Science vs. Religion by Steve Fuller

Author:Steve Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

4

America as a Legal Battleground

1. Expertise on the Nature of Science

2. Supernaturalism as Figment and Fact in the Naturalistic Imagination

3. Philosophical Resistance to Scientific Naturalism

4. America’s Unique Legal and Political Culture

5. Conclusion: The Threat Posed by Intelligent Design

1. Expertise on the Nature of Science

In February 2005, the Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan, asked me to serve as a “rebuttal witness” for the defense in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a trial scheduled to begin early in the autumn of that year, which would be the first case to test the eligibility of “intelligent design theory” (IDT) for inclusion alongside the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution in high school biology classes. As a rebuttal witness, my charge was to contradict the claims made by the plaintiffs’ witnesses, all of whom were seasoned veterans of related trials involving creationism. Their opinions were already compiled (Dembski and Ruse 2004) and their biographies featured on the website of the plaintiffs’ legal team, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I decided to participate without knowing this background but simply after having read the expert witness reports as filed by the plaintiffs’ lawyers. These struck me as based on tendentious understandings of the nature of science that would not have survived scrutiny on an informed listserv like HOPOS-L (dedicated to the history of the philosophy of science), let alone the peer review process of a relevant journal. I concluded that the plaintiffs’ experts simply took advantage of their “expert” status to offer their sincerely held but professionally uncensored opinions.

My critical eye was clearly informed by knowledge gained from science and technology studies, since, while having written on IDT’s struggle for scientific legitimacy (Fuller 1998b), I am not an advocate of – or expert in – either IDT or, for that matter, neo-Darwinism. But my prima facie marginality to the positions under dispute did not deter me. Indeed, I may be the first person to declare under oath that someone trained in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science – that is, science and technology studies (which I glossed as “social epistemology” during the trial) – can better evaluate the scientific standing of a field of inquiry than someone formally trained in science.

Of course, scientists trained in particular fields are better placed to issue judgments about the epistemic standing of claims and practices in those fields. But that is different from the second-order problem of whether such fields constitute sciences. A great virtue of the US Constitution is its delegation of educational decisions to the local level, so that those who pay for the schools (through taxes) get to govern them (Fuller 2006a: 174–9). There is no educational ministry that sets a “national curriculum,” as commonly found in much of the developed world. As long as enough students pass state-based (i.e. based in a particular US state) subject exams, the curriculum can be organized as the locals see fit – that is, until a legal challenge is raised.

Letting the locals decide science education simultaneously

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