interviewer, “the evidence uncovered by the sciences. But it was a philosophical inference drawn from the evidence.”

Flew told Dr. Benjamin Wiker that two factors in particular “were decisive”. “One was my growing empathy,” he said, “with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical Universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source.”

He told Wiker, “I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code.”

Flew answered Richard Dawkins’ argument that “the origin of life can be attributed to a ‘lucky chance.’” He said, “If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over.” Flew said, “I would add that Dawkins is selective to the point of dishonesty when he cites the views of scientists on the philosophical implications of the scientific data.”

Dissent from Darwinism

Have you heard of Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Inquiry (PSSI)? They are an intenational group of doctors who "dissent from Darwinism." Their web site states:

Sadly, academic freedom is no longer assured in many countries. This is
especially true when it involves espousing views contrary to the theory of
Darwinian macroevolution. Numerous instances have been documented where
scientists and teachers have either been censored or removed from their
positions for allowing or facilitating open discussion of the empirical problems
of macroevolution. In fact, one scientist with two earned PhDs in biology, who
followed long-standing procedures in allowing a properly peer-reviewed but
controversial article to be published in the journal he edited, was publicly
vilified and relentlessly persecuted.

Why do so many people believe in Darwinian evolution? Another page of the PSSI website responds:

Perhaps the answer is found in the following quote from writer and film
maker (Jurassic Park, et al) Michael Crichton (summa cum laude graduate of
Harvard College, MD from Harvard Medical School, postdoctoral fellow at the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies, visiting lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge
University): Consensus science "is an extremely pernicious development that
ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has
been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming
that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of
scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're
being had.

Raw political power

Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is an Iowa State University astronomy professor with an outstanding track record. He has produced 68 peer-reviewed publications including a college textbook. He was recently denied tenure and “Two members of his department have publicly stated that his support for intelligent design theory had something to do with the denial…” (OneNewsNow).

Don’t ever deceive yourself into thinking that science is just about the objective pursuit of truth. Sometimes it’s about raw, prejudiced, political power.

Lessons from the Living Cell

Some people like to imagine that “faith” is the world of unsubstantial imagination and fantasy while “science” is the world of hard data and solid facts.

I just finished a fascinating book entitled Lessons from the Living Cell which demonstrated how much speculation, wishful thinking and pure faith is involved in much of what we call “science.” Once a scientific paradigm becomes established, the scientific community rallies around the paradigm and fights tooth and nail to preserve it from all perceived attacks—even if the attacks are from valid scientific experiments. So when an experiment challenges the paradigm, scientists simply propose an additional hypothesis to account for the experiment in such a way as to maintain the status quo. When another experiment challenges the paradigm, another hypothesis is proposed, and so on, over and over again.

As an example, the author, Stephen Rothman presents his own work in the “transport of protein molecules across cell membranes.” No matter how many times Rothman demonstrated that the existing paradigm was based on insufficient scientific data, and no matter how many times he presented successful experiments demonstrating that the conventional wisdom was wrong, its advocates would just dig in their heels and propose one alternative hypothesis after another to maintain the status quo.

Rothman concludes that “scientific belief is not merely a matter of facts and reason. Prejudice about ideas and people; personality; the power of authority and prior belief; raw political power; who controls journals, organizations, and funds; the depth of commitment to an idea; and any and every other human and social attribute and foible that one can imagine are also at play.” Stephen Rothman. Lessons from the Living Cell; the Limits of Reductionism. New York : McGraw-Hill, 2001, 279.

This sounds amazingly like the response advocates of Intelligent Design get from the scientific community. But Rothman was not advocating Intelligent Design and in fact, there was no evidence at all that he was even a “man of faith.” Rothman, “was research professor at Harvard Medical School until 1971; when he joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. Best known for his landmark studies on the transport of protein molecules across cell membranes, he has made notable contributions in everything from molecular biology to physiology. Dr. Rothman has published nearly 200 articles in Nature, Science, and other prestigious scientific journals.” (From the back flyleaf)

Hidden Face of God

I recently finished reading The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder who received his Ph.D. from MIT. Reports are that Dr. Schroeder has even convinced the world-renowned atheist philosopher, Anthony Flew to change his mind about atheism. Even if you don’t understand the science below, you will understand the point at the end. Schroeder writes:

When a specific protein is needed by a cell, a chemical messenger is sent from the outer cell, through a pore in the nuclear membrane, into the nucleus. How the messenger knows to go to the nucleus remains a mystery. This messenger finds the needed chromosome (one of the twenty-three pairs), locks onto that chromosome, and moves along, nucleotide by nucleotide, until it comes to the
specific sequence of bases that marks the beginning of the gene that codes for
the desired protein.

