Intelligent Design Advocates Face Uphill Fight

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.

To be a scientific theory, the theory must be testable and falsifiable . . .

Not true. You are adding qualifications to the definition of "theory" that render it suitable to your personal views. Maybe it is because you do not like the idea that there is so much organized matter behaving according to predictable laws that you must define intelligent design out of the realm of scientific inquiry.

Besides, science is capable of recognizing the presence of organized matter, and the theory of intelligent design could easily be falsified by an overwhelming presence of disorganized matter and the absence of predictable laws.

ID has already been falsified by an overwhelming presence of facts on the other side. ID has already been exposed as a "scientific" fraud. That is the whole point of the judge's decision. The only basis for ID is religion. Period.

I find it amusing that the churchgoers are so adament in their defense of this religious creation. Most of the great scientists of the last 2 centuries believed in God and were no anti-religion. They just understood the maxim: leave unto Caesar, that which is Caesar's....

Religion and Science can peacefully co-exist, but religion cannot be taught in a government-funded classroom under the guise of being "science." Thank you founding fathers for the 1st Amendment.

The creator of the scientific method was Sir Isaac Newton. This is what he had to say;

"There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than any in profane history." -- Sir Isaac Newton

Here are some comments from other men intimately famliar with scientific method;

Albert Einstein -- "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man."
Alexander MacAlister, Biologist, Physiologist. He was Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge for many years. -- "It has been my experience that the disbelief in the revelation that God has given...is more prevalent among what I may call the camp followers of science than amongst those to whom science is the business of their lives."
Isaac Newton -- "This beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being...."
John Herschel, Astronomer. The son of William Herschel, he discovered over 500 nebulae. -- "All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more and more strongly the truths come on high and contained in the sacred writings."
John Polkinghorne, Physicist -- "By God's grace, we need hearts enlightened by the Lord Jesus Christ to understand reality."
Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph. The Morse code is named after him. The first message on the telegraph was: "What hath God wrought!" -- "The nearer I approach to the end of my pilgrimage, the clearer is the evidence of the divine origin of the Bible, the grandeur and sublimity of God's remedy for fallen man are more appreciated, and the future is illumined with hope and joy."
Alexander Polyakov, Physics Professor. -- "We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it."
William Thompson Kelvin, Physical Scientist, Mathematician, Inventor. Degrees Kelvin named after him. He held 21 honorary doctorate degrees. -- "With regard to the origin of life, science...positively affirms creative power."
Wernher von Braun -- "One of the most fundamental laws of natural science is that nothing in the physical world ever happens without a cause. There simply cannot be a creation without some kind of spiritual creator."

Nothing happens without a cause.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." -- John 1:1

"Science and faith are different. And attempting to confuse them benefits neither."

Of course they are. I am not confusing them.

I am stating that it is completely irrational and even psychotic for a scientist to hold a belief in God the Creator and then refuse to accept that God is relevant to science and Creation.

With God as the ultimate force, He must have a place in science since all paths will ultimately lead to Him.

I am a scientist, an engineer, a technologist and have been in R&D since 1983.

Just because God is the prime force does not mean we stop the science, raise our arms in the air and simply say "God did it" and stop the investigation. Quite the contrary, God encourages me to look deeper and gain more understanding about the workings of nature and to hypothesize how it all was achieved.

God is not magic. To some degree I believe we can understand how he did things. He put into place a system of natural laws that we have yet to come close to understanding.

God was a motivating force for Einstein's science as well, as he said "I want to know His (God's) thoughts. The rest are details."

So to exclude the idea that God was behind creation is irrational, and wholly unscientific. In science we do not rule out any possible solutions simply because our religion prevents us from believing in it. That is what atheists do. They automatically rule out God because their own beliefs cannot handle the concept.

God created us. We scientists must find out how He makes it all work, such as we can

"I'm willing to include God in science, as soon as you devise a way to test that theory and falsify it. Until then, it is belief and not science."

Tell me what science states that a system with initial conditions, @t=0, has zero energy yet suddenly at t=1 millisec, explodes into a system with all the energy contained by our current universe, without any external energy applied?

That formula does not exist. It is nonsensical. There was a creative force for our universe. Energy came from somewhere for some reason outside the bounds of our currently defined universe.

Do you know that science has lately discovered that up to 10, possibly 11, dimensions may exist? We live in only 4 of them.

Can you tell me that in the remaining 6 dimensions there may not be an intelligence? If we have intelligence in our current 4 dimensions, why would it be inconceivable that the other 6 not also have intelligence?

Can you tell me that the source of the energy in our current 4 dimensions may not have originated from any of the other 6? No. It is the only possible source of the energy that we know of now.

Can you tell me that the intelligence (that is more likely than not to exist) in the other 6 dimensions was not responsible for our universe? Nor can I. But I certainly cannot rule it out. It must remain a hypothesis until more advanced science can test it out.

Tell me an ID does not exist in the other 6 dimensions and I will call you a fool, and I will certainly call you very unscientific. An ID may not exist in those other 6 dimensions, but you cannot scientifically exclude the hypothesis.

BTW: It is believed that those other 6 dimensions include additional dimensions of time. Thus, time would comprise a surface, or even a 3-dimensional space in which it is possible to move about, forward and back, and sideways. That would be consistent with the Bible however, so we cannot allow "science" to conceive of such possibilities, can we?

BTW2: In those other dimensions of time, should life of some form exist, then it would be eternal life, though it may have zero dimensions in mass (i.e. spirit). (another Biblical reference).

BTW3: Magnetic and electric fields (also strong, weak) have zero dimensions in mass. They have no matter. Those fields, in a way, do not exist in our 3 dimensions of space, but they do effect matter that does exist in our dimensions. We know of the fields only because we can measure their effects on matter. They can be said to be of the same form as "spirits". No mass but able to affect matter, and able to carry information.

"God is a spirit" said Jesus Christ.

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