Yesterday, in Dover, Pennsylvania, logic and evidence prevailed over emotion and supposition. The Dover School Board's mandate that science teachers include a disclaimer giving, in essence, equal scientific weight to both Evolution and Intelligent Design was revealed for the fundamentalist Christian sham that it was, and overturned in court.

Driving home yesteday, I heard an NPR commentary (you can hear it for yourself) that, I think, considering the heatedness and stupidity of the debate, rather evenhandedly sums up my feelings.

The commentary was made by Lawrence Kraus, the Director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University. I have included his comments below in whole but please note that while I agree entirely with him, these words are the copyright of National Public Radio:

"Parents and students around the entire country are well served by a Judge's decision today that teaching Intelligent Design alongside Evolution in a Dover, PA high school science classroom violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. In a remarkable 139 page decision, the judge cut through confusions that have permeated much of the national debate thus far.

"Nationwide, an invented scientific controversy regarding Evolution is being used by those who innappropriately fear science on religious grounds as a rationale for attacking science itself.

"You see, science is based on falsifiable ideas that are subject to experimental tests. It is independent of questions of divine purpose. This does not make science immoral, it simply makes it different from religion. Neither encompasses all facets of the human experience and confusing this issue does a disservice to both science and theology, as theologians from St. Augustine onward have stressed.

"As a scientist, the legal issue in Dover was perhaps less important to me than the question of truth. The School Board was requiring teachers to lie to students about the nature of science. To thrive in a modern technological society, we owe it to our chilren to provide them the best scientific education we can. If a significant fraction of the public has doubts about Evolution, we simply have to do a better job teaching about it. The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance, but to overcome it.

"For example, recent studies have shown that 50% of the American public does not know that the earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do it. But if that's the case, does that mean we should teach the Earth-centric view of the solar system along with the correct view, the fact that the sun is at the center? At the same time, a significant fraction of the American public apparently believes the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, taking what appears to be a literal view of the Bible. Does that mean we shouldn't teach Astronomy or any of the other myriad bits of evidence that the Earth is, in fact, billions of years old? Obviously not.

"The Judge in Pennsylvania concluded with the statement that, "The students, parents and teachers of the Dover area school district deserve better than to be dragged into this legal malestrom." That may be true, but by doing so they have provided Judge Jones an opportunity to help the rest of the country move forward, not backward. For that, I thank him."

1. Cheesehead12/22/2005 11:07:19 AM

So much religious bigotry in the NPR quote, it seems a shame to diminish your site with this inappropriate drivel

2. Scott Good12/23/2005 08:11:38 AM
Homepage: http://www.scottgood.com

I have been reading the court's decision on this case (you can read it for yourself here), and it is fascinating reading.

One quick excerpt:

In summary, the disclaimer [which the Dover School Board had insisted be read in science classrooms before the teaching of evolution] singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.

Just a quick bit of a 139-page decision, but it is, in its entirety, carefully wrought and judiciously reasoned.

3. Scott Good12/23/2005 08:41:31 AM
Homepage: http://www.scottgood.com

Not that it isn't fairly self-evident the "intelligent" design is a thinly-veiled front for evangelical Christianity but, for the record, more from the record:

4. Whether ID is Science

After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that...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.