At this stage, the signaling molecule changes shape, and in doing so allows—or causes—and enzyme called DNA-dependent RNA polymerase (I’ll call it RNA-P) to join the action.

The RNA-P opens the helix, reads each nucleotide base, selects the correct complementary base from among the four types floating in the intracellular slurry, concurrently selects…the molecules that make up the spine of the lengthening strand of mRNA being manufactured, trailing behind the RNA-P, joins the just-selected base to the spine, takes the portion of DNA that has just been read and reseals it to
the parallel DNA strand which it was separated, opens the portion of DNA to be
read next, reads it, and continues the juggling act til it reaches a coded stop
order…And RNA-P does this manufacturing at fifty bases a second…Keep in mind,
this entire sequence is performed by molecules reading molecules, molecules
selecting molecules, molecules walking along with other molecules. Don’t project
too much brain power or body power into this system. It’s not little people in
there. It’s simply molecules that somehow seem to act like little knowledgeable
people, as if they had a wisdom of their own. Which they do (192-199).

This is only one small part of a much more complicated process that
takes place in what was once called the “simple cell.” At one time scientists
used to imagine that, given enough time (billions of years) simple cells could
evolve by themselves purely by chance or natural selection. The kicker here is
that “it all developed so very rapidly, almost simultaneously with the
appearance of liquid water on earth. We have absolutely phenomenal complexity,
not after billions of years of evolution, but at the very beginning of the
entire process (193-194)!

Of course all of this doesn’t necessarily “prove” there is a God but it certainly takes an incredible amount of faith to believe that it all happened by chance, natural selection, or random mutations. Personally, I don’t have that much faith.

And they call this “science”

Sir Fred Hoyle Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and Francis Crick were all world-renowned scientists who were atheists. The following are excerpts from a book which discusses their work on the origin of life:

Hoyle ran the numbers to determine the mathematical probability of the basic
enzymes of life arising by random processes. They conclude that the odds were 1
to 1 followed by 40,000 zeros, or ‘so utterly minuscule’ as to make Darwin’s
theory of evolution absurd.”

In order to explain the creation of the universe while carefully excluding God, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe came up with a theory called ‘panspermia,’ which holds that life began in space and spread to Earth by a steady influx of microscopic infectious agents delivered to Earth on comets.

Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his codiscovery of DNA, also realized that spontaneous evolution of life could not be reconciled with the facts. As he said, ‘the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd.’ Consequently, Crick hypothesized that highly intelligent extraterrestrials sent living cells to Earth on an unmanned spaceship…”

Ahh, but more recent evolutionists speak of computer simulations proving evolution to be true. “…in his book River Out of Eden, Dawkins blathers on and on about ‘computer models of evolving eyes.”

David Berlinski got to the bottom of the famed computer simulation, tracking down scientists alleged to have performed this wonderous feat, and discovered…it doesn’t exist.

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Tom Bethell quotes Berlinski’s summary f the evidence: ‘…There is no such model anywhere in any laboratory. No one has the faintest idea how to make one. The whole story was fabricated out of thin air by Richard Dawkins. The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim—Dan E. Nilsson—has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eyes’ development” (All quotations from Coulter, Godless, 208, 210-211).

So there you have it. Honest atheists like Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and Crick realize that it is simply impossible for life to have originated spontaneously on earth by itself so they propose that it originated someplace else—some place that, conveniently, places it out of the reach of scientists to examine the evidence. And they call this science!

Evolution—just one true thing

“…the late Colin Patterson, respected paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London…was on a quest to find someone who could tell him—as he puts it—‘anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think it true.’ Patterson said, ‘I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and al I got there was silence for a long time.” (Coulter, Godless, 201, see also Discovery Institute)

The science of God

Gerald Schroeder is a nuclear physicist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has also done work in biology and earth sciences. He has the distinction of being instrumental in convincing the world-renowned atheist philosopher, Anthony Flew, that God—at least in a Deist sense—really does exist after all

The following comes from Dr. Schroeder’s book, The Hidden Face of God; How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth. As with any book on this topic (and as you can see from the Amazon reviews) some people love it, some hate it. Either way, it is a facinating read.

