Today is the first day of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District.
Back in 2004, the Dover school board held a series of meetings in which
they discussed putting creationism into the science classes. Former
board member Bill Buckingham was reported to have said, “Two thousand
years ago, someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for
him?” Later, Buckingham vehemently denied making that statement in
discussion of the science curricula. The school board first approved
the acceptance of nearly sixty copies of the “intelligent design”
textbook, Of Pandas and People (OPAP), for the school
library. They then also adopted an “intelligent design policy”, that
was to inform the students in ninth-grade science classes about
“intelligent design” and the availability of OPAP in the library.
Following this, several parents sued the DASD over the “intelligent
design policy”. After several months of discovery, depositions, and
other legal paperwork, the suit is now ready for trial.
The defense attorney would like people to believe this is a case about freedom of thought and liberalism.
"This case is about free inquiry in education, not about a religious
agenda," argued Patrick Gillen of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann
Arbor, Mich. "Dover's modest curriculum change embodies the essence of
liberal education." The center, which lobbies for what it sees as the
religious freedom of Christians, is defending the school district.
While the challenger puts his case this way
"They did everything you would do if you wanted to incorporate a
religious point of view in science class and cared nothing about its
scientific validity," said Eric Rothschild, an attorney representing
eight families who are challenging the decision of the Dover Area
School District.
Well that pretty much sums things up. Do we want science taught in Science class or should we just make stuff up and teach people that? Of course the problem is that the supporters of "Intelligent Design" are attempting to get around the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by presenting this religious proposition as science, not religion.
Alternative science, that is, as if there were such a thing.
But to do so, the would have to show that Intelligent Design really is an alternative theory within the scientific community. But there are some obstacles to this.
Brown University professor Kenneth Miller, the first witness called by
the plaintiffs, said pieces of the theory of evolution are subject to
debate, such as where gender comes from, but told the court: "There is
no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary
theory."
On the other hand, he said, "Intelligent design is not a testable
theory in any sense and as such it is not accepted by the scientific
community."
Um, yep, that's one of the obstacles. Of course, supporters of ID will attempt to subvert this testimony by calling up "Scientists" who will claim ID is for real. Now if I were running things for the challengers I would call to the stand Rusty Carter.
Who's Rusty Carter?
Rusty Carter owns a company called Biblically Correct which hosts tours of natural history museums for kids. But as the tour guide, he puts his own spin on what it is they are seeing. Rusty doesn't deny the existence of Dinosaurs, he just fits them into his interpretation of the Bible's historical context.
God made dinosaurs on the sixth day of Creation,
the same day he made people, according to Rusty Carter's interpretation
of the Bible.
"The word 'dinosaur' was not invented back then, but in Job 38, there's two large creatures, behemoth and leviathan..."
And, of course, they made it onto Noah's Ark because
all the animals did. He
suspects Noah brought baby dinosaurs
Right. But how did the Dinosaurs die?
the creatures succumbed to overhunting or climate change.
Rusty and his colleagues are just trying to add a little "liberalism" to their science curriculum
"There's a lot of people asking questions about science," Carter said.
Tour leaders say they're trying to point out flaws in the "so-called science" of evolution, which contradicts their own understanding of Creation
As if putting dinosaurs on the Ark and having them killed off by overhunting isn't a flaw.
"Intelligent" Design indeed.
One of the things that a scientific theory must be able to do is allow scientists to predict results. So, for instance,
When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact
order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a
chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96
percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more
than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins.
But
decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just
refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let
them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.
If
Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to
perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from
evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of
harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations
in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.
"That's
a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in
the chimp project.
Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues
tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit
perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.
Intelligent Design has not, and can not predict anything. More importantly, you can not disprove the theory which is another fundamental aspect of science.
Without being able to do these two things, predict and disprove, at a minimum, it isn't science.
But clearly, the School Board in Dover, and Rusty Carter, missed that day in science class.
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