NYU Press Book Makes Fake Behe Quote a Linchpin of Its Case Against Intelligent Design

Last year, as we noted here yesterday, a book critical of intelligent design (ID) was published by a major American university press. The book promised to give a “full-length history of ID,” but it has multiple serious problems and ignores major portions of ID’s history. As evidence, consider this: A linchpin argument in the book turned out to be based upon a fabricated quotation — an extremely serious error. We sent an inquiry to the publisher, New York University Press, and they apparently agreed. It has pledged to destroy all remaining copies of the book, correct two crucial passages, and issue a corrected edition. This is a major victory for intelligent design, but more importantly, for the truth — although obviously we believe those things are one and the same. The publisher and the author also deserve credit for doing the right thing. But now for the details.

As we’ll see below, the book’s supposedly linchpin argument against ID as science was based on a fake quote. Fake, as in the person quoted (biochemist Michael Behe) never said it. Fake, as in the purported quote attributes to Behe a view that is the opposite of the view he actually holds. And that’s just the beginning of the book’s many inaccuracies.

Over a series of posts, I’m going to be reviewing this book. It has some positive qualities as well (which I will highlight), and it is certainly far from the worst history of ID ever written. However, there’s a strange bimodal quality to the book, as it’s also rife with serious factual errors and omissions that cause it to fall far short of its goal. I’m not sure this was planned, but one almost gets the feel that the book does some smaller and less important things very well so it can try to get away with doing some larger and more important things — things intended to make ID look very bad overall — very poorly. If that wasn’t the intent, it’s certainly the result. I’m probably going to give the book more attention than it needs, but because there are lessons to be learned along the way, the saga is worth reviewing.

The Lesson: Don’t Trust the Dover Ruling

A few general notes should be made from the outset. Today’s media environment is so full of untrustworthy news and opinion that it can often be hard to know what is true. Formerly trusted sources are no longer necessarily trustworthy. Science media are little better than any other kind, and even professional scholarship in a range of fields often proves to be hardly less shoddy. Or worse, it turns out to be AI.

And then along comes a book from New York University Press, C. W. Howell’s Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, spotlighting what it calls a “damning admission” from biochemist Michael Behe which supposedly shows there’s “something nonempirical at the heart of ID.”

But it’s literally a fake quote.

Designer Science wants to be the definitive history of ID. It’s based upon Howell’s PhD thesis at Duke University which promised “the first full-length historical overview of the intelligent design movement (ID), a popular and influential antievolutionary ideology prominent at the turn of the 21st century.” But it’s more like a time capsule, trying to take us back to relive and then crystallize a turbulent period early in ID’s history — before it became evident that intelligent design would blossom into the fruitful research program that it is today, and that ID would come out ahead in so many of the intellectual battles that Howell purports to chronicle (something I recently covered in a series here.)

In a sense I welcome the book because the scholarly errors are so readily identified: the fake quote which it makes a crucial part of its case against ID, but also its inexcusably ignoring the vast majority of two decades of ID research and scholarship — and I mean simply pretending large amounts of work doesn’t exist while simultaneously having the chutzpah to assert ID hasn’t recently produced anything new — and more. We’ll get there. But we are going to start with the fake quote, because it is such a clear-cut falsehood and helps place the book’s inaccurate (and highly incomplete) scholarship in perspective.

The quote reminds me of an online course that I taught recently. AI, as you probably know, poses new challenges to educators. While I was teaching this class, there were a few times when suspicious quotes popped up in student assignments, and sometimes when I checked the sources, lo and behold the quotes did not exist. AI is infamous for hallucinating quotations. It needs to be ruthlessly fact-checked.

Something similar went wrong with Designer Science. C. W. Howell’s untrustworthy source wasn’t AI but Judge John E. Jones and his 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling. Howell got duped by a fake quote that Judge Jones copied into his ruling. Howell apparently viewed Judge Jones as a trustworthy source and failed to fact-check him. The end result was that a linchpin quote in Howell’s case against ID turned out to be hallucinated — not by AI, but by ID critics.

