A few years back, I read a book by Michael J. Perry (“Religion & Politics”) that used a Rawlsian argument to suggest an almost conflicting position – one with which I agree much more. Perry suggested that religious speech might be barred from the realm of “public reason” only if its conclusions could not be justified on secular grounds but HAD TO BE gotten by religious grounds. Thus, an argument against gay marriage might not be allowed in the public sphere if it was an irreducibly religious argumement, but could be allowed the moment its conclusion could be reached on secular grounds (utilitarian, natural law, contractarian, etc.)

I agree much with Perry’s idea here (though I disagree with the idea that religious speech be barred from the public sphere at all as religious people have rights to agitate for their convictions as anyone else does.)

But under this conception, it would be hard to bar most of ID from being called scientific speech. Most of ID’s case is a negative one which gives (no matter how weak) secular objections to evolutionary theory. They do not say, ‘It cannot be true because it contradicts the bible,’ but, ‘it cannot be completely true because there are areas for which evolution cannot account or has not accounted.’

These are secular and, some may say, scientific objections. As such, the White paper does not make a case as to why these should be considered “extra scientific speech.”

(The best it does is to explain why positing a creator is ‘extra sscientifc speech,’ but as we all know, that is only the tail end of ID’s case, which is almost exclusively a negative one.)

A better way to make a Rawlsian argument (if that is the argument we want to make) for exclusion of ID is to argue that a Rawlsian veil of ignorance might lead to the conclusion that science classes should teach the general consensus of the scinetific fields that they study, and controverseys should be taught only when they have convinced a certain (high) number of experts.

As with any and all Rawlsian arguments, this is speculative, as Rawlsian arguments always venture guesses on what the pubilc would or would not find permissible while wearing a ‘veil of ignorance.’

Needless to say, I think that Rawlsian arguments are generally a mistake.