True. No J.D. He just won the 2008 Balzan Prize for work in moral philosophy, he is a University Professor at NYU, a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a fellow of the British Academy. He signed on to an Amici Curaie brief to the Supreme Court with Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Thomas Scanlon and Judith Jarvis Thomson (Brief of Dworkin, Nagel et al.)
The article in question, "Public Education and Intelligent Design," is about the 2005 decision by Judge John E. Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District! Here are some key paragraphs on constitutional questions:
The Dover decision relied on two interpretations of the Establishment Clause: the Lemon test and the endorsement test. The Lemon test requires that a law or practice must have a secular purpose, must not have a primary effect of either promoting or inhibiting religion, and must not foster excessive entanglement with religion. The endorsement test, enunciated by Justice O'Connor, requires that the law or practice not have the purpose or effect of endorsing a particular religion or religion in general.Interpretation of the Establishment Clause is unsettled and evolving, but if we take these two tests as a guide, the mention of ID seems constitutionally defensible. If properly presented, it could be defended as having the secular purpose of providing a better understanding of evolutionary theory and the evidence for and against it. Would it fail on the ground that one of its principal effects would be to advance religion?
It has to be admitted that, by suggesting that the existence of God is a possibility, and that if there is a god he might have played a role in the development of life, it would have such an effect. That might be too much religion by current standards. By the same token, such teaching would also advance atheism, by suggesting that the nonexistence of God was a serious possibility, so it might lose from both directions. Perhaps silence on the subject of the relation between evolutionary theory and religious belief is the only course compatible with the Establishment Clause.
It would be a shame if this were so....I would like to believe that something less inhibited would be admissible, namely, a frank discussion of the relation of evolutionary theory to religion in some part of the high school curriculum. If biology teachers would be too burdened by this task, room should be found elsewhere.
I think the true position of those who would exclude intelligent design from the domain of science is that things have changed fundamentally since 1859. In other words, when Darwin published The Origin of Species it may have been appropriate to present it as an alternative to design, just as Copernicus had to present the heliocentric theory as an alternative to the geocentric theory. Yet now, after all that has happened over the past century and a half, the very idea of design is as dead as Ptolemaic astronomy: a reductive and above all purposeless naturalism can be taken for granted as the only possible form of explanation in biology. To exclude the possibility of divine intervention in the history of life is scientifically legitimate, and to assign it any antecedent positive probability at all is irrational. To the extent that such a prior probability affects conclusions drawn from the evidence, they too are irrational, and cannot be taken seriously as scientific proposals.
Judge Jones is careful to say, "We express no opinion on the ultimate veracity of ID as a supernatural explanation." This is not the position of most evolutionary scientists, however. They believe that there are no supernatural explanations, and that trying to show that they are incompatible with the evidence is a waste of time. It is part of their basic epistemological and metaphysical framework, which either excludes the existence of God or, at best, places him entirely outside the boundaries of the natural universe. They do not think, Maybe there are supernatural explanations, but if there are, science cannot discover them. Rather, they think, Anybody who is willing even to consider supernatural explanations is living in the past.
We cannot, however, make this a fundamental principle of public education. I understand the attitude that ID is just the latest manifestation of the fundamentalist threat, and that you have to stand and fight them here or you will end up having to fight for the right to teach evolution at all. However, I believe that both intellectually and constitutionally the lie does not have to be drawn at this point, and that a noncommittal discussion of some of the issues would be preferable.