Please note that I’m not saying that Howell knowingly misquoted or misrepresented Behe — in fact his willingness to change the book when notified of the error suggests he cares about the truth. But the existence of this fake quote does not bode well for the book as the definitive “full-length history of ID.” While there are genuine positives to say about the book, as we’ll see, the fake quote is just the beginning of its serious problems.

Aside from the obvious point that one should never misquote a source, there’s a moral to this story that’s more directly relevant: Many ID critics find it convenient to push the Dover ruling as the ultimate refutation of intelligent design, but as we learned long ago and have pointed out numerous times, the Dover ruling is full of plainly inaccurate statements and objective factual errors about ID. Many scholars refuse to acknowledge this fact or at the very least implicitly trust the Dover ruling as an accurate source of information about ID. It isn’t. Dover’s emperor has no clothes. The ruling is full of errors, omissions, and factually false claims about ID. If you’re going to cite the Dover ruling, you need to fact-check it. And if you trust Judge Jones and don’t fact-check him, you could get yourself into a lot of trouble. I don’t wish this upon C.W. Howell, but this, tragically, is exactly what has happened to him here. Howell got burned by Judge Jones for not fact-checking him.

At least one prominent ID critic has admitted the poor quality of the Dover ruling. In 2006 a leading anti-ID legal scholar named Jay Wexler wrote in First Amendment Law Review: “The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous both to science and to freedom of religion.” This saga provides yet another piece of evidence backing up what Wexler wrote some 20 years ago.

A True Confession?

In a section of Designer Science on the Dover trial ominously titled “Judgment Day,” Howell offered what he believed to be a powerful admission by Dr. Behe supposedly exposing “something nonempirical at the heart of ID” (p. 132). This was a key part of Howell’s argument and he referenced it later in the book as well towards the end. In general, Howell’s rhetoric in the book is fairly measured. But in this case, he amped it up because he thought he had a gotcha. At the Dover trial, Behe allegedly made “the most damning admission.” It came, we learn, “from Behe’s mouth himself” (sic) — he means Behe’s own mouth — when it was “confessed on the stand.” That’s quite a buildup! Here’s the full passage from Howell:

Ultimately, the most damning admission might have come from Behe’s mouth himself, when he confessed on the stand that the “plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.” At root, Behe’s admission showed that there was something fundamentally nonempirical at the heart of ID, that it was based upon philosophical assumptions, on metaphysics, and on first principles. It therefore depended upon a prior commitment. (p. 132)

So the claim is that Behe literally said these words (“from Behe’s mouth”) — that the “plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God” — under oath no less, on the witness stand. But also, literally, it never happened.

Behe never said on the witness stand that the “plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.” Nor was Behe asked about those exact words during the trial, nor did he agree to those words being stated to back him (as sometimes happens during trials). Those exact words exist nowhere in the Dover trial transcript. As far as I can tell, Behe has never written or said those words anywhere else either. And to be clear this was not some kind of a slight misquote where Behe said something quite similar. It’s a completely fake quote.

I am a scientist, not a philosopher, but before I discuss the origins of Howell’s fake quote, it is worth noting that Howell’s understanding of the definition of science is muddled. Howell implied that if any scientific theory rests on non-empirical or philosophical assumptions, then it cannot be science. Yet all scientific theories ultimately rest on some prior beliefs that are non-empirical. For example, scientists must assume in their investigations that the rules of logic are valid. The rules of logic are not empirical data. This does not render scientific investigations that rely on the rules of logic non-scientific. As a general rule, Howell’s broad claim was not the defeater he seems to have thought it was.

Regardless, Howell’s particular claim about ID depending on a prior belief in God happens to be false.

