The Dover "Intelligent Design" case

As everyone now knows, Judge John E. Jones III has invalidated, on Establishment Clause grounds, the Dover Area School District’s Intelligent Design policy.  (Here, thanks to Howard Bashman, is the opinion.) 

I suppose I should be, but I really am not, particularly interested in Judge Jones’s identification and application-to-the-facts of the governing doctrinal standards.  (That said, I cannot resist:  It seems strange to me that courts treat separately – i.e., as two distinct Establishment Clause “tests” – the questions (i) whether state action is inconsistent with Lemon’s “purpose” and “effects” components and (ii) whether state action is inconsistent with Justice O’Connor’s no-endorsement rule.  It seems to me that it would be more straightforward simply to regard a purpose-to-endorse as an invalid purpose, and an effect-of-endorsement as an invalid effect, under Lemon.  Anyway . . ..)

The opinion did raise for me, though, (at least) these two thoughts:  In his conclusion, Judge Jones characterized – indignantly, it is fair to say – as “utterly false” the “assumption” that “evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general.”  He added, “[r]epeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.” 

I wonder if Judge Jones is as obviously correct as he seems to believe he is?  The “scientific experts” to which he refers include John Haught, a Georgetown theologian and author of many well regarded books on science and religion, including “God After Darwin:  A Theology of Evolution.”  As Haught discussed a few years ago, in a helpful essay in Commonweal magazine (“The Darwinian Universe:  Isn’t There Room for God?”), many top-tier, brilliant evolutionary scientists and philosophers – e.g., Daniel Dennett, Frederick Crews, Richard Dawkins -- do insist that “evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general” and that – in Haught’s words – “beneath life, consciousness, and culture there lies only a mindless, meaningless swirl of purely physical stuff.”

Now, I think – and, I admit, I hope – that Judge Jones is right in his characterization as “utterly false” the evolution-necessarily-entails-atheistic-materialism “assumption.”  But is he on solid ground when he (in effect) takes judicial notice of the assumption’s baselessness?

A second thought:  It seemed to me that, running through Judge Jones's analysis, was a view not simply that “science” entails “methodological naturalism” (a view that strikes me as sound), but also that premises that are not (reductively?) materialistic or naturalistic are therefore “religious” and (presumably) inadmissible in the curriculum of a public school.  (I would welcome correction from those who have read the opinion and do not detect this theme.)  If my sense is accurate, does Kitzmiller suggest that the Constitution requires that public schools teach “materialism” and prohibits teaching or endorsing views – for example, the view that the wealthy have a moral obligation to help the poor, or that the powerful are morally constrained in how they treat the weak – that depend, at some point, on non-materialistic premises?

The suggestion here is not that “intelligent design” is “science” or that Judge Jones was wrong to invalidate the program.  My question, instead, is whether it is plausible to think that the moral, ethical, normative, and prescriptive components of public-school education are any more consistent with thoroughgoing materialism than is “intelligent design”?  And this question makes me suspect that we would be better off if our debates about the content of science classes (and history classes, government classes, literature classes) were not framed in terms of what the Constitution permits.