Dover, a good argument against ID ?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1795-dover-a-good-argument-against-id
Whenever the teleological argument of Gods existence is brought forward by believers, it is very common that unbelievers immediately try to shift the goal posts and begin to point out that intelligent design is not science, that it was debunked at the Dover Trial, rather than stick to the issue, and actually deal with honesty in regards of the arguments brought up for debate.
Ask ANY real scientist, if he thinks the best way to proceed in scientific truth, is to have courts of law decide what scientific theories should be accepted.
John E. Jones, III is one of the most incompetent judges on the bench. His decision simply parroted the ACLU argument. He had ZERO judicial experience before being appointed. He was a rich lawyer who twice lost elections for office. Oh yeah, he was appointed to head the PA Liquor Control Board prior to being appointed to the federal bench! His decision was far more about maintaining his presence at country club cocktail parties than it was about law!!
everybody who has ever had experience in a courtroom (in ANY country), knows that courtrooms are literally full of lies, nonsense, injustice, and obfuscation. Only a fool would today claim that "truth" is best resolved, or in fact resolved at all in a modern courtroom. It matters not whether the case is big or small, rich or poor, intelligent or moronic. Courtrooms are of course run by lawyers, and without prejudice, lawyers are human beings, most of whom are motivated mainly by money, secondly by political passion, and perhaps as a limping third, justice and truth. Or at least community justice, or perhaps pragmatism.
Yet when a court rules in favour of the cause of Evolution, we are suddenly treated to the most amazing fairy-story of all: Courts are now the "ultimate" arbiters of truth: Perhaps even the best discoverers and establlishers of scientific truth. Suddenly, the lawyers have become our heroes, accurately dissecting the bitter pill of Intelligent Design, to discover the horror of Creationism, masquerading as 'science' and daring to "infect our children".
Please. If a person born anytime during the post-war baby-boom knows anything, he knows this is pure horse-manure. I'm telling you what everybody already knows: After the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations,
the Viet Nam war, and Nixon, the Bush elections and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the O.J. Simpson trials and Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Oil spills and Enron, nobody does, nor should they, trust the government, courts, politicians or lawyers. Its not about age groups, its about history. But lest there be any doubt,
"The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous to both science and to freedom of religion".
(Prof. Jay Wexler, Boston Univ. School of Law).
Revised Report of Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D. May 19, 2005 Case: Tammy Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District and Dover Area School District Board of Directors
https://ncse.com/files/pub/legal/kitzmiller/2005-10_amicus_briefs/2005-10-17_DI_Kitzmiller_AppA_Meyer.pdf
Problems With the Dover Decision
https://www.discovery.org/f/1453
• At the very least, the Dover decision is overboard. Judge Jones found that the Dover school board acted for religious rather than secular reasons. That finding was enough under existing Supreme Court precedents to strike down the Dover policy. There was no legal reason for Judge Jones to address the broader question of what is science and whether intelligent design met his definition of science.
Judge Jones’ ruling is poorly argued and its discussion of intelligent design as science is largely inaccurate, possibly due to the fact that more than 90% of the ruling’s section analyzing intelligent design was copied virtually verbatim from a document submitted to him by attorneys working with the ACLU.1 Judge Jones even copied the factual errors contained in this document, which was known as “Plaintiffs’ Proposed ‘Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law’.”2 For example: » Judge Jones claimed that biochemist Michael Behe, when confronted with articles supposedly explaining the evolution of the immune system, replied that these articles were “not ‘good enough.’” In reality, Behe said the exact opposite at trial: “it’s not that they aren’t good enough. It’s simply that they are addressed to a different subject.” (emphasis added) The answer cited by the judge came not from Behe, but from the attorneys working with the ACLU, who misquoted Behe. » Judge Jones claimed that “ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications.”
Again, the actual court record shows otherwise. University of Idaho microbiologist Scott Minnich testified at trial that there are between “seven and ten” peer-reviewed papers supporting ID, and he specifically discussed Stephen Meyer’s explicitly pro-intelligent design article in the peer-reviewed biology journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Additional peer-reviewed publications, including William Dembski’s peer-reviewed monograph, The Design Inference (published by Cambridge University Press), were described in an annotated bibliography of peer-reviewed and peer-edited publications supporting ID submitted in an amicus brief accepted as part of the official record of the case. The judge’s false assertions about peer-review simply copied false claims made by attorneys working with the ACLU. » Again following the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Judge Jones insisted that ID “requires supernatural creation,” that “ID is predicated on supernatural causation,” and that “ID posits that animals... were created abruptly by a ... supernatural designer.” He further claimed that “[d]efendants’ own expert witnesses acknowledged this point.” In fact, defendants’ expert witnesses did nothing of the sort. ID proponents—including the defendants’ expert witnesses at the Kitzmiller trial—have consistently explained that ID as a scientific theory does not require a supernatural designer. For example, when asked at trial “whether intelligent design requires the action of a supernatural creator,” Scott Minnich replied, “It does not.”
