A SCHOOL district in Pennsylvania recently made headlines by becoming the first to require the teaching of the intelligent design theory in biology classes as a possible alternative to Darwinian evolution. Similar plans have drawn attention in Georgia and other states where religious parents worry about their children being taught an accepted scientific theory that they nevertheless find to be both untrue and offensive. Given the interesting nature and intense ferocity of this dispute, one aspect that gets little attention is the way it illustrates an interesting problem with public schooling in an intellectually diverse liberal society.
It is a core tenet of liberal political theory that government should remain neutral in disputes that arise between competing philosophical or religious ideologies. This concept inspires the First Amendment's content-neutral protection of free speech and free exercise of religion, as well as the idea that church and state should be firmly separated. By extension, this paradigm includes a moral right that parents have to raise their own children as they see fit with respect to political, philosophical and religious instruction. But with children from different families attending the same regimented public schools, the state's ideological neutrality becomes difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.
Intelligent design is the theory which holds that the universe, due to its intricate complexity, must have been created by some powerful and purposive creator. This idea is dubious not only for its lack of empirical support but also because, after a few moments of reflection, it just doesn't make any sense. The theory posits that only a divine creator could account for the complexity of the world around us, but it offers no satisfactory account of how this creator itself is supposed to have come about.
Presumably, any creative entity with divine powers is at least as complex as the world it creates. So if you're starting from the premise that high-level complexity can't arise on its own, you can't just say that God created the world and leave it at that. Nor can you say that God has always existed, since you have already ruled out the possibility that something so complex could simply exist as its own cause with no further explanation.
At some point, you'll need to follow one of two paths: You must either admit that complexity can arise on its own without requiring any further explanation (in which case intelligent design theory becomes superfluous), or else you're going to need a theory (like evolution) to explain how complex systems of spontaneous order could arise from a mess of disorganized chaos.
For this reason among many others, most scientists and intellectuals today are firmly convinced that intelligent design is nothing but a desperately contrived piece of pseudo-scientific drivel, and I tend to agree. For those who are similarly convinced, it is clearly upsetting that intelligent design is being taught in some of Pennsylvania's public schools because we don't want to be forced to fund or send our children to an institution that is going to give authoritative scientific validity to a view that we find to be patently false.
But now imagine how parents who believe in intelligent design must feel. Evolution, which they believe to be a despicably false theory, is taught as fact in public schools not just in one state but in every state. As it stands, the tax dollars of millions of intelligent design adherents are being used to finance the spread of an ideology that they deeply oppose.
Now, even those of us who would like nothing more than to see intelligent design theory disappear should be uneasy with our government taking sides in this ideological dispute. First of all, in today's evangelical political climate many state schools could very quickly and easily become much more hostile to evolution. As such, it is dangerous to make the state the arbiter of what our children should be taught. But beyond this, it's just not right for the state to impose compulsory schooling that uses public funds to push one side or the other in any ongoing controversy with such deep scientific and religious consequences.
If schools were converted to a voucher system or, better yet, privatized completely, parents could choose from a competitive variety of schools with different approaches to this topic as well as other controversial subjects such as sex education, literature and politics, which cannot simply be cut out of the curriculum altogether. Short of this, it is impossible to avoid embroiling the power of the state as a partisan force rather than a neutral referee in our society's intellectual milieu.
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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