(For previous posts in this series, see here.) The judge who presided in the trial Kitzmiller v. Dover seemed to have a more sophisticated idea of the nature of science than Judge Overton in the 1982 case of McLean v. Arkansas. Judge Jones’s full analysis of how he came to his conclusion that intelligent design …
Monthly Archive: November 2007
Nov 29 2007
From Scopes to Dover-26: The Discovery Institute’s dilemma
(For previous posts in this series, see here.) The Dover school board policy was challenged in December 2004 as a violation of the establishment clause and so the two sides prepared to go to trial. The lawsuit for the plaintiffs led by Tammy Kitzmiller was filed by the ACLU of Pennsylvania and included experienced constitutional …
Nov 28 2007
From Scopes to Dover-25: The Dover policy on teaching evolution
(For previous posts in this series, see here.) I previously showed how that the intelligent design creationism (IDC) strategists had laid out a careful long-term stealth strategy aimed at discrediting the teaching of evolution and breaking through the restrictions placed on religion in the schools because of the establishment clause in the First Amendment. They …
Nov 27 2007
From Scopes to Dover-24: Three trials leading up to Dover
(For previous posts in this series, see here.) While all the strategizing in the wake of the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard case was being done by the intelligent design creationism (IDC) advocates under the auspices of the Discovery Institute, three other cases all set legal precedents for what would happen in Dover. In 2000, a …
Nov 26 2007
From Scopes to Dover-23: Why some religious people hate the theory of evolution
(For previous posts in this series, see here.) To understand why there is such a deep-seated opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and how intelligent design creationism (IDC) came into being, one needs to understand its essential idea and the motivations of the people behind it. On the surface, IDC seems to …
Nov 23 2007
The evil of the consumer economy
Each year, the Thanksgiving holiday is ruined by the revolting attention that the media pays to the retail industry in the days immediately following Thanksgiving. They wallow in stories of sales, of early-bird shoppers on Friday lining up in the cold at 4:00am to get bargains, fighting with other shoppers to grab sale items, people …
Nov 22 2007
Thanksgiving musings
(This is a repost from Thanksgiving of last year, considerably added to and modified.) For an immigrant like me, the Thanksgiving holiday took a long time to warm up to. It seems to be like baseball or cricket or peanut butter, belonging to that class of things that one has to get adjusted to at …
Nov 21 2007
From Scopes to Dover-22: Creation science is reborn as intelligent design
(For previous posts in this series, see here.) It was with this history of US Supreme Court decisions in mind that we can understand the emergence of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement. IDC has to be understood as a carefully crafted theory that was designed to overcome the legal restrictions placed by the establishment …
Nov 20 2007
From Scopes to Dover-21: The death of ‘creation science’
(For previous posts in this series, see here.) In the previous post we saw how the goal of trying to get creationist ideas back into the science classroom took the form of the birth of ‘creation science’ and calling for it to be taught along with evolution. While ‘creation science’ had no explicitly religious language, …
Nov 19 2007
From Scopes to Dover-20: The birth of ‘creation science’
(For previous posts in this series, see here.) Following the overturning of the 1974 Tennessee “equal emphasis” law, neighboring Axis of Weevils member state Arkansas took the lead in trying to find ways to undermine evolution and introduce religious ideas of creation into the biology curriculum in ways that would not violate the establishment clause. …
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