&Chi. TEACHING EVOLUTION. The SEAL conference yesterday had an interesting but a bit odd session on "Intelligent Design". This was presented as a conspiracy by five or so evangelical Christian scholars from various disciplines to try to persuade the world that evolution theory is bunk and God created the world directly. What made it odd was that it took about three sessions before I could get much idea of what the Intelligent Design idea is. All the presenters were deeply hostile to the idea, which is fine, but I wish they'd stated the position they were attacking before the attacks. The attacks themselves were all on the motives, credentials, and publishing outlets of the "ID" people, it being taken for granted that they are wrong in their ideas.
That's not necessarily a bad way to have a session, but instead of being the discussion of the idea that I expected it was a discussion of the law nad sociology of the idea, an equally interesting, but different topic.
I haven't said what the idea is myself yet! Well, I may still be confused, but here is the idea I got. There are various schools of thought on the origin of species:
I raised a couple of hypotheticals which show how silly this is.
Some lobbyists say, "This should be taught in the high schools, not only because it is clearly true but because this will encourage people to believe in Jehovah."
Such school lessons clearly have a religious motivation and a religious effect. They would encourage Christianity. Should schools therefore ignore the evidence of the monolith?
The law's purpose is clearly religous. Once it is passed, must Indiana schools stop teaching evolution? The Moon Monolith. We discover on the moon a stone monolith saying "Jehovah created the world at 6 a.m. in the year 3 billion BC," and also describes a Unified Field Theory that works.
The Incautious Hindus. A group of Hindus lobbies for an Indiana state law allowing evolution to be taught in Indiana schools. They incautiously admit that they favor the law because they think it would discourage Christianity. Nobody else lobbies for the law, but it does pass.
The problem that both of these hypotheticals raise is that current Supreme Court doctrine focusses not on whether something taught in school is true or false, but on whether it has a religious motivation or a religious effect. This way of thinking is completely unscientific, of course, and is probably motivated by distaste for religion, although to be consistent, it would have to include results like that in The Incautious Hindus , where action with a purpose overtly hostile to religion must also be banned.
Judges don't have to be consistent in this way, of course, and they aren't. But a good point that someone raised at the conference was that the effect of this crazy jurisprudence is that schools are afraid to teach anything about evolution at all. If they teach evolution as an undoubtedly true theory, the Fundamentalists will sue them; if they teach it as anything else, the atheists will sue them. Thus, they are only safe if they avoid the subject. That is a victory for the Fundamentalists, of course-- especially for the Young Earthers who have the weakest logical position.
The idea that the Constitution says a government organization's actions must have a secular purpose and a secular effect is nonsense, of course, something that ought to be noted in any discussion on this subject. To appreciate the divergence between the rule of law and the rule of judges, you need to see the full Constitional clauses that are cited. Here is the 1st Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
As you can see, the 1st Amendment plainly applies only to the federal government, not to the states. Indeed, it was passed precisely to prevent behavior by the federal government such as the U.S. Supreme Court has been engaged in-- imposing federal religious or anti-religious policy on the states-- and when the 1st Amendment was passed, more than one state had an established, official state religion.
But did the 14th Amendment change all that? Section 1, the Due Process Clause cited in Everson, says
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
That has nothing to do with establishment of religion. The government still can spend money pushing views to which some citizens object, be those views religious or not; and it can still spend money on social policies such as education, whether using religious schools or not.
[more, permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.10.04b.htm ]
&Psi. OLD TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS. I learned something contrary to the conventional wisdom on the accuracy of the Masoretic Old Testament text from Jim Davila at Paleojudaica:
It is true that, say, the Isaiah manuscripts from Qumran Cave 1 show relatively trivial differences from the Masoretic Text (although these include some rather interesting readings that may be original). But the Samuel manuscripts from Cave 4 have considerably larger differences; often whole phrases were miscopied or left out of the MT. Then there are two very different editions of the book of Jeremiah known from Qumran. The longer one is the one found in our Hebrew Bible today. Another version, shorter by about 1/7 and a somewhat different order, was known from the Greek Septuagint. It used to be possible to argue that the Greek version was a mutilated perversion of the original Hebrew by an overzealous translator. But now Hebrew fragments of both editions have turned up at Qumran. Which version belongs in the Bible? I submit that this question is of interest to anyone for whom the Bible is important and that it does indeed have serious bearing on the meaning and context of the text.
Given my past post saying that Jeremiah is the most boring book of the Bible, maybe I should look at the Septuagint version instead.
[more, permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.10.04c.htm ]
&Omega. REGULAR WEBLOGGING. I try to put something up every day, but yesterday the SEAL Conference (of which more later) and the three-hour length of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio interrupted. During a boring tenor's aria in the opera, though, I had an idea for how to reorganize this site. I guess if I'd had my laptop along, I could have posted here too-- but my keyboard isn't quiet enough anyway.
[more, permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.10.04d.htm ]
To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.