The verdict in the Dover intelligent-design trial is in! To nobody’s surprise, it’s a rout.
HARRISBURG, Pa. – “Intelligent design” is “a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory” and cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.
Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said.
“We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom,” he wrote in his 139-page opinion. “The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy,” Jones wrote, adding that several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs.
Judge Jones’s opinion is online (pdf); commentary from PZ and Ed Brayton. Overall, a huge, unambiguous win: not only were the creationists shot down, but their religious and anti-science agenda was made perfectly clear.
Not that the battles are over just yet. DarkSyde has an interview with Chris Mooney about his book The Republican War on Science. We have a long way to go, but it’s nice to win one decisively once in a while.
Mark: I have no agenda here, nor any knowledge of the Discovery Institute, but I have a problem with accepting the notion that anything in this world, including scientific method, is so monolithically integrated and independent of its environment that it’s incapable of adaptation.
The strength of the hypothesis-prediction-testing-observation chain is questionable (IMO). How do we protect observation from paradigm-contamination? How do we deal with predictions that can’t be meaningfully tested because observation alters results? And what do we do with hypotheses (dealing with unavoidable subjects) that are mathematically sound but are incapable of making testable predictions?
The problem with this explanation is that it leaves us with a “transcendent God that exists out of time”- in other words, it is no explanation at all, but simply the positing of a rug we may not look under.
For a solution that doesn’t involve eternal Gods, or an infinite stack of turtles, check out my exclusive interview with the Designer of God, Mrs. Tibbit.
Zilch: Good interview. Strange situation, though – both believers and non-believers in God and Tibbit are still awaiting the advent of reason.
Meanwhile, if, however unlikely it may seem, ID should eventually pass the science criteria, which would take precedence – upholding a law based on good political reasoning or upholding the truth? (assuming bona fide science is truth)
I still don’t get why there is anything wrong with a theory that has a great body of circumstantial evidence behind it, and absolutely no conclusive proof against it. I don’t understand why we as scientists pan the idea of intelligent design. The fact is, we really have no idea what’s out there.
In my opinion, it is impossible to completely discard the idea of intelligent design. Though I’m not a creation activist, I am forced to admit that:
a)There is no scientific reason to reject the possibility of the existence of a higher power. No, we cannot conclusively measure it or quantify its existence. But quantum mechanics arrived a long time ago, and hardly anyone believes in limitless powers of observation anymore. In other words, the fact that we can’t measure it does not mean it doesn’t exist. There are a lot of things we can’t measure that are certainly real enough… the other side of the event horizon comes to mind. (And according to many physicists, reality includes such mysteries as M-theory, the Higgs boson, et cetera.)
b) The theory makes sense. Having a higher power create the universe certainly solves a lot of problems; it makes the entire question of origin a great deal simpler. How did penguins survive more than one generation in Antarctica before they evolved the group dynamics to form a working relationship between the mother and father for the survival of the chick? If we accept the possibility of intelligent design, it is obvious that the birds were created for life in Antarctica. There is no mental gymnastics, trying to fit the observed world with a certain theory.
I am not a religious fanatic, and I try to be scientific. But the face of science is changing, and what was once considered the hobby of dreamers is now accepted fact. What would Galileo, with his rigid adherance to the experimental method, think of what is now modern science? Newton might or might not be ready for relativity. And we might or might not be ready for what very well may be out there.