Uncritical Copying from the ACLU

So where did Howell get this fake Behe quote? He got them from Judge Jones in the Dover ruling. But the judge got them from someone else. A very important fact about the Dover ruling is that Judge Jones copied about 90 percent of his section on whether ID is science in a verbatim or near-verbatim fashion from an ACLU brief. The brief was submitted to the court soon after the trial phase ended. The judge’s method of authorship has been amply documented: see this report we published in 2006. As a result, Judge Jones also copied numerous errors from the ACLU into his ruling, as we documented and sourced. Howell omits all this from his history.

Is this “plagiarism” by Judge Jones? Technically, no. Judges are allowed to copy briefs from parties. However, the practice is frowned on by higher courts because judges can thereby cause the “zeal and advocacy and … enthusiasm” of highly partisan attorneys to be uncritically copied into bad law. The U.S. Supreme Court once quoted those words, urging judges to “avoid as far as you possibly can simply signing what some lawyer puts under your nose.” Unfortunately that is exactly what happened here. It’s worse, though, because of all the errors that Jones copied. Yet Howell managed to perpetuate one that we had previously missed!

Here’s what Judge Jones wrote in the Dover ruling, side-by-side with the ACLU brief:

To summarize what happened, this nightmarish game of bad-scholarship-telephone went like this:

• In 2001, Michael Behe writes an article claiming that ID is empirically based and doesn’t require any religious commitment.
• The ACLU then very badly misrepresents Behe’s article as claiming that “plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God,” and then the ACLU puts this distortion into a brief filed with Judge Jones during the Dover trial.
• Judge Jones then copies the ACLU’s brief with its misrepresentations into his ruling, but he makes things worse by adding the phrase “emphasis added” so it looks like those were Behe’s exact words. (Judge Jones still attributes those words to Behe’s 2001 article at least.)
• Then, finally, Howell brings the final piece of distortion: He claims that Behe said those words on the witness stand — a “damning admission” that “came from Behe’s mouth” no less! But the worst part is that Howell uses this fake quote in his book as a linchpin gotcha quote to basically claim that ID is more religion than science, etc.

It’s quite a chain of errors, from the ACLU to Jones to Howell. Each makes it worse than the one before. The only party who didn’t misquote Behe, or imply it was quoting him, is the ACLU, which at least did not put words in Behe’s mouth. The ACLU’s summary of Behe’s view is an inaccurate characterization of what the biochemist said. But when Judge Jones writes “emphasis added,” you might assume, if you weren’t paying attention, that he is quoting Behe’s exact words, because it’s hard to imagine why you would say “emphasis added” unless you were quoting someone. Finally, then comes Dr. Howell who puts the same words directly into quotes.

Back to the Original Source

The ACLU’s brief indicates the original source for this idea — it’s plaintiff’s exhibit 718, which is a paper that Behe wrote in the journal Biology and Philosophy in 2001 (it appears to be available online free here). If you search the paper, you also find that the phrase “plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God” does not appear. So Behe never wrote those words, even in the original source.

What’s going on is common in the law: The plaintiffs’ attorneys were twisting and spinning the evidence to make it say what they want it to say. Judge Jones apparently didn’t take the time to check their claims, and he assumed they were Behe’s own words. He copied the mistake into his ruling. And now historians of ID are citing these words as a direct quote from Behe, a “damning admission” that he supposedly “confessed on the [witness] stand,” showing there is “something fundamentally nonempirical at the heart of ID.” Or as Judge Jones and the ACLU both falsely put it, this shows ID “is a religious and not a scientific proposition.” And none of it happened. It would be funny if it weren’t such bad scholarship.

Howell Borrowing from Wikipedia?

But in fact, Howell added new mistakes that even Judge Jones did not make. If one examines the table above closely, one sees that neither Judge Jones nor the ACLU’s brief are actually citing Behe’s Dover trial testimony for the fake Behe quote. Rather, they are citing plaintiffs’ exhibit P-718 at page 705, which is the aforementioned scholarly paper Behe published in Biology and Philosophy in 2001. Yet the quote does not exist in Behe’s paper either. And again, it’s not some kind of a slight misquote as there’s nothing similar to the quote in the paper.

