Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul (2008)

Deception and religion have been joined at the hip for a very long time, perhaps as long as religion has existed in human culture given that religion has its origins in believing what we can never see or know.  Monkey Girl is Edward Humes' account of the Dover Township, Pennsylvania school board's effort to introduce the subject of intelligent design into the high school science curriculum and the litigation that ensued when parents stepped forward and asked a court to enjoin the school board's effort on the ground that it offended the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  What the 6-week trial in a United States District Court exposed was concerted deceit on the part of groups opposed to the teaching of natural selection  and what Charles Darwin called "descent with modification" in public school curriculum because it offended the biblical stories that lead them to the belief that god (an intelligent designer) created each of the species separately and the view of some that these acts of creation began no more than 10,000 years ago.  Comparable acts of deceit in the commercial world would be called mislabeling or misbranding or fraud.  In court, it is called perjury.

The drive to engage in the acts of deceit documented by Humes begins with the United States Supreme Court's decision in 1987 that the teaching of creationism offended the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and could not be taught in public schools.  If creationism could not be mandated as a subject of instruction in United States public schools these groups began to think about branding creationism as something else, something that sounded like it belonged in the science classroom --- intelligent design.  Their legal strategy, for example, compelled them to abandon the words "god" and "creator" and relabel god an "intelligent designer."  Their legal strategy also compelled them to create a controversy when, at least in the scientific community, no substantial controversy existed:  the existence of an intelligent designer would be deemed a serious scientific question and one that demanded that schools "teach the controversy."  The lingo of creationism and its relationship to the book of Genesis had to be purged if science students had any chance of being taught an alternate explanation of the creation of species alongside natural selection and descent with modification in the classroom.  This was no easy task.  To biblical literalists, it was confusing and did not sit well with the hard core biblical believers who wanted to drive natural selection and "Darwinism" from science class because, in their view, it was atheistic.  But for the advocates of intelligence design, their difficulties extended beyond the religious motivations of the Dover school board.  Not only were the intelligent design advocates ultimately unable to succeed in concealing the religious motivations of the school board, it turns out there was a long and unambiguous record demonstrating that intelligent design had its intellectual seed in creationism.  The very book that the intelligent design advocates wanted the high school students of Dover to have in their classroom, Of Pandas and People, had been drafted prior to the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, and the drafts had used the word creationism.  By the time of publication, after the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Edwards, the word creationism had been deleted everywhere and replaced with the term intelligent design. 

At the heart of the lawsuit, known as Kitzmiller v. Town of Dover, was this question:  was intelligent design science or religion?  For the plaintiffs, intelligent design was on trial; for the defendants and their supporters, traditional science was on trial.  After a six week trial in which the court heard from scientists on both side of the question, the court found that intelligent design was not science; it was religion. 

The scheme to inject intelligent design --- as opposed to creationism --- into the science curriculum begins with a paper developed by a University of California law professor, Phillip Johnson, that came to be known as the "wedge strategy," because it envisioned hammering a "wedge" into the tree of science by criticizing evolutionary theory --- putting science on the defensive and exploiting religious sentiment that was not only skeptical of evolutionary theory, but was essentially ignorant about natural selection and the body of scientific literature that had substantiated Darwin's natural selection model.  The wedge document was developed by Johnson in collaboration with the Discovery Institute, and essentially outlines not a scientific research program, but a public relations strategy to persuade people that a scientific controversy existed and that the public needed to be made aware of the controversy.  The wedge document was never intended to be made public, and it was forthright and honest in expressing the goals behind the wedge strategy, leaving no doubt about its theistic underpinning: 

• "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
• "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings were created by God."
• to initially see, within five years, "intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory" and within 20 years to see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science" and to see "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life." 
• "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

During the Kitzmiller trial, however, the lawyers for the defendants, like Peter denying Jesus, wanted nothing to do with the wedge document.  They argued that it was a "mere fundraising proposal" of little significance.  The lawyers for the defendants desperately tried to prevent the plaintiffs' witness, Barbara Forrest, who testified not only about the revisions to the Pandas and People book but also about the wedge document, from testifying at all. 

A central part of the Discovery Institute's strategy was to change the ground rules of science so that it not only included the natural, material world, but also the supernatural ethereal world.  The problem with this project is that it is nothing less than the merger of science and religion.  According to the testimony of the plaintiff's expert at the Kitzmiller trial, "Science is the systematic attempt to provide natural explanations for natural phenomena."  The exclusion of the supernatural from science was unavoidable.  A scientific theory is testable, and is capable of being proven false.  The supernatural is not testable.  Judge Jones concluded, "Intelligent design is predicated on supernatural causation. . . . Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science.  These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief."

