The Record

Issue date: 4/22/04 Section: News

Media Credit: Tammy Pettinato Lawrence VanDyke, 2L

Lawrence VanDyke's Book review in the January 2004 Harvard Law Review was vociferously attacked by Brian Leiter, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, for its "scholarly fraud." VanDyke's note was a review of Francis Beckwith's 2003 monograph titled "Law, Darwinism, and Public Education" that concluded that a fair reading of current constitutional jurisprudence very well could allow presentation of Intelligent Design (ID) in schools.

"Shame on the Harvard Law Review for abandoning its own standard editorial practices in this case," asserted Leiter in his online critique. "This Book Note never could have survived real [cite]-checking. It never could have survived critical evaluation by experts. The book note is riddled with factual errors and misleading innuendo from start to finish. Law professors have long had doubts about the intellectual integrity of student-edited law reviews; incidents like this suggest, if anything, that our doubts have been understated."

According to 2L VanDyke's note, the Intelligent Design (ID) movement "insists that "intelligent agency" provides an origins paradigm that is better supported by the empirical evidence and gives greater coherence to our scientific observations and philosophical intuitions than does the philosophy of methodological naturalism (MN) underlying evolutionary orthodoxy." ID is a broad movement, according to VanDyke, with its adherents sharing a "skepticism that Darwinism (natural selection) alone can fully account for life as we observe it today, and, second, that there appears to be significant evidence of actual design in the universe."

Critics of ID insist that it is creationism, even though both of the major creationism groups (Answers in Genesis and Institute for Creation Research) have expressly disavowed ID as creationism, according to VanDyke.

"This isn't to say ID doesn't have implications for religion," explained VanDyke. "But this doesn't make ID religion, any more than the earnest belief by many people that evolutionary theory has implications for religion makes evolution religion. Leiter (and others) seem to think that if somebody is motivated by their religious beliefs, what they are pursuing is therefore religious. This is an elementary error - a scientist motivated by their earnest religious beliefs to pursue a cure to AIDS is no less practicing science. Leiter, and others, in continually referring to ID as creationism, appear to be hoping to discredit ID before ever evaluating ID on its empirical and philosophical merits."

Continued...

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