Intelligent Design case decided - Dover, Pennsylvania, School Board loses [Fox News Alert]

Fox News | 12/20/05

[snarks_when_bored]

Fox News alert a few minutes ago says the Dover School Board lost their bid to have Intelligent Design introduced into high school biology classes. The federal judge ruled that their case was based on the premise that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was incompatible with religion, and that this premise is false.

[nascaryankee]

Easy there killer. Was "umkay"ing your "Um".

[narby]

You are correct that the Supreme Court has mangled the meaning of the First Amendment in the last 60 years.

It's too bad these Dover bozo's attacked science instead of the bogus Supreme Court precedents. But those being in place, this judge's hands were tied. ID is indeed religion, and religion has been ruled off-limits to public schools.

Now that this is over, I hope the culture warriors will find another, more relevant, subject to go after besides science. Religion always loses when it attacks science. Always. This was a waste of time.

[orionblamblam]

> Some people worship themselves.

Yes. They're called "celebrities."

Then there are those who have grown up and worship *nobody.*

[dread78645]

Evolution is being taught as a religious belief in our schools also. Just look what happens to anyone who dares to disagree with evolution.

Uhm ... What?

Are they cast into Hell™ ?

[benjibrowder]

I absolutely agree with your assessment that the government should not be involved in the education business. Finally, someone says this which needs to be said.

Oh, and I felt the need to make it my new tagline.

[AntiGuv]

Apologies accepted!!

[Stark_GOP]

Godwin Law.

[CharlesWayneCT]

I'm not trying to defend a literal 6-day creation, just arguing that it is not incompatable with the facts which support evolution, once you postulate an all-powerful God.

Genesis 2 is a narrative, and would be less likely to spell out a worldwide sequence of events than Genesis 1.

[Baraonda]

"Fot it to be a theory, you need to show some predictions that it makes of future observable data and some way in which it can be falsified."

The theory of evolution says that any organism from one class or species will evolve into an organism from another class or species, which is not true. No such evolution as ever been seen taking place.

[snarks_when_bored]

Here's why I said, "I'll assume (for your sake) that you're joking":

(1) You said, "Humans are not monkeys." Since no evolution theorist has ever said that they are, you're making a joke, right?

(2) You said, "We neither share nor have anything in common with them [i.e., monkeys]." Since monkey DNA and human DNA are roughly 93 percent identical, you're making a joke, right?

[Thatcherite]

You speak of predictions and hypotheses! Aren't those guesses?

They are, until the predictions come true. Countless predictions of future observations have been made using the theory of evolution, and uncannily they always come true when investigated. Successful predictions are one of the requirements for a theory to be considered scientific. ID has mode none to date, and the supporters of ID haven't even proposed any.

[MindBender26]

>Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. 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.

Man, someone sure forgot Law Rule #7. "Never Poss-off the Judge!"

[benjibrowder]

"The man obviously never met my ex-wife.... or any 16 year old boy" Is it really necessary to degrade a sixteen year old boy, or your ex-wife even. I hope she b&^%*-slaps you. Maybe a sixteen year old boy would kick you in the groin too.

[CharlesWayneCT]

As to the "bear false witness", I'm not saying that he DID do so, or did NOT, merely postulating that it could be so.

But I would point out that Jesus himself spoke in riddles, and said it was to keep people from seeing the truth.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Thanks for the polite reply. Behe's is one of the works I was referring to. But I'd say that what you refer to as the author's eventual philosophical interpretation (that is, non-scientific) is not philosophy, but logical extension. And that logical extension, in my opinion, is as much based in scientific principle as the "logical extension" that evolutionists hold (that since there is a sequence of change through generational adaptation, therefore all evolution must be able to be de-volved back to an extremely simple, single source of life).

And as I implied, we are all affected by personal bias on this issue. The point is, none knows for sure and 100% belief in either approach involves a bit of "faith" that cannot be proved scientifically to be ultimate truth. Therefore I say, in the true scientific and philosophical spirit, let's consider all the possibilities.

An interesting note: the earliest Western philosophers, what are grouped as the pre-Socratics though many were in fact contemporaneous with Socrates, were called phusikos, the term that later was used for physics. It refers to those that studied the nature of things. They were, essentially, philosophers of the "nature sciences." Funny how we argue all around the circle and come back to what was being debated 2500 years ago!!

[AntiGuv]

And just to be patently clear, my vested interest here is one thing and one thing only: I want to enjoy scientific advances. My concern with religion is only so far as I perceive it to hold science back. For all I care, they could teach Sunday School in the public schools every day, so long as they don't undermine the teaching of science by teaching religion as if it were science.

[narby]

There is no scientific experiment that can be carried out, suggested, or provided, without employing intelligent design.

Oh! There goes Fester, off on the "man can design, therefore men were designed" circular argument.

How many times have you tried that Fester?

[Baraonda]

"Do you know what "theory" means in the context of science?"

Conventional definition of theory is not applicable to ToE since evolution is not science. Evolution is NOT a fact - it's all cooked up stuff.

[Dimensio]

What does the Darwinian THEORY explain!

It explains the existing diversity of life on earth and the fossil record, both in its configuration and the appearance of fossilized organisms that do not resemble any existing species of organisms, as well as the abscence of existing species of organisms appearing within the fossil record.

They are theories!

Evolution is a theory. I'm still waiting to hear someone justify ID as a theory.

You speak of predictions and hypotheses! Aren't those guesses?

Predictions are educated guesses as to what observations will occur based upon a specific test. Predictions are derived from theories, they are not themselves theories. Hypotheses are constructs to explain events that have not yet risen to the level of theory. And I didn't say anything about hypotheses before, so why did you claim that I did?