As I'll post in a follow-up, the Dover lawyers fought like demons to keep this testimony out of the court record; it's (IMHO) a devastating blow to the 'ID is science' case.
I hope those ID people don't think St Peter is as dumb as the people they're selling books to.
Another column from the very amusing Mr. Argento.
Dover trial, horns (or lack thereof) and all
MIKE ARGENTO
Thursday, October 6, 2005
HARRISBURG — Along about the 658th hour of Dr. Barbara Forrest's stay on the witness stand, during Day Six of the Dover Panda Trial, I started looking for her horns. Never did see them.
It was right about the time that defense lawyer Richard Thompson was repeatedly asking about her various memberships in such seditious, treasonous and just plain evil organizations as the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association and the ACLU that it occurred to me to look for her horns.
They weren't there.
Now, it could be that she was hiding her tail under her trim black pantsuit, but frankly, I didn't really look.
The defense tried very hard to keep Forrest, a philosophy professor from Southeastern Louisiana University, from testifying by portraying her as being in league with the devil. The defense had a pretty good stake in keeping her off the stand. She is probably the foremost expert on the genesis, such as it is, of the movement to introduce unsuspecting kids to the idea of intelligent design creationism and, through that, to overturn our very idea of what science is and what it does.
But before asking her about that, Thompson wanted to probe her membership in the American Civil Liberties Union.
"When did you become a card-carrying member of the ACLU?" Thompson asked in a tone that suggested that such membership put her in league with Satan and the forces of evil.
Not just a member. "A card-carrying member."
Forrest answered that she joined the organization in 1979 because she believes in the Constitution and the ACLU defends that vital document.
Thompson then asked whether she supports everything the ACLU does.
Forrest said she believes in defending the Constitution.
And then Thompson asked whether she knew whether the ACLU has defended child porn as protected speech under the First Amendment.
Before Forrest could answer, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, Eric Rothschild, rose and objected on the grounds of relevance. In other words, his objection was, essentially, what does this have to do with anything?
The judge cut Thompson off.
Which was too bad because the way it was going, I figured Thompson's next question would be something on the order of, don't you and your friends get together to watch snuff films while snacking on aborted fetuses?
It didn't get that far.
It did get into a discussion about logical fallacies, which was interesting because while accusing Forrest of committing logical fallacies, Thompson committed some himself.
So in addition to providing lessons in critical thinking and philosophy, the participants — Thompson, mostly — provided a literary lesson, giving the audience an ample dose of irony.
See, while he was accusing of Forrest of employing an ad hominem argument — an argument in which you don't address the merits of the issue under debate and attack the messenger instead — he was employing an ad hominem argument.
What great fallacy did Forrest commit?
Near as I can tell, she used the words of the people who came up with the idea of intelligent design to show that it's a religious idea — one based on a narrow view of Christianity — and not a scientific one.
She used their own words against them.
Evil, evil woman.
Using one's own words against him is not, in and of itself, an ad hominem argument. The words can be used that way, but if they speak for themselves, it's not ad hominem.
Now, if I were to call Thompson a doody head, that would be an ad hominem argument.
Forrest described the intelligent design movement's "wedge strategy," described in a document that the intelligent design people wrote, cleverly titled "The Wedge."
At one point, an attorney for the defense asked her whether she knew that that document was intended to raise money, that it was part of a fundraising plea. Forrest didn't know.
But by asking, was the defense saying that the intelligent design people had portrayed their theory as a religious idea just to get money out of people? Were they saying that they intended to prey upon people's faith to get them to open their checkbooks? Were they saying that it's OK to say anything when you're trying to wrest dollars from an unsuspecting public?
At the end of her direct testimony, it was clear how the so-called theory of intelligent design came about. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that teaching creationism in public schools was unconstitutional. The people who wanted to teach creationism in public schools — people who believe teaching science in general and evolution in particular is responsible for all of society's ills — had to come up with something else.
So they thought about it and rubbed a few brain cells together and came up with intelligent design.
Now, they admit, they have no theory and they don't really have anything in the way of science on their side.
Essentially, what they did was take their creationist literature and replace the word "creationism" with the phrase "intelligent design."
Really.
So in addition to committing sloppy scholarship, Forrest's testimony suggested they were lazy, too.
At one point, Forrest pointed out a document in which one of the authors of the intelligent design nontheory posited that belief in evolution leads to belief in, among other things, Scientology.
So that's what's wrong with Tom Cruise?
And now, for today's Moonie reference.
One of the founding fathers of intelligent design, Jonathan Wells, went to school to study biology and dedicate his life to bringing down Darwin after being urged to do so by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Couldn't he have just sold flowers at the airport like the rest of them? It would have saved us all a lot of trouble.
But...but....good Christians would never lie about their intent....
Interesting article from about 1o months ago
http://ydr.com/story/reader/53566/
ACLU won’t put Darwin on trial
DAVE DENTEL
Sunday, December 26, 2004
So the Dover Area school board’s decision to challenge evolution by requiring the teaching of intelligent design has — as many people warned — provoked a lawsuit, one that the district is not likely to win.
By ruling in other cases that theories contrary to Darwin’s theory of how life developed “lacks a clear secular purpose” in regards to public education, the Supreme Court has established a legal doctrine that American Civil Liberties Union lawyers are sure to seize upon in the Dover case.