Thus, Howell has compounded the error by not only attributing those exact words to Behe, but by claiming they derived from Behe’s actual Dover testimony — something that not even Judge Jones nor the ACLU asserted. Yet Howell claims, these words are a “damning admission” that Behe “confessed on the stand.” Where did Howell get this idea?

It’s hard to know for sure, but a possible source is Wikipedia — also notorious for its errors on ID (for example see here and here). On Michael Behe’s official Wikipedia page (here), it says the following:

Many of Behe’s critics have pointed to these exchanges as examples they believe further undermine Behe’s statements about irreducible complexity and intelligent design. John E. Jones III, the judge in the case, would ultimately rule that intelligent design is not scientific in his 139-page decision, citing Behe’s testimony extensively as the basis for his findings:

• “Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.”

Wikipedia thus seems to suggest that these words came from Judge Jones “citing Behe’s testimony.” Did Howell simply borrow from Wikipedia the idea that Behe said those words during his Dover testimony? It’s possible, but it’s not clear. What is clear is that Behe has never written or said that the “plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.” Nor is this some slight misquote where Behe said something similar. As far as we can tell, neither these words nor anything resembling them have ever been written or said by Behe.

But we should note that Howell isn’t alone in making this mistake, and he’s far from the first ID-critic to do it. In fact, there quite a list of other ID-critics who read Judge Jones’s ruling, apparently did not feel the need to fact-check it, and then falsely claimed that Behe said those words during the Dover trial. These include: Jason Rosenhouse, “Why is it Unconstitutional to Teach Intelligent Design?,” Skeptical Inquirer; Jerry Coyne, “The Great Mutator,” The New Republic (archived here); David E. Levin, “Review: The Edge of Evolution,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education; Mary Katherine Hackney, “In This Apple for Teacher an Apple from Eve – Reanalyzing the Intelligent Design Debate from a Curricular Perspective,” North Carolina Law Review; and of course Wikipedia.

Apparently many ID critics also have misplaced faith in the trustworthiness of Judge Jones ruling — or perhaps they just prefer to put their heads in the sand when confronted with just how inaccurate the ruling is. The difference in this case is that of the sources who got fooled by Judge Jones’s sloppy authorship, only Dr. Howell was writing in a peer-reviewed historical treatise from a major university press. Indeed, the fake Behe quote is also present in Howell’s PhD thesis, and the reviewers of the latter apparently did not catch it there either.

The good news is that when confronted with the misquotation, Howell and his book’s publisher admitted the error and we are told it will be removed from the book. Kudos to Howell and NYU Press — let’s hope the others who made this same mistake will do the same.

What Behe Actually Said

When Behe was asked about the paper in his comments at the Dover trial, here’s what he actually said on the “stand”:

Mr. Rothschild [Plaintiffs’ Attorney]: And, Matt, if you could turn to page 705 of the article. If you could highlight the top paragraph, until the sixth line. And you write here, “What if the existence of God is in dispute or is denied? So far I have assumed the existence of God. But what if the existence of God is denied at the outset, or is in dispute? Is the plausibility of the argument to design affected? As a matter of my own experience the answer is clearly yes, the argument is less plausible to those for whom God’s existence is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God’s existence.”

It’s a God-friendly theory, isn’t it, Professor Behe?

Behe Answer: Let me respond in a couple of ways to that. First, let me clarify for context that this is a journal called Biology and Philosophy. So not only am I speaking about scientific matters here, but I’m also talking about nonscientific matters here in an academic forum. Academics embraces more than just science. This is an academic forum which also embraces philosophy, and so I addressed philosophical issues as well.

