I’m afraid I have to disagree with Nathan Schneider again. This time it’s about his AlterNet assessment of the Dover trial and the Intelligent Design controversy. I have several things to say about it. For starters, he makes this most curious allusion:

The Dover trial followed in the footsteps of its notorious predecessor, the famed Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. Like Dover, Dayton was a set-up, orchestrated by money and interests from far away. The ACLU backed Clarence Darrow, the great freethinking lawyer, against the towering populist politician William Jennings Bryan, who fought, literally, to his death — he died, exhausted and disgraced, a week after the trial ended. All of it was immortalized by H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun, one of the foremost journalists of his generation.

Mencken may have immortalized it, but as MSNBC notes, he did it by distorting it:

The picture that emerged, especially in the hyperventilating prose of the iconoclastic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken and later in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” was of a town full of “Christian pro-creation” believers who were “uneducated, dimwitted people who came to town barefoot and married their cousin,” said historian John Perry, co-author of a new book, “Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial“…. That caricature, like so much we think we remember about the famous Monkey Trial, was largely wrong.

And it would be all too easy to conclude from Schneider’s account here that Dayton was a creationist set-up. The “money and interests from far away” were the ACLU’s.

Schneider’s information on Dover apparently comes from Laurie Lebo’s bookThe Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America. It is not without some distortion of its own, not so much in what is said but (as above) in what is left unsaid. The Discovery Institute is made to appear pragmatically calculating:

Early on, seeing how the case would go, the Discovery Institute withdrew its support.

In fact the DI did not just withdraw support, turning tail and running from the case as soon as it looked lost. They consistently advised the school board not to proceed with its new policy, just because it was ill-advised (here and here).

Under current case law, Judge Jones was right to rule against the Dover School Board because of their openly religious intent. He went far beyond his proper role, though, in ruling Intelligent Design unscientific. Though Schneider called this “damning” for ID, it’s really quite irrelevant, unless the science community thinks they should submit all of their conclusions to federal judges for final approval.

Schneider proceeds to engage in some serious stereotyping:

The pro-evolution science establishment wants to protect the methodology and public support that have allowed it to learn so much already and poise it for endless more. Secularists want to protect the American legal tradition that keeps church and state comfortably separate. Religious fundamentalists want to bear witness to the created truth of God before the invented truths of people, winning even as they lose.

That is breathtakingly … something. (You fill in the blank.) Where do I begin to respond to this?

First I’ll ask whether Schneider considers David Berlinski to be a religious fundamentalist. What, in fact, does “religious fundamentalist” mean, other than being a convenient name to pin on persons so you can dismiss them out of hand?

Next, what is it that the science establishment needs so carefully to protect? What in ID is an attack on scientific methodology? Only this: that it will not insist on philosophical materialism, the doctrine that nothing exists except for matter, energy, and their interactions; or, that every natural event without exception has a natural cause that in principle could be investigated by scientific means. ID brings no “attack” on science per se. It does suggest that science may not be able to answer every question that can possibly be asked, a fact that is as well established as gravity and relativity theory. Some scientists may feel personally attacked by that. But science itself needs no protection from truth.

As for public support, I don’t think evolutionists’ dogmatic closed-mindedness contributes much toward public goodwill. Scientists who think otherwise are making a serious strategic error.

ID is also not about attacking the “separation of church and state.” Remember, the DI advised Dover against taking up their policy. Recall too that there are two streams to this debate. ID opponents seem to jump from one of these streams to the other, based on rhetorical convenience. There is the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and there is science education in public schools. The matter of ID in science education is not in dispute. Despite some serious distortions of fact regarding Texas, Missouri, and Florida, nobody is calling for ID to be taught in American public schools. That’s settled, and it’s hard to see why it keeps coming up from anti-ID writers.

The other stream is the pursuit of scientific knowledge, which is not a matter of constitutional law (despite Judge Jones’s sticking his nose into it). This stream is not about what’s being taught in the schools, it’s about what’s being studied in the labs. This is where the future of this debate needs to go. It may be the only thing that has any chance of ending the stalemate Schneider describes. We ought not to expect it to change the debate much for a few years, though; not until a critical mass of young pro-ID scientists attain tenure and feel safe to publish on the topic.

Schneider says in the end we just ought to change the subject:

Despite its theatrical appeal, battling creationists will not fix science education. Teaching science will — with high standards, qualified teachers, and access to lab equipment.

I wonder if he thinks that contributes anything to the debate. I would ask him to pick up the phone, call the Discovery Institute, and ask them to respond to that. Here’s how they’ll answer: “Thank you for that. We’ve been saying that all along!”