Recently
a federal court dismissed a complaint brought by Citizens for
Objective Public Education (or COPE) against the Kansas State Board
of Education; COPE claimed that new science standards the board had
voted to adopt back in 2013 were in fact a form of
non-theistic/atheistic religious indoctrination, and thus a violation
of students' and parents' First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The
court dismissed the case on the basis that COPE had no standing to
bring a suit in the first place, and thus did not particularly
comment on the merits of the complaint.1
This is a shame, since COPE's strategy involves preemptively
defining what they call “ultimate” questions, such as those
asked in origins studies - what is the cause of life, how did the
universe begin, and so forth. COPE cites a 1961 decision (McGowen
v. Maryland) in which the nature
of religion is defined as “an aspect of human thought and action
which profoundly relates the life of man to the world in which he
lives.” COPE borrows this entire definition in order to explain
what they mean by “ultimate” questions: “These questions are
ultimate religious questions because answers to them profoundly
relate the life of man to the world in which he lives.”
How is it that
these questions are inherently religious? Because, they say, the
answers to other religious questions, questions about “the purpose
of life and how it should be lived ethically and morally,” are
wholly dependent on how one answers the “ultimate” questions,
namely, “whether one relates his life to the world through a
creator or considers it to be a mere physical occurrence that ends on
death per the laws of entropy.”2
COPE's
use of the world “ultimate” put me in mind of Tillich's
definition of religion: “Religion, in the largest and most basic
sense of the word, is ultimate concern.”3
I am, however, more familiar with Baird's understanding of ultimate
concern, as he says, “By 'ultimate' I am referring to a concern
which is more important than anything else in the universe
for the person involved.”4 COPE, I think, would combine the two definitions, only leaving off
the last four words of Baird's understanding, thereby making religion
more important than anything else in the universe. Their basic
premise, the assumption from which their whole argument begins, is
that questions about the nature of life and the universe are
inherently religious questions. For COPE these are also normative
questions, in the sense they cannot be subject to any debate or
disagreement.
COPE's argument
universalizes religion to encompass all aspects of life, as they
explicitly state when they claim the new science standards would
require students to accept
a non-theistic Worldview. As used herein, "worldview"
means a religious view that is "an aspect of human thought and
action which profoundly relates the life of man to the world in which
he lives" (McGowan v. Maryland, supra).
If that paragraph
sounds familiar, it's because it's the same definition from the same
decision COPE cites at the beginning of their complaint. For COPE,
religion and worldview are the same thing - it is impossible to have
a view of reality that is not religious, because religion is nothing
but one's view of reality. This is how they can make the
apparently contradictory statement that the science standards
represent a “non-theistic” worldview: non-theism, or atheism, is
religion because it is a worldview, and all worldviews are religion.
But
there are really only two worldviews, which COPE already hinted at
earlier in their complaint when they assert there are two ways a
person can relate their life to the world, either “through a
creator” or as “a mere physical occurrence that ends on death per
the laws of entropy.”5
If the court had examined the merits of COPE's complaint, they would
find it stumbling over itself at this point, because of what COPE
says is the real agenda behind the new science standards:
The
purpose of the indoctrination [i.e., the science standards] is to
establish the religious worldview, not to deliver to an age
appropriate audience an objective and religiously neutral
origins science education that seeks to inform. [emphasis mine]
This
is the constitutional problem that creationists and intelligent
design proponents always run up against, seemingly without realizing
it. They cannot possibly demonstrate what a “religiously neutral”
position looks like because all worldviews are religion.
For them, religion is ultimate concern, and they believe this is the
normative definition of religion, applicable to everyone throughout
all time. This being the case, they cannot ever claim to represent a
non-religious position, and their legal argument falls apart. This
is a real pity for COPE's legal team, since they composed an 80-some
page complaint, and no judge really needs to read beyond the first
dozen or so paragraphs to dismiss it.
COPE
has not given up, as they filed a petition for a hearing en
banc,6
mostly based on the assertion that the Tenth Circuit misread their
complaint in the first place:
The
Decision [by the Court] erroneously states that the Complaint alleges
that the Standards promote a "non-religious worldview"
without "condemn[ing] any religion." In fact the Complaint
does the opposite, as it alleges in detail how the Standards seek to
replace the Children's theistic beliefs with a "non-theistic
religious worldview that is materialistic/atheistic."
This
is where the courts and the creationists talk past each other: the
courts have long since decided that there is the religious, and there
is the secular, and that much of life and society and government is
taken up with the latter, not the former, while for the creationists
there is only the
religious, and there can never be anything else. COPE will never be
able to cope.
1 In a single footnote the court does “note that COPE asks the court to implement a requirement identical to the one imposed by the statute in Edwards. COPE frames the materialism of evolutionary theory as a religious belief competing with COPE’s own teleological religion, and demands that if evolution is taught, teleological origins theories must also be taught. The Edwards Court expressly held such a requirement unconstitutional.”
2 This odd phrasing is due to an old creationist/intelligent design understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, that a closed system will always tend toward disorder and chaos. If this is true, they say, then how could molecules ever spontaneously self-organize and self-replicate? How can new and more complex forms of life ever evolve? But they have a limited view of how the second law works, and fail to take into account that nothing in thermodynamics says there cannot be local areas of increased order within closed systems, as long as the entropy of the entire system is increasing rather than decreasing. Given that the closed system we're talking about when it comes to the evolution of life is the whole of the known universe, it is not only possible that there could be local pockets of order, it is virtually certain.
3 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (1959), pp. 7-8, quoted in Baird, p. 18.
4 Robert Baird, Category Formation and the History of Religions, 2nd Ed., (1991), p. 18, emphasis in original.
5 There is an unstated implication to this either/or choice, in that if one relates to life through a creator, then life is not something that “ends on death per the laws of entropy.”
6 A petition which the court denied; COPE now plans to file a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court.