And again, my statement as written is certainly correct. And it’s happened time — many times in science, and, again, I’ll just refer back to John Maddox’s article “Down With the Big Bang.” He didn’t like the Big Bang theory. And it wasn’t because the data were inconsistent with it, it’s because it was philosophically unacceptable. Walter Nernst hated the idea of a beginning to the universe. It was unscientific. So — and other people have said similar things. So it’s clearly true that people make decisions even about a scientific theory, based not only on the science itself, but what they perceive as other ramifications of the theory.

But I argue, I’ve argued a number of places, that it’s the proper role of a scientist to leave aside those other considerations as much as possible and focus simply on the scientific data.

As can be seen, in no way did Behe “confess” that somehow, as Howell put it, “there was something fundamentally nonempirical at the heart of ID, that it was based upon philosophical assumptions, on metaphysics, and on first principles” or that ID requires “a prior commitment.” Instead, Behe clearly said that ID is “a scientific theory” but that sometimes for psychological reasons people reject scientific theories “based not only on the science itself, but what they perceive as other ramifications of the theory.” Using examples of the Big Bang and others, Behe made it clear that his statement in his article is about sociology and psychology that applies to all science, and is not something peculiar to intelligent design.

Behe went on to say that scientists should avoid this psychological tendency “as much as possible and focus simply on the scientific data.” Nowhere does he even remotely concede that ID is not science or that ID is religion or that you must believe in God to accept ID. If Howell went back to the original source at this linchpin moment in his presentation, there’s certainly no indication that Behe “confessed” anything like this on the “stand.” That is the top reason this is a very serious case of bad scholarship.

In contrast, if you read Behe’s paper in Biology and Philosophy in full, it similarly affirmed — in strong words — that ID is a scientific theory. In fact, in the paper Behe explicitly addressed and denied the idea that there is something “fundamentally nonempirical” about ID, writing:

The conclusion of intelligent design in biochemistry rests exclusively on empirical evidence — the structures and functions of the biochemical systems — plus principles of logic (for example, see Dembski’s (1998) The Design Inference and Ratzsch’s (2001) Nature, Design, and Science). No particular tenet of faith is involved.⁹ Therefore, I consider design to be a scientific explanation (whether ultimately correct or not).

It would be hard to imagine Behe offering a stronger confirmation that his position is that ID is a “scientific explanation” based “exclusively on empirical evidence.” And rather than admitting that ID “depends on a prior commitment,” as Howell alleges, what Behe actually wrote is: “No particular tenet of faith is involved.” Yet this is from the source that ultimately led to the fake quote. This directly contradicts Howell’s interpretation of Behe’s testimony, and Dr. Howell egregiously misrepresented Behe’s position on the question of whether Behe agrees or ever admitted there is something “fundamentally nonempirical at the heart of ID,” etc.

Let’s step back and appreciate what happened overall here: Howell offered us a quote from Behe. But he wasn’t actually quoting Behe. He was really quoting from something written by the ACLU. And what the ACLU wrote was a highly inaccurate misrepresentation of Behe’s actual position. So basically, Howell was quoting the ACLU as it misrepresented Behe, and then he was attributing the ACLU’s false mischaracterization of Behe as if it were a direct quote from Behe making a “damning admission” that “came from Behe’s mouth” on the witness stand. Presumably it was all just an unfortunate series of mistakes, but wow. Just wow.

The ACLU’s interpretation of Behe’s quoted passage was also later explicitly refuted during the Dover trial by another defense expert witness, Steve Fuller, a historian of science and sociologist at the University of Warwick. Fuller explicitly denied that Behe was saying that the “validity” of ID requires believing in God. Neither the ACLU, nor Judge Jones, nor Howell recognized this fact.

