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[Phys-L] Re: judge rejects i.d. in PA case



[cross-posted to phys-l and chemed-l]

M and D Weiss wrote:
The judge in the Dover, PA i.d.
case has emphatically rejected the school board's i.d. curriculum and threw out the changes the
board had made to the biology curriculum which had included mention of i.d. as an alternative
theory to evolution.

Yup. The full text of the court's decision is available at
http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/images/12/20/kitzmiller.pdf

In fact, according to news reports I heard, the judge came down quite hard
on the school board, calling the i.d. changes nothing more than creationism in disguise, and
practically accusing the board members of deception and even outright lying in their courtroom
presentations.

I am always skeptical of news reports ... but this one is pretty close to
the mark.

practically accusing the board members of deception and even outright lying
. ^^^^^^^^^^^

There's no "practically" about it. On page 115 the judge says
"the inescapable truth is that both Bonsell and Buckingham
lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions"

Page 46:
"Dover School Board members’ testimony, which was marked by
selective memories and outright lies under oath,"

Page 105:
"the record reflects that these witnesses either testified
inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions"

======================================

Also let me point out that the judge's reasoning is quite dramatically
different from one part of the reasoning I put forward on this list.

I said "ID is being touted as a scientific theory". That was arguably
narrowly true, but I now see that it misses the point, because (according
to the judge) the touts are lying. From page 26:

"A significant aspect of the IDM is that despite Defendants’
protestations to the contrary, it describes ID as a religious
argument."

Another passage of particular interest appears on page 32:

"As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the
Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were
completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court’s decision
in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching
creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards
drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge: (1) the
definition for creation science in early drafts is identical
to the definition of ID; (2) cognates of the word creation
(creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately
150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with
the phrase ID; and (3) the changes occurred shortly after the
Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and
cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards."

The overall impression can be summarized by the following equation:

creationism + lying about it = ID

Let me be clear: I made the mistake of taking the ID partisans at
their word. I grossly underestimated the degree of lying going on.
I therefore became an unwitting participant in spreading these lies,
for which I humbly apologize.

Of course many of the other points that I (and others) made in this
forum remain valid. For example, the judge left no doubt that ID
is not science. From page 64:

"We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one
of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID
is science."

=========

It will be interesting to see what happens next. It seems a safe bet
that the ID partisans won't just give up.
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