It is easy to imagine the Board (populated by Creationists) thinking “Science” is something they knew all about - - and that it would be easy to show a “scientific presentation of intelligent design” would EQUATE to “science”.
In due course, they found out that a “scientific presentation” does not TRUE SCIENCE make!
Correct. He was hilariously bad, though.
I think I mentioned cargo cults earlier. And that’s the sort of problem you have with someone like the Board in Dover. They see Ann Gauger on a green screen with fancy equipment behind her, wearing a lab coat, and they think, “surely THIS will bring the cargo!” If all that you understand about science is that it involves people who own lab coats using words you are not sure you know the meanings of, then ID is science to you.
As it happens, in my post-legal life, I deal with this sort of problem constantly. Since my retirement from the law, I have worked in a field which involves technical matter that is sometimes so counter-intuitive to the average person that proper technical explanations sound like rubbish, while rubbish sounds like technical explanations – and we have many competitors who have figured this out and who therefore sell the rubbish! We do well with customers who have enough technical background to know the difference, but we have to work very hard to establish our credibility with those who do not.
Now, what does that work call for? This is where the science popularizer can do the most good. It calls for something I had to do in the law all the time, which is taking a complicated thing and making it intelligible to someone without the appropriate background. I may have said this previously in this thread, and if so, my apologies for being repetitive – but when I was practicing law I found that a lot of lawyers liked to have their clients baffled. They liked to “explain” things in terms they probably realized their clients could not understand, on the belief that (1) this enhanced their perceived expertise, and (2) this meant the client was not in a position to reject their advice, because the client couldn’t argue with the lawyer. I always thought that the more difficult path here was the better one: an informed consent model. I may not know how to DO the oral surgery which I am submitting to tomorrow afternoon, but I am able to understand if the doctor explains to me the risks and benefits in terms with which I am familiar. Likewise, I felt that while my clients would be completely at sea if they tried to litigate complex constitutional issues themselves, it was my duty to explain those issues in terms they could understand and assist them in weighing risks and benefits. If they rejected my advice, they would do it knowing why; indeed, I would probably have explained the case for rejecting my advice, while giving the advice and explaining why I thought it should be followed.
We have GOT to make science intelligible to people. This is hard, because it means addressing people at all levels of understanding and receptiveness, from blinkered fundamentalists on up. The DI has a strategy for every level; we need to have a strategy for every level.
I think we should do a scientific dramatization! Just set up two boxes! One box is for God to use, and the other box, the control box, is the one we ask God to ignore!
I had a funny argument with my Mormon brother once. Two bits:
(1) He was quite angry at Paul Allen for funding the PBS series on evolution, because, he said, they featured the creationist point of view, but only the CRAZY creationists. I asked him if he could name a non-crazy creationist. Crickets.
(2) After I suggested that empirical validation was required for such things as his claims to heal disease with his hands, he complained that I would only accept God if there was “100% proof.” I suggested to him that I would take 5%: show me one phenomenon which demonstrably happened 5% more often with divine intervention than without, and I would believe. His mute frustration was a delight to behold; yes, a sophisticated response might be made to my request, but he displayed the feature of thinking which was all too common among blinkered fundamentalists: he had never actually thought about ANY of this at all, and just had a great big gap, where others have some sort of sophisticated (even if terribly flawed) epistemology.
Incidentally, his faith-healing powers were a bit questionable (I am sure you are shocked to hear this!). Because it involved people dear to him, I did not point this out, but when he described having laid hands on his mother-in-law’s tumor, feeling a wave of warmth, and then having her report at her next exam that the tumor had “exploded,” he did not seem to understand that cancer cells migrating about the body outside of the tumor was not likely to be a good thing. Nor did he seem to have considered that the fact that she had then died of cancer was problematic for the healing. At moments like that, I do sort of wish that the requirements of human compassion and kindness were not so limiting to discussion.
Me too. And I remember American Family Radio at that time going ballistic about the “plagiarism” in Judge Jones’ ruling. From there the complaint went viral among many IDers I knew within the Bible Belt.
When those close to the case were making such “plagiarism” claims, it is difficult not to see this tactic as lamentable behavior. I can’t assess motivations but it sure seems like deliberate disinformation or blatant ignorance of how courts operate.