Correcting the Fake Quote

Howell’s fake quote was not just an inconsequential goof. His argument about ID as religion, not science, largely hinged on it. In addition, Howell compounded his errors about the fake Behe quote near the end of the book where he once again misinterpreted what Behe “testified” on the witness sand. Howell wrote:

Toward the end of his testimony at Dover, Michael Behe testified that one’s preconceptions and metaphysical stance may be the primary driver in one’s scientific conclusions (and in his case, he was referring to his own reading of design onto nature). (p. 192)

Yet Behe never testified that “one’s preconceptions and metaphysical stance may be the primary driver in one’s scientific conclusions.” And he never testified that his own personal “preconceptions and metaphysical stance” are what led him to the conclusion of intelligent design. Behe is a practicing Catholic, and has said many times he has no particular religious objections to evolution. For example, Behe told EWTN, one of the largest Catholic news networks, in 1996, “I never gave evolution a second thought, and certainly saw no conflict with Church teaching.” And the National Catholic Reporter printed the following not long before the Dover trial in 2005:

Behe is a Catholic … Yet Behe told me he believes a Catholic in good faith can accept the scientific mechanisms posited by evolutionary theory.

“I’m a biochemist, not a theologian,” he said. “But it seems to me that belief in mutation and natural selection is compatible with Catholicism, as long as the underlying premise is that God set it up that way. That seems to me an orthodox Catholic position.”

“I’m critical of evolutionary theory not because it’s unorthodox,” he said, “but because it can’t do what it purports to do.”

Behe’s conclusions about intelligent design and evolution are thus driven by what he believes is the scientific evidence, not his theological preconceptions. If we properly interpret the aforementioned passage from Howell on page 192 of Designer Science, Behe never warned against “his own reading of design onto nature” (emphasis added), but instead was giving a general warning against letting “one’s preconceptions and metaphysical stance” determine your scientific conclusions — even as he acknowledged that as a sociological and psychological matter, obviously it happens, not just with respect to ID but with other scientific theories as well. Behe’s Dover testimony on this point was never meant to be a description of how ID works, but rather a warning about how not to do science, generally speaking.

Behe’s actual statement on the witness stand was thus: “it’s the proper role of a scientist to leave aside those other considerations as much as possible and focus simply on the scientific data.” He affirmed that ID was science, and even wrote the following striking passage in his paper which became the plaintiffs’ exhibit from which the fake quote ultimately derives:

The conclusion of intelligent design in biochemistry rests exclusively on empirical evidence — the structures and functions of the biochemical systems — plus principles of logic. No particular tenet of faith is involved. Therefore, I consider design to be a scientific explanation (whether ultimately correct or not). (internal citations removed)

It would be hard to imagine a stronger statement by Behe affirming that ID is based upon empirical data — and this quote is found in the plaintiffs’ exhibit which, through a chain of increasing misrepresentations, eventually led to Howell claiming there’s something “something fundamentally nonempirical at the heart of ID.” Howell thus invented quotes from Behe, took his words out of context, and severely misrepresented Behe’s position in order to construct a totally false narrative.

As I mentioned at the outset, New York University Press has agreed to delete the hallucinated quote, apparently missed by their own peer reviewers, in Designer Science. In a letter to the press, I pointed out the error. They did not defend the bad scholarship. The academic gatekeepers at NYU, with Howell’s apparent approval, in the end, did the right thing. They deserve credit for this. But how much damage was done in the interim?

The Lessons Learned: The obvious lesson is to never use an invented fake quote and certainly don’t make it a linchpin argument of your academic book. But everyone probably knew that already. So a more useful lesson here is probably that one should not trust Judge John E. Jones’s Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling as a trustworthy source of reliable information about ID. If you’re going to borrow any of his arguments, go back and fact-check him first. You’ll be glad you did — and you might save yourself a lot of trouble for doing so! You might also be surprised to learn what we already knew: the ruling is a highly inaccurate treatment of intelligent design, and should not be taken as a reliable source of information about ID!

Tomorrow, “Fighting a Battle That’s Over, and ID Won, Designer Science Omits Key Portions of ID’s History.”