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.
Ping for later
I'm in tears after reading this! I nearly wet my pants!
This is the way to put an end to this Creationism/ID crap -- laugh it to death! Treat it as the intellectual joke that it is, and don't spare the rod!
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.It wasn't just a piece of overheated fundraising copy. That text was lifted whole from the Discovery Institute's (CRSC) About page, as it existed for the first two years of the CRSC's existence (which is still available at The Wayback Machine)...
THE proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed human beings not as eternal and accountable beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by chance and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and music.
The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. ... etc. etc. yadda yadda yadda