The human body acts as a finely tuned machine, a magnificent metropolis in
which…each of the 75 trillion cells, composed of [10 with 27 zeros] atoms, moves
in symbiotic precision…

[These atoms] are organized by a single act when a protozoan-like sperm cells adds its message of genetic material into a receptive egg cell....

Until the mid-1970’s the accepted wisdom was that the origin of this
organization that we refer to as life was the result of chance random reactions
among atoms, gradually combining, one chance occurrence building upon another
over eons of time until self-replication and then mutation produced the first
biological cell. Three billion years were thought to have passed between
the formation of liquid water on the formerly molten earth and the appearance of
the first forms of life….

Two to three billion years were available for randomness to do its work. ‘Given so much time the…impossible becomes the possible, the possible becomes probable, and the probable virtually certain’…So wrote George Wald, professor of biology at Harvard University and Nobel laureate….

In the mid-1970’s came the seminal discovery of Elso Barghoorn. He, like Wald, was at Harvard…Using a scanning electron microscope…Barghoorn searched the surfaces of…stone taken from the oldest of rocks able to bear fossils. To the amazement of the scientific community, fossils of fully developed bacteria were found in rocks 3.6 billion years old. Further evidence…indicated the origins of cellular life at close to 3.8 billion years before the present, the same period in which liquid water first formed on Earth.

Overnight, the fantasy of billions of years of random reactions in warm little
ponds brimming with fecund chemicals leading to life, evaporated. Elso
Barrghoorn had discovered a most perplexing fact: life, the most complexly
organized system of atoms known in the universe, popped into being in the blink
of a geological eye (49-51).

Kitzmiller v. Dover: a miscarriage of justice?

Last year Recliner Commentaries posted a series of articles on the Kitzmiller v. Dover case on Intelligent Design (see "Intelligent Design" in the subject index for previous posts). Now, a new revelation has come to light. Excerpts of a WorldNetDaily report appear below:

"One year ago, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones' 139-page ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover declared unconstitutional a school board policy that required students of a ninth-grade biology class in the Dover Area School District to hear a one-minute statement that said evolution is a theory and intelligent design "is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view."

"But an analysis by the Discovery Institute, the leading promoter of intelligent design, concludes about 90.9 percent – 5,458 words of his 6,004-word section on intelligent design as science – was taken virtually verbatim from the ACLU's proposed "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law" submitted to Jones nearly a month before his ruling."

John "West is vice president for public policy and legal affairs for the group's Center for Science and Culture, which issued a statement saying, 'The finding that most of Judge Jones' analysis of intelligent design was apparently not the product of his own original deliberative activity seriously undercuts the credibility of Judge Jones' examination of the scientific validity of intelligent design."

"We were stunned," said West, who pointed out Jones even copied several clearly erroneous factual claims made by the ACLU."

"The revelation that Judge Jones in effect 'dragged and dropped' large sections of the ACLU's 'Findings of Fact' into his opinion, errors and all, calls into serious question whether Jones exercised the kind of independent analysis that would make his 'broad, stinging rebuke' of intelligent design appropriate."

This discovery raises serious questions. For example, since the ACLU was supporting the winning side, how can it possibly be ethical for the judge to have essentially cut-and-pasted his conclusion from arguments previously prepared by that side? Was the judge just a biased tool for one side of the dispute? Was this really a fair trial at all, or was this just a kangaroo court in which the judge had already made up his mind from the very beginning?

Given the fact that I read the decision and often found the judge’s reasoning to be ludicrous, my conclusion is that this case has moved beyond the issue of Intelligent Design to an issue of judicial ethics and the miscarriage of justice! If there is a mechanism in place for the investigation if judges, it needs to be applied in this case.

The Pope and intelligent design

UPI is reporting that the "Pope may embrace intelligent design." I would certainy hope so. While some Christians may object to intelligent design as a methodology, denying intelligent design as a theory is denying that God had anything to do with the origin of the universe.

SETI and Intelligent Design

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific organization that searches for signs of intelligent life in outer space. SETI has received support from such reputable agencies as NASA, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, US Geological Survey, Jet Propulsion laboratory, et al. In an essay on the SETI Institute website, Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak attempts to distance SETI from Intelligent Design research.

