A Chronicle of the Ball State Controversy

Christopher Stephens offers a time-line of all of the happenings at Ball State over the past year involving the controversy with intelligent design. 

More Problems Concerning Ball State University and Intelligent Design

Questions have been raised regarding meetings between Jo Ann Gora, the current president of Ball State University, and Indiana legislators which concern her public stance on the teaching of Intelligent Design.  Christopher Stephens of Ball State Daily writes:

Ball State’s decision to meet in private with lawmakers to discuss concerns about teaching intelligent design is raising questions with some students and professors.

Dom Caristi, a professor of telecommunications, said Indiana’s Open Door Law dictates how accessible official government meetings must be, as well as those involving state employees. He said Thursday’s planned meeting between lawmakers and university officials falls into a gray area within this code.

Indiana code 5-14-1.5, called the Open Door Law, states that the official action of public agencies be conducted and taken openly. This is to ensure that people are able to fully be informed, according to the code.

At issue, apparently, is how representative these meetings actually are and whether they have bearing on the overall legislature in terms of any action. I think that neither party does themselves any favors by having these meetings in private, since the issue of ID at Ball State made the national papers.

Ball State University: The Backlash Continues

The Muncie Star Press is reporting that now the course purporting to teach atheism that was put in the spotlight by the Discovery Institute is under investigation.  Seth Slabaugh writes:

“You can be assured that the syllabi and curricula of all of the courses you singled out, as well as those of other courses offered by the Honors College and elsewhere at the university, are reviewed and updated on a regular basis,” BSU President Jo Ann Gora wrote in a letter on Monday to The Discovery Institute.

The institute is an anti-evolution, pro-creationism intelligent design think tank in Seattle that maintains supernatural forces shaped the universe.

“Some were undergoing this process before we received the inquiry regarding Honors 296, and others are being reviewed and updated at the present time,” the letter read. “Our intent is to ensure that their content and pedagogy reflect the highest academic standards.”

It appears that Gora is concerned about the allegations but in typical fashion, the Discovery Institute is approaching the controversy in a very ham-fisted way by threatening legal action. At issue seems to be the make-up of the commmittee to evaluate Eric Hedin's class and whether or not equity is being applied across the spectrum. The story continues:

[John] West said, “We gave BSU an opportunity to clarify what it is doing, and to show that it is applying its policies in a fair and legal manner. Because BSU has refused to clarify what it is doing or answer our questions, we will be forced to seek another remedy.”

Gora said she shared the institute’s concerns and demands with the university’s board of trustees before responding to the institute by letter this week.

It seems to me that this can only come out well for the Discovery Institute, despite the fact that I still think that they are providing a mixed message in their protest. The position of the university has always been that intelligent design is not accepted science and should not be taught as such. If the Discovery Institute were protesting the straight teaching of evolutionary theory in biology class, that would be one thing. They have historically argued in an anti-evolutionary vein so that would make sense.

But that is not what they are doing. They are protesting because a strictly theological perspective is being taught in another class and they want that scrutinized. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I am thinking "ID is either science or religion. It cannot be both."

Discovery Institute Attacks Ball State's Decision to Allow Atheistic Seminar

The Discovery Institute has written an open letter to Jo Ann Gora, the president of Ball State University, asking her to be consistent with regard to the treatment of protected speech on campus.  Christian NewsWire reports:  

"If Ball State is going to ban faculty speech favoring intelligent design by claiming that it would violate the separation of church and state, then it must apply the same ban to faculty speech that promotes atheism or attacks intelligent design in the classroom," says Dr. John West, Vice President of Discovery Institute.

Discovery Institute is asking BSU to investigate its honors seminar "Dangerous Ideas." The sole textbook used in the course is an anthology edited by a prominent atheist in which the authors assert that "Science Must Destroy Religion," that "There is no God; no Intelligent Designer; no higher purpose to our lives," and even that scientists should function as our society's "high priests." The book contains an afterword by atheist evangelist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.

