UK needs its own Dover Trial

We are now 6 years on from the historic Kitzmiller vs Dover Trial in which brave parents challenged a US school board's decision to teach 'Intelligent Design' (ID) as if it were part of some sort of scientific controversy.  By doing this the ID movement neatly tried to sidestep the obvious truth that ID is not science in any real sense.

Kitzmiller et al were pointing out that ID's backers had sought to avoid scientific scrutiny by advocating that 'the controversy', but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. They claimed that this tactic was at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the ID movement was not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

Tammy Kitzmiller

It seems obvious that we desperately need a 'Dover Trial' in the UK to counter the spread of irrational teaching in our new plague of 'faith schools'.  Things in UK are even worse than they were in US.  They are actually trying to teach ID and creationism as if they were science.  They do not even need to dress it up as controversy.

The problem is that the UK has no constitutional protections against the spread of pernicious supernatural beliefs throughout the state system, infecting the minds of our children while they are still vulnerable.  We have no constitution in the sense that USA has one.  Worse than that, we have no First Amendment guaranteeing the separation of church and state.

Most people in UK are probably completely unaware that USA even has a First Amendment.  It they are aware of any at all it is most likely to be the fifth, as a few Brits bandy the phrase "I'm claiming the fifth".  They use this expression to boast that they are not going to admit to an indiscretion that they are secretly proud about, but they probably don't know what the fifth is the fifth of.

Tammy Kitzmiller et al were fighting for rationality, as was their constitutional right.  UK rationalists have to fight even to gain that constitutional right, and the problem is that few people have noticed the impending problem.

UK in fact has state sponsored church, being one of only two countries in the world which appoints religious officials as part of our government.  The only other is Iran.  Aren't we in good company?  So things seem to be going from bad to worse as faith schools establish a new foothold, trying to drag the country back to the beliefs and technology of medieval times.

In the Dover Trial - and I think to the great surprise of many people - the conservative judge, Judge Jones, ruled in their favour, doing a great service to the young people of their nation.  A few of the findings leave it in little doubt that the Dover School Board lost the case with no hope of appeal.

"The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory."

and

After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are:

1. ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;
2. The argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and
3. ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.

It is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena.

Judge Jones headed off all hope of an appeal with a wisely worded paragraph.  (We could do with some wise judges in UK too!)


Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.



May Europe learn something from this sensible decision!