Darwinian Warfare

As sequels go, it was a relatively bad one, barely reaching the level of Grease 2 or Alien: Resurrection. But like most bad retreads, it had at least one interesting moment . . .

The scene was Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District et al., better known to the news-watching public as "Scopes II," the evolution-vs.-intelligent-design trial they're having in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, these days. In a cavernous, poorly lit courtroom in the Pennsylvania capital, a distinguished-looking man with silver hair in a blue suit and a dark tie (speckled, amusingly, with missing-link skulls) submitted to the bumbling interrogation of a glum-looking Christian attorney named Robert J. Muise.

The two men were a study in contrasts, both in demeanor and diction. The former was Dr. Brian Alters, a Harvard man and professor of science education at McGill University in Montreal, who sat with his brow furrowed and a broad smile on his face -- looking comfortable, even triumphant, on the witness stand.

He was here playing a by-now-familiar role in evolution trials, the very same role once played by his former colleague, the late Stephen Jay Gould, at the 1982 case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education: that of the learned progressive come to slay the dragon of fundamentalist ignorance.

Of course, in the first film of the monkey-trial franchise -- State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, the sensational affair of 1925 that pitted evolution against religion in court for the first time -- the side of science had not been allowed expert witnesses. But things had changed an awful lot in eighty years, as evidenced by Alters' sartorial dig at his reactionary inquisitors.

"It's Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Zinjanthropus boisei," he'd said during an earlier recess, looking down at his tie. "A student gave it to me."

Muise, meanwhile, looked like a line-drawn Webster's dictionary illustration of the word "loser." He was an unhappy-looking man, all forehead and sunken eyes, with the crudely wetted-down haircut and tight collar of a fourth-grader dressed by his mom. Throughout most of the trial he had sat mute and miserable in his chair at the defendants' table, like a boy watching an ice cream cone melt, not objecting even when his much-loathed American Civil Liberties Union counterpart across the room blatantly led his witnesses.

Muise was part of the legal team donated to the defense by a group bearing the impressively pretentious name of the Thomas More Law Center, a sort of Christian version of the ACLU. The group considers itself the vanguard of the anti-Darwinist movement -- its understated slogan is "The Sword and Shield of People of Faith."

The lawyer had come to Harrisburg with these fellow knights-errant of the anti-evolution movement to defend one of the very stupidest concepts ever to get a hearing in an American courtroom: an alternative to evolution called Intelligent Design.

The theory, called "ID" for short, posits that life on earth was simply too complex to be explained by the random and undirected natural processes described in Darwin's theories. The chief innovation of ID was that it did not call God by the name "God" but instead referred vaguely to an "intelligent designer."

The essence of its scientific claims was that biology was just too intense, dude, to be an accident. A local columnist mocked the theory as resembling a teenage stoner looking at the back of his hand and being too amazed to deal.

Muise was saddled with all of this -- the bad haircut, the droopy face, the silly theory, the consciousness that everybody who's ever seen Inherit the Wind was going to consider him the bad guy at this trial. Worse, he was stuck with clients who were clearly on the wrong side of the law, and a case that, in an honest courtroom, even Johnnie Cochran couldn't win.

But Muise wasn't here to win. He was here to make a point, and he made it when he started asking Alters about statements made by certain prominent scientists.

"Dr. Alters," he said, "were you aware that Professor Steven Weinberg once said that 'I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive to religious belief, and I'm all for that!'"

"An unfortunate remark," said Alters, shaking his head and squirming. The look on his face said, "Can we move on?"

But Muise didn't: He rattled off more quotes from prominent scientists, including one from Gould ("Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us") -- who, Muise noted with obvious pleasure, had once written a foreword to one of Alters' books. Alters shrugged it off, calmly sticking to his contention that evolution was not an indictment of religion.

As Alters gave his denials, Muise turned to the gallery and, for the first time that afternoon, evinced a small smile. That smile spoke volumes. It said, "At least my clients know when they're full of shit. But these eggheads . . ."

Muise had a point. His defendants and their ID theory had come under attack for an obvious reason: Just because you say in a court of law that you're not creationists doesn't make it true.

Now Muise got to say the same thing to those superior-sounding intellectuals who flew into God's country and insisted, under oath, that they weren't enemies of religion. You can yell it at us till you're blue in the face, the lawyer seemed to be saying, but we who really believe know better.

To blue-state intellectuals like Alters, Kitzmiller v. Dover was just another clash with religious loonies of the same primitive sort found in the original Scopes trial, die-hards determined for some incomprehensible reason to drag us back to the Stone Age.

But to the defendants in this case, Kitzmiller was a chance to turn Scopes on its head. If what Scopes' defense attorney Clarence Darrow accomplished eighty years ago was to expose the narrow-mindedness and anti-intellectualism of the Bible Belt, lawyers like Muise were out to show the opposite in Kitzmiller -- that most scientists secretly hate God, laugh at his followers and would like to stamp out both for all eternity, only they don't take Christians seriously enough to be straight with them about this.

Both sides were right, obviously, which made for the usual perfect comedy of American politics: two entrenched camps determined not to communicate, but still engaged in an extravagantly violent public waste of time and money, with no resolution visible, or even imaginable.

The reason for America's fascination with evolution trials isn't hard to figure. The Scopes monkey trial of 1925 was one of the great paradigmatic clashes of modern American history. The battle lines drawn in the punishing heat of that Tennessee courtroom vividly described, for the first time, the basic political divisions that would end up dominating modern American society.