In her published remarks on the issue, this is what President Gora said:

“Intelligent design is overwhelmingly deemed by the scientific community as a religious belief and not a scientific theory,” President Jo Ann Gora said. “Therefore, intelligent design is not appropriate content for science courses. The gravity of this issue and the level of concern among scientists are demonstrated by more than 80 national and state scientific societies' independent statements that intelligent design and creation science do not qualify as science.”

The question is not one of academic freedom, but one of academic integrity, she added. “Said simply, to allow intelligent design to be presented to science students as a valid scientific theory would violate the academic integrity of the course as it would fail to accurately represent the consensus of science scholars.”

Nowhere in there did President Gora ban faculty speech on the discussion of intelligent design on campus.  Instead, Ball State is banning the teaching of intelligent design in science classes because it is not established science (it is not science at all, for that matter).   The two are very different things.  Leave it to the Discovery Institute to conflate them.

The other peculiar thing here is which First Amendment clause has been used.  By demanding that the atheistic seminar be investigated, focusing on the religious nature of the course and contrasting it with intelligent design, John West is focusing on the establishment clause rather than the free speech clause and, thus, is agreeing that intelligent design is religious, in nature.  Otherwise, why would he care about a philosophy seminar promoting atheism?  This is a substantial shift away from the standard position of the Discovery Institute, which has continually put forth the idea that ID is not tied to religious practice or theology.  If it is going to be argued that banning it is a violation of the establishment clause then it must be. 

It is difficult for me to believe that this is what they really meant to say or that they could have made such a rookie mistake.

The Washington Times Weighs In on Ball State

Getting in a little bit late in the game, The Washington Times waxes on the trials of Eric Hedin and Ball State University and, by and large, makes a hash of it.  They write:

At Ball State University in Indiana, for example, anti-religion activists are irritated that physics and astronomy professor Eric Hedin presented intelligent design in his classroom as a plausible theory of origins. The basic gist was that mankind and the universe did not spring forth out of a series of wholly random events and that some higher power guided the process.

For one thing, intelligent design is not a theory of origins. Intelligent design is not really a theory at all, in the scientific sense of the word. Intelligent design rests almost entirely on the premise that prevailing scientific theories are at a loss to explain certain processes that take place in the natural world.  Second, there is nothing in the scientific enterprise that argues that the universe sprang forth out of a series of wholly random events.  That is a non-scientific statement.  Onward.  They continue:

Progress depends on challenging the conventional wisdom. Most of the ancient world looked at the sky and assumed it was obvious that the universe revolved around the Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus said, no, the common belief was wrong and the planets, including Earth, revolve around the sun. A century later, Newton explained how gravity made it all work, which was accepted until Einstein came along with his breakthrough theory of relativity. Science never rests.

It is somewhat ironic that she chooses these examples of people who challenged the prevailing views because each one of these people had hard evidence that supported their positions.  This was also true of Charles Darwin, who's theory was revolutionary for its time and, with other researchers extending it, had been found to be one of the most robust theories in existence.  Now let's see what the theoretical constructs of intelligent design are. As Paul Nelson said eight years ago:

Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” –- but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.¹

We are eight years down the road and intelligent design still consists of attacks on evolution rather than a attempting to design a full-fledged theorectical base. Jeffrey Shallit pointed this out a year back:

Here is a perfect example of this sterility: Bio-Complexity, the flagship journal of the intelligent design movement. As 2012 draws to a close, the 2012 volume contains exactly two research articles, one "critical review" and one "critical focus", for a grand total of four items. The editorial board has 30 members; they must be kept very busy handling all those papers.  (Another intelligent design journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, hasn't had a new issue since 2005.)

The 2013 volume has had, in eight months, only three articles and all three are based on arguments against evolution, not support for intelligent design.  The problem persists.  And as long as proponents of ID cannot provide their own tests of how this theory can be supported, it does not belong in the science classroom. Indeed, their only recourse in recent years has been to try to redefine science so that ID can be incorporated.  The problem here, is, as Michael Behe noted, when one does so, astrology is considered to be science.

Jo Ann Gora of Ball State did not close off discussion of competing scientific theories, she closed off acceptance of a non-scientific alternative to established science.


¹Nelson, P. (2004) The Measure of Design," Touchstone, pp. 64-65