Law & Society Blog

One of the more fascinating “great debates” in the United States (and as far as I can tell only in the United States) is that between evolutionary theory and creationism or intelligent design. Let me clarify right away that I don’t consider the substance of that debate interesting at all. Within the scientific system, the ultimate arbiter for the truth of factual claims since at least the early 18th Century, there is no debate. Claims of intelligent design or any other variant of creationism that have been advanced so far are so obviously false that they hardly merit a footnote. But that is beside the point. Creationism is not science, rather it is part of a religious movement that seeks to influence the political system and other functionally differentiated systems, including education and law. The problem (from the point of view of the system that wants to do the influencing) is, that politics and law are communicatively and operationally closed. Each system only processes communications according to its own operative code. Considerations of faith can only enter the political system if and to the extent that the political system decides to recast these issues on the basis of its own operative distinction of power and opposition. The same is true for the legal system with its operative code of lawful and unlawful. (Of course, nothing in here suggests that politicians or lawyers can’t be faithful. We all are inhabit many systems.) For example, within the religious system, a controversy about transubstantiation might be of great significance. (At least it used to be.) Yet it would be virtually impossible to force that issue upon, say, a modern legal system. The legal system decides autonomously what it considers relevant, and that does not ordinarily include questions of religious dogma. New issues enter a system by invitation only, that is, according to the selective openness of and on the system’s own terms. (Ignoring a system’s specific mode of semantic closure and its resultant selective openness is one of the primary reasons why regulation ?¢¨ƒ¨Ï and education ?¢¨ƒ¨Ï so often fails.)

How is this relevant for the creationism debate? Attempts to directly force the issue upon the political system are likely to be met with resistance. The political system has historically claimed its independence from religion as a result of functional differentiation. Independence meant closure. Within the legal system, that closure is represented by the constitutional requirement of the separation of church and state. At the same time, the political system has opened itself to all things science. It closely observes a wide range of issues and controversies within science, which may be translated into and represented within the political system at any time. Once the political system has assimilated a scientific issue (e.g., the properties of stem cells), that issue takes on a parallel life of its own, outside of the scientific system, following the rules of the political discourse; transplanted content almost never contains dynamic links.

Different systems have taken on leading roles at different times in history. Leadership simply means that a significant number of other social systems independently subscribe to content identified and processed by the leading system for import and assimilation. (Figuratively speaking, those systems open a port in their firewalls.) Religion was the leading system of the Middle Ages. Following the American and the French revolutions, the political system assumed a leading role. Today, it might be the global economic system. And since the early 18th Century, the scientific system has never ceased to play a leading role. Influencing a system with few outgoing feeds will have less of an impact than influencing one with many active subscribers, which is why being part of the scientific discourse is of great value to ideas with the ambition to change society. Marxism, fascism, socialism, but also law, economics, and politics have all tried to dress up and pose as science with varying degrees of success. Creationism, that is, religious dogma, wrapped in the rhetoric of scientific discourse, is following their lead. And as a foreign protocol encapsulated into HTTP is able to tunnel a firewall, so do religious issues, camouflaged as science, enter systems that would otherwise be reluctant to process them, such as education, law, and politics.