The judge ignored the positive case for design and falsely claimed that ID proponents make their case solely by arguing against evolution. • Judge Jones adopted an unfair double-standard of legal analysis where religious implications, beliefs, and motives count against ID but never against Darwinism. • The judge overstepped the bounds of the judiciary and engaged in judicial activism by declaring that ID had been refuted when the judge was presented with credible scientific witnesses and publications on both sides showing evidence of a scientific debate. In fact, Judge Jones engaged in textbook judicial activism by presuming that it is permissible for a federal judge to define science, settle controversial social questions, settle controversial scientific questions, and settle issues for parties outside of the case at hand so that his ruling would be “a primer” for people “someplace else.”
• Finally, Judge Jones used poor philosophy of science by dangerously trying to turn science into a voting contest by ruling that popularity is required for an idea to be scientific. Stephen Jay Gould, writing with other scientists, eloquently explained why science should never be a popularity contest: “Judgments based on scientific evidence, whether made in a laboratory or a courtroom, are undermined by a categorical refusal even to consider research or views that contradict someone’s notion of the prevailing ‘consensus’ of scientific opinion... Automatically rejecting dissenting views that challenge the conventional wisdom is a dangerous fallacy, for almost every generally accepted view was once deemed eccentric or heretical. Perpetuating the reign of a supposed scientific orthodoxy in this way, whether in a research laboratory or in a courtroom, is profoundly inimical to the search for truth. … The quality of a scientific approach or opinion depends on the strength of its factual premises and on the depth and consistency of its reasoning, not on its appearance in a particular journal or on its popularity among other scientists.”3
What Legal Scholars Are Saying
“The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous both to science and to freedom of religion.” —Jay D. Wexler, Professor of Law, Boston University Law School; “Kitzmiller and the ‘Is it Science?’ Question,” 5 First Amendment Law Review 90, 93 (2006), Emphasis added. Note: Prof. Wexler is a strong critic of teaching ID.
“[I]nvalidating the teaching of intelligent design in public schools is flatly inconsistent with free speech principles... If the Supreme Court ever gets a case, unlike Kitzmiller, where the School Board of Legislature’s apparent motive for integrating intelligent design into the curriculum is to maximize student exposure to different ideas about the origin of the species, and not to indoctrinate religion, the Court should uphold the provision.” —Arnold Loewy, Self-described First Amendment “liberal,” George R. Killam Jr. Chair of Criminal Law, Texas Tech Law School; “The Wisdom and Constitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in Public Schools,” 5 First Amend. Law Review 82, 89 (2006), Emphasis added.
“Despite Judge Jones’ apparent desire to have the final word on ID for the judiciary, future jurists encountering efforts to address the topic of ID will have not only the right, but the obligation to think for themselves and determine whether the reasoning used by Judge Jones is accurate, necessary, or even relevant. ...ID will survive Kitzmiller not only because the ruling itself is unpersuasive and is owed no deference, but because the scientific evidence pointing to design in nature is just as powerful today as it was before Judge Jones ruled.” —David K. DeWolf, John West, Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” 68 Montana Law Review 7, 17, 57 (Winter, 2007).
http://www.discovery.org/a/443
Michael Behe :
In the context of my book it is easy to realize that I meant there has been little work on the details of the evolution of irreducibly complex biochemical systems by Darwinian means. I had clearly noted that of course a large amount of work in many books and journals was done under the general topic of "molecular evolution," but that, overwhelmingly, it was either limited to comparing sequences (which, again, does not concern the mechanism of evolution) or did not propose sufficiently detailed routes to justify a Darwinian conclusion. Comparing sequences is interesting but cannot explain how molecular machines arose. Mechanisms (such as gene duplication, domain shuffling, and concerted evolution of multigene families) are thought to be involved in evolution at the molecular level, are however not justified in Darwinian terms. The processes like gene duplication, etc., although very significant, are not by themselves sufficient to understand how any complex biochemical system, may have arisen by Darwinian means.
Behes claim is confirmed through this peer reviewed paper :
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.20365/abstract
although the process of gene duplication and subsequent random mutation has certainly contributed to the size and diversity of the genome, it is alone insufficient in explaining the origination of the highly complex information pertinent to the essential functioning of living organisms.
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1181
Evolvability. Evolutionary biology’s preferred research strategy consists in taking distinct biological systems and finding similarities that might be the result of a common evolutionary ancestor. Intelligent design, by contrast, focuses on a different strategy, namely, taking individual biological systems and perturbing them (both intelligently and randomly) to see how much the systems can evolve. Within this latter research strategy, limitations on evolvability by material mechanisms constitute indirect confirmation of design.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1795-dover-a-good-argument-against-id
Whenever the teleological argument of Gods existence is brought forward by believers, it is very common that unbelievers immediately try to shift the goal posts and begin to point out that intelligent design is not science, that it was debunked at the Dover Trial, rather than stick to the issue, and actually deal with honesty in regards of the arguments brought up for debate.
