Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

But the IDers are all barmy according to c.i. and Lola.Having no common sense is barmy isn't it.

How can the barmy side win anywhere?That's barmy.

Scopes, 2005: 'Design' Theory Faces Legal Test
Scopes, 2005: 'Design' Theory Faces Legal Test
By SUZANNE SATALINE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 22, 2005; Page B1

Debates about the boundaries of science and religion that marked the famous Scopes trial in 1925 are likely to unfold next week at a Harrisburg, Pa., federal courthouse in the first legal test of an anti-evolution doctrine known as "intelligent design."

Aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, 11 parents of Dover, Pa., schoolchildren have filed a federal lawsuit against that town's school board, accusing it of violating the principle of separation of church and state. The school board requires that at the beginning of the 9th grade unit on evolution, teachers are supposed to read a statement to a biology class: "Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact...Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view."

Science teachers balked and many Dover parents were angered as well. The plaintiffs are asking the court to void the intelligent-design policy in the class.

The intelligent-design doctrine asserts that some natural processes are so complex and ingenious that they must have been created by an intelligent or supernatural cause -- perhaps God -- rather than the randomness of natural selection.

Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District is expected to draw national media attention as well as expert witnesses from Brown University and other prominent institutions. The trial, slated to last five weeks, will be monitored by scientists, educators and politicians around the country. The trial will not be televised.

The outcome is likely to influence state school boards in Kansas and Ohio, which have moved toward allowing teachers to critique Darwin's theory, as well as policies in many individual school districts. "The results of the Dover trial will be extremely significant for American public school education," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the nonprofit National Center for Science Education, based in California, an organization that advocates teaching evolution and advised the plaintiff's team on science matters.

"If the judge rules in favor of the plaintiffs, then this will truly throw sand in the gears of efforts to get intelligent design taught at the high school level," said Ms. Scott. "If the judge rules...for the district, I think this will give a green light to school districts that would like to introduce some form of creationism in the classroom."

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the leading backers of intelligent design, say they are delving into scientific mysteries to explain such biological developments as the workings of cells. "We don't say God designed," said John West, associate director for the institute's Center for Science and Culture. "It's not about trying to reconcile science with some religious text. It's about this longstanding question in biology about the appearance of design."

The trial also has potential ramifications for public higher education, where the evolution-creation dispute is heating up. The University of California at Berkeley faces a lawsuit from students at Christian private schools who say they can't go to the prestigious campus because the science courses they took -- based on anti-evolution textbooks -- don't fulfill its admission requirements. At Ohio State University, a review of a doctoral dissertation in science education by an intelligent-design proponent was put on hold this spring after faculty protests. And at Iowa State University, where a faculty member who teaches astronomy wrote a book contending that the Earth must have been created by design, more than 120 faculty signed a petition this year saying that intelligent design is not science.

Critics of intelligent design, who include most mainstream biologists, say it is religion masquerading as science -- essentially, the latest evolution of creationism. But Christian educators and intelligent-design backers were heartened last month when President Bush said that both sides of the origins debate should be taught. "It is a legitimate controversy among scientists and credible scientists believe that intelligent design is a better explanation for complex biological systems than we have seen," said Richard Thompson, defense attorney for the Dover school board and chief counsel with the not-for-profit Christian law group, the Thomas More Law Center.

The Dover Area School District was the first in the nation to include a mention of intelligent design in the science curriculum. For now, the theory isn't actually taught.

"The intent [by Dover officials] is to systematically destroy the theory of evolution because the theory tells the students we came from monkeys," said plaintiff Bryan Rehm, who has a daughter in ninth grade at Dover High. "According to them we didn't come from monkeys. God made us as the way we are today...That's fine, but that's not science. That's the book of Genesis. And the last time I checked, the Bible is still a religious text."

The jury at the carnival-esque Scopes trial in 1925 supported a Tennessee law making it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible." But the legal tide since has not been kind to evolution opponents. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the last of the Scopes-type anti-evolution laws in Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968, and lower courts followed suit in scuttling so-called "equal time" laws that required schools to teach creation science. In January, a federal court ordered Cobb County, Ga., to remove evolution warning labels on biology texts, saying they had "an impermissible effect" of promoting religion. That decision is on appeal.

Nevertheless, the anti-evolution forces have pressed on. The Kansas Board of Education voted in August to include greater criticism of evolution in its school-science standards -- which lists all aspects of the subject teachers should present. An outside academic agency is reviewing the proposed curriculum and it comes up for a vote in October. In 2002, Ohio adopted science standards requiring students to examine criticisms of biological evolution.

Opponents of intelligent design are monitoring several school districts in New Mexico, including Rio Rancho, where the school board agreed recently to allow evolution alternatives to be broached in class. Efforts to change science standards have also sprung up in school districts in Maryland, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Mr. Rehm, the Dover parent, and a former Dover physics teacher, said either way, no one in his community wins.

"If the school board gets it in its favor, we've got one more place in the country where kids aren't getting an acceptable science education," Mr. Rehm said. "And if we win, the school board gets stuck footing the bill" for legal expenses.

