The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA [Paperback]

I am a person who closely follows the evolution- creationist (or ID, if you prefer)wars. The court case of Kitzmiller vs Dover Board of Education gained national attention while it was underway in 2005. I read almost all of the 139 page decision handed down by Judge Jones after the trial ended, and it made me want to find out more about the trial testimony. At this point I would like to make it clear that my approach to this book review is to convey to you the contents of the book. Unfortunately many reviews of books on controversial subjects turn into one sided rants. I will try and keep my personal viewpoint out of this review.

The first part of the book details the discussions that took place at Dover Board of Education meetings. Various members felt that creationism (as the members originally referred to it) should be part of science education. These members were also of a mind that religion should also play a role in education. Then we meet the dissidents, those who formed the nucleus of people siding with the Kitzmillers who felt that creationism had no place in the classroom. Organizations sympathetic to the board's creationist views quickly instructed the board to substitute the term Intelligent Design for Creationism. During the trial, however, board members who testified stated that they had not discussed anything about the religious aspects of ID in their meetings. This turnabout prompted Judge Jones to actually call Board members liars in his decision.

Mr. Slack unfortunately provides only brief summaries of much of the courtroom testimony. He does focus in on a debate over the word "theory". The layman's use of this term differs from the scientific meaning of the word. A scientific theory is not akin to a hypothesis or a guess. It is used to summarize a well established body of facts into a meaningful whole such as when referring to the theory of relativity.

Another body of testimony was concerned with the difference between philosophical materialism (PM) and methodological materialism (MM). MM refers to scientific research to examine the natural world. PM is a philosophy about the natural world. Plaintiff testimony described Intelligent Design as being a philosophy about the natural world, and science as being a methodological approach to determining facts about the natural world. Thus, in their opinion, ID is not science.

I won't detail more of the evidence. My purpose here is to give you a few details so that you can decide if this is the type of book that you want to read. As I said, I wished that the book was about 100 pages longer, and contained a lot more of the testimony. I assume the author might have felt that too much of such detail would eliminate a significant amount of potential readers.

Judge Jones' decision came down harshly on the defendants, essentially stating that Intelligent Design is pure religion and not science. He also points out an interesting logical fallacy in ID's reasoning. He considers it a false dichotomy (false choice)to reason that if evolution is wrong then ID is the only other alternative. The author spends some time discussing Judge Jones decision, but again I was eager for even more.

The author has an interesting final chapter where he discusses Kuhn's concept of scientific paradigms. Kuhn believed that scientists work in a rather circumscribed area, or paradigm, on various scientific issues. Newtonian physics was one such paradigm, and when unanswered questions began to crop up a new paradigm, that of relativity, more or less superseded Newton. The point expressed here by author Slack is that Science and Intelligent Design occupy totally different paradigms without any overlap. I guess that's a pretty good way of putting it. Neither side accepts or will ever accept the other's viewpoint.

This is a good book for anyone who wants a reasonably brief, very understandable summary of a very important trial. Those of us on either side of the issue who are looking for more detail will just have to wait for another book to come along. By the way, the author sides with the evolutionists, but, for the most part, does not preach his viewpoint (although he does name one chapter "Liars for Christ").

Mark Twain, that 19th Century freethinker, wrote in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" that "every time the magic of folderol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of folderol got left." Yes, the magic of folderol lost in Dover, but as the book opens, it hardly seems inevitable.

Well, Twain didn't live in 21st Century rural America. Slack's book highlights how the "Intelligent Design" movement is another battle between those who find neither meaning nor morality nor knowledge attainable except in the context of intimate relationship to the Christian Deity, and those who don't. Not all of the latter are atheists, of course, but they include all scientists who prefer not to organize the history of the natural world around 3000-year-old writings.

There are many books on the Dover trial out now. What Slack's does better than any other is peer into divisions on the anti-scientific side. The members of the Dover School Board, one of whom had completed only the eighth grade herself, are willfully ignorant. They couldn't explain or define the scientific or pseudo-scientific issues. All they saw in Intelligent Design and its pet textbook "Of Pandas and People" (entitled "Creation Science" in its original edition!) was something closer to their brain-dead reading of Genesis 1 than the traditional biology textbooks. They were also "Liars for Christ", in Slack's colorful description, swearing falsely at their depositions. (This book hints more clearly than the others that the Superintendent also lied.) But there were more sophisticated ID champions, including the author's own father. They adhere to the same need to support their faith from natural evidence: a sort of self-directed apologetics. Slack illuminates how the scientifically literate and illiterate subscribers to ID/creationism are willing to make common cause against non-theistic epistemology, but also the tensions between them.

I recommend this book for its insights into a lamentably large segment of American society. Humes' Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul is still the best of breed.

I should also point out that it has been edited just as sloppily as the other books on Dover. Friedrich Dürrenmatt was certainly not a Dutch playwright (he was Swiss), Kennedy does not have three consecutive ns, and the attempt to typeset circumflexes is somehow, even in this day of computerized publishing, bungled.

An intellectually honest and unpedantic look at what is still/again a major faultline in American culture. The Battle over the Meaning of Everything doesn't bridge this gap, but it strives to map out some of its features in detail. Gordy Slack does a good job in taking in the vast scope of the issues (hence the title) and also a magnifier's view of the court case and the cast of individuals around which it turns. A great read.