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Federal Judge Rules Against Intelligent Design
evil agent writes "CNN is reporting that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III has ruled that Intelligent Design cannot be discussed in Dover, Pennsylvania biology classes. Dover Area School Board members had previously mandated that Intelligent Design be included in the biology curriculum. According to the judge, 'our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.'" Update: 12/20 23:40 GMT by J : eSkeptic has a look back at the trial and what led to it. And the Discovery Institute has issued a press release.
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This case won't be appealed. The school board that introduced Intelligent Design in Dover was unceremoniously dumped on its ass at the last election, and the incoming board has made it clear that it would not appeal a ruling in the ACLU's favor.
Nor, for that matter, would the main ID advocates want this case appealed. The Discovery Institute pulled its support early on, for instance. Sophisticated ID advocacy requires that the public face of the movement be very quiet about its religious motivations, for fear of exactly what happened in Kitzmiller. The old Dover school board was unsophisticated, and much too blatant about its purely religious motivations.
ID advocates have seen Kitzmiller as a disastrous airing of their dirty laundry from fairly early on; the only thing surprising about this ruling is its refreshing breadth, depth, and clarity.
I find it much easier to believe in evolution than to believe that God went through this elaborate lie to trick us. I mean faking a fossil record is one thing but creating the universe with light already in transit so the stars would look like they're been there for billions of years?? Or creating the image of a supernova such that we would think that it exploded billions of years ago but didn't really?
Come on. Get a grip. I believe in God but I cant believe he's a coniving trickster that the fundamentalists seem to think he must be.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
We both permit and support the education our children receive in our area's public school system. IMHO, they're doing a pretty fair job.
We both teach our children what we believe. Our children know that we're speaking about our beliefs, even when we speak of them as facts.
We made sure our kids were capable of critical thought, judgement and self-determination in the area of beliefs. They have their own (for the record, two have ended up Catholic, one agnostic, one athiest - the jury's still out on the youngest two, but they're leaning toward agnostic and Jewish).
If I believe a thing to be true, wouldn't not sharing that with my children be abuse?
Physical property X can vary from Y to Z but it doesn't. Slightest variation in X would preclude life.
Ex: Boiling point of water, melting point of ice, enzymatic reactions, patterns of moulcules and crystals, etc....
2. Hypothesis
Possibly, some external stimulus is arranging the observed phenomena to ensure a suitable environment to enable life to exist.
3. Experiment
Like gravity, we are still looking for answers on how it works at the physical level and how to verify.
4. Results
...see 3.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
The desktop computer I have today has evolved over the last 30+ years.
You mean designed, right? Or did you really mean that some pdp-11s had sex and gave birth to a pdp-12?
What one might consider a computer 100 years ago most certainly bears no resembelence to what we have today.
That's right. 100 years ago, computer was a job title.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The opposite of "a religious person" is not "an atheist".
What makes someone religious is their blind acceptance of some dogma. Faith defines religion - belief without or even contrary to evidence or reason. Many Buddhists are atheists and yet still religious people because they follow the doctrine of their religion without question.
What makes someone atheist is not believing in God(s). As it happens this is the default position of someone who is not religious, as without observed evidence of logical proof, it is irrational to believe in God(s). I myself held this position for the majority of my life. But it's possible to be a non-religious theist, if you've got a sound argument for the existence of God.
Myself, I find that speaking of God makes perfect sense if you see it as speaking of the universe anthropomorphically. My beliefs are not fundamentally different from an atheist's, but suddenly I can understand theists statements about God in a way which not only means something, but quite often produces true statements on the theists parts. Seen in this way, a proof of God's existence is just a proof of the universe's existence, which is trivial as the universe is "all that which exists".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The examples proffered by ID advocates are certainly interesting examples, but the problem is their lack of integrity in assuming they can "prove" natural selection did not cause them. That lack of integrity threatens science by letting all sorts of sloppy discourse into the pool of scientific ideas.
They set up some arbitrary criterion (like "irreducible complexity"), claim a particular example meets that criterion, then claim that supports their alternative theory.
The flaw is that "irreducible complexity" does not imply "could not have arised by natural selection", just "could not have arisen through some *straightforward* process of evolution."
Nature is big enough and has been around long enough that there is a good likelihood that some things will exist that have not left enough evidence behind to determine their natural origins. The fact that we don't have, for instance, hard evidence of the genealogy of the Japanese emperors does not mean we accept that they arose from the Sun god. We might be able to figure out that they came from Korea because of similar customs, or whatever, but we also might never figure it out.
In a similar way, we might NEVER figure out, for example, exactly how DNA became the genetic material of choice. That's not evidence in favor of ID or against evolution, its a lack of evidence for anything. We can HOPE to get enough indirect evidence to make a compelling case, but we might not get what we want.
There is the scientific theory of electro-magnatism. Do you dispute that electricity is a fact? Isn't it a fact that electricity powers light bulbs?
No - it is NOT a theory. A defining characteristic of a theory is that it must be falsifiable. ID is NOT falsifiable - so it can not be described as a "theory". It is, best described, perhaps, as a "crackpot theory". Or alternatively, we'd be kind, and say it is "conjecture", "speculation", or "a poor answer to a question which doesn't exist", or any other non-scientific concept.
I'm encouraged to see some sense coming out of a US court on this topic: there's hope for the USA yet!
Be nice if you could learn to spell. The word is "DEFINITELY"!
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
It posits a God with a sense of aesthetics.
This God finds the idea of presto! creation cheap and unattractive.
Any child can fashion a man from mud and then breathe on it. Even though this is the medium he must work in, he does what he can to imply the possibility of something much more elegant. A creative process which starts with molecular seeds, an intricate plan, and a dream.
Perhaps this is that God's way of telling us he, too believes in God. A God who created him/her but remains hidden.