I mentioned the brief filed by 85 scientists asking the judge not to rule on the question of what is and is not science, a brief written by DI fellow David DeWolf. Over on the Panda's Thumb, Timothy Sandefur has written a blistering critique of the dishonest rhetoric found in that brief. Also pay particular attention to a long comment by Pim Van Meurs, who goes into a lot of detail on some of the false factual claims in the brief. Sandefur sums up the vacuity of their argument perfectly:
The brief makes no scientific argument at all, and gives no indication of where the court might look to find a scientific argument. Instead, the amici contend that the scientific community ought to welcome debate. "The scientific enterprise advances when scientists make new discoveries correcting or overturning previously held theories." (p. 7). Well there's no denying that, and certainly nobody would be more pleasantly delighted than I, if proponents of ID were ever able to come up with a new discovery. But the classrooms of government-operated elementary and high schools are simply not the place to make new discoveries! The place to make new discoveries is in the laboratory, in the field, and in the pages of peer-reviewed scientific journals, in none of which have the proponents of ID produced a single workable idea. If it is "premature" to expect ID proponents to produce the evidence with which to "advance" the scientific enterprise, then it is way too premature to allow ID proponents into the classroom. ID proponents seem to be asking for a "general warrant": let us into the classroom first, and we'll give you the evidence to justify our admission later! And if you point out that they're skipping a step, then you're "stigmatizing" them.
For a second, let's apply this analysis to a hypothetical: let's say Matt Hale of the World Church of the Creator wants to teach children in a government-run school that God made white people smarter than black people and Jews. Don't you go calling him an anti-Semite, now, because that's just an "ad hominem attack." (Cf. p. 12). And don't go demanding that he prove his claims before teaching it to children--he'll get to that later, you know? For now, it's important to teach children to keep an open mind about all sorts of different ideas. After all, Hale could be the bellwether of a new scientific paradigm!
Well said.
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Something must have changed since the 1960s. I took advanced biology 1962-63 in my freshman year in high school in a northern suburb of Cincinnati. Not exactly a liberal area. And we had evolution as part of the curriculum. There was no objection, and there was no "creationism" or "intelligent design." Indeed, I suspect that if somebody objected he or she would have been viewed as something of a kook.
Has something changed out there in the heartland? I moved away from there years ago--I'm currently in Massachusetts--so I really don't know.
Oh, one more thing. I do and have done physics. One of the things that I found wonderful about physics is that the theorists insist that Einstein's General Relativity reduce to Newton's theory of gravitation in the classical realm.
I read the brief, and I dismiss it pretty much out of hand. It provides no evidence for its assertions. It is lacking both in scientific evidence and in legal evidence.