It’s a pity, really, because instead of addressing the facts about science, all the ACLU has to do is show how Darwinism conforms to the prevailing secular dogma — and argue that intelligent design is likely to stir up trouble in public schools by invoking the divine and the miraculous.
The irony is that some of the parents who sued the Dover Area School District said they were worried that under the proposed curriculum students would not be taught “sound science.” And yet, in a trial focusing on science and which theory best fit the facts, it’s the Darwinists who would be put on the defensive.
Indeed, for some scientists (albeit what Time magazine characterizes as “tiny pockets” within the scientific community), the basic arguments supporting the theory that life arose by a happy accident in a cosmos ruled by chaos simply don’t stand up. What’s more, when building a case for intelligent design, its supporters draw from discoveries across a range of scientific disciplines.
These scientists point to cosmology and the Big Bang theory, which holds that the universe suddenly burst forth, in the beginning, from what can only be described as some unfathomable source of creative energy. They point to physics, which declare that the basic forces that hold the universe together (and make it suitable for life) are fine-tuned with a mathematical precision that defies belief. They gape at the massive amounts of genetic information filed away inside every single living cell, then take a closer look and ask how anything so complex and perfectly ordered could be formed by a gradual, random process.
Now, it’s not as though Darwinists are unaware of these grand enigmas or that they fail to feel a sense of awe when confronted with the mysteries of the universe. In fact, many people who believe in evolution have found a way to reconcile the theory with their own religious faith.
But when it comes down to it, the usual response of present-day science to extraordinary phenomena that some would say point to God, is either to relegate it to the “soft” disciplines of philosophy and theology, or simply to ignore it.
After all, science as it is currently defined deals only with material things and processes. Anything that smacks of the miraculous, then, is of no scientific consequence. It doesn’t exist.
So denial serves as a useful tool for many Darwinists. When confronted with the reality of human consciousness, for instance, they vaguely assert that it must be something that emerges when brains reach a certain size, or they pretend it isn’t there.
One school of thought among Darwinists holds that what we perceive as consciousness, that yearning to understand why we are here and how we should live, is just an illusion, a byproduct of an organ whose only function is to make sure our physical bodies survive long enough to reproduce. As MIT’s Marvin Minsky famously put it, the human mind is nothing more than “a computer made of meat.”
Other glaring flaws in Darwinism follow a similar strain. Its adherents can’t produce all the facts they need to bolster their case, so they trot out absurd assertions that they trust can’t really be disproved. So in the end Darwinism draws its strength not from rigid scientific truth, but by offering a rather vague philosophical catch-all.
This may seem a rather blatant accusation, but it is echoed even by Darwinists themselves.
Consider the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. A popular champion of modern Darwinism and a pop-culture icon (he was depicted on an episode of “The Simpsons”), he also came to criticize some of the orthodoxies of the theory.
This is not to suggest that he rejected evolution. His reflections are more like those of an aging bishop who candidly confesses to problems within the faith.
But in an article published this year by Scientific American, Gould seems to be stating that he believes in Darwinism despite what he knows about the facts.
Gould’s criticisms are actually quite damaging. He can offer no explanation of how life first emerged, other than to say that geology seems to hint at its “inevitability.” He declares the fossil record woefully inadequate for showing how various species developed, and that fossils for higher life forms “do not even constitute an evolutionary series.” He suggests that evolution is not a constant, gradual process but instead occurs in “quick and quirky episodes.” He argues that there is no reason to believe that evolution moves automatically toward more complex life forms, and that natural selection often is overrated and misused as an explanation for how or why evolution occurs. He says the truth is that evolution is so random that there is no way to predict how life forms ultimately will develop.
Gould feels free to make these statements and then insist that Darwinism holds true. And yet he knew full well, as various York College instructors pointed out in denouncing Dover’s proposed intelligent design curriculum, that science is supposed to concern itself with facts that are “testable, reproducible and observable.”
But if life is nothing more than a cosmic lottery, it’s hard to see how it can be studied as science. And how does one conduct a controlled experiment for randomness?
Gould ended his article by calling for a rethinking of what he labeled the icons of evolution. Prominent intelligent design advocate Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute in Seattle uses similar language in his criticism of Darwinism.
Does that mean there’s common ground here? Not really, because what’s at issue isn’t the scientific method, or even fossils, field studies and ancient rocks. No, the debate in Dover (and in some 40 other states around the country where Darwinism is being challenged) ultimately has to do with picking an official philosophy of origins.
The science of life, it seems, can’t be taught without making some references to design and purpose — or the lack thereof. And if it’s one particular philosophy that earns teachers their paychecks and gets scientists grant renewal, then there really isn’t much incentive to explore the others — no matter how much religious dissenters might complain. Scientific materialism wins.
Still, it’s worthwhile to consider what law professor Phillip Johnson had to say on the subject. Johnson wrote: “Any true metaphysical theory must account for two essential truths which materialism cannot accommodate: first, that mind is more than matter; and second, that such things as truth, beauty and goodness really do exist even if most people do not know how to recognize them.”
Just don’t expect these essentials to be addressed in science class.
Dave Dentel is a copy editor for the York Daily Record/Sunday News,
It really makes no difference where the ID "movement's" roots are in evaluating the substance of their argument. When are we going to learn that an ad hominem argument is not logically valid.