Ask ANY real scientist, if he thinks the best way to proceed in scientific truth, is to have courts of law decide what scientific theories should be accepted.
John E. Jones, III is one of the most incompetent judges on the bench. His decision simply parroted the ACLU argument. He had ZERO judicial experience before being appointed. He was a rich lawyer who twice lost elections for office. Oh yeah, he was appointed to head the PA Liquor Control Board prior to being appointed to the federal bench! His decision was far more about maintaining his presence at country club cocktail parties than it was about law!!
everybody who has ever had experience in a courtroom (in ANY country), knows that courtrooms are literally full of lies, nonsense, injustice, and obfuscation. Only a fool would today claim that "truth" is best resolved, or in fact resolved at all in a modern courtroom. It matters not whether the case is big or small, rich or poor, intelligent or moronic. Courtrooms are of course run by lawyers, and without prejudice, lawyers are human beings, most of whom are motivated mainly by money, secondly by political passion, and perhaps as a limping third, justice and truth. Or at least community justice, or perhaps pragmatism.
Yet when a court rules in favour of the cause of Evolution, we are suddenly treated to the most amazing fairy-story of all: Courts are now the "ultimate" arbiters of truth: Perhaps even the best discoverers and establlishers of scientific truth. Suddenly, the lawyers have become our heroes, accurately dissecting the bitter pill of Intelligent Design, to discover the horror of Creationism, masquerading as 'science' and daring to "infect our children".
Please. If a person born anytime during the post-war baby-boom knows anything, he knows this is pure horse-manure. I'm telling you what everybody already knows: After the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations,
the Viet Nam war, and Nixon, the Bush elections and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the O.J. Simpson trials and Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Oil spills and Enron, nobody does, nor should they, trust the government, courts, politicians or lawyers. Its not about age groups, its about history. But lest there be any doubt,
"The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous to both science and to freedom of religion".
(Prof. Jay Wexler, Boston Univ. School of Law).
Revised Report of Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D. May 19, 2005 Case: Tammy Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District and Dover Area School District Board of Directors
https://ncse.com/files/pub/legal/kitzmiller/2005-10_amicus_briefs/2005-10-17_DI_Kitzmiller_AppA_Meyer.pdf
Problems With the Dover Decision
https://www.discovery.org/f/1453
• At the very least, the Dover decision is overboard. Judge Jones found that the Dover school board acted for religious rather than secular reasons. That finding was enough under existing Supreme Court precedents to strike down the Dover policy. There was no legal reason for Judge Jones to address the broader question of what is science and whether intelligent design met his definition of science.
Judge Jones’ ruling is poorly argued and its discussion of intelligent design as science is largely inaccurate, possibly due to the fact that more than 90% of the ruling’s section analyzing intelligent design was copied virtually verbatim from a document submitted to him by attorneys working with the ACLU.1 Judge Jones even copied the factual errors contained in this document, which was known as “Plaintiffs’ Proposed ‘Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law’.”2 For example: » Judge Jones claimed that biochemist Michael Behe, when confronted with articles supposedly explaining the evolution of the immune system, replied that these articles were “not ‘good enough.’” In reality, Behe said the exact opposite at trial: “it’s not that they aren’t good enough. It’s simply that they are addressed to a different subject.” (emphasis added) The answer cited by the judge came not from Behe, but from the attorneys working with the ACLU, who misquoted Behe. » Judge Jones claimed that “ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications.”
Again, the actual court record shows otherwise. University of Idaho microbiologist Scott Minnich testified at trial that there are between “seven and ten” peer-reviewed papers supporting ID, and he specifically discussed Stephen Meyer’s explicitly pro-intelligent design article in the peer-reviewed biology journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Additional peer-reviewed publications, including William Dembski’s peer-reviewed monograph, The Design Inference (published by Cambridge University Press), were described in an annotated bibliography of peer-reviewed and peer-edited publications supporting ID submitted in an amicus brief accepted as part of the official record of the case. The judge’s false assertions about peer-review simply copied false claims made by attorneys working with the ACLU. » Again following the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Judge Jones insisted that ID “requires supernatural creation,” that “ID is predicated on supernatural causation,” and that “ID posits that animals... were created abruptly by a ... supernatural designer.” He further claimed that “[d]efendants’ own expert witnesses acknowledged this point.” In fact, defendants’ expert witnesses did nothing of the sort. ID proponents—including the defendants’ expert witnesses at the Kitzmiller trial—have consistently explained that ID as a scientific theory does not require a supernatural designer. For example, when asked at trial “whether intelligent design requires the action of a supernatural creator,” Scott Minnich replied, “It does not.”
