Last night on the PBS Newshour, the head of the Thomas More Law Center said this:
"RICHARD THOMPSON: Well, first of all [ID is] a scientific theory and therefore it's proper to be in the science class. After all, all the Dover area school board did was make students aware that there is a controversy in this area and that there is an alternative theory, and that's the theory of intelligent design. This judge should not place himself in the position of determining which scientific theory is valid and which is not. A thousand decisions is not going to change the law of gravity, nor is a thousand judicial decisions going to determine whether intelligent design is a valid theory. That should be left up to the scientists. It should be left up to the debate that the scientific community was involved with." http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/july-dec05/design_12-20.html Doesn't this go beyond spin and amount to blatant misrepresentation? After all, Judge Jones did not find that ID is not a valid scientific theory, he found it is not science, period. (I reproduce the judge's summary of this finding below.) This may seem a picky semantic distinction, but I don't think it is, and I don't believe Thompson thinks it is either. If Thompson wanted to explain to his viewers why ID *is* science -- i.e., on what basis he disagrees with the judge's analysis regarding scientific method, logic, testing, and peer review -- that would have been one thing. And it would have been a much steeper challenge. Instead, by inserting an illegitimate premise and telling viewers (the vast majority of whom will not read any part of the opinion) that the decision was about a judge arbitrarily choosing between theories that are actively competing within the marketplace of legitimate science, rather than about science vs. non-science, it seems to me the defendant's counsel deftly undermines the credibility of the judge and the decision in the public mind. And such attacks from the right, aimed at distorting and oversimplifying judicial work, are part of a pattern with which we've all become familiar. Steve Sanders >From the opinion at 64: "After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research." _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