Numerous posts in this blog raise issues that are relevant to the Kitzmiller case:

Teleology v teleonomy.  (June 12, 2011, May 24, 2010  and March 24, 2010 post).

The human propensity for self-deception and deception.  (February 4, 2012, August 28, 2011, and May 22, 2011 and May 12, 2010 post)

Anthropomorphism, anthropotheism,  and anthropodenial.  (March 20, 2012, June 12, 2011 and June 17, 2010 post).

Dualism and materialism.  ( December 17, 2012, February 27, 2011 and September 27, 2009 post)

At its core, the intelligent design movement, as exposed in the wedge document, is about as un-American as any group can be.  The long-run goal is for design theory to permeate not only religious, cultural, and moral life, but also "political life."  This is so contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, one would think the design movement's adherents were really living in modern Iran or some other theocracy.  Yet what Monkey Girl reveals is that the intelligent design movement has so little respect for the First Amendment, because they believe the government has abandoned religion by recognizing the freedom of atheists, skeptics (agnostics), and pantheists who imagine a universe governed by natural laws (see January 31, 2013 post) and they believe the government has abandoned its moorings as a "Christian nation."  In contrast, Humes closes out Monkey Girl with a quotation from the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, signed by founding father President John Adams:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility, against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the Parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."  (Emphasis added).

Nor should one forget the Jefferson Bible, in which founding father Thomas Jefferson, excised the text pertaining to miracles and other supernatural events. 

I have a proposal that will surely bring the intelligent design movement and creationists running back for the protection of the First Amendment.  Congress should pass a law that requires every religious school class to teach the following every Saturday or Sunday:  "The Book of Genesis is a story.  It was written and later edited by men who could not explain their origins or the origins of the physical universe including other life on earth and life and other material beyond the earth.  It's a wonderful story and it even has meaning, but it is just a story.  Our origins really did not happen they way, Adam and Eve were not real people, and the other stories that purport to be written history of the Hebrews are merely stories as well.  There may be some little historical basis in some of these stories, but they have been gilded, edited, redacted, and revised to fit a collective memory long after the events described in Genesis purportedly took place.  And by the way, children, did you not see that Genesis mentions nothing about the dinosaurs and other animals that lived on earth millions of years ago, whose bones we find in the ground today.  Children, do you not wonder why Genesis does not mention dinosaurs and other animals who no longer exist?  The answer is simple.  The men who wrote the stories in Genesis did not know about these animals.  They were not as knowledgeable as you are today."  Once the law is passed, I am sure there will be a lawsuit.  Maybe the ACLU will be the plaintiff.

In Edwards v. Aguillard, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia dissented from the majority's decision that struck down Louisiana's statute that called for the "balanced treatment" of "creation science" and "evolution science" in Louisiana schools.  The 7 member majority of the Court authored by Justice Brennan and the concurring opinions of Justice Powell and Justice White found plenty of evidence that creation science lacked a secular purpose and was religiously inspired.  "This is not a hard case," wrote Justice White.  The case came before the Supreme Court based on the trial court's grant of a motion for summary judgment, which meant the trial court found enough undisputed evidence presented by the plaintiff's challenging the Louisiana statute to warrant granting a judgment without a full evidentiary trial.  Justice Scalia professed to take no position on the merits of "creation science," but he felt that Louisiana deserved a full evidentiary trial before an appellate court such as the US Supreme Court decided whether or not there was a valid secular purpose.  One would think, and hope, that Justice Scalia, informed by the full evidentiary record in Kitzmiller, would have recognized as Justice White did in Edwards that "this is not a hard case" had the Kitzmiller case made its way to the Supreme Court for judicial review, and that he would recognize that intelligent design deserved the same fate that creation science received in Edwards. 

Benjamin DeCasseres, Spinoza Liberator of God and Man (1932)

There has been a flurry of biographies in recent years about Baruch Spinoza. Among them: Spinoza, A Life by Steven Nadler ; Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind by Steven Nadler ; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age by Steven Nadler ; Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by Rebecca Goldstein; Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity: 1650-1750 by Jonathan Israel; The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart; Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio

Each of these volumes is commendable to the reader interested in the man whom Albert Einstein called "The greatest of modern philosophers." And to read the written word of Baruch Spinoza himself, there is the relatively recent edition of Spinoza's Complete Works translated by Samuel Shirley.

When Benjamin DeCasseres wrote Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man, he cites only John Colerus' The Life of Benedict Spinoza (1705) and a unnamed volume authored by John Maximilian Lucas published in 1719 as his sources on the life of Baruch Spinoza. As the list of books above demonstrates, the late 20th and now the 21st centuries are increasing their attention to Spinoza.

