From Leigh Jackson
After reading Francis S. Collins’s religious apologia The Language of God, Steve Fuller is persuaded he was right to testify for the defence in the Dover debacle in Pennsylvania last year (26 August, p 48).
Judge Jones’s verdict shredded the defence case that intelligent design (ID) is science, not religion, and should be taught alongside evolution in school biology classes. Fuller’s criticism of Collins amounts to saying that ID is better religion than Collins’s theistic evolution. In saying this, isn’t he implicitly admitting that the defence in that trial was a sham? Are we to take it that the ID movement thinks it is right to compel parents, school education boards and courts to accept religion in science classes in contravention of the US constitution? Is it something intrinsic to the nature of the ID movement that it can contemplate forcing change on such a grand scale?
Fuller accuses Collins of being mired in confusion but he is no less mired in it himself. To imagine that the animal-rights movement has any more respect for or understanding of the science of evolution than ID reveals his own confusion in stark fashion. Fuller suggests that the animal rightists are “good Darwinians” (but not good Christians) because they don’t put humans “on top”. But they cannot appeal to evolution in support of their view that the use of animals as models for humans is impossible, a priori. Just the opposite is true. Evolution positively invites us to investigate their possible usefulness as human models.
Far from consisting of good Darwinians, the animal rights movement has no concern for the science of evolution. In this it is similar to the ID movement – and it is similar to Fuller too.
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