Posted on 10/07/2005 7:23:15 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
To keep this all in one daily thread, here are links to two articles in the York Daily Record (with excerpts from each), which has been doing a great job of reporting on the trial:
Forrest cross-examination a rambling wonder.
About the time that Richard Thompson, head law guy at the Thomas More center and chief defender of the Dover Area School Board, started his third year of cross-examination of philosopher Barbara Forrest, it was easy to imagine that at that moment, everyone in the courtroom, including Forrest, who doesn’t believe in God, was violating the separation of church and court by appealing to God for it to please, Lord, just stop.It wouldn’t have been so bad if there was a point to the ceaseless stream of questions from Thompson designed to elicit Lord knows what. He’d ask her the same question 18 different times, expecting, I guess, a different answer at some point. And he never got it.
Thompson, who said he’s a former prosecutor, should have known better. Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and expert on the history of the intelligent design creationist movement, was a lot smarter than, say, some poor, dumb criminal defendant.
Here is a summation of Forrest’s testimony: She examined the history of the intelligent design movement and concluded that it’s simply another name for creationism. And what led her to that conclusion? The movement leader’s own words. They started out with a religious proposition and sought to clothe it in science. The result was similar to putting a suit on your dog.
[anip]
Thompson was in the midst of asking Forrest whether she had heard a bunch of things that some people had said to indicate, well, to indicate whether she’d heard a bunch of things that some people had said, I guess, when the topic came up.
Thompson asked whether she had ever heard a statement by some guy — frankly, this one caught me off-guard and I didn’t catch the guy’s name — who said that belief in evolution can be used to justify “cross-species sex.”
This came on the same day that Thompson grilled Forrest about her opposition to the so-called Santorum amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act that seemed to encourage, sort of, the teaching of intelligent design. Our U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum is a friend of the intelligent design people.
He also has a strange obsession with bestiality, commenting that court decisions that uphold the right to privacy would lead to — naturally, and you know you were thinking it — man-on-dog sex.
Dover science teachers testified that they fought references to intelligent design.
Defense attorney Richard Thompson [he represents the school board] said differing opinions on whether teachers and administration worked in cooperation to create the Dover Area School District’s statement on intelligent design comes down to perspective.
Spelling, grammar, English are just as important as science in the real world.
I would have loved a history of science class in high school. But it's not science itself. I do recall managing to get through high school -- a private prep school no less, with fours years of hard science and five years of math -- and not learning anything about scientific methodology.
I was surprised in college by the amount of rigor required to conduct the simplest experiment or even to gather observational data.
So I am not surprised that people become enamored of ideologies that bypass the evidence collection stage and simply announce their conclusions to willing ears.
That would include Behe, Dembski and Denton, the major players in the ID game.
"So I am not surprised that people become enamored of ideologies that bypass the evidence collection stage and simply announce their conclusions to willing ears."
I couldn't agree more. I think it is very important to show students HOW something became to be accepted. Stress the scientific method and explain how testing evidence works. Don't just throw a book in front of students and have them read basically someone's opinion. Teach them how to perform the tests themselves, then maybe they would really learn about science.
Were you under the impression that ID advocates don't accept the general facts of evolution, including common descent?
Well, why quit at that? Why not have each student develop as long a list of brand new theories they make up themselves? You don't want them growing up to be toadies of tiresome pre-existing crackpot theories do you? Pre-existing crackpot theories are just as establishment-boring as music, science, grammar, math and history classes, really, why fetter our children's imaginations?
In my high school that was what we did in ninth grade. However, it's a difficult concept, and I took a long time to understand the ramifications.
Sure. But we didn't let the Communists pick the curriculum. We didn't give Communists "equal time". We didn't let them make our school "teach the controversy" and present the Communists' propaganda about their own system. We didn't have "debates" between Communists and Capitalists.
Are you saying all in the scientific community have no arguments with the TOE?
They have arguments about some of the details, sure, but not about the fundamentals.
I doubt that is what you are saying because it isn't true
In the way the creationists mean it, it's *not* true.
and I'm sure you are also just seeking the truth.
Indeed, which is why I feel strongly about not letting misrepresentations and propaganda masquerade as science.
Now that I've answered *your* questions, why don't you answer the ones I asked you first?
"Why not have each student develop as long a list of brand new theories they make up themselves? "
They can call it *Whole Science*; it will fit in great with Whole Math or Whole Language.
...and this is your sober, dispassionate assessment, of course.
What a good idea...maybe we should also have them make up the rules of grammar and musical notation and formal mathematics for themselves. Obviously, anything it took our best minds 400 years of painstaking labor to produce ought to be easy enough to duplicate in a secondary school in a few class hours.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/re1/chapter6.asp
There are some still out there who don't see the evidence pointing to humans descending from apes. I agree with them. I would want my children to have the same choice.
Michael Denton, Nature's Destiny
"it is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science - that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes.This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called "special creationist school". According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving the suspension of natural law.
Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world - that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies."
I don't know what you mean. I didn't intend to "dismiss" the fossil record--how could I "dismiss" it? In fact I mention it mostly to say that it can't tell us whether or not biochemical systems evolved by a Darwinian mechanism. My book concentrates entirely on Darwin's mechanism, and simply takes for granted common descent.
Those people are not at the dover trial, and they are mostly young earth creationists. The main ID advocates accept common descent.
What is the point of ID if they accept common descent? What are they arguing about then?
Interesting question. I've been trying for a couple of months to get a FReeper advocate of ID to answer that question. ID is a conjecture within mainstream science. but not yet a hypothesis.
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