Posted on 12/22/2005 6:09:22 PM PST by KingofZion
Like many evolutionary mistakes, intelligent design may be on the road to extinction, put there Tuesday by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III.
When Jones ruled that the Dover Area School District's intelligent design policy violates the First Amendment and barred the district from mentioning intelligent design in biology classes or "from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution," he wasn't just applying a pinprick to the trial balloon intelligent design supporters had chosen to float in this case.
He aimed a cannon at it. And fired. Several times. Odds are, other courts will find it hard to argue that he missed his target.
In one of the most closely watched cases in recent memory -- not just in Pennsylvania but across the nation -- Jones took the opportunity in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District to frame the case in the much larger context many, including supporters of intelligent design, had seen it in.
The impact of his ruling can't be overstated. Not only did Jones find the policy unconstitutional but he also ruled that intelligent design is not science.
"[M]oreover ... ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents," he said in the 139-page opinion.
Jones didn't pull any punches in making his ruling, criticizing the school board for its policy, as well as those who saw the case as an opportunity to make law that would pave the way for greater acceptance of intelligent design.
"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge," he said. "If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.
"The breathtaking inanity of the board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."
Not surprisingly, several groups that endorse the teaching of intelligent design, or "ID" as Jones referred to it throughout his opinion, lashed out and accused him, as he anticipated, of being an "activist federal judge."
Who knew that Republican judges appointed by Republican presidents could be such hacks for the left?
Well, if activism is changing the norm and imposing one's will from behind the safe confines of the bench onto the helpless masses, then Jones' decision in Kitzmiller hardly fits the bill, since the opinion follows closely the reasoning of other federal courts on the issue, including the U.S. Supreme Court. If anything, Jones was critical of the changes the Dover Area School Board made for an entire community and potentially a whole generation of school children.
But organizations like the Discovery Institute, the Thomas More Law Center and the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom should be angry with Jones. Because what he did in his opinion, systematically and ruthlessly, was expose intelligent design as creationism, minus the biblical fig leaf, and advanced by those with a clear, unscientific agenda: to get God (more specifically, a Christian one) back into the sciences.
Jones goes into an exhaustive examination on the intelligent design movement, and what he found will make it difficult for future pro-ID litigants to argue that the whole thing isn't religion masked in neo-scientific terms.
According to Jones, the Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture developed a "Wedge Document" in which it said the goal of the intelligent design movement is to "replace science as currently practiced with 'theistic and Christian science.'"
He said that one of the professors, an ID proponent, who testified for the school board "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."
Jones also points out that the ID textbook the Dover policy encouraged students to check out, "Of Pandas and People," is not only published by an organization identified in IRS filings as a "religious, Christian organization," but that the book was meticulously changed following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in 1987 that the U.S. Constitution forbids the teaching of creationism as science.
By comparing the early drafts to the later ones, he said, it was clear that the definition for creation science was identical to the definition of intelligent design and that the word creation and its variants were replaced with the phrase ID and that it all happened shortly after the Supreme Court decision.
As Jones points out throughout his opinion, ID's supporters couldn't shake two problematic facts -- its close association with creationism and its inability to divorce itself from the supernatural.
"ID is reliant upon forces acting outside of the natural world, forces that we cannot see, replicate, control or test, which have produced changes in the world," he said. "While we take no position on whether such forces exist, they are simply not testable by scientific means and therefore cannot qualify as part of the scientific process or as a scientific theory."
All of which lead Jones to conclude that "ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory."
There's plenty of other things worth noting in Jones' opinion, including how school board members talked at meetings about creationism and complained of "liberals in black robes" taking away "the rights of Christians," or how the Discovery Institute was in contact with board members prior to the policy change, and a number of other machinations that might leave one feeling less than secure about the separation of church and state in Pennsylvania, but those are facts specific to this case.
The real impact of the opinion is what Jones lays out with regard to intelligent design's roots, its proponents, its agenda and the tactics (and there's really no other way to describe them) being used to advance it. It reads like a cautionary tale, one that we should all be reading.
And while it's unlikely that the country has seen the last of this issue, one can hope that Jones' decision might save future judges a little bit of time, if not discourage groups with a religious ax to grind from using residents of small communities as pawns in the name of a dishonest, fruitless agenda.