According to Shostak, “When ID advocates posit that DNA – which is a complicated, molecular blueprint – is solid evidence for a designer, most scientists are unconvinced. They counter that the structure of this biological building block is the result of self-organization via evolution, and not a proof of deliberate engineering. DNA, the researchers will protest, is no more a consciously constructed system than Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Organized complexity, in other words, is not enough to infer design.”

What planet is this guy from? How could a scientist seriously compare the complexity of DNA with the Red Spot storm on Jupiter? And is he serous about organized complexity not being enough to infer design? It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in English, for example, to tell the difference between random letters on a paper, and an essay that was designed by an author. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in geology to tell the difference between natural geological formations, and designed monuments like those on Easter Island. It is apparently just in biology where organized complexity doesn’t count.

Shostak continues, “But the adherents of Intelligent Design protest the protest. They point to SETI and say, ‘upon receiving a complex radio signal from space, SETI researchers will claim it as proof that intelligent life resides in the neighborhood of a distant star. Thus, isn’t their search completely analogous to our own line of reasoning – a clear case of complexity implying intelligence and deliberate design?’ And SETI, they would note, enjoys widespread scientific acceptance.”

Shostak’s answer is that SETI looks for artificial signals, not for complex signals. He says, “Our sought-after signal is hardly complex, and yet we’re still going to say that we’ve found extraterrestrials. If we can get away with that, why can’t they? Well, it’s because the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality.”

This argument is just smoke and mirrors. First, although the artificial is not always, complex, complexity is often the hallmark of artificiality. For example, when the Rosetta Stone was first discovered, no one mistook the complex scripts for erosion or natural scratches.

Second, if SETI did find highly complex signals from outer space for which natural explanations proved to be statistically improbable, you can bet your last dollar that they would claim to have found signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Third, the point of comparison is the fact that both Intelligent Design and SETI scientifically study evidence for design. The fact that the evidence for design in biology may be different than the evidence for design in astrophysics does not make either one less scientific than the other.

Kitzmiller v Dover and the First Amendment

“In the late 1870’s Congressman James G. Blaine introduced…the Blaine Amendment, by which the First Amendment’s restrictions on the federal government would be extended to the states. Introduced again and again in subsequent sessions of Congress, it never garnered enough votes. But the very fact that it was introduced tells us something important. If the Fourteenth Amendment had really been intended to apply First Amendment restrictions to the states, why would the Blaine Amendment, which sought to do the very same thing, have been introduced in the first place? But less than a century later, the Supreme Court would declare in Engel v. Vitale (1962) that local school boards were prohibited from approving even nonsectarian prayers for use in schools. Americans…would be surprised to learn that [this decision] runs exactly contrary to the Framer’s intent. Not only Jefferson but the entire founding generation as well would have considered such a ruling to be a stupefying departure from traditional American principles and an intolerable encroachment on communities rights to self-government”
(The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods, B.A. in history from Harvard, masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University, 21-22).

Engel v. Vitale dealt with nonsectarian prayers in public schools but Kitzmiller v. Dover goes even further by prohibiting a school district from even reading a 30 second statement informing students of a book in the library! Our founding fathers would have been shocked and appalled by the kind of tyrannical government encroachment on the people’s right to self-government exhibited by Kitzmiller v Dover.

Intelligent Design and religious motivation

A major factor in the Kitzmiller v Dover decision against Intelligent Design was that the school board was religiously, rather than scientifically, motivated. Unfortunately, this confuses motivation with subject matter. Whether or not Intelligent Design is religiously motivated is irrelevant as long as the subject matter is scientific and serves a secular purpose.

It is important to understand what is going on here. By making motivation the key element in deciding that a statement on Intelligent Design could not even be read in the classroom (censorship!), this court takes one more step toward eliminating all religious discussion in the public forum. What’s next? Should we declare abstinence programs unconstitutional if they are motivated by religious morality? Should a class promoting the protection of the environment be declared unconstitutional if it is taught by someone with a religious concern for the environment (and would the exact same class be legal if taught by someone unmotivated by religious concerns)? Should we declare hurricane aid legislation unconstitutional if it was proposed by a Christian congressperson motivated by religious love?

Although Intelligent Design has a secular purpose—“advancing science, enriching the science curriculum, preventing viewpoint discrimination, promoting academic freedom” (Dembski. Design Revolution, 56), the government has declared it unconstitutional simply because some democratically elected school board members were religiously motivated. Our forefathers would roll over in their graves at the thought of such a perversion of our Constitution!