I’ve had similar conversations. However, some people have answered “Ken Ham” as an example of a non-crazy creationist. When I asked for an explanation, they told me that, to them, Ham “and the PhD scientists at Answers in Genesis” are decidedly “non-crazy” because they distance themselves from people like Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind, Carl Baugh, and Walter Brown.
So I suppose it’s all relative. (We could devote a lengthy thread to describing the wide spectrum which could apply here. But I hope we don’t.) A friend who is a big fan of AIG once told me that Ken Ham is “the thinking man’s apologist for Young Earth Creationism.”
(I tried unsuccessfully to avoid ending this post with the terse comment, “Go figure.”)
I think what we see here is a principle I call the “conservation of crazy.” Between the evaluator and the creationist, one can divide, say, 100 Luskins (commonly abbreviated Lk) of Crazy. The distribution, or attribution, of this craziness is for the evaluator. If he assigns all 100 Lk to Ken Ham, he is himself at 0 Lk. He may, however, choose to assign 0 Lk to Ham, in which case he retains 100 Lk. It works out perfectly: the crazier the evaluator, the less crazy he believes Ham to be.
My system is metric, as in:
100 Luskins = 1 Hv (Hovind) = 100 cHv (centiHovinds)
Walt Brown’s Hydroplate Theory is variously rated but is usually expressed in MHv (megaHovinds.)
1 – I don’t know about “on staff,” but one of the four authors of Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision was David K. DeWolf. Here is the blurb about him:
-Professor of Law at Gonzaga Law School (Spokane)
-graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School
-Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute
-author of:
Washington Tort Law and Practice
Washington Contract Law and Practice
articles on First Amendment Law, including “Teaching the Origins Controversy” (Utah Law Review)
2 – At the time of the Dover trial, Seth Cooper was employed as an attorney by Discovery, but I believe he left that position long ago.
I remember DeWolf. Never on staff at the DI. He did try to sneak past the voters onto the Supreme Court here (we are one of those silly states that elects its Supreme Court) and so I and others were trying to make sure people knew not to vote for the creationist.
Cooper also appears to have no experience practicing law.
since ID isnt a religion i dont see how it can violate the Constitution.
no its not. some ID guys even believe in common descent (i know that prof behe believed so in the past) and old earth. so certainly that ID isnt creationism.
if so we cant say that ID isnt science because the court say so (i know that many say so). court decision is irrelevant in science
what do you think about this argument: do you think that a complex mouse trap (that contain thousands of parts), that not only can catch a mouse but can also run after him is evidence for design?
Well, I guess the Dover School board should’ve hired you to argue their case before the court. Somehow they never thought of using the “Is not! Nyah, nyah, nyah!” defense.
There was a very sad case here in Canada several years ago in which a child with bone cancer was denied treatment because his parents insisted on using prayer instead (The case was never adjudicated because, before it went before the courts, the child was found to have metastatic disease which rendered the question of treatment moot.)
The father was interviewed and described with delight how his son’s tumour had grown so much it had burst thru the skin and was oozing blood and other fluids. To the father, this meant his prayers were causing the tumour to leave the body.
The kid died a few days later.
if you think that ID is religion can you tell why?
Because design implies God.
Now this, of course, is where you say something along the lines of science just detects the design, and the question of who is the designer is another issue.
Here is the problem with such a statement. Outside of ID adherents, nobody believes that. At all. Nobody is obliged to believe that. An integrated worldview does not allow you to believe that, so there is no burden of explanation required to regard ID as religion.
Something doesn’t have to be “A Religion” to trigger the problem…
it merely has to be of “Religious in Nature”,
presuming metaphysical principles or elements that can only be proved or demonstrated by faith.
so? we are talking about ID. who cares if others believe in something else?
how detecting design is religious in nature?
Indeed. And to my knowledge, nobody claims that ID isn’t science because the court said so. People do point out, however, that the reason the court said so is that ID isn’t science.
I think it is absurd. Don’t you?
Yes, tales like that just break my heart. Fortunately, my brother’s faith-healing efforts were ancillary to, not in substitution for, conventional medical treatment – so while I am sure they did not help, they also did no harm.