With all due respect to my many Christian friends, and to sites such as Joseph Farah's usually excellent WorldNetDaily.com, the judge was both conservative and definitive in his ruling.
Leaving no wiggle room with phrases like ""The breathtaking inanity of the board's decision is evident -", he clearly defined the difference between science and activist theology.
Conservatives might be better served by remembering where activist theology got the Catholics, particularly during the heyday of Church "activist theologians" making nice with Commies in South America.
Science explains what the world is. Religion discusses 'why', not 'how'. Religion and science are not competing, they are different.
Please demonstrate that they *could* have varied. For all you know, they have the only values they *could* have had via natural origins.
This is one of the most powerful arguments in favor of God.
If so, then the rest of the arguments in favor of God must be very weak indeed.
It is statistically impossible (almost infinite improbability) for those physical constants to come into existence at random with the values necessary for life to exist.
Please provide evidence for your presumption that a natural origin for the Universe would produce values for physical constants "at random". We'll wait.
That is why scientists had to create the wild-eyed notion that an infinite number of parallel universes must exist (the "multiverse" theory), for an infinite period of time, and our universe is just one of those random universes that just happened to have the right set of values.
You have *really* garbled the anthropic principle. Try again.
God is much more likely.
So... Rather than a workable Universe existing without "help", it's "much more likely" for an infinitely perfect supreme bring to exist without "help". Haven't you just traded a thorny problem for an infinitely thornier one?
Particularly since God has already told us He exists and intervenes in our lives everyday.
That's what the Norse said about Odin, too.
ID never had a chance. It was stillborn.
Absolutely correct.
If you think so, then you're as confused as he is.
Did Judge Jones ban the multiverse as well? He certainly would have banned Lemaitre's Big Bang Theory.
No, he wouldn't have.
I can see it now. Albert Einstein testifies before Judge Jones and says, 'The universe is static, we all know this'. Lemaitre testifies: 'But your honor, even Professor Einsteins own field equations testify to the fact that the universe is expanding and he threw in a cosmological constant to maintain the universe as static.' Judge Jones: 'Science doesn't allow for creationists like Lemaitre poisioning the minds of our youth with creationism, Professor Einstein obviously has the better argument here and is eminently qualified. Big Bang Theory is banned. Next case!'
Nice straw man. Too bad it bears no resemblance to the actual arguments used in the Dover case.
I swear, this goofy misconception comes up so often that I'm going to have to make this into a hotkey:
This is horse manure, son. The *majority* of American "Darwinists" are Christians. The primary "pro-Darwin/anti-ID" expert witness in the Dover trial is a Christian (biologist Kenneth R. Miller), who has written a book about reconciling evolution and God. What does that do to your silly conspiracy theory?
So do most "evolutionists".
But is your social circle qualified to accurately teach evolutionary biology, or have they fallen for the anti-evolution "creation science" disinformation and propaganda?
May I quote you?
"What does that do to your silly conspiracy theory?"
First, you are a very uncivil and hostile debater. How about calming down a bit? That valium in your medicine cabinet may help.
Second, I never proposed that there is any conpiracy. That is in your paranoid mind. Although Darwinism can mean simply evolution, I have always considered it in this debate to also mean first causes..too. So when I say Darwinism I include spontaneous formation of life from the infamous building blocks through chance.
I, like Kenneth Miller believe that evolution can be reconciled with God, but creation of life by chance cannot. I am not an opponent of evolutionary theory, though I do ask that its flaws be at least mentioned in school.
And with respect to first causes, I also ask the ID also be mentioned in school when speculating on this matter.
Please don't confuse the issue with facts.
I'm not sure about the school board in Lemaitre.
But I am sure that the multiverse is analagous to Einsteins adding in the CC.
Merry Christmas to you and yours Ichy.
ping everyone Friday AM.... well written article, indeed!
No, I'm not, as should have been made clear by the sentence which preceded that one.
By extension, those who believe in the creation account are not qualified, even though they have attained high levels of competence in the field of Science.
You have a great ability to read things into my post which are not actually there.
This points back to my post in #43.
...only in the sense that it raises the question of whether you misread those other "examples" as badly as you misread mine, perhaps due to some kind of big chip on your shoulder.
Lame, pointless response?? Really now!
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