The first skirmish in the war between red states and blue states was held there, in Dayton, where smartass ice heathens from the north descended upon small-town America to laugh at the superstitious but numerically superior yokels of the heartland. In a breathtakingly accurate preview of things to come, the yokels actually won the trial, but history judged them the losers -- thanks mainly to the flamboyant propaganda of a godless misanthrope named H.L. Mencken, the brilliant Darwinian ancestor of the modern liberal media.

The same basic conflict has persisted to this day. If anything, the political echo from the Dayton courtroom has grown exponentially louder. The modern right-left, Bush/anti-Bush, red-blue, Hannity-v.-Air America paradigm more than ever mirrors the courtroom geography of the Dayton trial, which pitted the urbane, Europe-loving intellectual of the north against the defiant God-fearing patriot of the south.

Both sides still define themselves in terms of that story, with red-staters especially still smarting from the same underlying intolerable insult: being told how to live by silver-tongued out-of-towners.

The urge to throw off that invading infidel has been the force driving conservative-talk-radio ratings into the stratosphere for nearly two decades. Eighty years later, Rush Limbaugh's act is really no different at all from that of Scopes' inquisitor William Jennings Bryan, another fat man with a loud voice who seized power by warning that the devil was leaving the campuses of the north and headed your way.

Kitzmiller v. Dover looked like Scopes in reverse. Instead of a single schoolteacher trying to buck the law by teaching evolution in the intractable heart of the Bible Belt, this case involved a single school board trying to buck the law by slipping a teaspoonful of God into a continent-size, thoroughly secularized school system.

Like Scopes, this case began as a minor political disagreement in a small town that self-consciously grew into a national controversy. Making a long story short, Kitzmiller v. Dover boiled down to a few unusually pious individuals on the school board of a little Pennsylvania town unilaterally voting, in October 2004, to insert a four-paragraph statement about "Intelligent Design" into the local high school's curriculum. Immediately a coalition of parents filed a federal lawsuit against the renegade school board.

The basis of the plaintiffs' suit was found in the 1987 Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard, in which the court ruled that the teaching of "scientific creationism" in Louisiana public schools violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. The crux of the plaintiffs' case in Kitzmiller was that "Intelligent Design" -- the theory backed by the school board -- was just creationism in disguise. If it was, then the Dover school officials would be guilty of the same First Amendment offense described in Aguillard.

Again, this was Scopes, but backward. The religious side was at the defendants' table, and this time it was religion and conservatism that would have to struggle to get a public hearing for its newfangled theory.

More important, however, the prognosis this time imagined religion as the legal loser but the practical winner, instead of the other way around.

Playing the role of Clarence Darrow in this case was an ACLU lawyer named Witold "Vic" Walczak, a well-spoken, witty Bruce Springsteen fanatic with a distant but significantly less thuggish resemblance to Armand Assante. For Walczak (pronounced Wall-check), the question of the underlying meaning of Kitzmiller was a lot less important than its immediate legal import.

"It is difficult to sugarcoat the implications of a loss," he said, conceding that the meaning of a win would be harder to define. "If the court rules that ID can be taught, it's gonna be like mushrooms in the forest after a summer rain. They'll be teaching ID everywhere."

But the trial quickly unfolded into a blowout, with ID proponents experiencing a fresh slaughter in each successive day of the proceedings. The most damaging testimony came from a philosophy professor named Barbara Forrest, who testified that in early versions of Of Pandas and People -- the pro-ID textbook offered to the children of the Dover school district -- the word "creationism" had been used in places where the text now reads "intelligent design."

Much of the trial continued in this fashion, with the defense of the Thomas More lawyers amounting to little more than tiresome exercises in semantic hairsplitting -- as when Muise asked Alters if intelligent design ever overtly named God as the "intelligent designer," or if he even knew of any instance in which any of the Dover children had even read Of Pandas and People (a Clintonian line of defense if there ever was one: Yes, we put an ID book in the library, but nobody read it).

But the real victory of the defense was in forcing men like Alters to insist with a straight face that Darwinism is not incompatible with religion. Technically this was true, of course, but it was striking that it was exactly the same kind of feeble technicality as the contention that ID has no literal connection to God or the Bible. A technicality like Clinton not sleeping with Monica Lewinsky, like John Kerry owning a rifle. Technically true -- but fooling no one.

Intelligent design may very well have been conceived as an end run around the Supreme Court, and in a matter of weeks, it will likely be exposed as such, when the Honorable Judge John E. Jones III rules in favor of Kitzmiller et al. in the Dover case.

But ID is also revealing itself here in Pennsylvania in another form. It's having a coming-out party as a deliberate satirical echo of the great liberal lie of the modern age: the idea that progressive science and religion can coexist.

For a century or so since Nietzsche, popular culture in the West has operated according to an uneasy truce, in which God both is and is not dead. We teach our children the evidence-based materialism of science and tell them they can believe in God and a faith-based morality in their spare time if they like.

And in some parts of the country, we celebrate Scopes as a victory over ignorance, while still insisting that we do not also celebrate it as a victory over religion. What these endless Scopes sequels tell us is that somewhere many years from now we're going to hit a fork in the road, beyond which this have-it-both-ways philosophy isn't going to fly anymore. Is God dead, or isn't he? Are we believers, or not? They know what we think. They just want us to come out and say it.