11.28.05
Constitutionality of ID
Jay Wexler, in his debate with Beckwith over the constitutionality of teaching ID has a forthcoming article, abstract below; commented on at Dispatches From The Culture Wars.
It would seem that teaching ID in biology classes is a Bad Idea from the word go, but to say that it is unconstitutional to do so is problematic, to say the least. It is liable to amount to saying that it is unconstitutional to even think about teleology! Why not simply outlaw Aristotle, while you are at it! You cannot make it unconstitutional to disagree with Darwin. And no use saying high schools deserve one policy while universities get another. That merely gives the game away (on both sides): the minds of the young are at risk of being liberated from brainwashing. How did scientists get in this mess? For it is true, in practice, whatever the legal theory, that bringing ID into classrooms would, or could, be a pernicious moment, a rubicon.
Part of the problem is the lack of a ‘dialectic’, a subject that I fear was terminated by Hegelian attempts to make it an absolute metaphysics. But the point is that science is not a one way march to Truth, but a zigzag in a field where a dialectical spectrum is the case. The heritage of mathematical physics is a misleading luxury. If you try to fix biology in the same fashion, purely imitative, the dialectic will turn and bite you.
This merely means that enquiry is the only methodology of science, and any dogma as rigid as the Darwinian is at risk of becoming a de facto religion itself. Only the absence of such an internalized dialectic, explicit from the beginning, could have left scientists so vulnerable to the inexorable externalized dialectic of traditionalists.
I reserve the right to disagree with myself on what I just said, on the grounds of internalized dialectic.
Intelligent Design and the First Amendment: A Response
JAY WEXLER
Boston University - School of Law
——————————————————————————–Washington University Law Quarterly, Forthcoming
Boston Univ. School of Law Working Paper No. 05-16
Abstract:
In September 2005, a federal district judge in Pennsylvania began presiding over the nation’s first trial regarding the constitutionality of introducing the concept of “intelligent design” (ID), a purportedly scientific alternative to the theory of evolution, into the public schools. My previous work has argued that teaching ID in the public schools would raise serious constitutional problems. In a series of writings, including a full length book and several articles, Baylor University professor Francis Beckwith has argued that public schools may constitutionally teach ID. In doing so, Beckwith has critiqued a number of arguments I have previously advanced in my own writing, calling them, for example, “wide of the mark” and “patently unreasonable.” In this essay, I respond to Beckwith’s arguments regarding ID, both those that specifically critique my own arguments, as well as those that stand on their own. Specifically I disagree with Beckwith in three substantive areas: whether courts should find that ID constitutes a religious belief, whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards v. Aguillard casts doubt on the constitutionality of teaching ID, and whether teachers have any first amendment academic freedom right to teach ID in direct contravention of clear school policy.