DeCasseres' small book is not a biography, but it is what The Washington Post obituary writers would call "an appreciation." It is an appreciation of the philosophical foundations of the thinking of Baruch Spinoza: mystical pantheism born of the mind of Plotinus; Epicurus' pursuit of happiness and avoidance of anxiety; and Giordanno Bruno's pantheism. It is also an appreciation of how Spinoza's writings have influenced modern thinking.

An important aspect of Spinoza's thinking is his rejection of anthropotheism. DeCasseres, however, has a very different take on anthropomorphism or anthropotheism than Spinoza's works describe. "The evolution of the idea of God is an anthropomorphic evolution," DeCasseres writes. "It has grown and expanded with the growth and expansion of the consciousness of certain individual men. God is always, and will always be, a 'personal' God, for he is always generated in a unique and individual sensibility. He is the reflection of a man's consciousness. But God's liberation proceeds just in the minds of thinkers. When the greatest degree of universalization of the idea of God is reached, as it was in the brain of Spinoza, the personality of the universalizer becomes one with the universal generalization of all the shackles of relation melt in the Absolute, and the All and any one of its infinitesimally small modes of relative and fugacious existences become one, as in the case of Spinoza. Hence the consciousness of Spinoza and God become interchangeable."

"God in Spinoza is still anthropomorphic and Panmorphic because the mathematical reasoning which Spinoza used to reach him is man-form and has no reality that we know of outside of man's brain; because the peculiar mystical intuitions of Spinoza which urged him to use this process are man-form, and because the internal and external universes with which he identified God are man-form.

"God is, then, still a prisoner, even in Spinoza, of the human reason, of mystical intuition and of the phenomenal universe. And his liberation by Spinoza consists in this: that within the limits of the imaginative Absolute, the imaginative Eternity and Infinity and the imaginative intuitions of Spinoza's consciousness God ceases to be bound by any relation, special attribute, special law or special incarnation. What was Spirit became flesh, say the incarnationists. But Spinoza says, What was flesh now becomes Spirit, and other than Spirit nothing is or can be. Therefore I am --- and you are --- God."

This is poetic hogwash. [God] cannot be a prisoner and at the same time be liberated, and it was not so "even in Spinoza." DeCasseres treats every creation of human imagination as "anthropomorphic." For Spinoza, god was not the creation of human imagination; it was something (all of Nature) the human mind came to understand through reason. By DeCasseres' definition, the Big Bang is anthropomorphic as is quantum mechanics simply because it is the creation of the human imagination. DeCasseres is wrong about god as "prisoner"; DeCasseres is correct that Spinoza did liberate "god" from its anthropomorphic tether. Spinoza did imagine Eternity and Infinity, without special attribute or special incarnation, and he imagined the entire physical universe and everything within that universe, and he imagined it without limit in time and without limit in space, and he called it god. What is anthropomorphic is something with special attributes (mode and extension in Spinoza's parlance), and by acknowledging this much, DeCasseres is inconsistent in saying Spinoza's god "without special attribute or special incarnation" was anthropomorphic.

Spinoza's god does not choose between good and evil; Spinoza's god does not love or hate; Spinoza's god does not cause miracles to happen; Spinoza's god does not hear prayers or respond to them; Spinoza's god does not bring things into being because something that is "absolute" and infinite [meaning that it represents everything] does not create itself. On this last point, it is logical to be sure, but I have to part company with Spinoza, not because of his pantheism or because of his objection to anthropotheism, or because of his objection to a Creator, but because nature is constantly creating and bringing things into being. At some point, a physical system (even a system of nature called "god") --- such as Spinoza's system (see March 6, 2012 post) --- has to address the fact that "things" in that system are brought into being that did not previously exist, at least in the same form they previously did. While I can agree with Spinoza that an anthropomorphic god did not "create" man, evolution as we know it is a fact of nature and the human species certainly was created by evolutionary forces. If "god" represents everything in nature, than god certainly represents evolutionary creation and bringing things into being. That is the "logic" of Spinoza's system, in my view.

Spinoza had enormous influence on Enlightenment discussion of a deity. His was not the only view that varied from anthropocentric Christian, Jewish, and Muslim visions of god. (See May 24, 2010 post). But however we may agree that, in Spinoza's system, god is untethered from its anthropcentric chains, most humans today still believe in an anthropocentric deity who hates, kills, loves, creates, discriminates, is petty, responds to human pleas, and has a wide variety of other human features. (See December 20, 2011 post and May 12, 2010 post and June 12, 2011 post).