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Re: Scopes, 2005: 'Design' Theory Faces Legal Test


This is an interesting case as well.

You would think that one of the reasons Berkeley is known as a 'prestigious campus' is because of its high academic standards. Something they have achieved with rigorous admissions requirements.

rosborne, It's more than interesting; it would potentially become a national class action suit between christian private schools and public schools. If christian private schools win, our country losses; our science courses will fall further behind in this world of economic competition.

c.i.

How do you arrive at such a sweeping conclusion?
Your "country" as you call it is a coalition just like all other countries. Various centres will contribute different things to it. Suppose food producing areas are more productive with a religious orientation in their institutions and industrial areas with a scientific undertow. Isn't the map divided roughly along those lines now. It is in Europe.

The scientific revolution grew up on the soil of a predominantly religious,not to say fundamentalist,tradition.

A truly scientific mind recognises no nationality. Everything is "object" to such a mind at those times it is being scientific. To think of oneself as having a nationality is a belief. An advantageous one admittedly.A comforting one for some. For now anyway. In what way is nationality scientific? It's emotional. Emotions are anathema to science. Fancy styling a hurricane Rita.

Anderson's experience is not unknown to ethnographers. Often times during the course of fieldwork they find it impossible to explain their "scientific" explanations to others. A classic example is given by Richard Scaglion in:
"Ethnocentrism and the Ablen" in The Humble Anthropologist: Tales From the Pacific, Philip Devita ed. Wadsworth 1990.

Scaglion attempted to explain gravity to the Ablen, a tribal/horticultural people in New Guinea. They thought his explanation silly and Scaglion found he had no convincing evidence to back up what was basically a belief. This does not mean that the Ablen's explanation, that the world was flat, was equally valid. The ultimate test of any theory is its utility, and the flat earth and Intelligent Design both fail by that measure. The theories of Gravity, and Evolution (Natural Selection) both have great utility in explaining how the world works, the alternatives have none.

Acqu-

But is the utility of explanation the only utility.I understood from those on the left that Fox News provided obfustication presumably,as it is a product in a market,for those who seek obfustication.Would you like to see some tame de-obfustication of the courtship rituals in modern industrial society?

I do not know that there are any explanations of courtship rituals in anthropology of modern industrial societies, tame or otherwise. But that is beside the point. In science the only value of a theory is it's utility. But socially humans have a tendency to use them for other purposes, particularly those they have an incomplete understanding of.

spendius, Science is science, and it has absolutely nothing to do with creationism or ID. If our schools begin to treat creationism and ID on the same level in our science corriculum, it becomes a crutch/handicap to students, because everything they can't understand or explain falls on some designer. Creationism and ID belongs in philosophy/religion class, not science.

Acqu-

So scientists,real ones,could find utility in a theory about the social use of certain theories for other purposes.I am aware that this paves the way for the alpha/beta/gamma idea.One might say,and I may get shot down for this,gammas believe in ID for a utility purpose,betas don't believe in ID because they believe that not doing so makes them different to gammas,who they look down on, and alphas just run things as best they can taking these contradictory beliefs as scientific facts which have political muscle depending on various sociological,pyschological and geographical factors.

I'm not sure what "them" refers to.I've taken it as the theories.

c.i.

There is such a thing as devolution of ideas.It applies usually in an integrated political system to matters which the ruling caste see as of little importance.The general planning laws are fairly rigid on matters like industrial and residential zones but within the rules we are often allowed to paint our front doors whatever colour we like.In Switzerland,I have been told,it is a law that the front garden be neat and tidy.

The very fact that the ID/SD debate is going on suggests that the ruling caste think it of little importance or possibly even useful as a distraction or as an efficient generator of fees.

Is that skeptical or what?

Yes "them" refers to theories.

Scientists as a body tend to look askance at the application of their theories to issues outside their field. Thus, as far as I know, physicists have given no thought to the social application of the theory of the electron, and biologists have thoroughly rejected the social/political application of Darwins theory of Natural Selection. An application which has a long sordid racist history. That does not mean that others will not do so.

Acqu-

Im not clued up on the theory of electrons.Is an electron one of those little"x"s which science teachers place on circles to show how they go around a nucleus?

Yes-the implications of Darwin are a bit fierce but don't tell the SDers.It was bad enough for them finding out there is no Father Christmas.

No, the SD/ID debate is going on, because most people of religion do not understand science/evoltuion, and they want to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of society. Science is not religion. ID is not science.

We have done that c.i.We have that on board.We also have on board that the SDers are saying "over my dead body".The fight's the thing and speculating on the eventual compromise.That post won't have shifted one mind one iota.

spendius, Exaggeration such as "over my dead body" is uncalled for. Please show proof of such a claim.

It's just an expression we use in England to signify "no way".I thought it was used in America.If it isn't I'm sorry.Cultural disjoint.I wasn't thinking you might start warring over ID.Perish the thought.

spendius, If you're going to use expressions used in England, you must clarify what you mean more clearly. Many of us do not live in England.

"Over my dead body" is an expression used in Connecticut all the time. This is New England so we're a bit stand offish, but we are still part of the US.