keeping a grip
I was skimming through Judge John Jones’ opinion on Kitzmiller vs. The Dover Area School District, released today. I’ve never actually read a court opinion before, but I was struck by how straightforward it was, and clear-headed. Also by how mercilessly it shreds the defendants’ arguments. I mean, justifiably so — I still can’t believe we’re wasting time and money on this at all. But its tone suggested a bias. Calling the pedagogy implied by some of the Dover board’s decisions “colossally bad” teaching, for example.
Then I read this:
Jones — an appointee of President Bush, who backs the teaching of Intelligent Design — defended his decision in personal terms.
“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist court,” Jones writes.
All I can say is thank the Designer for rationality. And thank you, Judge Jones, for doing your job.
December 20th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
The full conclusion is worth reading. Part of it:
Breathtaking inanity? Wow.
Amen.
December 20th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
Heathen!
December 21st, 2005 at 5:39 am
On the bizarre side of everything, I believe in something similar to “intelligent design,” but since when did belief equate to science? Scientists find it difficult to agree on data, much less conclusions. A bunch of believers trying to agree on anything comfirms the view that the comos tends toward chaos. So keep religion (i.e. belief systems) out of public schools because public funds cannot be used to support religion unless we want a religion-based totalitarian state. How is this even debatable?
December 22nd, 2005 at 4:32 pm
I’m with Theo. I’m open to the idea of intelligent design, but I don’t see any justification for teaching it in public schools.
But I also don’t think that we need to all be good Kantian rationalists at all times. I welcome the intelligent design debate as an ongoing philosophical/spiritual discussion. What the ID people should do is publish some papers and thereby open up their ideas to scrutiny. There does seem to be *some* science to ID. The Strong Anthropic Principle uses math to suggest a design at work. Of course it’s a leap of faith, but it’s no more a leap than Einstein’s Cosmological Constant. If the ID people can throw this out there and make some good arguments based on what speculative science suggests, then we can move forward.
But the problem is that ID people (whoever they are) are not interested in this type of approach because the impetus is ideological more than it is any concern for the advancement of knowledge. This is sad, because once again it shows that the concept is not nearly as flawed or misguided as the people who utilize it for political/social/ideological advantage.
December 23rd, 2005 at 8:53 am
Meh. My comment got too long-winded. I made it a post.
December 23rd, 2005 at 11:20 am
Maybe the difference for me in this ID business is that the “something like ID” that I tend toward rises out of sight as a direction in which all things cosmic appear to be going. ID wants to talk about origins, which are utterly and forever obscured in the veil of the void, the impossible silence of what came before. Of course, the design that I see may be simply the inevitable gestalt of randomly falling and organizing bricks. It is that they organize at all in any fashion that takes away my breath and points to Design. Mostly, I have to make sure none of my credit card payments are late, or that wall of randomly falling bricks will fall on me.
December 25th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
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