Lying for God: The Dover Debacle

The verdict for Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, in Pennsylvania’s Middle District Court, was issued shortly before Christmas, 2005. For the plaintiffs — Tammy Kitzmiller and ten other parents of Dover area schoolchildren — the trial’s six-week ordeal ended in resounding victory. The verdict was unambiguous, not at all the narrowly favorable ruling expected by many on the plaintiffs’ side. For the defendant school district and members of its Board, trial and verdict were a debacle, the ultimate shape of which became visible early in the proceedings — even before the defense was fully launched. Now, in her book The Devil in Dover, journalist Lauri Lebo, native to rural, south-central Pennsylvania and at home among its people, has published an extended human-interest account of the trial.

Kitzmiller was a landmark case, but that designation might at first be thought misleading. It was, after all, only the most recent of a long series of American court actions, beginning more than eighty years ago, including two that reached United States Supreme Court, the most recent being Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), which confirmed 7 to 2 that the Louisiana “equal time” law requiring the teaching in public schools of “creation science” alongside evolution was unconstitutional.

In each case to date, creationists have sought either an outright ban on the teaching of evolution, or by other means to render futile any instruction in what they still insist on calling “Darwinism.” But the target of creationism in these actions has always been more than Darwin’s 1859 masterpiece, which set forth natural mechanisms (since then solidly established in science) for the colossal diversification, over time, of life on Earth. Their target has been and remains all of modern biology, and a good deal of the rest of science, because biology is today evolutionary throughout — as has been declared during the last six decades by its most eminent practitioners.

In these trials, creationism has attacked not only the vast matrix of facts of Earth history, descent with modification among the biota, evolution observed and simulated in the laboratory, plus a century and a half of evolutionary theory, but also, directly or otherwise, the ground rules — the epistemology — of natural science. They have scorned methods of inquiry that over the last three hundred years brought the modern world into being.

Thus Dover turns out to have been a landmark case because the nature of its proceedings, and the ancillary events in its course, made it impossible for the court to ignore the attack by Dover’s Board on those epistemic ground rules. A sound verdict needed to address not only the constitutionality of the school Board’s policy of promoting “alternative” theories; it was forced also to evaluate the alternative specifically promoted by the Board — Intelligent Design (ID) theory. In so doing the sitting judge had to rule on what, among the claims made for ID, is science and what is not. The commanding judicial opinion, written by John E. Jones, III, presiding, recognized both needs and met them frontally.

Lauri Lebo, an experienced journalist and sometime specialist on education for the York (PA) Daily Record, attended, investigated, and reported on Kitzmiller from start to finish.