The judge ignored the positive case for design and falsely claimed that ID proponents make their case solely by arguing against evolution. • Judge Jones adopted an unfair double-standard of legal analysis where religious implications, beliefs, and motives count against ID but never against Darwinism. • The judge overstepped the bounds of the judiciary and engaged in judicial activism by declaring that ID had been refuted when the judge was presented with credible scientific witnesses and publications on both sides showing evidence of a scientific debate. In fact, Judge Jones engaged in textbook judicial activism by presuming that it is permissible for a federal judge to define science, settle controversial social questions, settle controversial scientific questions, and settle issues for parties outside of the case at hand so that his ruling would be “a primer” for people “someplace else.”
• Finally, Judge Jones used poor philosophy of science by dangerously trying to turn science into a voting contest by ruling that popularity is required for an idea to be scientific. Stephen Jay Gould, writing with other scientists, eloquently explained why science should never be a popularity contest: “Judgments based on scientific evidence, whether made in a laboratory or a courtroom, are undermined by a categorical refusal even to consider research or views that contradict someone’s notion of the prevailing ‘consensus’ of scientific opinion... Automatically rejecting dissenting views that challenge the conventional wisdom is a dangerous fallacy, for almost every generally accepted view was once deemed eccentric or heretical. Perpetuating the reign of a supposed scientific orthodoxy in this way, whether in a research laboratory or in a courtroom, is profoundly inimical to the search for truth. … The quality of a scientific approach or opinion depends on the strength of its factual premises and on the depth and consistency of its reasoning, not on its appearance in a particular journal or on its popularity among other scientists.”3
What Legal Scholars Are Saying
“The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous both to science and to freedom of religion.” —Jay D. Wexler, Professor of Law, Boston University Law School; “Kitzmiller and the ‘Is it Science?’ Question,” 5 First Amendment Law Review 90, 93 (2006), Emphasis added. Note: Prof. Wexler is a strong critic of teaching ID.
“[I]nvalidating the teaching of intelligent design in public schools is flatly inconsistent with free speech principles... If the Supreme Court ever gets a case, unlike Kitzmiller, where the School Board of Legislature’s apparent motive for integrating intelligent design into the curriculum is to maximize student exposure to different ideas about the origin of the species, and not to indoctrinate religion, the Court should uphold the provision.” —Arnold Loewy, Self-described First Amendment “liberal,” George R. Killam Jr. Chair of Criminal Law, Texas Tech Law School; “The Wisdom and Constitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in Public Schools,” 5 First Amend. Law Review 82, 89 (2006), Emphasis added.
“Despite Judge Jones’ apparent desire to have the final word on ID for the judiciary, future jurists encountering efforts to address the topic of ID will have not only the right, but the obligation to think for themselves and determine whether the reasoning used by Judge Jones is accurate, necessary, or even relevant. ...ID will survive Kitzmiller not only because the ruling itself is unpersuasive and is owed no deference, but because the scientific evidence pointing to design in nature is just as powerful today as it was before Judge Jones ruled.” —David K. DeWolf, John West, Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” 68 Montana Law Review 7, 17, 57 (Winter, 2007).
http://www.discovery.org/a/443
Michael Behe :
In the context of my book it is easy to realize that I meant there has been little work on the details of the evolution of irreducibly complex biochemical systems by Darwinian means. I had clearly noted that of course a large amount of work in many books and journals was done under the general topic of "molecular evolution," but that, overwhelmingly, it was either limited to comparing sequences (which, again, does not concern the mechanism of evolution) or did not propose sufficiently detailed routes to justify a Darwinian conclusion. Comparing sequences is interesting but cannot explain how molecular machines arose. Mechanisms (such as gene duplication, domain shuffling, and concerted evolution of multigene families) are thought to be involved in evolution at the molecular level, are however not justified in Darwinian terms. The processes like gene duplication, etc., although very significant, are not by themselves sufficient to understand how any complex biochemical system, may have arisen by Darwinian means.
Behes claim is confirmed through this peer reviewed paper :
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.20365/abstract
although the process of gene duplication and subsequent random mutation has certainly contributed to the size and diversity of the genome, it is alone insufficient in explaining the origination of the highly complex information pertinent to the essential functioning of living organisms.
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1181
Evolvability. Evolutionary biology’s preferred research strategy consists in taking distinct biological systems and finding similarities that might be the result of a common evolutionary ancestor. Intelligent design, by contrast, focuses on a different strategy, namely, taking individual biological systems and perturbing them (both intelligently and randomly) to see how much the systems can evolve. Within this latter research strategy, limitations on evolvability by material mechanisms constitute indirect confirmation of design.
Last edited by Otangelo on Wed Dec 23, 2020 4:07 pm; edited 11 times in total
