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.
