As a further note on the connection between this and EC jurisprudence,
there is a major lawsuit going on right now in Pennsylvania over this
and the central question will be whether ID is a scientific theory or
merely old-fashioned creationism dressed up in vaguely
scientific-sounding language. If it is the latter, then the Edwards
precedent applies. And so far, the evidence is strongly on the side of
the first conclusion, not the second. The criticisms of evolution
offered by the ID crowd - and that is all ID actually is at this point,
a set of criticisms of evolutionary theory, there is no ID theory or
model - are the same criticisms that were found in creation science that
was ruled out of public school science classrooms in 1987. In fact, I
have just today been reading the deposition of the publisher of the
textbook, Of Pandas and People, that the Dover school board put into
science classrooms there. His name is Jon Buell. In that deposition he
makes the very damaging admission that they used the exact same
definition in the book of "creation science" as they used for
"intelligent design". In fact, the original draft of the book used the
terms "creation", "creationism" and "creation science" and they were
later simply replaced with the phrase "intelligent design" with no
change in the definition or the positions attributed to them as distinct
ideas at all. And this is from the first (and only) "intelligent design"
textbook ever produced, the very book that coined the phrase. This is
likely to be very compelling in court.
Ed Brayton
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